Soloing in Tank Spec Come Warlords

Dual-Spec has not always been a part of the WoW. The feature was introduced in patch 3.1, The Secrets of Ulduar. This allowed, for the first time, for players to be able to switch between different specs and selections of talents, as well as action bar arrangements, without having to return to a city or pay a gold fee (which was fairly costly at the time.) While the initial 1000g price tag was a deterrent, for anyone playing a healer or tank, it was a godsend.

I leveled up to 80 as a Protection Paladin, only briefly changing specs in the late days of Burning Crusade to do the Sunwell Island (Quel'danas) daily quests after having hit level 70. It was slow-going. Back then, not only did tanks have to focus on defensive stats, but many of our abilities had to deal extra threat, given that our damage was tuned so low.

Still, tanks (particularly Paladins) could deal a lot of AoE damage, and thus there were somewhat more efficient ways to kill monsters out in the world, but if you wanted to tank while leveling, it really wasn't affordable to switch specs often, and so things went very slow.

Up through Wrath of the Lich King, tanking was kind of two games or strategies. One had to gear for survival, stacking as much stamina and bonus armor as one could, but then one had to play for threat, ensuring that you could keep the enemies off  your party. This used to be a bit more of a challenge. In Cataclysm, we saw the introduction of Vengeance. The idea was that there was inherently an issue with scaling. DPS would be landing proportionally more crits and attacking faster and faster, while tanks would, yes, be taking less damage, but not really gearing toward more damage. With boosts to the threat multipliers on tank stances/forms/buffs/presences and subsequent buffs to Vengeance, the threat game became something of a non-issue.

The problem was that Vengeance was great at helping tanks with both damage and threat in challenging raid content, but it left tanks fairly weak outside of that context.

The tank dynamic was shifted again in Mists of Pandaria, and Active Mitigation at least made things like hit and expertise attractive once again to tanks. Likewise, some tanks began to go in for throughput stats, like Paladins with Haste. Still, with Vengeance as the main source of tank damage capability - eclipsing even the tank's attack power gained from all their strength or agility, there remained this fundamental problem of Vengeance - that it was super-powerful in a difficult raid, but next to worthless in old content or while soloing.

So the thing that's very exciting in Warlords is that tanks can finally dish out some decent damage while solo. Vengeance is now Resolve, and has no effect on attack power. Thus, tanks are now tuned to have a higher damage output, because Vengeance won't be there to pump it up.

And so that means that it will be a fairly reasonable strategy to do your questing in your tank spec.

Soloing while in tank spec can be pretty great, actually. I've now tried it on a Paladin and a Death Knight. Now that there are real group quests back in the game (though they are thankfully now all optional, usually involving just a single enemy to slay,) being in tank spec means that you can usually take on these guys and survive long enough to take them down.

I also think that this might encourage some people to try out tanking. When the only way you can really get any experience with the spec is by running a dungeon where people expect you to know what you're doing, it can make a lot of people too nervous to even try. But if you can "tank" throughout your leveling experience, you can then take your basic understanding of the spec into a dungeon and just adjust your play to take into account the other players in your party.

I may, in fact, level up Jarsus (the paladin) in his Prot Spec, which I haven't done since Wrath.