A few days ago I had a feral tank from another guild on our server question me for wearing T8 shoulders instead of T7 for tanking. Now, for a second I was extremely confused, both T7&8 set bonus suck for tanking, so I pulled up the other shoulders and compared them. The tradeoff is 11 stam and 30 arp (T7) for 10 agi, 9 armor, 12 AP, 13 crit, and a whopping 48 expertise rating (T8).

So, knowing the obvious reason he prefers T7 i asked, 'Hey, whats better about T7"?

I got the, "lol more stam dude!" Response I expected and hung my head with sadness.

If any feral tanks stumble across this, please listen. As a bear, it is not your job to stack stam and ignore a potential goldmine of other stats on items. It is a useful TOOL for SPECIFIC situations, but don't stack stam for your primary set blindly. By all means gem for it if you must, but do not pass up 48 expertise rating (and other goodies) for 11 stam. Ever. Please. It not only makes us look silly, it makes us look plain bad. Sure you can show off in Dal how much HP you have, but anyone who knows what's going on will not be impressed. I do not stack stam and I sit at 50K HP buffed for HM ULD, and that is PLENTY. I'm trying to get *rid* of stam if that means picking up more threat.

I see the same type of thing happen with deathknights, altho to a lesser extent now. Just keep in mind, new tanks, bear tanks, and *especially* new bear tanks, your health bar doesn't mean shit if you've ignored your other stats to get it there.

I've been struggling to stay away from gnomes lately. They do look extremely tasty and I will admit, I did sneak into to Ironforge to scope out some lunch. One particularly plump gnome caught my eye today. Likely the most tender and juicy gnome ever. I almost broke down and gobbled him up, but then I realized that the grumpy, pudgy little guy reminded me of my good friend Odock, and I felt extremely bad for him.

It was then I realized that my guild was right. I had been putting on a few extra pounds. Nixxon has been talking about shaving the fat lately. Up until this point I thought he was talking about the baddies that have tea parties in the flames, but I realized that he meant that if I can't slim down, I am going to have to join the Rets, STFU and heal.

I have no interest in shutting up, or healing, so I did some BGs last night after the raid to work out. Shmuck is actually not as bad as you'd think he is and I actually had *fun* playing this game (outside of raiding) for the first time in months. See, exercise can be fun! I worked up quite a sweat but had a net-gain of 3 pounds that day due to mana strudels. Damn you mages....