You have 25 man raids max and you have paladin/druid/priest healers, shamans... I don't think so.

You have 25 man raids max and you have rogue/mage/warlock DPS, hunters... I don't think so.

It's a stupid way to argue against it.

I'm all for versatile usage of hybrid classes in raids, but here's the thing. If there are 6+ mobs to deal with in a 25 man raid encounter, wouldn't it make more sense from encounter design perspective to allow for either CC (which so many of the classes have so many choices to pick from) or AoE? Maybe mages, warlocks and holy novaing priests want something to do also? :P

Also, in such a situation, why couldn't you do a rotation evasion tanking between the 3 rogues on that one mob and have the rest of the raid not tanking burn it down first? Or more interestingly, given how blizzard seems hell bent on giving paladin their tanking identity back why are only 1 of the paladins off tanking?

It really seems like you guys are just looking for something else to do than stand behind a mob and dps, and pidgeon holing of classes in raids has been a problem for alot of raiders, but I would wonder about balancing giving a rogue tanking abilities in this game. Especially given that they seem to be emphasizing PvP aspect of the game in TBC, and blizzard has been notoriously bad at balancing their class designs for both PvE and PvP.

Also, not that I necessarily share this view, but for the premier (yes fury warriors can also compete I know) dps class to ask for more roles in the raid could sound a bit like greedy whining to a casual observer.

I don't think anyone advocates everyone be able to do everything. However, in any situation where a mob can be slowed/snared, a mage can effectively tank (Rajaxx adds, hello). It's not tanking in the soaking up form, but you're taking hostile DPS out of the equation, and generally having them look in your direction.

This, of course, is entirely a function of encounter design. For example, did your guild's rogues drool on Vent with joy when it was discovered the large number of stunnable mobs (including boss adds) in Naxx? My former guild's did. Moving forward, with the "emphasis on the hybrid" and the deemphasis of the tank and spank encounters, I can only hope that this will become more the norm than the exception.

As for your hunter, wouldn't it be great if there were encounters where you're overwhelmed with moderate sized adds that can't be maged down, but pets could nullify them? You'd no longer have to justify suboptimal DPS ("Yarr replace us all with mages and rogues outside of the tranq rotation kludge!"). What if they had a healing bite, so if the mob only does a finite amount of DPS, they are fire and forget tanks for mid-sized (aka, larger than mage AOE, smaller than Fankriss snakes) mobs? (Even level warlock with felhunter eating the magic from those ghosts in the higher level razorfen is along the lines of what I'm rambling about here - I was able to solo packs with the felhunter healing itself sufficently quickly off of the buff eating).

There's no reason that encounters and classes can't be opened up so that they're more than one trick ponies.

Not that I want to be a rogue tank. But I'm enjoying being a lolferal these days, shifting the raid's balance between healing and tanking at a click. Being more than a one trick pony is great. (And no, my druid doesn't raid top end progress content, which also has brought a lot of the joy of WoW back for me too, by the by, specifically because the margin for error allows for even more diversity)

Shamans provide useful buffs, hunters provide useful buffs, and take little damage, and have incredibly good agro reduction.

Rogue tanks offer an inferior ability to tank compared to 3 (4 if you include shamans, don't look at me they've got mail and shields) other classes. Add to that the fact that rogue "tanking" abilities are either luck or cooldown based, and it's pretty clear as to why they're just not well suited to tanking mobs for any long duration of time. I don't know what more to tell you, atm, there's no situation in which I would consider a rogue tanking spec to be useful, once new encounters come out... I might just have to change my mind.

Wouldn't you rather argue about how warriors get yet more useful raiding talents (blood frenzy) and spells (commanding shout). Or the fact that all warriors have a new spell (spell reflection) which is virtually just as good (argueably better) than the 41 point travesity that is cloak of shadows?

Avoiding the "I'm looking for a bear, you're not a bear," effect - how about mobs that have -hit when hit by a rogue that can be gouged?

How about this - imagine an untauntable boss that is unparriable and unblockable, hits for 1000 (special only) and does a stacking debuff. Every sixth swing is replaced with an instagib kebob attack that will fail unless the target has 3+ of the debuff. Manageable healing, warrior and bear can't handle it, and the rogue MT if he gets a fourth stack can either feint and call pal #2 to AR, or vanish and have pal #2 pick it up.

Oh, wait, that's I'm looking for a bear, you're not a bear, a gimmick fight and hardly relevent. Well, yeah. Just like Garr and Moam are gimmick fights to make warlocks useful. It all rests on encounter design.

What if you can't burn it in 45 seconds?

