New Feral Goal

[Jyynx]

So from what I heard and have read, I guess in the future for tanking I'll need to work on defense which currently is 411 to atleast 420, and more +hit for those harder instances I guess is required. My current armour is 31,676 which gives me 75% AR, and hp at about 14,653. Just wanted to give an update on current goals for raid, see yeah in game.

[Etrigana]

Druid defense cap is 415, not 420. We are spoiled because survival of the fittest cuts our chance to be crit by 3%, thus its incredilbly low cap as opposed to a warrior.

Im not sure what you have in regards to gems in your sockets, but you might be able to just swap out gems to hit the defense cap and take a slight loss in HP or other stats. Hitting the defense cap is going to be more beneficial than a few hundred health as it knocks criticals off the hit table entirely, which in the long run is going to make life a lot easier for a lot of people. But if you have some mixed gems, like maybe 4 def and 6 stam gems, switch them out for the pure 8 def gems. Or, even because you are so close to the defense cap, switch a 12 stam gem for 8 def. That 120 health is damn nice, but its not as nice as being crit immune.

For a fight like Morogrim, getting you crit immune is going to save us a lot of hassle. So that should be priority number one.

-Etri

[Nortibiry]

I am not a druid but some things to consider:

Everything I've read suggests that you can also use resilience to decrease mob crit chance -- I know you pvp a fair bit so it could be you already have the gear to do this. Remember that the point isn't to hit 415 defense for some magical reason, it's to reduce the chance the mob has to crit against you to zero. Here are some pages with some formulas you could play around with:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Defense
http://www.wowwiki.com/Resilience

Generally a warrior would never want to do this because we get more out of defense rating in terms of avoidance, but the numbers would have to play out a little differently for druids since you don't benefit from the increased chance to [edit]block & parry. This is also, incidentally, where the phrase "defense cap" comes from -- defense does continue to help past 415/490, it just helps less since past these points it stops reducing mob crit chance, and at this point it makes more sense to itemize in other directions, if you want more avoidance.

(Some people have told me that resilience and defense don't stack, but I've never seen this from any source ... plus there are items in game which have points in both)

I've also read (but again, I am not a druid) that 75% reduction is the cap for armor reduction -- you might want to double check that, and if you are at the cap see if jostling around gear can give you more points in other areas while maintaining maximum armor reduction.