In a fight like H. Alys, tank DPS mattered, so standing in fire was completely logical. In 5s I do roughly 18-19K DPS as a tank and my output varies in raids. In general, the DK I tank with does more damage than I do and I was very happy to be within a couple K of him in DPS for H. Ultrax this week (first week was a 4K difference). But there are some specific gearing differences between DKs and Paladins (weapons, lol) that tip the scales in their favor (IMO).

I'd say that it's more fight specific than anything. Currently any tank swap fight that I start, my cotank has to either push a ton of output or I have to switch to auto-attacking (or walk away). I've zoned out and pulled a mob right off of him without thinking and then died because I wasn't aware of my own threat (threat is the first thing I forget about when I'm pissed or tired). Rag was ALSO a massive PITA for this and I regularly ended up walking away from the boss so I wouldn't pull him back and increase my stack count. It's just more of a headache in my mind than anything. I get what it was designed to do, but at a higher level, I would prefer it do what Theck has recommended.

As someone who hadn't raid tanked seriously since BC or early Wrath, when I was asked to step up as temporary off tank in my ten man, Vengeance was a huge issue on any fight with with tank swapping, IE, everything. Since I learned tanking in the MAX THREAT AT ALL TIMES mode, I was hitting my rotation like clockwork, hitting DPS cooldowns every time they were up, and still probably gearing more for threat than a serious tank would. They way I saw it, if my survivability wasn't immediately in danger, my job was to provide as generous a threat ceiling as possible. All of that meant that it was hard to taunt off of me and I several times pulled threat off the other tank through what I considered my normal tanking rotation. Now I did, eventually, unlearn a lot of those habits (and start Salving myself when she taunted), but it was definitely an issue.

Vengeance, in my opinion, makes tanks lazy. Maybe it'll be different when MoP's new tanking paradigm is in place, but we're not there yet.

You haven't been doing anything wrong Katyromick. For one thing, I think DKs experience this problem to a lesser degree as they can switch to more threat/damage-generating attacks (Heart Strike) in lieu of of death strike spam as they out-gear content.

More importantly though, if you haven't noticed the Vengeance issue on tank swaps, I would contend that your other tank probably was either getting very streaky with their Vengeance buildup (a problem in itself, as mentioned in Theck's blog), or they weren't maximizing their dps (more of a personal problem, but it masks the mechanical one).

I remember noticing this problem the most on Ragnaros tank swaps with my paladin trying to taunt/pull off of my bear tank teammate. Big swing damage (or avoidance), the Burning Wound debuff, combined with the bear's ability to stack more agi/stam compared to my paladin favoring mastery put this issue under the microscope for me. Even with preemptive taunting, popping wings, holding a SotR for the taunt, and occasionally hitting the bear with Salv still wouldn't always hold off their threat gains. That's absurd. The difference was so stark that encounters with good Vengeance would allow this bear to be doing 25k dps compared to my ~15k dps. Nothing in my rotation could be changed to compensate.

Theck's solution is very elegant and definitely would make me enjoy tanking more.