My main, Jarsus, is a Protection Paladin. I leveled him up from 1 (well, ok, 10, because he had no talents before then) to 80 as Protection, and he always tanks. Going Retribution on him is always weird, and it feels wrong to see him on the log-in screen without his good old sword and board (or mace and board,) so I'll sometimes switch specs and gear before logging out even if the next thing I intend to do with him is run some dailies.
With Jarsus, there's never a question when it comes to gearing. Do I prioritize tank gear or dps gear? Always Tank. If I ain't tanking, I ain't on Jarsus.
However, my "Vice Main," or "Primary Alt" or whatever, the Death Knight, Oterro, is a somewhat different story. I leveled up Oterro as Blood dps originally (best leveling spec the game has ever seen, by the way) and liked it so much that I actually hit 80 on him an hour before I did on Jarsus. Over the course of Wrath, though, I became interested in trying out tanking on other classes. Wrath was kind of a golden age of tanking in my (admittedly rose-tinted) eyes. Tanking was fast-paced and demanded a lot of attention to maximize threat on lots of targets. Without reliance on Crowd Control, and without the enormous band-aid of Vengeance, you had to fight your dps tooth and nail to keep up in threat (with none of this "Active Mitigation.") So Oterro became the first tank convert. It was actually quite useful, because I settled on Blood as my tanking spec shortly before they announced that Blood was going to be the tanking spec.
The elimination of Blood dps forced me to look into the other specs for Oterro's soloing spec, and so I got into Frost (I'd originally created Oterro as a lookalike of Uterro, my Draenei Shaman, and in terms of role-play, I consider them to be the same person, especially given that Uterro was deleted to make room for Oterro - so being a master of at least one element seemed thematically appropriate. I also just prefer the reactive gameplay of Frost over Unholy.)
Cut to today. While tanking is still fun, and it's actually a lot easier to adjust to Mists-era Blood than Mists-era Protection, I am finding myself drawn to Frost dps more and more. (It doesn't hurt that apparently dps doesn't have to wait through the hour-long queue for Raid Finder that I encounter when queueing on Jarsus.) Blood is still a lot of fun (again, I prefer "reactive" over "active" mitigation) but it's also not hard to like gigantic Obliterate crits and the huge explosion of damage caused by Howling Blast.
So, I'm currently in the process of re-alligning Oterro to be primarily Frost. This is proving somewhat slow.
Part of it is just unlucky drops. I ran four dungeons on him today (I rarely do more than one) and saw only one drop (ironically, I actually wound up getting two pieces of tank gear, owing to well-geared or leather-wearing tanks.) Oterro's dps gear is actually pretty crappy, most of it left over from Townlong Steppes, as I prioritized tank gear in Dread Wastes. While I'm doing fine damage in the 40k range (I think Frost might be a little overpowered at the moment, given my mix of gear,) the barrier to Raid Finder is still quite far away.
I should say now that I'm not really offering many suggestions, but here's one: Blacksmiths can currently make iLevel 450 tanking gear. They can also make both Strength and Intellect PvP plate at the same iLevel (the recipes cost Spirits of Harmony, so it's not super easy to get them all.) I realize that this does kind of complete the plate trifecta, but it seems to me that it might have been nice to provide PvE Blacksmith gear for level 90 people that isn't some reputation-bound epic piece. Blacksmithing, and indeed all the armor professions, are fairly limited in scope at the moment. They can make 384 greens (useless once you're out of Jade Forest) that sometimes grant 414 blues (that get outdated once you're out of Kun Lai.) Leveling the professions is somewhat easier than it has been in the past, but there's really nothing useful from the trainers at level 90.
Given that you may have used up your Dread Wastes quest rewards on tanking gear, it does make the transition a little bumpier. Granted, there is JP gear, but this requires quite the grind, and of course only satisfies certain slots.
Frankly, I think the real blame for this issue (and yes, I realize I very well may be making a mountain of a mole hill here. Forgive the rant. This is the internet, after all) is the new quest reward system. Before Mists, each quest had an odd assortment of items - a hunter weapon, a priest belt, a rogue chest piece, and a tanking shield, for example. Enough quests would offer rewards that you would often be able to, in each zone, get a nearly-full set of tanking and dps plate (the two were often not rewarded by the same quests) at that zone's iLevel.
Actually, this also lends some support to the notion of getting rid of tank gear altogether. Guardian Druids and Brewmaster Monks, after all, can use their gear as quite decent Feral or Windwalker sets. While they may have different stat priorities, for the most part they're using the same stuff. If this were true of plate tanks, all they would need to collect for a separate dps set would be a two-handed weapon (Blood would already be there. And if it was a Warrior, they could just use two tanking weapons, given that we don't seem to be seeing any dodge or parry on 1-handers anymore.)
Oddly, the shift in Mists has been somewhat toward greater specialization, via quest rewards and the LFR loot system, all at a time when tank dps while soloing out in the world is back to Burning Crusade-level wimpiness. (I miss my Sacred Duty, damn it!)
So, it will be an interesting process. The challenge, of course, will be to maintain the Blood set after I start building up the Frost.
/End Rant
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