I just hit or am about to hit 80: Now what?

First things first: the magic number to hit as far as defense is 540 or 535, note that there are combinations of Resilience and Defense that can add up to the required crit reduction, you’re looking for a total of 4.39% or 4.35% crit reduction, depending on if you’re doing heroics or raids. Before you step foot into PuG heroics you’ll want to get a few normal instances under your belt.

A good place to start would be Gun’Drak, it has two tanking rings available: Solid Platinum Band from the quest For Posterity, and Gal'darah's Signet, which drops from, surprisingly enough, Gal’darah.
From Utgarde Pinnacle, you can snag the the Reanimated Armor from Gortok Palehoof, Amulet of Deflected Blows from Skadi, and Svala's Bloodied Shackles from, you guessed it, Svala. If you can’t get the Reanimated Armor to drop, you can get the Silver-Plated Battlechest from the quest Junk in my Trunk. From Halls of Lightning you can get the Eternally Folded Blade from Volkhan, and Seal of the Pantheon from Loken.

If you go Back to the Past you can get Slaughterhouse Sabatons from Meathook, Flowing Cloak of Command from Salramm the Fleshcrafter, and Leeka's Shield from Mal’Ganis. And finally, in Oculus we have two more rings, the Dragonflight Great-Ring from Eregos and Staunch Signet from the quest The Struggle Persists, further down that chain we have the Bracers of Reverence, the Helm of the Ley-Guardian from Eregos and the Girdle of Obscuring from Mage-Lord Urom.

If you’re keeping tally, we have 4 rings, neck, leggings, boots, helm, chest, weapon, shield, trinket, belt, and cloak, and 2 wrists. We’ve got a full set of armor except for gloves, shoulders, and one trinket, and not a single gold piece spent or heroic run. Of course, this late into the expansion you’ll want to probably pick up several pieces of the Titansteel gear, or get carried through heroics/raids, but nothing teaches better than doing, and normal instances are an EXCELLANT place to learn good tanking habits.

The reason I didn’t list Trial of the Champion here is because it’s new, so everyone doesn’t necessarily know the strats involved, and more importantly, because higher geared tanks are going to be running it for The Black Heart. So PuGs are used to super geared tank running it, and it’ll just end badly if a fresh 80 tries to run it, also it’s scaled a little more like a heroic instance than a normal instance anyway.

As for the instances I did list, I’d suggest Gun’Drak first off, because it’s a lower level, 68 I think, and will be more forgiving. After that Utgarde Pinnacle is probably the next easiest, then Halls of Lightning (though this has a lot of AoE damage), Culling of Strat is about on the same difficulty as HoL. Oculus.. on my server, getting a Oculus run is a miracle, and that’s what it’ll most likely boil down to, which one is easiest to get a group for.

So there you go, yet another guide for gear and instances for the beginning 80. I’ll try to get a similar guide up for heroics sometime next week, and after that raids, though, these days you don’t necessarily need the gear from heroics to do raids, but I’ll pretend you’ll still do normals, heroics, then raids.