EDIT: The OP is not going to be updated anymore since all the new info is easily accessable from MMO-C anyway.
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Sup. Figured it would be nice to have one thread for all the tank changes since it's quite tedious to look into 4 different threads for similar info. Most changes will affect all tanks anyway and in addition it's always nice to have a list to compare where you stand with the other tanks.

General:

- Crit immunity and non-tank specs:

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Q u o t e:
With the higher health pools, a non-Protection / Blood / Feral should be able to tank most non-heroic dungeons. You'll get crit, but the crits won't kill you. In fact, that is more reason to keep crit immunity to the dedicated tanks.

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- Taunt is now (presumably) on the melee hit table and does not miss with 8% Hit. See post 169 for more details.

All classes:

- The -AP debuff is now a flat -10% damage reduction. DKs got one as well now.
- Thunderclap effects appear to be unchanged, and still reduces attack speed by 20%. However Thunderlap itself got it's debuff duration lowered to 10 seconds.
- Crit reduction from tanking stances is now implemented: DKs get it for free in Frost Presence, Druids still from SotF, Paladins through Holy Shield talent and Warriors from Safeguard. These talents now properly give you Daze immunity.
- Two tanking classes can now apply the major armor debuff: Warriors with Sunder Armor and Druids with Fairire Fire. In addition to this Hunters can apply this now as well at base (no special pet required).
- +Health raid buffs are gone. Commanding Shout and Blood Pact now emulate Prayer of Fortitude.
- The On Next Swing specials (Heroic Strike, Maul and Runestrike) were changed to Instant attacks that are on the GCD and incur the GCD.
- Block now reduces 30% of the swing properly
- Parry is now 50% damage reduction for 2 swings. [BUG?] However it is still full avoidance on mob specials (like Cleave). Dodge, Miss and Crit Block all affect your Parry chance negatively. Not only can a Parry roll be overwritten by these, it even affects BOTH Parry rolls. Also, a slow hitting mob or one that casts inbetween the 2 Parry rolls will negate the 2nd Parry because you are only guaranteed a 2nd Parry ~3 sec after the first Parry. (See post 88 for further details)
- Stoneskin and Devotion Aura do not stack anymore.
- Defense from gear is gone now without any sort of compensation. Defense from enchants and gems are unaffected though.
- Bonus armor got lowered by A LOT. ILVL 270 epic shields lost around 1.4k armor and some items like the Organ lost ALL of their armor. However a blue ILVL 277 shield which should have lower armor than the epic 270 shield has 1.3k more armor more, so it is possible that this a bug.

Druids:

- Maul is now functional
- [Bug?] Swipe is hitting for alot less than on live.
- FF now emulates Sunder Armor
- Lost alot of AP due to the WotLK tanking gear being just having Agi and no more +AP.
- Thrash is available but the Swipe synergy is not yet included.
- Improved Leader of the Pack is now 4%/8% healing as well as the 4%/8% mana restore for the Feral but based on the wording it may no longer provide healing to anyone else.
- Savage Defense is now a 50% chance on Critical Strike to put up a shield worth 75% of our total Attack Power.
- My combat forms cost 174 at lvl 80 now, without any talents spent.
- [Bug] Dire Bear Form is gone for me, but this might be because I logged out in Dire Bear Form during the patch. Need confirmation from others since all my Druid has got right now is the old Bear Form.

Paladins:

- [Bug] SoV does not apply a dot.
- BoSanc is now passive.
- Divine Intervention is gone.
- Divine Plea is still there.
- Forebearance is still there.

Continued below.

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Q u o t e:

The thing I'm wondering now is what's the stance on tanking now? Is it ONLY for those who are setup specifically to tank?

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With the higher health pools, a non-Protection / Blood / Feral should be able to tank most non-heroic dungeons. You'll get crit, but the crits won't kill you. In fact, that is more reason to keep crit immunity to the dedicated tanks.

We're still working on talent trees. You'll probably see a lot more of the passive or boring talents go away in the next build or two. Talents like Master Marks are here to stay though.

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Q u o t e:
I hate threat dealing with threat. The group just shouldn't be fighting the tank to get the job done, especially since we're all on the same side. It shouldn't be the tank vs. the group vs. the mob. Baking in hate reduction into abilities would be great, though. Paying precious talent points for this is just not something I like doing. Though, I do agree that some kind of hate dump would be good. Still too early to really see where things are gonna end up.

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Even today, pulling threat from a tank in a single-target fight after a few seconds into the fight is pretty uncommon. That isn't likely to change. You'll still have to be more careful early in a fight, or when threat changes such as new adds arriving or tank transitions, or an encounter that actually messes with threat a little. If threat is simply never an issue then tanking becomes a good deal more boring.

What is going to change is that we are getting rid of passive threat reduction talents and threat transfers like Misdirect and ToT being used as threat enhancers.

On threat, one of the changes we're considering trying out is to have threat decay pretty rapidly. The idea is that a tank should never be able to get so far ahead on threat that they can AFK for the rest of the fight. It might sound like a nerf, but really the intent is to make sure that the tank's job is never done -- that what you do will remain important.

The tuning wouldn't be such that if you missed a couple of swings that the warlocks would pull aggro. The feeling would be more that you have to still make decisions with regard to threat generation throughout the fight.

