The Slow Death of Tank Gear

Paladin tanks have very weird stat priorities now.

The reason for this is that we get a huge benefit from our Shield of the Righteous ability. At my current levels of mastery in a mix of JP blues and LFR epics, ShotR gives me a full 50% reduction in physical damage taken.

The thing is, Shield of the Righteous is very short. The damage reduction only lasts 3 seconds. On the plus side, getting to three Holy Power does not take long. The thing is, because this ability is so powerful, we really need to maximize the time it is up. This means we prioritize hit, HARD capping Expertise, and... Haste.

Because we inherited Ret's Sanctity of Battle, the cooldowns on Judgment and Crusader Strike/Hammer of the Righteous now scale with Haste. And when your survival is built on maintaining a 3-second buff that needs HoPo to put up, you are going to want to hit with your HoPo generators as consistently and frequently as possible.

What this means is that Paladin tanks now want Hit, Expertise, Mastery and Haste (Mastery is still good as it's the thing that determines how powerful that awesomely powerful ability is, not to mention giving Block chance and buffing Bastion of Glory.) Look at those stats. Notice anything? Put together, those look like DPS stats.

A Paladin tank could have a set of gear with not a bit of dodge or parry, and still be considered appropriately geared. This strikes me as odd and unsettling. For one thing, the automated gear-distribution in LFR is going to give me sub-par gear sometimes, and lock me out of some of the better pieces.

Part of my issue here is aesthetics. I don't like seeing any dps stats on tanking gear. Back in the day, hit and expertise were your threat stats, and dodge/parry/block (which became Mastery) were the defensive ones. Making tank gear distinct from dps gear helps people know what to roll on if they're not theorycrafters, and frankly, if there's a plate piece that has dodge and parry and there's a tank class out there that says "nah, that's not for me," you've got a problem.

I don't know what it's like for the other tanks. Given that Blood DKs have hardly changed, I assume the priorities are the same as they were in Cata, and I haven't touched the Druid or Warrior tanks this expansion, while the Monk is only level 50 and just taking what agility gear he can get.

So there are two solutions, as I see it:

A: Get rid of tank gear

This is not the solution I would favor, but it's doable. Plate tanks would simply use the same gear as plate dps - the same way that Guardians and Brewmasters essentially use the same gear as Leather Agility dps. They've already started making all tanking weapons have role-neutral stats, making them equally useful for Single-Minded Fury and Dual-wield Frost. However, if we went this way, I'd propose that Dodge and Parry be rolled into Haste and Crit, respectively. There's a certain flavor to it (you're fast, so you can dodge, or you're good at placing your weapon just right, so you can parry better) and it would truly unify the gear types. Plus, you could either nerf or get rid of Vengeance entirely, as tanks would now be scaling just as well in their offensive stats as dps. (And as I've said before, Vengeance has some inherent problems, like the way it makes tank swaps a nightmare.)

That said, this would raise some issues as well, such as causing even more loot drama. One could, of course, adjust drop rates or some such thing to allow what would now be the most popular type of gear among different specs (with 8 different specs that could use Strength Plate, compared to, for example, the 2 specs that can use intellect mail) to cause less of a problem.

B: Make dps stats less attractive to tanks

Now, I differentiate Threat stats from DPS stats, despite these meaning the same thing, ultimately, by putting Hit and Expertise in the "threat" category, and Haste/Crit in the "dps" category. The reason is that I actually really like having to hit/expertise cap now. I hated how in Cataclysm, a quarter of my attacks just plain didn't hit the boss. Sure, I was still holding threat and all, but it's not exactly a great feeling to see so many abilities just go to waste. But haste and crit, well, I just want to leave those to the dps. Let me get my dodge/parry (and wonderful, delicious mastery) for my survival.

Now, as far as I know, the haste issue is mainly a Paladin one (Brewmasters seem to like it a lot for Energy regen, but they're going to get some on their gear anyway.) So one thing they could do is take Sanctity of Battle away from us. Sure, this probably devalues Mastery a bit, and maybe takes some of the fun out of trying to maintain maximum ShotR uptime, but there's another possibility:

Instead, have something called, oh, let's say "Conviction," which would be a passive bonus to Protection. Every time you dodge or parry an attack, the cooldown of your Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous (and maybe include Judgment) is reduced by .5 seconds (or whatever value would be balanced.) Now, we've got a huge incentive to get dodge and parry, because it not only gives us the RNG-dependent lack of getting hit that one time, it also gives us the damage-smoothing of Shield of the Righteous more frequently. Essentially, Conviction, and thus Dodge/Parry becomes our form of Haste. And then we can dance around, arm in arm with our Retribution brothers, wearing our cool black tanking gear while they wear their cool bronze dps gear and everyone's happy and puppies.