The only professions that have no real tanking buffs are I believe skinning, tailoring and herbalism. If you happen to have that combo of professions, then yes, similarly geared people will have an hp/mitigation boost over you.

You can still be a perfectly viable tank with those professions though.

You can also see this behavior with Avenger's Shield.

Min-maxing your professions will clearly increase your tanking stats. Are they substantial enough to be required? I'd say that depends on your guild, but likely no.

As for your other question, about avoidance vs. mitigation, it's really a personal preference. Relying on avoidance is relying on luck. A good string of RNGs will save you in situations where your healers might be distracted( or otherwise occupied - think Illhoof type fights ). Bad streaks can instagib you on fights that are otherwise entirely under control. Relying on mitigation means that you're probably going to take more damage overall. Any given damage will be less, but it will be constantly happening.

Obviously, it's never all-avoidance (unless you manage to reach the unhittable mark, which appears unlikely in WotLK), or all-mitigation/hp. It's some combination of the two. And where you lie on that spectrum depends entirely on where you, and perhaps more importantly your healers, are comfortable with. Feedback with your healers here is the most important thing, even if it's usually just "Wow you were hard to heal there," or "You barely seemed to be taking any damage at all."

2 points in PoJ gives a 15% movment speed buff, while TV only gives 8%. Less stamina and less speed makes Tuskarr's Vitality inferior in any tanking circumstance.

Why should anyone recieving more damage by relying on mitigation in contrast to relying on stamina?
Increasing your mitigation stats should always decrease the total damage taken(while your mitigation is below 102,4%).

The profession thing is more about how much time you have to put into it... For now it's better to run heroics/10-mans to get better gear than to spend time leveling a profession (especially if you also need to farm the gold). Once I'm getting bored outside of raids, though, I'm pretty sure I'm going to level jewelcrafting. Not going to replace enchanting though - for holy it's too much effort for too little gain (leveling BS instead), and for prot it's equal to BS until you can socket all you gear with the yet-to-be-implemented epic gems (and again assuming new enchants won't be released to compensate).

If you really want to do your best in tanking, then LW+JC (or if they add a decent bracer enchant then BS or enchanting instead of LW). However unless you already have some awesome gear, you're probably going to gain more stats by doing other things.

I've been thinking about this for awhile, but does anyone think it would be possible to solo 10-man Loatheb? You'd spec 40/31/0, and stack enough BV so that you're fully blocking every attack. Sacred Shield will absorb Deathbloom almost completely, and then you just have to keep yourself alive through 4000 damage every 15 seconds from Inevitable Doom. Holy Shocking yourself in between Necrotic Auras seems like it could be enough to accomplish this.

The circumstances under this would be possible preclude theorycrafting. You'd need an instance ID that has cleared to Loatheb, not killed him, and don't wish to progress any further.

If one finds oneself in this situation, one should go solo him, and then post.

To start, your holy shock won't cut healing 4000 damage every 15 seconds, at least not in tanking gear and not when you can only shock once every 20s.

It should be possible with the right amount of thought put into it. You would just have to find a way to make the HPS you're possible of producing enough to make the incoming damage minimal, and then you'd be in for one heck of a long fight. Sacred Shield, BoSanct for Mana return, JoW, and Holy Shield spam should let you get through it - would be interesting to see done either from a WWS parse or a video. Let me know if you give it a go!

HS CD is 6 seconds now, not 20.

It'd be interesting to see if it would be doable, but frankly, I really don't think you'd be able to, since HS doesn't heal for much unless you're full holy.

Loatheb makes you able to heal for only 3s out of every 20s via a debuff, so unless the cooldown is less than 3s you can only get 1 HS every 20 seconds.

Actually I think sacred shield, JoL, and enough gear would make it quite possible. Loatheb simply hits like an infant- I don't know what everyone else has seen but I saw a monster '102' last night, and I'm certainly not maxed on gear. With proper stacking I think a LoH and a few choice heals could get us through it- is there an updated SH trinket?

To get around the spellpower problem I'd just use a Titansteel Guardian as my weapon with spellpower enchant, that will bring Sacred Shield up to ~1000 absorbed and will let it absorb almost all deathbloom damage. Everything else would be Prot gear, focused on block value. Holy Shock would be ~3000 base and with the spore buff it will be critting a lot. Yes, it can only be used every 20 sec but Inevitable Doom is only every 15 seconds and that's really the only thing that needs to be healed through. Seal/Judgment of Light would not do much, the aura is -100% healing recieved, so for 17 seconds out of 20 you'd get nothing.

My main worries would be beating any hidden berserk timer and durability issues. It would probably take over three hours to accomplish. I doubt I could average more than 750 DPS, as I'd be using Seal of Wisdom and using ShoR sparingly both to conserve mana and avoid clipping cooldowns. That means I'd be breaking several shields and probably some regular armor pieces, which I wouldn't be able to replace.

Holy Shock also might not be enough. About 500 damage would leak through from every Deathbloom, and then there's Inevitable Doom every 15 sec. I could probably expect to heal an average of around 5000 HP with each shock, but at one every 20 sec it's not going to completely cover it. Might be able to live for half an hour but certainly not the 3+ hours required.

I highly doubt I'll find a guild willing to hand me an instance ID cleared to Loatheb, either.

