This kind of thing has always bothered me. As our mitigation goes up, our damage output and threat generation go down. And this isnt due to the inherent changes in gear, it's due to rage generation. Doesn't it strike anyway as completely backwards that warriors are the one and only class in the game that gets worse at something as their gear improves? A protection warrior should never have to take their shield off in order to effectively tank a 5-man dungeon, and yet it's suggested all the time. To me, that just seems like a broken mechanic. Our threat generation really needs to scale with our mitigation in some way.

And regarding druids, imagine if you had two separate trees for cat form and bear form... all of those feral talents split into two trees. There, now you're a warrior.

I really don't think I can explain that any better, but the feral treee is the equivalent of a combined fury and protection tree. Hell, they even took the talents that boosted feral combat in balance and moved them all to restoration so you wouldn't even have to make difficult choices and still get a minor healing boost.

And the bit about warriors being so gear dependent is true, but how are druids not as gear dependent for tanking? Isn't itemization the entire reason warriors still have an edge in live? People keep acting like once we see raid gear, the warrior tanking set will be better than the druid tanking set... you can't possibly know that.

Current gear in BC is equivalent between the classes, and it's all we have to go on. Which means if you're looking for the cold hard numbers of it, this is as good a place to start as any because it's a direct comparison of talents and abilities. It isn't hard to see who's winning out.

So you expect the protection tanks to run around in raid encounters with a Nightfall and then what?
You have to realize that we don't just give up dps in raids, we pretty much give up 5 man tanking, PVP and money-grinding.
And you want us to run around with a Nightfall on raids so you can tank, switch out to heal when necessary and take the rogue spot when a rogue die.....
Give me the dps of a feral druid in cat form and I'll call it fair.
Battleshout or Leaders Of the Pack?

I think everyone should be able to do very respectable DPS no matter what class they are or what their spec is. Times are a changing; anything else in a future (mainstream) MMO would just be a design flaw.

That being said, Protection Warriors are hardly suffering. Huge talent buffs in TBC, not to mention every single one of the new core skills benefit Prot warriors more than DPS warriors. And yes they're still the best tanks. The real deficiency prot warriors have is solo grinding, but that's also less true than it was before. I myself suspect full-spec prot warriors will be hugely powerful in the arenas (with the right team, of course).

Just wanted to add my 2 cents. As a prot paladin in live, I'd just like to add a few things that a few people seem to have skipped over or are not aware of.

As for the int requirement on paladin gear for tanking, I rarely run out of mana (and therefore threat via my holy damage) when tanking a single target. With judgement of wisdom up, I have enough mana to spam judgement of righteousness whenever it comes up. With blessing of wisdom on myself (and possible mana tides, innervates, mana potions, etc) now and coming in TBC, mana will never be a problem unless the boss mana burns, of which very few do.

35-40 mp5 via the buff, plus gear, spirit regen, and 90 mana every here and there from melee strikes means you can pretty much spam judgements, seals and holy shield indefinatly (spelling? :P) itemisation shouldn't be a problem in TBC looking at what they've already released. Hell, we can wear warrior gear :p

As for the posts mentioning warriors ability to choose when to block, in my experience Holy Shield gives prot paladins this ability too. You can argue all day long about which tank will be hands down better, but I wouldn't count on warriors being tiers ahead of paladins come proper itemisation in tbc.

My biggest concern will be how effective the new paladin 'taunt' will be. If this turns out to be an innefective way of grabbing aggro, Paladins will probably fall behind.

You forgot to add that we can replace Mages as well when they die, all with the same gear and the same encounter. Personally I top the Damage and Healing charts while outtanking ever Prot Warrior there is. Your Druids can't do it? Please replace them with competent hackers.

That is exactly how it works for Feral Druids as well. I go with Outriders Leggings because they have a crapton of agi (Crit/Dodge) Sta, and high armor, instead of going with R13 Pants that give 48 AP but .5% less dodge/agi and a bit less armor. I take less damage when hit because of more armor, and get hit less from more dodge, I also generate less rage when I hit. Better mitigation, less damage.

The major difference? Druids dislike Defense because we don't get Parry/Block and getting to "uncritable" was fairly rediculous for us, so we asked for more Agi and Armor on 'feral gear'. Warriors asked for dodge, parry, block and defense ... that's what you got.

And for the record, a prot warrior in full wrath was capable of pulling off 500 DPS before 2.0. I don't know what the new amount would be with new talents/rage gen though.

Full wrath with a Thunderfury is hardly indicative of prot warrior DPS for 2 big reasons. The first being that the 5 piece wrath bonus is actually a nice boost for dmg, and the second being the Thunderfury procs doing a lot of his damage. So yes, a prot warrior with a TF can spam hamstring and do decent dmg with procs and saving 5 rage on 5 piece Wrath procs. However, that's not representative of prot warrior dps in any way, shape, or form for anyone not using 5 Wrath and a Thunderfury.

Shouldn't equipping end of the line DPS gear as Prot Warrior actually increase the DPS compared to Wrath even without TF?

*sigh* You asked a question that was answered on page 2. I gave an off the wall answer, one that I'm frankly jealous of. If kitty druids had something like a Nightfall proc as a talent "lolferal" jokes would have died real fast.

I suspect that prot wars who have nothing to do on a fight, do the same thing as resto druids when there's enough healing: find something else that they can do that helps the raid progress.

All other classes all have the "I'm not always the best at something" thing going on and they seem to be doing fine. Some fights rogues are better dps, on some hunters etc. We touched on this on page 3 I think.

There needs to be a balance between speck / player skill / gear / class. Just because I speck resto doesn't always mean that I'm automatically the best healer out there. Sometimes there's a priest that might heal better than me, sometimes a pally. Some pallies can heal better than some priests. That's just common sense.

In my opinion, tanking should be no different than any other job in that respect.

Also, bear in mind that there is little reliable info coming from the Beta in terms of class design. There's undoubtadly alot of sensationalism.

Remember when rogues started crying that the sky was falling because warriors could out damage them on select fights? Yeah. We didn't take it seriously then, we shouldn't take it too seriously now.

Kosath has brought up the only truly concerning arguement about warrior scaling that I've seen from a mechanical point of view. But if it makes you feel any better,(from an itemization point of view) two weeks ago the Beta Druid forums were convinced that we'd end up being healbots again at 70, due to scaling issues / talent issues. It appears that looking closer at relative items, that druids get less of a dps boost for items of equivalent nature.

Despite what you might think, the grass isn't any greener over here.

Apologies for the slight derail but would your decision change at all if the R13 two piece bonus (+20 Stam) came into play? As I have been unable to get my hands on neither a Guise nor a pair of Green Dragon pants--their name eludes me at the moment--I'm considering my PvP Gear options. The R13 hat is almost a given, considering that none of the faction specific rewards include helms, and I'm trying to decide which of the the WSG or R13 pants would be superior, given the additional set bonus of wearing both R13 items.

I'm also considering swapping out my SF Boots for the R12 piece for general PvP, as that would make the 3pc speed bonus kick in, but I haven't decided on that yet.