I have been levelling my 4 Horde Shamans, along with my friend, who is a Paladin, and we recently reached level 80. :thumbsup:
We decided it was time to start gearing up for Heroics and the first goal was obviously to get him to 535 defense.
After about a week of questing and farming materials for defense gear, gems, quest gear, etc., we finally got him to 685 defense rating/539 defense.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...rank&n=Dejavou
He is in mostly all quest/crafted blues and what not, but nonetheless, finally at the magic uncrittable number, so we run off towards our first Heroic Dungeon all excited to finally start getting some epic gear through badges/drops, etc.
My shamans are all in mostly quest blues and around 1600 spell power (flametongue and totem of wrath).
The paladin and my 4 shamans have levelled together since arriving in Northrend, and minus the learning curve of the new dungeons, we pretty much have flew through all the "normal" mode instances with little trouble.

Anyhow, we enter Utgarde Keep, which was the heroic daily, and get through the first boss with only a couple of wipes, mostly due to stupid things. Once we settled down we get to the 2nd boss (or bosses in this case), we wiped over and over until we gave up with all our gear at 0.
I was rather shocked at how hard they were hitting the tank, so I looked at my damage meter, Recount, and checked "Incoming Damage" for the paladin, and it showed that he had been "crit" 78 times. ?(
I thought "no way this can be right", so we repaired and went back in for a 2nd try. This time I reset the meter and monitored it every couple of fights thinking the addon was wrong or something.
After getting to the 2nd boss again, Recount had recorded that he had been critically hit 62 times. It showed each Shaman's DPS-highest was 1.2k and lowest was 1010 average.
So I spent about an hour reading numerous articles on defense at various sites, I found that even at 540, there is still a small percentage that you may get critically hit, but 62 times?

Frustrated, discouraged and tired, we finally gave up last night and went to bed, having only killed the Prince twice and received 2 badges. We will probobly try another instance tonight, hopefully it will get better once we get over shock of the damage
increase, usually having to heal every 3-4 dps cast versus 1 round of dps-heal over and over.

Northeast - 80 Shaman-Fizzcrank (US)
Northwest - 80 Shaman-Fizzcrank (US)
Southeast - 80 Shaman-Fizzcrank (US)
Southwest - 80 Shaman-Fizzcrank (US)
Benjeman - 80 Paladin-Fizzcrank (US)