Stamina + agility are awesome. Dodge and defense are okay. Expertise is nice until you reach the parry-haste softcap, then its meh, as is hit.
As for druids vs. traditional tanks, here's a blurb I wrote for the tanking guide on my guild's website:
Quote:
Some more fun additions for druid tanking. Since we get our stats from mainly rogue gear we are generally looking at pieces that other tanks wouldn't even consider. There are a couple of melee DPS stats that become more important.
Savage Defense is a druid ability that procs off of Critical Hits, and reduces the damage done by the bosses next physical attack. How much does it reduce incoming damage? Well that is determined by your attack power, of course! 25% of your AP gets applied to damage reduction, so pieces which have crit and AP start to look very good to bears. That being said they usually aren't stacked in lieu of other more traditional tanking stats, but having them on gear is a great bonus. Besides, Blizz did away with tanking stats on leather this expansion, so you might as well keep a look out for some nice +crit & +AP pieces!
Bears also have some wild scaling values. We get 25% more stamina from items then other tanks do. This makes it very tempting to stack stamina. However it is also easier for a bear to outstrip his/her healers ability to keep them alive, by ignoring good +agility or +armor gear that would help reduce the incoming damage.
Think of it this way, the stamina stacker has 60,000 HP and takes 10,000 HP damage per hit, the healers can heal them for 9,000 HP in this time; that's not going to end well. Now a more balanced build may have only 40,000 HP, but now with the extra damage mitigation from armor/agility this tank only takes 8,000 HP damage per hit. Since the healers can output 9,000 HP of healing in this time all is well. While this general concept holds true for all tanks, it usually isn't much of an issue for non-druids. It is extra important of bears to consider however, because they are the most in danger of out-stacking their healers ability to keep them alive.
As for armor, we go wild with this. See that awesome tanking trinket that has +1,000 armor on it. The other tanks are kinda *meh* on it ya? Well not you druid tank, that's +3,700 armor in your hands, very nice indeed! EDIT: (bonus armor doesn't scale like this as of patch 3.0.8, thanks for the heads up guys)
Oh, and the Druid 202 sticky has some awesome tanking advice, definitely a suggested read. ;-)
Edited, Nov 4th 2009 1:45pm by someproteinguy