Resistance Sets for Furball TanksFollow

How important/valuable are they?
To druid tanks in particular. I'm just entering Kara, and the resistance greens in the AH have enough stam to keep up with the gear I'd be swapping for them, so they essentially add 20-30 resistance per piece at the cost of defense rating, armor, agility etc. Are there any rules of thumb about the tradeoffs? Seems like for bosses where magical resistance matters enough to bother with a resist set, armor and dodge become less important anyway. Is crit immunity relevant still? Or is that a melee thang? : /

How much +resist makes a set worth a damn?
I've identified five slots where I can replace my primary tanking gear without sacrificing any stamina, nor too much armor. That gets me to around +150. Does every little bit help, and that much would help my healer in a way they'd even notice, or is there some number I should strive for?

Thanks for the response.

To clarify, the "entering Kara" comment was meant as a shortcut explanation of where I'm at gear-wise: 14k hp, 27k armor, 28% dodge. Just didn't want T5 badasses laughing when I mentioned building resistance sets from AH greens and asking about +150 resist. :)

I figured an arcane set might be useful for Curator, and more importantly for Vexalus in Magister's Terrace, which I plan on running a lot because there's some nice upgrades for me in there and I can run it more frequently/quickly than Kara.

That reminds me...are there any sets that'd be especially valuable across the Coilfang instances that I'm supposed to be "running til my eyes bleed" for CE rep for Earthwarden? I guess I can wowwiki every boss in there and do some math on which resist set would give the most bang for my buck.

Edited, May 7th 2008 7:22pm by JeeBar

As a rule, I wouldn't worry too much about it. We are moving into TK & SSC and there is no fight in any heroic, Kara, Gruuls, Mag that I have used any resistance gear for so far. The 2nd boss in MT is more about how you do the fight. If you just try and burn him as quick as possible then you are going to struggle.

The first real fight you should collect resist gear is a mixed frost/nature set for OT'ing the Hydross fight. Even then, many druids do it without any resist. There is a later fight in BT/Hyjal (not sure which) which needs shadow resist as well but other than that there isn't much required at this stage.

Most of the time, the resist helps when you are a little undergeared for a fight. There are only a couple of fights where it is really "required".

Thanks much, that's the gold mine I'm used to finding at wowwiki. This time I had stumbled into http://www.wowwiki.com/Resistance which was way too much math and not enough useful info for me.

I'm surprised at how few bosses it's useful for...I'd put together a few pieces of AH green fire resist for Nazan in ramps and Sepethrea in mech, and a few pieces of arcane for Vexallus and Curator, and considered getting some shadow for Omor the Unscarred. I'd thought there'd be lots more applications than those, though, because I haven't even run all the instances yet, but per this wiki page that's fully half of the actually useful situations in 5-mans. Guess I won't be investing any more gold in resistance gear in the foreseeable future, cool.

Aside for the frost resistance set for Hydross and the shadow resist for the boss in MT, I dont see much use for a resistance set.
Maybe that boss in heroic arc too, but you can go fairly well without it

Kara > You need nothing
Gruul > Nothing
Mag > Nothing
SSC > Frost, Nature, mix of the two, and possibly fire (my guild prefers druids to warlocks for leo)
TK > Possibly fire, but it's not really needed.
Hyjal > Shadow
BT > Shadow and fire

I've never been to sunwell so I can't speak for it.