One of the side-benefits of rolling a plate tank is that you get your own set of gear. When you're raiding with the guild, you've got at most one person to compete with for drops, and with Monks joining Druids in the ranks of tanks that use the second lowest class of armor, there's a decent chance that your Paladin, Warrior or Death Knight will have all that lovely gear for him or herself.
Back in Burning Crusade, when Blizzard was starting to embrace the various nonstandard class roles, we had specialized gear for many particular specs. There was leather with strength and extra armor on it for Bear Druids, and there was tanking plate with intellect and +spell damage for Prot Paladins. Wrath simplified matters by switching Druids over to a strictly-agility system (as well as Enhancement Shamans, who greatly benefitted) and giving Protection Paladins a built-in bonus to their spellpower that worked with ordinary tank gear.
Yet these days, we're seeing some very interesting things: Protection Paladins (and I could be wrong here, but I think also Blood DKs) are liking haste a lot. In fact, until changes to Grand Crusader were made, haste actually came before even mastery (today as I understand, the two are roughly even, depending on your stylistic choice.) Given that mastery is a fantastic stat for pretty much all tanks as well, in many cases, a tank will want pieces of gear that don't actually have any of the poor, neglected "tank stats" on it.
A lot has happened to make tank gear less complex. Defense Rating departed with Cataclysm, while Block Rating was transformed into mastery for the two specs who wanted it (and block value disappeared because the mechanics behind blocking changed.)
Really, the only things that make tank gear tank gear are the existence of Dodge and Parry rating (trinkets obviously being far more complex and thus sort of an exception to this.) Yet for a tankadin, for example, Parry is ok and Dodge is something you pretty much always reforge out of.
So I think Blizzard needs to make a real decision here - do they even want Dodge and Parry rating to still exist? Sure, I love that my tank gear is indisputably tank gear, but at this point, it's gear that serves a fairly small number of specs (let's not get into Intellect Plate right now,) and beyond that, specs that will have a very low representation in any group, because there just isn't much they can do to make you bring more tanks (well, they could do more, but you get the impression that they don't want to.)
Assuming they even want to keep passive avoidance as a thing (they seem to far prefer active mitigation,) it seems that they could link, as I've suggested before, the two major non-mastery secondary stats, haste and critical strike rating, to dodge and parry.
One could then do interesting things with the two stats - for example, a crit with Crusader Strike could give you two Holy Power instead of one, or twice the rage from a Shield Slam. Haste could continue working as it does for Paladins and Death Knights (maybe do a similar thing in lowering the cooldown for Rage-generating Warrior abilities.)
I love me some tank gear, don't get me wrong. It's a great feeling to have yourself decked out in awesome gear that makes you nearly indestructible, but it strikes me that the way things are going, tank gear as something removed from DPS plate could very well be on the way out.
In the future (probably not the next post, but soon) I'll talk about the way that tanks are becoming an endangered species, and both how Blizzard might encourage more people to play tanks and also how they seem to be discouraging people from tanking in the first place.
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