Also, while I'm talking about Titansteel Guardian, does it occur to anyone else that for both single-target boss tanking and AE tanking, (>6 targets) this is simply the best weapon? It's going to nearly double the value of your Sacred Shield and that's a lot of extra mitigation. It definitely hurts your threat output on a single target but your threat is so incredibly high anyway, I don't think it would matter. For AE tanking it would substantially BOOST your threat output as well as your mitigation, as Sacred Shield is going to be proccing basically instantly every time the CD is up. Only for holding aggro on 2-5 targets does using a standard tank weapon seem better, due to HotR.

Where the hell is the +hit rating on tanking gear?

Without the talent Precision around these days with its free 3% hit, I've had to socket a 16 hit rating gem and enchant precision to gloves and icewalker to boots in order to get just under 4% hit. t7 gloves are the only set piece with any hit on them (if I wear them over Gauntlets of the Disobedient) and the only other items with +hit on I use are my weapon and shield, which if I upgrade could lose me even more hit!

As far as titansteel guardian being greater mitigation in an aoe situation due to the spell damage, you also have to look at the stats of the tanking weapon you would be replacing. Take red sword of courage with 38 def and 26 str. This gives (before diminished returns) 1.25% total mitigation, almost 1% of which is avoidance along with 16 block value from the str. Since the added spell dmg from titansteel gives 365 added absorbtion every 6 seconds and you're discussing a situation where you're tanking over 6 mobs depending on the amount these hit for you won't be increasing your survivability.

Hit-capping isn't necessarily a requirement on every single fight. If you're doing a fight that amounts to a tank-and-spank, you can be pretty sure that, e.g. MD/TotT+AS+judge+slam will land enough threat to let your dps start up. Capping only come into play when you need to guarantee a taunt or a slam/AS to pick up adds or whatever. So it's entirely doable (albeit annoying) to carry around a few extra pieces for a hit-cap set.

Obviously this is one reason why the [Titanium Weapon Chain] is probably the best weapon enchant available, even if you have PoJ.

[Snapper Extreme] food gives 40 hit rating and 40 stam, so you can carry some of that around for hit-crucial fights. Ditto [Elixir of Accuracy], which gives 45 hit rating. Given that new flasks aren't really much better than the old ones (Stoneblood is actually worse than Fort from an itemvalue perspective) you don't lose nearly as much by forgoing one.

You could perhaps arrange on a normal run for everyone to take a half-hour break and sit outside Loatheb's room while you go in and try to solo him. No concerns about missed loot that way. (Or if there's concern about not tagging him, pay them 10g each to cover repairs when they run into the room with you and just sit there and die.)

There's about half a page dedicated to it.

(Snowy edit: Deleted the other 2 posts to conserve space)

I wouldn't call block rating crappy, considering unhittable is pretty hard/impossible to achieve right now without Redoubt proc'ing.

My question is, anyone out there using the +Defense +SBV% meta gem rather then the +Stam +Armor%. The gem requirement (2 reds 1 blue) is unfavorable but it provides a good chunk of Defense which can allow more gear changing. Personally I've been running into the problem of passing up 'upgrades' due to the fact the Defense I would lose would drop me below uncrittable, and I don't have alternative gear to make up for it.

Achieving unhittable (assuming you mean 102.4% avoidance) isn't too hard with just holy shield up in raid gear.

As far as the meta goes, that's partially why I like my JC, it enables me to just use pure stam gems in and still obtain the meta requirements. I'd personally use parry/stam gems to fufill the requirements of the +DEF/+SBV meta if I didn't have the option of prismatic gems. There's a few more orange/purple gems that are potential options.

For the most part, there seems to be quite a bit of +hit on 25man gear. I'm basically hit capped in my current gear on raid bosses assuming there's a +3% hit debuff on the boss.

I've been using the def/blockval gem without question. Not that the stam/armor meta doesn't have some benefits, but I just can't even consider using it until I get extremely comfortable on defense-capping. Like everyone else, I'm constantly running into the problem of "upgrades" that drop me below the defense cap and I'd be in worse shape without that meta.

There are a lot of slots on my gear where I want a reddish gem to get the socket bonuses, so meeting the 2-red requirement is pretty automatic. (In fact, until I red this post I thought it was a two-yellow requirement, but I never lost the meta-gem, so I didn't notice anyway.) The lack of any orange gem with defense is annoying, but c'est la vie for now.

Also, pro tip: If possible, it's a good idea to fill some of the meta-gem requirements using other sockets on the helm. Having the required gems "built in" can save you some regemming hassle as you upgrade (and this is the period where a lot of people are doing a lot of upgrading.)

And also: If you really find red gems to be a hassle and you're willing to give up 9 def rating, you can use the old-school [Eternal Earthstorm Diamond] which only requires yellows and blues.

And also also: Sorry I haven't gotten the guide together faster. I'm in crunch time in classes, in addition to getting the guild through our first kills on the 25-man content this past week. Things should be lightening up by the end of this week and I'll have plenty of time over the holidays to complete the guide and polish it up.

And also^3: In the Benefactor's Bar there's been some explanation from Boethius about the intent of these new class forums. The idea is to cut down on the mega-thread phenomenon by giving people a place to start smaller threads about manageable topics. So, if you have something to talk about regarding tanking or prot paladins that seems to be worth a good chunk of discussion on its own, you might want to start a new thread on it.

[Perfect Champion's Huge Citrine] or [Perfect Stalwart Huge Citrine] seems like a, well, perfectly viable option for the time being. -1 def and dodge/str vs. the NYI rare version isn't enough to pitch any fuss over.

I suspect Blizzard left out the rare gems that they did so as to encourage crafters to actually make perfect gems for awhile. Any excuse to get those uncommon gems off of my bankmule is one I can support.