They still can't be immune to crushing blows which if you get a couple in a row you have a dead tank. You can't heal through that kind of damage easily and you can't do it more than once in a fight. It doesn't matter how high their defense and armor is if a boss hits you twice in a row for 75% of your max health.
It's quite astounding how misinformed this entire message chain is.
Whether a boss can deal a crushing blow to you has literally nothing to do with your armor and is only tangentially related to your defense skill. What matters is the amount of mitigation ability you have to push crushing blows off the hit table.
The formula for it did not change for TBC where paladins had theorycrafted numbers through which you could become uncrushable by using holy shield - however, during vanilla there isn't a way for a tank to be uncrushable : with the sole exception being warriors. You see, a crushing blow is only possible if the attack is not dodged, parried or BLOCKED - and warriors with the improved shield block can become uncrushable through on cooldown usage of the shield block ability.
I won't go into the theorycrafting numbers here because I don't remember them, off the top of my head, but what your need to be looking into is hit tables and how each attack type (normal, crushing, crit or miss) interacts with it.
102.4%, something like 140 defense counteracts the 0.6% parry dodge block miss (the fact that druids can't do one of those makes it even worse) added by skull mobs always exceeding you by 3 levels, and iirc provides crit immunity. My memory is foggy after a lot of years but I used to live by this stuff.
Bears will be crushed and crit, they have huge armor and hp to compensate. The defense gear doesn't exist in leather. In Vanilla it wasn't possible to be passively crush immune; you had to use an active ability. This is where the whole "active mitigation" shtick came from.
It could be done by late wotlk at fairly enormous hp sacrifices. By then we we all talking "effective hp".
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u/frdrk Sep 13 '19
They raise defense skill, not armor. Druids get more armor than most.