Losing +defense as replace my crafted blues?

Hi! New tankadin here, been level 80 for a week almost and have done loads of heroics and now just recently off-tanked Naxx10.

Problem is, I used a lot of time to gather different gear that had enough defense for me to reach the cap, and when I thought I was ready to do heroics, I had about 545+ defense and I felt confident. However, I haven't gotten a lot of epic drops yet, but I've done some research on them, and they seem to have generally way more avoidance and mitigation, but way less defense.

Please help me, how do I balance this? Will I be able to still stay over the def limit while still replacing all my blues with drops from Naxx10 (and later Naxx25 and so on)?

I was gonna post my armory link for reference, but I logged out in my ret gear+talents (which are of way lower quality mind you) so it won't do much good.

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet ... Kraustdahl

Anyways, all helpful information is greatly appreciated!

Do you have a defense trinket? It helps a ton until you get some decent gear.

hoho wrote:Do you have a defense trinket? It helps a ton until you get some decent gear.

Its not even decent gear that is this cause. For some reason when you start getting epics the def that you worked soooooo hard to get drops very fast. Hold on to your crafted blues. Try to get the seal of the pantheon or the trinket off thadduis for stop gap def drops and enchant your gear (chest, cloak, wrist (bc enchant) Shield) with defense.

It will happen we tanks seem to forget that....lol

I didn't have an issue with defence until I started swapping Naxx10 gear for badge and Uld10 gear. Basically if you keep the 4 defence enchants and gem selectively when required 'until' you get the repelling charge you should be ok if you are sensible about which upgrades you equip. The Seal of the Pantheon can bridge the defence gap short term if required.

If you go from Blue items to those from ToC I can see HUGE problems as the defence is lower if it is there at all on the ToC items and this will cause big issues. I would try to get the Repelling Charge as soon as possible.

Sorry I can't be more help.

Barathorn

You can also wear the pvp resilience trinket, it's a bunch of uncrittability. Not as good as defense, but still not bad.

Don't be afraid to gem defense if you need it either. The epics usually have more HP base than the blues anyway.

Echoing Barathorn here - 93 defense from the near-BiS enchants (I'm including Hodir shoulders and AC head here) plus another 21 defense from the meta gem slot, will bridge a lot of that gap between blue gear overbudgeted for defense and purple gear that is better in every other respect but threatens to dip you below 540 defense. There's also no shame in ignoring socket bonuses to go for 20 defense if you still need some more...

Trinket/gem/enchant defense and get rid of those blues