The post you quoted had nothing to do with crushing blow immunity. It was solely about threat generation. Block value does nothing to make one uncrushable, but rather is one of the warrior's primary threat stats, by way of Shield Slam. He was simply comparing the main threat stats of warriors and paladins, since the warrior stat gives the paladin zero increased threat, and vice versa.

On the topic of Hamstring vs. Frost Trap / Wingclip. Note the difference in speed reduction--frost trap is 60%, wing clip is 60%, hamstring is 50%. Thus--it takes only a few seconds of moving to get away, poorly designed RNG talents (Imp Hamstring, Mace Stun, and Imp Wing Clip) aside.

They could have tanking plate no longer serve any threat functions. It would just be all defensive stats. They could then expect warriors/deathknights to grab DPS plate (and weapons) for spots to cover threat needs. Prot paladins would want spell power plate (and weapons) for threat gen. Such a system would require both warriors and paladins to balance their needs on their own.

Then again, Blizzard probably has a more eloquent way of addressing this.

In all honesty, that sounds like a fairly decent solution. If weapons were given extremely 'aggressive' stats and armor was produced in one of two flavors, balanced and defensive (with a small subset of non-set 'aggressive' armor pieces--stuff like gloves, belts, bracers, and shoulders maybe?) both tanking and DPSing COULD get covered with a moderately reduced loot table. The only problem I can see with a system like that would be giving tanks 'DPS Weapons'; while I'm certain that the vast majority of posters here would be just fine with having one class of non-caster weapons--basically, remove tanking one-handers--I'm just as certain that plenty of drama will come from some uninformed $PHYSICAL_DPS_CLASS moaning very loudly about $TANK getting 'his' $SHINY_WEAPON.

So long as tank death remains one of the cornerstones of "encounter difficulty", there would be enormous practical and psychological pressure to just completely forgo "threat items" and either (a) expect the tank to play better, or (b) reduce raid threat (damage) output. Which is quite close to what the situation was in early WoW raiding (where warriors were the only tank), with a very fixed gear outlook that didn't include stats like hit rating or expertise rating, no shield slam scaling, and sets that sort of asked you to pretend that attack power was useful as a warrior tank. Sure, every tank is free to substitute some DPS gear in for encounters where tank death is a non-issue, but *nobody cares about those*, and if Blizzard were to adopt this approach to tanking mechanics, they'd essentially just be crippling raids for the fights that matter.

Moreover, even if Blizzard did adopt a system where mixing DPS gear was expected for threat generation purposes, I think they'd have a hard time communicating that idea to players. People understand that they should use gear for their given role; it's a concept that's intuitive and obvious. Tanks would continue to do that, and just expect non-tanks to adapt accordingly to their poor threat generation.

I really think that we're better off with tanking gear and stats that offer gradual bonuses to threat generation via built-in threat-increasing stats (agility, block value, hit/expertise, *some* attack power or spell damage). It's mathematically advantageous, to boot.

Well, if Blizzard wants to move prot pallies and warriors toward using the same type of gear, they could make Holy Shield and Avenger's Shield scale with BV instead of spellpower...

And they seem somewhat emboldened about posting leaked Alpha content, as opposed to data mined from the alpha client :\

Paladin's main threat moves are Holy Shield, Consecrate and Seal/Judgement of Righteousness.

Two of those Holy Paladin's use for grinding atm.
And warriors and DKs appear to be scaling with strength/AP more now. It will definately be interesting to see what Blizzard does with the Paladin class and how they plan to integrate Protection Paladins into useing more generic tanking gear.
Now it seems as though Ret and Fury will be using the exact same gear (even the two-handers) along with DKs.

A possible solution would be to have Paladin's use more melee attacks to generate threat (a new tanking strike perhaps) to move paladins towards Expertise and hit rating more and then maybe a block value modifier for Holy Shield seeing it already has poor scaling. Of course they could be more extreeme and make many of their spells scale with attack power similar to DKs.

