Bears and defenseFollow

Your GM is right. The new version of SotF gives 2/4/6% crit reduction, so with 3/3 you are critproof even with no +defense and +resilience on your gear. If you do have some defense and/or resilience you can get away with less points into SotF.

Chance to be crit is 5% base, 5.6% for mobs 3 levels higher (like raid bosses). 3/3 SotF reduces chance to be crit by 6%, which more than covers a raid boss's chance to land a crit.

Edit: Rating -> actual percentage goes up as your level goes up (so it takes more defense rating for 1% crit reduction at 80 than it does at 70), but the actual % stays the same.

Edited, Nov 1st 2008 8:44pm by AstarintheDruid

Well, there's 3 plate tanks that can get defense rating from every slot of gear, and then there's druids. Defense on any piece of leather creates a drop that only one 1/2 of 1 spec for one class wants. Other than Heavy Clefthoof, we got all our defense in TBC from rings/necks/cloaks/ a trinket and a weapon. Many druids also resorted to Resilience to be immune to critical hits.

Now, Blizzard can stack all the defense rating on plate gear and some tanking accessories and druids won't have to worry if an upgrade makes them vulnerable to critical hits. I had to sit on more than one avoidance/mitigation upgrade because it had dodge rating instead of defense, and I needed crit reduction somewhere else before I could change.