Furthermore, we are exploring the threat generation of Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade being temporary. That way it would still be useful for initial pulls or when adds join the fray, but wouldn't be a crutch to keep tank threat consistently high throughout a fight. Tanks are already dependent on other classes for their survival -- we want threat generation to be primarily the tank's responsibility. (Don't take that to mean that dps classes won't have to watch their threat or use threat dumps -- it just means we don't want to have tanks relying on other classes to generate threat for the tank.)

We're also not happy with the new implementation of parry, where you take 50% damage from two swings. It sounded good on paper, but after testing it out we thought the second swing just feels goofy and confusing. Our plan is to revert parry back to 100% avoidance and remove the concept of swing speed increase for any creature (players could still do it). We would change the budget on parry to be exactly the same as dodge. We'd also like to add some more talent hooks that favor say parry over dodge for some classes -- stuff like "After a successful parry...."

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Q u o t e:
I think what GC meant is that they don't want us be able to stop really having to matter about the threat after, say 2 minutes of fight, and just do our cycle to keep it more or less at the same level, as it often happens today.

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Exactly. The Putricide and Rotface examples are all solvable problems. If we want you to be able to off tank or kite, we can design the encounters to support that.

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Q u o t e:
I don't want to lose any of that to decay because that's just punishing me for no reason.

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It's a little more consistent with the rest of the game though. A rogue who hit 12,000 dps a few seconds ago can't just sit back and rely on that damage to carry them through the rest of the fight. That dps definitely counted for something because the boss is that much closer to death. But they need to keep up with it the rest of the time too. In the same way, we want tanks to care about threat and not get into situations where there is no realistic way anyone can ever pull off of them. If you are doing your rotation right, as most raid tanks do, you won't have any problem. If you tab out to surf the internet then you may have a problem.

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Q u o t e:
I'd still rather tanks had more defensive things to get right rather than focusing on the offensive things. Tanks should care about the incoming damage they take at the end of a fight - particularly in a mana-sensitive context. Giving tanks more direct control over the incoming damage they take would separate skill levels, feel more accurate for the tanking role and allow for more interesting interaction with the boss.

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Tanks have a lot more cooldowns to use than they used to. Fundamentally though, our difficulty model is dependent on requiring a stable of healers to keep the tank up. If the tank has too much control over whether he or she lives or dies, then your success or failure has a lot more to do with the skill of that one player rather than the coordination of the raid as a whole (which is where we want it).

One idea we like for Vigilance is for it to keep the protective aspect it has now, but instead of transferring threat to the tank, it gives them a chunk of Vengeance if the target takes damage. The nice thing about that is it turns into a great tool for an OT to use on the MT.

Let me expand on why we would look at threat decay.

If you tanked pre-LK, maintaining threat as a tank was a pretty big deal. The best tanks were the ones who could generate threat quickly and keep it high, allowing the raid to go to 100% quickly. We lost that a little in LK, and part of the reason was Tricks and Misdirect. Those abilities can keep a tank's threat high enough to where the risk of pulling off of the tank is very low.

But is that fun for the tank? If threat never matters, then the tank is left with trying to stay alive (which comes down to managing cooldowns) and perhaps moving the boss or other encounter-specific mechanics (which to be fair, we do a lot more of these days). The problem with staying alive as a goal is that it's pretty binary. The tank can't really work to "stay alive better than last time" in the same way dps can try to maximize their dps or healers can try to keep everyone up without running OOM. Threat gives tanks something to work on. It gives you a reason to hit that Shield Slam at the right moment rather than being lazy and mostly autoattacking.

Having said all that, we don't want threat to constantly feel like a throttle and we don't want tanking to feel horribly frustrating. We want you to be able to manage your own threat as a tank and we'll give you the tools to do that, but then you actually need to do that. Having a slow threat decay makes sure that your job is never done -- that you can't get so far ahead of everyone that hitting Shield Slam at the right time becomes irrelevant for the rest of the fight. If you are already an awesome tank you probably won't notice a difference.

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Q u o t e:
I think your example is also quite a bit off. The way I see it, tanks will still have a threat lead. The boss won't just randomly turn to a DPS because you got unlucky, but you will have to keep generating threat to stay ahead. If you start chatting for 15 seconds instead of using your abilities, there might be consequences.

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Yeah, this is along the right lines. You won't suddenly notice a massive drop because "decay kicked in." But you'll never be able to get so far ahead of everyone else that there is no possibility of them catching up even if you do nothing. As I said, if you hit all your buttons now, you won't notice a difference, but there might be a more noticeable difference between good tanks and bad tanks.

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Q u o t e:
Q u o t e:
If "threat" was so outta control in LK why are we getting vengeance?


We won't have tricks of the trade or MD anymore. Tanks may fall behind the DPS later on so it is to keep us up there easier.

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Right. Vengeance isn't to make threat irrelevant. Vengeance is to solve a very specific problem, which is that if threat is balanced in the first tier, it won't be balanced in the last tier because dps specs gain a lot more dps stats from their dps gear than tanks gain dps stats from their tank gear. As an alternative, we considered just not making tanking gear, but we didn't like how that would feel.

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Q u o t e:
In beta lvl80 tanking gear have less stamina then plate DPS gear

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Do you have examples of such gear that we need to look at or are you just speculating?

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Q u o t e:
Another example would be Badge of Frost plate belts:

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Ah, okay, I thought you meant gear you earned in beta, but you're talking about the current gear when it gets updated to Cataclysm rules. There is some funkiness there because of all of the stats we have to remove, but rest assured you will still have a lot more health than non-tanks and once you get into Cataclysm gear, your stuff will also have more Stamina than theirs.