Apparently the F&F alpha just ended. I have a feeling the beta will be announced plus a release date at the WWI thing.

Interesting if true...where is your info from?

FFA closed without doing 2 classes? That strikes me as somewhat disturbing (another series of untested pally changes, joy!).

Well thats kinda scary.

The alpha isn't really as much about balance issues as it is determining that the framework is largely stable.

Yeah, which is what makes me nervous. The original TBC paladin talent trees for beta were horrid because they had no testing done on them (Improved Seal of the Crusader was our 51 point ret talent, nuff said) and I really hope they don't do the same thing.

Did they fix them to your satisfaction by the end of beta?

We're getting quite off topic, but no. Ret and Prot were still in pretty sorry states at release of TBC, prot not becoming somewhat viable until 2.1 (though the stamina gap still existed until 2.3) while ret was without the one thing it really needed (Threat Reduction) until 2.3.

I'm not trying to be a doommonger, but Blizzard does have a history of messing things up when they don't test them enough (beta > 2.0 Gruul for example).

If WotLK is aiming for a November release as has been speculated, there's still 5 months for things to be tested, so I wouldn't worry about whether something made the alpha or not. As far as I can tell no class has had all their new skills implemented, so everyone is really in the same boat of needing a lot of balance testing before it's ready.

Ret still has issues? Or just Alliance Ret? I'd say we could use a little buffing to be more useful when we lack Windfury, but warriors are just as dependent on that, and rogues get a huge buff from it too.

Wayyyyyy off topic:

Ret still has scaling issues (any of our "filler" attacks only do baseline damage because we have zero ways to scale spell damage) and absolutely massive mana issues (due to the fact that any regen we get is from raid buffs, we get nothing from talents or gear) in both solo/small group PvE and PvP. We're too dependent on Windfury for DPS and have no CC so finding small groups is difficult under the best of circumstances. Ret has no way to deal with healers in PvP, making it something akin to a bad Arms Warrior.

Ret also is still stuck with the "lolret" stigma that has haunted us since release. There isn't much the devs can do about that, unless they want to take the Feral/Enhance route and overpower us for a few months so people start to respect the spec then reign it back in.

Regarding tank gear homogenization:

I don't see a need to have a lot of sweeping changes.

1. A lot of Warrior gear already has STR, so if they continue along that path, Warriors should have ample amounts of AP to buff up their new threat scaling with.

2. Death Knights look solid to share Warrior tanking gear as well. The only foreseeable hitch would be the fact that without a shield, Shield Block Value and Shield Block Rating would be useless for DKs. However, given the change to the Shield Block ability, one would expect Blizzard to steer clear of SBR/SBV stats, or devise some way let DKs leverage them, if not directly.

(Question: I haven't been keeping on top of the DK TC, can anyone enlighten me on how a tanking build/rotation would look like?)

3. Paladins already play very well with Warrior tanking gear, being able to leverage on nearly all their stats except STR. Our only worries are a lack of spell damage for threat and STR being relatively useless. Changes in this area could take a lot of directions:

* We could get a talent that converts STR/AP/some other tanking stat into spell damage, so that Warrior gear is fully compatible.

* We could get a talent similar to Predatory Strikes: "Increases your spell damage by x% of any spell damage on your equipped weapon", which could potentially allow us to draw all our threat from our weapon. Warrior gear would then be fully compatible if there's no more need for spell damage on any slot besides our mace.

Time will tell, but honestly I think tanking gear and Prot in general is the least of our worries.

Even yesterday some people said lolret in guild chat. While it may have been to joke, it is a lost-lasting sigma (that was deserved, the spec was bad for a while).

The devs know the issues (not just with Paladins, with Group buffing as well), hopefully the next Wrath push will have some talents to see if they are addressed. Adding things like Battle shout and Windfury affecting people outside the group with help Ret a lot.

The Alpha has NOT ended yet. There wouldn't be a release date given for a game when it enters beta either. Now the Alpha probably will be ending in the next week or 2 followed by the beta but it hasn't stopped yet.