Just to nitpick, I think it would be 11% of their overall direct damage that would be contributed by the priest (55 divided by 5 individuals), meaning the shadow priest would need 89% dps.
I still think shadow priests will be a phenomenal boon to a raid.

Wrong. If the shadow priest boosts each lock's damage by 20% (assuming two locks) then he's applying basically 40% of the dps of a single member, simply by keeping weaving and misery up. With three mages, he's doing an additional 15%, so that's 55%.

So, in a raid with two locks and three mages, simply by existing a shadow priest is adding half a dps slot's worth of dps, and he only has to make up the other 45% to be viable for raw numbers. Not to mention VE and VT regen.

How is warrior tanking in the expansion anyway? I see lots of doom and gloom from various posters and can see the arguments pretty easily about how they affect large mob quantities in instances.

I can easily see a raw lack of global cooldowns not being enough at about 4 mobs quite easily, but with 7 mobs it seems down right absurd. I can do 7 mobs on Noth easily enough but they come one at a time provided healers do not run out of mana and the adds do not synch attacks up, but 7 at once seems ... daunting to say the least.

Don't think this deserves its own topic, but just wondering as I have no access to the beta (or much desire to level and level again on the same exact stuff).

Gothik live side.

I levelled a warrior purely to test the gearing in TBC (as in, he got to 60 in greens and blues and was transferred to the alpha server).

As such, he's now fully dressed in TBC gear. I've tanked everything, instance wise, up to Shattered Halls, etc, which we did at level 67. It's fully possible, aggro really isn't as much of a problem as people make out (feral druids were a bit of a nuisance for a while, but they got their threat generation in cat form fixed).

The biggest difference is, it's a lot harder to tank in an offspec than before, since the encounters are, naturally, tuned around having at least a prot-ish warrior, due to the buffs that tree received. Obviously, this will be mitigated somewhat by gearing in the tanks who've been sitting at 60 for some time.

I don't think you're intended to tank 7 of the mobs at one time. It's more of an exercise in crowd control, rather than just your normal dps one mob at a time down. As I said earlier, this was from when we did it at level 67, so it may be a touch simpler at 70, but warlock fear kiting, mage sheeping, frost novaing, rogue stunlocking casters, etc, is the order of the day.

The main reason I think that is one of the mobs in the big pulls has scatter shot, which makes tanking them a bit of an uphill struggle.

Anyway, I'm a druid, what the hell do I know about tanking.

It's not that big a deal providing your dps actually focus fires, I'd say. I got my warrior alt at 63'ish and I've tanked hellfire citadel and coilfang so far. I specced full prot though, and I can certainly see how that makes things easier :)

A thunderclap and demo shout along with some cleaves and a sunder on a mob or two generally keeps everything stuck to you, healer aggro isn't that big a problem on most encounters.

This is definitely the case, warlocks, mages, rogues and hunters all have their hands full in the upper tier of instances. The better your gear is the less CC you need but it makes life much simpler. (P.S. Hunters can drop traps in combat now so stop chasing stuff that runs to us. If we need it off we will feign or clip it, if we let it come to us it's because we have a trap down)

Far as Sharpshooters go, if you try to tank them you will get a scatter shot to the face and drop threat on everything for a few seconds. I started ranged tanking the sharpshooters and it saves a lot of headache. They will not scatter shot if you are outside their dead zone and they only hit me for about 400 or so ranged so its not a big deal. A warlock could accomplish the same thing with searing pain.

I actually prefer druid tanks in the higher end instances, since they can hold threat on 3 thing with minimal effort, just goes up from there if they are skilled.

There is a pretty big jump from what you are doing now at 63 and what you will see at 70. The pulls he is talking about are capable of taking a tank out with one round of attacks from all the mobs involved. An example would be the Champion pulls in Shattered Halls, 5 incoming mobs that all hit pretty hard and all mortal strike.

Edit: Apparently the Mods saved anyone the trouble of being spoiled.

I am now doomed forever. :(

Regarding instance difficulty, by all reports I feel that the current TBC 5-man difficulties are pretty much working as intended. This is/was my first WoW character ever, and I levelled the old-fashion, unguilded way. I think I must have gone through 7 Gnomeregan runs before actually killing Thermaplugg, so horrid, horrid pugs are nothing new. Nonstandard mechanics to fights are actually pretty common - and the power of information repositories like WoWWiki will eventually cater to the casual crowd. (Can't believe I said that. Oh well)

The average lv60+ casual will be a lot more experienced than the average lv30 casual. I'd think that with all else being equal, encounters at that stage in the game should be slightly more difficult than the legacy 5-mans after gear levels, etc are all considered.

I think the standard 5-mans will generally become pretty straightforward fare with even the most green of PUGs, because none of them have particularly complex mechanics, nor are they severely testing. In the Heroics, on the other hand, I just can't see Jimbob and his Rapier of the Monkey getting very far.

What? That is the exact reason why even hardcore min/max-stacking guilds brought 1-3 warlocks in Naxx 1.12, since the increased damage from curses made up for their own mediore damage. Thinking along those lines is absolutely correct in a min/max scenario.