What if there are 7 little mobs, or 8? What if the mobs manaburn?

If everything can be CCed or AoEd, won't that get boring too? It allows more flexibility in encounter design. It allows more flexibility in group makeup.

Balancing is less of an issue than you think, since the chief advantage a rogue has (extremely high dodge mitigation, basically) is useless vs. casters, only moderately useful vs. warriors, and is totally useless vs. a combat rogue with our DPS-lowering talent. In PvP, a rogue with that kind of spec/itemization would look a lot like a prot warrior - harder to kill, but not really all that good at killing you, either.

And rogues are only the premier DPS class on single-target fights without detrimental PBAOE. That kind of fight isn't all that prevalent, and other classes compete quite well on other types of encounters. If it seems greedy to want the ability to do something that isn't single-target DPS, oh well.

I can't buff. I can't provide any group benefit at all (unless the mob is stunnable).
I can't provide effective CC - sap is nearly worthless.
I can't heal.
I can't kite.
All I can do effectively is single-target DPS.

Is it really greedy to want to be able to do something that requires any interaction at all with the rest of the people I raid with?

Fankriss.

Kurinaxx.

Like I've been pointing out, like Avair said up front - we're 90% there as is. Add in threat management capabilities (a taunting poison to go with Shiv, a poison allowing us to eliminate the rogue passive and give us the equivalent of Defensive Stance/Bearform threat multiplication) and we're 96, 97% there. The other 3-4% is just itemization.

An idea I had about the Aggrivating Poison was to make it a 0% chance of application for a 2-3 second taunt, it would then be designed to work with Shiv. Also to make it so you couldnt just spam Shiv and make it more challenging, make it have say 5 charges on it.

So quick summary to the thread to date.

* Some people think rogues shouldn't tank.
* Numbers show we are very close to viable as off tanks with current itemization.
* To make this workable in the expansion we need Blizzard to:
** Add some slightly better itemization (Beef's suggestion about socketable druid/rogue tank gear is great)
** Add threat/taunt poisons.

Without the +threat poisons and some itemization, none of this works.

So the question is, how likely or how possible is it that somebody at Blizzard will A) notice this thread? B) Read it C) Take it designers to see it is workable in their plan? D) Actually add it as an option?

Theorycraft is nice, but at worst its just a tree falling in a forest with nobody around to hear it.

Really, it's fine to have it be many charges, just make it 1s in duration with a 0-5% rate of application. The length of snap aggro, with current taunt mechanics, is less important than the ability to force aggro is.

I updated the orginal post with a more balanced version of enraging poison. Basically 1% chance to apply, 1s duration, +20 energy cost to Shiv. Taunt once per 6s basically, but at the cost of threat generation (since it costs energy unlike warrior's taunt).

I swear, if Blizzard does read this post, and take action based on the suggestions contained herein, I'll be disappointed. Assuming that one were to accept the (faulty) premise that the numbers show we're "close" to being able to tank, might I ask why you guys want this?

Yes, I have read the thread, a few times. Please don't misinterpret this as a lack of respect, in general the roguecrafting on this board is literally second to none, which is why I'm here. It's clear that you guys are doing your homework on this issue that is clearly important to you, and I respect that a great deal, but in all honesty if Blizzard "re-allocates" some DPS abilities (as sparse as they are in this alpha talent release) for more tanking abilities based on the theorycrafting in this thread... I'll seriously be pissed. I don't want to see rogues as the feral druids of the Xpac. I want to be top dog DPS - it's what we're made for. Our damage avoidance is due to the fact that we *are* squishy, and as Gurg mentioned, the improvements to our avoidance are being made for reasons that we can't currently grasp. To take the 'improvements' and try to apply them to "I CAN TANK VAEL" is missing the forest for the tree's IMO. Any talk of application beyond 4H is purely speculative.

Oops. Sorry about that. Corrected.

What abilities? Based on what we suggested all that is needed is one or two more poisons for generating threat/taunt. They already added a "Feint" poison, which frankly seems completely unnecessary. The avoidance abilities are already in the subtley tree, which no PvE DPS rogue is going to touch.

More to the point, how much more DPS are we realistically going to get? There is a upper cap, after all, since we need to balanced for PvP as well.

From a personal standpoint, to prolong my investment in this game. Sooner or later DPS gets boring, and having something else to do will delay that point for me.

From a practical perspective, because we're never going to be allowed to be clearly superior DPS because it breaks PvP, so there's no reason *not* to ask for something else. If I can't have A, at least I can have B.

The thing is: there's no re-allocation of talents in this thread.

