To Bear the Burden - The Future of Tanking Part 1

The good news first: Blizzard wants all four tanking classes to be equally capable of tanking everything. Guilds that do not have a protection warrior will be able to tackle everything just as well. Every class will get their niche in which they are strongest, but no encounter will need a certain class.
They even go as far as saying that even non-tanking builds can do 5-mans well.

Now the bad news: Not to decry Blizzard's good intentions, but some of the blue posts indicate that they do not really know what to do with bears and in which niche to put them.
What they aim for:

• Warriors get the best mitigation
• Paladins stay kings of AoE tanking, with improvements for single targets
• Death knights will specialize in magical damage
• Druids get the most health

Combined with the fact, that quite often druids are not mentioned when the other classes are, this does not sound encouraging. Who would take a MT-druid that needs more healing when they can get a warrior who does the same, but takes less damage?

I'll return to that point further down, but first take a look at how things are now.


The Current Situation

Today the premier tanking class is the protection warrior. No matter where you are, you will not go amiss having one with you. Some encounters even require their abilities.
Pallies are the best by far in 5-mans (and Karazhan), and are very nice to have in Hyjal. But they take more damage than warriors and run into threat problems on long boss fights (and when offtanking).
Druids are the best OTs, pretty good on hard- and/or fast-hitting bosses (high AC) and generate the most single target threat, but require a bit more healing and have no emergency buttons whatsoever.

Druids and warriors are pretty much the two tanks of choice in 25-mans, especially when tackling new bosses. Most raids also have one slot for a protection pally to handle AoE situations.

The biggest problem all tanks face is game mechanics (followed by overzealous DPSers).

There are two aspects you have to focus on: Holding aggro and staying alive.

In order to stay alive you have to stack AC, dodge, parry, block and defense (druids rely on dodge and AC only).
What makes this really difficult are crushing blows. They are a mechanic where a certain percentage of attacks hit you for 150%. Here comes the fun - their random nature can lead to nearly unavoidable wipes. If you are unlucky, you take several in a row. That is an amount of damage which your healers cannot compensate. Especially fast hitting mobs are a problem in that regard.
To counter that, high-end tanks try to get crush immune. That means either you use active abilities (Shield Block, Holy Shield), or you stack your stats high enough to reach around 103% avoidance to be passive crush immune; something only warriors and pallies can do. Druids can reach maybe 80% passively, and have no abilities (which is one of the reasons we get that much AC).

All of that would be good and well. But the problem is the other part of the tanking equation: Threat.

The threat you generate does not scale all that well with tanking gear. The abilities have a fixed component and their damage multiplied by the factor you gain from Defensive Stance, Bear Form or Righteous Fury. That means to increase your threat output, you have to increase your DPS - but you cannot do that, as your equipment is focused on taking lots of damage. If you rely on passive immunity, your gear is gimped threat-wise, and if you go for active immunity you spend far too much GCDs and rage/mana on keeping your abilities up.
In addition as a druid or warrior with better equipment you tend to get problems generating enough rage, as a paladin you run out of mana (which you gain by getting healed). As an example: In full tanking gear my feral druid tends to be around 65% dodge (even more with a shaman in my group). That means less than one in three attacks actually hits me and generates rage.

So, as your raid increases its DPS with every equipment upgrade, you actually tend to decrease your threat output. Combine that with damage dealers that do not watch their threat and you arrive at one of the reasons why tanking becomes so frustrating in high-end raids: you do not fight the boss - you fight your own raid.

See the second part on how this will change and what Druids can expect.