Originally Posted by Malm
We use a warlock to tank KJ with. The warlock won't need any special gear and can perform his normal role. Use the first 15% only spamming searing pain (obviously without salvation). After that our lock is between 100k to 150k ahead on threat and no one ever catches up.
I don't see why you should dedicate a single player, be it a gimped dps warrior or feral dps'ing in bear form, when going with a warlock doing what he would do if he wasn't tanking is easily doable.
The only real drawback, which really isn't that huge, is the lack of timers a warrior might have and a little smaller hit point pool.
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Well, they are less durable. They will have less hp, take more damage (compared to warrior D stance), and no emergency cooldowns. They do receive more healing but die more easily in any healing gap. While it may have been our fault, we had a warlock tank die on quite a few attempts in our early learning. Once we switched to a defensive warrior tanking they noted that it was easier to deal with and they could focus more on the raid.
Also, since the warlock does not have blessing of salvation they will more threat-limited on sinister reflections (unless you buff/remove BoS). Depending on your raid makeup this can be important. Another important point is that a melee tank will eat the vast majority of the knockbacks. If you use a warlock tank, your top melee DPS are going to get knocked around instead. This lets the melee DPS do more and makes the "melee tank" DPS appear artificially lower.
The DPS requirements for the phase transitions may seem hard at first, but when the fight is learned and people stay alive and get the haste buff it is not too bad. At that point we decided that tank survivability and raid healing was more important than the DPS.