The talent trees, as shown, are fine for hypothetical rogue tanking. The talents supporting it are already being given to us. The changes to finish it are essentially in itemization, and adding a couple poisons. Nothing about it requires us to lose the ability to be a top DPS class, because the tanking role we'd provide is really no deeper than the secondary roles mages can perform. The abilities we're already being given support it with minor itemization changes - we're getting a -threat on application poison, give us a +threat on application poison. Give us some form of poison or buff to eliminate our threat reduction. Allow slightly better leather tanking itemization (which helps druids too!). And that's it. Not a huge amount of changes.

I wouldn't call the issue important to me, necessarily - I won't quit if it doesn't happen. I do, however, think it would be a positive addition to the game, just like I think giving warlocks some damage back to go with their utility and giving mages additional kite/CC skills made the game better. I think making shamans and paladins less pigeonholed into one role makes the game better.

I think giving players more options makes the game more fun for everyone, and while I *enjoy* figuring out how to maximize my DPS, I'll get twice as much enjoyment out of figuring out how to both maximize my DPS *and* figuring out how to effectively roguetank.

I'm not shouting "I CAN TANK VAEL", even though Vael is actually a pretty good example of a fight rogues do well in (short duration to maximize evasion's applicability, a large portion of the damage is fully mitigable). I don't want to replace warriors.

But I wouldn't mind occasionally hearing "OK, Kalman, throw on your tanking gear and pick up Khan the Poisoner while the AoE tank/kill team destroys Khan's minions." Having something else to do on occasion (the suppression room does NOT count) is fun. Fun is why I play the game.

Is there some other type of personality that runs up to a 100 yard tall minion of an ancient evil god, stabs it for one fourth its life, and has plans of seeing tomorrow?

You can block a hamstring and negate its effect. Nitpicking, but a true fact :P

This requires that your block value be greater than the damage dealt by the hamstring, right? It's the warrior analog of priest/mage shields soaking up kicks and preventing the interrupt, I think?

Yes, same idea, but a block value higher than hamstring after armor mitigation is not exactly high or hard to get (even blocking a crit hamstring is frequent).

Right. But the point of "500 damage melee attack which applies debuff lasting 5 seconds which increases melee damage taken on next attack by 500, debuff stacks infinitely" being far more survivable by avoidance tanks compared to mitigation tanks stands. Really, just about any encounter with a stacking melee-applied debuff would favor an avoidance tank over a mitigation tank.

I think the rice chessboard problem would be more fun. Does one damage, and doubles per application. How many tanks do you think would go, "Lol lootpinata - is this guy bugged?" before getting non-crit hit for 8192?

I'm not really sure you need a boost to threat generation to be a useful tank. Certainly a tank needs to do enough damage to keep above healing threat, but the only reason a rogue would need to additional threat generation is if you assume that the mob you are tanking is going to be the focus of everyone's fire while you are tanking it. If you can offtank a mob in a corner until the rest of the raid has burned down the mobs that a warrior/druid/pally/etc is tanking, that can be a signifigant benefit to the raid. For example, envision a wave of 20 mobs that have a short range heal and a stacking damage aura. You'd need to keep them apart so you could burn them down without the other 19 mobs casting heals on the target of your assist train or smashing your tanks with 10k hits. With 20 mobs, everyone who can stand toe to toe with a mob would have to tank something. Or alternately, think of a pair of adds who have a stacking poison that was mentioned earlier in the thread that are resurrected by the boss if they are killed first. Certainly you could rotate through warriors tanking them, but that adds complication and requires a ton of dps. If you had a rogue who can avoid the stacking poison for a long period of time, once the boss is down, a warrior could step in, taunt the mob off the rogue, and everyone could dps it down before the warrior became too poisoned.

I honestly think rogues are fine for limited offtanking as they stand currently, it's just that no encounter design has made it worth losing the rogue's DPS while they tank something in the corner. Other than gimick fights, would you rather lose the DPS of 1) a paladin/shaman 2) a druid or 3) a rogue?

The major reasons for the +threat poisons are twofold - one, given current game design, you need to have the ability to taunt to be a tank - especially since the strength of avoidance tanking (stacking situations) being somewhat luck-based requires a way for rogues to swap aggro around. Second, because rogues have a passive threat reduction, simply to restore us to even with everyone else and give us a method to generate enough threat to be a useful tank, we'd need threat generation and a way to eliminate the penalty.

What if healing is more important? Would you rather lose the healing of a rogue or a druid/paladin/shaman?

I don't want a gimmick, I'd just like to see a legitimate secondary role for a rogue rather than "If it's single-target melee DPS, you're great, otherwise you're useless".