Welcome to the world of blood tanking.

Actually, I think that it has merit... It just all depends on how it is executed.

I think expertise should not change that much, but there should be a penalty for having your attacks dodged or parried, just not what it was in Vanilla-WOTLK: parry hastened blows. It needs to be a small penalty, but not so small that it can be ignored; perhaps something to do with our next attack or resource.

I like the idea with hit, but with a small change. Dont make it so much a mitigation stat like GC described, but make it so that when a shield tank has to block, it checks 2 numbers: your hit rating and your block rating (via mastery). Hit determines if we can actually block the attack (just like hit determines if you actually hit) and then it checks the block chance to determine how much you block.

As a warrior tank I love this idea!

I'm concerned about this. I am a warrior tank, and I stack mitigation stats exclusively. If there is hit/expertise on an item it is always reforged.

That being said, if they make being hit/expertise capped a virtual requirement, that's going to eat into my avoidance/mitigation stats. Tanks are already incredibly gear dependent. A lot of onus is put on tanks to not be squishy, and currently a tank needs to have better gear than dps or heals in order to be effective. I know that vengeance helps with threat, but we still go SPLAT w/o enough avoidance/mitigation.

Just concerned that I won't have enough gear slots in order to be an effective tank. Sure the guys in full 359/372 won't have a problem, but those of us in 346 gear are going to get roflstomped. I don't want to come across as 'the sky is falling', because there aren't too many details about how this will be implemented, but i really don't like this proposed change.

@Alf: Can you please elaborate? Why do you not think it's a good idea? Yelling in caps that it's not a good idea isn't necessarily the most constructive way to say you disagree lol.

@adamjgp: I have a tank that's in all iLevel 346 gear with a couple of iLevel 359 epics and my strategy has been to cap Hit and Expertise simply because it's a hard cap that I know I can reach. Yeah yeah, I know, days of capping something for tanks went away with Wrath, forgive me if old habits die hard. However, my OCD has been satisfied with this approach and so far, I've polled every healer I've run with (heroics, no raiding on my tank yet) to see if they think I'm squishy in general and so far all of them have been quite happy with healing me. So, just wanted to let you know that I think your concerns are unwarranted as far as running heroics are concerned. My overall strategy has been:
1) Stack hit and expertise to caps (I'm over 26 expertise at the moment because I find threat gen an issue against raid geared DPS and as a pally, it's an excellent threat stat).
2) Stack as much mastery as possible.
3) Balance Dodge/Parry so neither suffers more than the other with diminishing returns.
Gemming: All my gem-sockets have stamina in them while picking up socket bonuses (so red sockets have Sta/Exp, yellow have Sta/Mastery, and blue sockets are pure Sta).

Maybe it's not the best tank gearing/gemming strategy out there, but it's straight-forward enough for me to grok pretty well and I've found that my original concerns with this strategy yielding a particularly squishy tank were completely unfounded.

Hope this info helps!

I'd say getting hit/exp capped for heroics is probably a good idea, since the bosses don't hit hard, and there's a lot of trash, so vengeance won't stack high enough to provide meaningful threat.
However, at the raiding level, threat stats lose value over time as the AP from vengeance gets high enough to offset misses &c. If they're less valuable than stats providing combat table coverage, why would you keep them on gear?
The reasons it's a bad idea IMO is that it will mean tanks will have another cap needed to maximise mitigation, it will devalue mastery until you're hit capped, as well as moving back into the era of ridiculous spikes in damage that they deliberately tried to get away from after wrath.

@Squatch: I can say from personal experience, the difference between raid necessity and heroic necessity in Cataclysm is HEAVILY noticeable. I had healers praising my survivability in heroics, and then when we started raiding, I had to reforge and even revamp my spec because my stat weighting wasn't working. I tried to go for the hit cap for a while to pump some threat into bosses, but bottom line is the mitigation stats are far too necessary to reforge them into hit and/or expertise. This is more because of the new healing style than tanking in general. Healers need to be very smart with mana. Wasting mitigation stats on hit or expertise means more mana spent in raids keeping the tank alive. You can get the threat without necessarily being hit-capped. You can't survive a boss fight if you're never mitigating.

Really I'd love an excuse to actually go for the hit/exp caps, missing with abilities just feels sloppy, but currently the tradeoff is too big for too little gain.

@Squatch - Do you use CC in your heroics? A 333 geared tank doesn't take much dmg when there is only 1-2 mobs hitting them at a time. (Lemme say this before I get flamed about CC - It's not a bad idea for CC. I've just encountered more DPS and healers bitching and moaning when there is CC involved. So personally, I've stopped using it 99% of the time. I take ALOT more dmg than before but my mitigation and health has balanced that out.)

I don't think that exp or hit are bad stats, I've always had the thought that as our gear increases the need for exp and hit will increase. Vengeance can only do so much for threat once the DPS is pulling double or triple what they are now. At that point we WILL need exp and hit to do our jobs correctly. Until then, meh. Why screw with somethin that ain't broken imo.