Note that the armor cap is rising at level 80 (the same way it rose at level 70). Also, with crushing blows out the picture on raid-bosses, and presuming that crits aren't an issue for tanks, the entire tanking scene will be changed.

Yes, bears take full damage from spells (bypasses armor). Spells still bypass plate armor, too, leaving only a few talents in the Paladin/Warrior protection trees to reduce this by 10% or less.

It seems like Bears will need to be able to get armor and stamina roughly equal to Warriors and Paladins in WotLK, depending on how their agility-to-avoidance works out. In TBC, Bears had massively larger armor to compensate for the fact that they would take crushing blows -- a regular hit on a Warrior for 6k would hit a druid for 5k or so. (Assuming 62% armor mitigation on the warrior and 75% mitigation on the druid). But occasionally (15% of attacks), the druid would take a crush for 7.5k. Overall, this ends up being the same level of damage, though the Druid has to absorb a few more spikes.

One positive side-effect of this change is that it may end up being more difficult for Druids to reach the armor cap -- a significant scaling problem in TBC.

I could see a Feral talent that increased your armor by your current AP if the developers discover that the current armor level of bears isn't sufficient for the new content.

One final point of comparison. Assume that a level-80 warrior or paladin (with shield) has about 24 thousand armor. A Feral would need about 5580 armor from gear to get the same effect. Assuming about 800 armor from rings, and 800 from a staff, that leaves about 4000 armor to be gained from helm, shoulders, etc. Looking at the current amount of armor on level 71-78 blues, it looks like Feral druids would be about 500 armor short at level-80, assuming level 77-80 blues.

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