Oki... I've gone waaay over defense & really haven't found it that hard, but I've also been really quite lucky with drops (thank god.. makes a pleasant change). My comments:
I think tanks are going to have to start looking at stats in a much more similar way to healers. My BC primary was a resto shaman. I tried to maintain slots so that, as much as possible, for each socket I had a haste or +heal or mana-regen option.
Considering I was never part of an absurd-progression guild that would get me kil'jaeden gear for my off-set, this generally revolved around finding a few slots - typically ring, trinket, neck & one of wrist/gloves/belt/boots - where I could get some pieces to interchange.. one with craploads of haste, one with craploads of mp5, et cetera.
OK, this is seriously elementary stuff. But I really get the impression people are underrating it. Sacrificing one slot to an inferior item which happens to have buttloads of +def is a pretty standard trade-off really. Sacrificing one ideal for another necessity should also be a standard trade-off (i.e. 102.4% vs. uncritability with solid avoidance/stam).
A quick run of wowwiki's numbers is telling me
Seal of the Pantheon gives me 2.11% combined avoidance+block (75% of that being avoidance) + it's 13.21 defense-towards-uncrittability... versus
Lavanthor's Talisman giving me 4.51% block. And i'll leave out the on-use's, that just complicates things.. but I really like armour ;)
This is probably one of the more arguable examples I could've gone for, but in my book: about half as good + boatloads of my uncrittability requirements vs. the 2.42% extra 'half' towards my 102.4% preference is an easy choice in favour of the first (assuming I have any hassles maintaining defense at that point).
Personally, I'm just using very little tier gear - I agree, it tends to be very low comparatively - and that's my problem solved. The down side of this is that I'm nowhere near 102.4%... which hasn't been a significant issue so far in naxx - IMO the place is coordination over gear & deep down I'd still just rather be miss/dodge/parry-ed than block. On pure number-crunching I might be off but, from my practical feel of the situation, I'd still rather stack a solid combo of def/stam/avoidance over the sacrifices I'd have to make to maintain 102.4% (and my guestimate is the sacrifice-factor will be true until you're packing an awful lot of best-in-slot or close to items).
- Lakhesis.
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