Tank Buffs! Riposte for Warriors and Death Knights and an Across-the-Board Buff for Taunts

Threat in WoW has transformed quite a bit in recent years. In Wrath and earlier, it was a tank's main focus to worry about keeping one's threat up on enemies. One geared for survival and played for threat. With Cataclysm's introduction of Vengeance, which was originally just to help us scale better with gear but since has been treated as a panacea for all threat problems (one that I think has some huge flaws,) the focus has shifted away from maintaining threat and on to active mitigation - playing for survival.

While I actually have mostly come around to the active-mitigation style of tanking (saving a Shield of the Righteous for something like Sha of Fear's Thrash, for example,) I think that the assumption that tank threat doesn't need any help is false.

Luckily, 5.4 appears to be adding some things to make a tank's life easier.

First off, all generic "taunt" abilities (Taunt, Reckoning, Growl, Dark Command, and although it is not listed yet, I would assume Provoke) will not only force the target to attack you and put you at the top of the threat list, but it will also increase your threat generation against it by an additional 200% for the duration. This, I think, will make things like Tank-Swaps far easier, and it will also make a taunt more meaningful and useful. Good!

The other change appears to be directed only at Death Knights and Warriors in the form of Riposte. Basically, dodging or parrying will give the tank a chance to increase their crit chance by I believe half of their combined dodge/parry value. This will certainly make dodge and parry better as threat stats, but also, at least for Warriors, increase Rage generation due to the recent changes to Enrage, and thus feed into survival.

Paladins don't get this, either because Blizzard wants to enshrine haste-tanking on Paladins (boo! boo I say!) or because we already have the 5.1 or 5.2 or whenever it was changes to Grand Crusader, causing parries and dodges to have a chance to light up our Avenger's Shield and make it generate Holy Power.

Even though I had talked about removing tank gear altogether, it might be more ideal to make those avoidance stats more attractive.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see the avoidance stats given a little more oomph, tying them into core mechanics in a mastery-like manner, like making parry increase resource generation, and also definitely making avoidance help out with threat.

The taunt change is very nice. Lets see more of this kind of thing!