I sense a dark, looming cloud in your future.

Why for giving frank and honest opinions?

Yeah! Burn Ghostcrawler at the stake! How dare he squash our hasty assumptions that we'd get a glyph to play as a caster tank in cloth gear! How dare we be demoted from main tanking to off-off-tanking! Even though we didn't really have any indications of defensive cooldowns, being able to taunt effectively, or anything to generate a substantial amount of threat! IT'S ALL HIS FAULT WE CAN'T ASSUME TO HAVE NICE THINGS.

BURN HIM AT THE STAKE, I SAY!

@Avan. The glyph has been shown to give them an 8s taunt and 500% increased threat. Additionally, with talents, new abilities and pets, they have 2 CD's that reduce damage by about 50%, as well as several powerful self healing abilities.

While I understand the responses being lobbed about on here, the real complaint is not that Ghostcrawler is evil for implementing/not implementing this, but that he was tone deaf with his delivery. Frankly I'm surprised that given the positive reception of the idea that they didn't just go ahead and decide to tune Warlocks to be tanks in Demonology. As GC admits, the seeds are already there, why not make folks happy by doing it? More importantly, why squash the idea without taking time to consider it? Would adding tanks really destroy the game?

This is coming from a former Resto Druid. So to the upset 'Locks I say: I feel your pain.

@Adam

That wasn't datamined material; it was a fairly comprehensive revamp of the class effected by glyph, playtested during the beta. The very fact that it WAS a glyph belies his claim that it's designed for spot tanking the way a MoP feral swapping to bear or a DPS warrior pulling out a shield is, since you can't swap glyphs in combat.

If he'd said that it's strictly for soloing and random funsies, that'd be one thing. But he also mentioned clutch tanking, one thing a glyph that hurts DPS will never be used for. It doesn't, currently, but pretty much everybody assumed that that, at least, was a bug.

Don't get me wrong; Blizzard never promised us the ability to truly tank on our Warlocks; it's certainly not the first time a really nifty ability has shown up in beta that never made it to live. But GC's dissembling... irritates.

What you're missing, Boobah, is just how much of the beta is still broken. Yes, it is played. It isn't playing as it is intended. The Warlock columnist did a great little post on it today, and how playing beta in its earliest form is still essentially data mining.

You should check it out.

@Boobah
"dissemble - verb : to give a false or misleading appearance to; conceal the truth or real nature of"

Your comment... irritates.

- "since you can't swap glyphs in combat."

It's entirely possible that there are one or several mistakes going on here on the Dev's part. During the Ulduar PTR, Fragments of Valanyr were Unique (30) yet required 40 to complete the quest. During the Cataclysm Beta there was a bug that put all Trolls on the Human male skeleton. Sometimes wierd crap happens because wires get crossed and other times a developer in one department or another just makes a bonehead move.

Explanations:

1) Someone had a derp moment and forgot that you can't swap glyphs in combat while they were playing around with this glyph.
2) Someone was playing around internally with an alternative version of the glyph that did way more than intended, had a derp moment and accidentally put it on the Beta servers.

The answer isn't to get all pissy and bitchy like they do over at MMO-Champion (and a surprising amount here - Honestly, I really thought this community was better than that), but to say "Hey, if you want this to be an emergency thing, then it can't be a glyph since you can't swap glyphs in combat, otherwise no one will use it since no normal Warlock will give up a major DPS CD on the off chance that he'll need to tank for 5-10 seconds".

More from GC:

As some of you have pointed out, the glyph of Demon Hunting in your beta build doesn't deliver on what I described above as the design. The newer version of the glyph, hopefully available in the next beta build, allows a warlock to toggle in and out of the off-tank / survival mode, more like the druid going Bear or the warrior going Defensive.

The new shapeshift granted by the glyph is called Threatening Presence (PH) and adds Taunt and Fury Ward to the normal Metamorphosis toolkit. You still get the damage reduction from mastery instead of the damage boost from mastery while in this form. You can also choose to go into normal Metamorphosis even if you have the glyph. Let us know how it feels.

We appreciate all the feedback and passion on this topic. We expected this glyph would serve a pretty niche community and were surprised at how many players were excited about it. We are still in beta and are still very much experimenting with what kind of gamplay we can deliver in glyphs.

Hate is pretty strong, but it's a personal opinion - no one has to like Ghostcrawler, nor be pleased by anything he says.

@Zack

Because I'm sure it wouldn't be fair to all those demo locks who don't want to tank and don't want to lose their DPS spec because a few people do. I like my demo lock, I like soloing stuff, I like his AoE damage. If I want to tank, I will tank on one of my tank specced toons. I know this won't be popular here, but I don't want/need to tank on my lock or hunter or frost mage. We are getting a new tank with the monk class.

I for one will continue my campaign to flesh out Glyph of Demon Hunting and allow Warlocks using it to act as full tanks.

While I have leveled several classes that CAN tank (and some even have some modest gear towards the purpose) none of them make me as giddy to take up the role as Warlock Meta-tanking.

@Noyou

I have five 85 toons, two of them are tanks (warrior and paladin). My main toon is a hunter, I play almost exlusively as Surv since the later days of TBC, and it is my favorite spec among all my classes. Yet I would be absolutely happy if one day Blizz turns Surv into tanking (or healing, whatever) spec. Because having more dungeon roles and functionality for your class of choice is awesome. More is better.

I see why people are saying "just implement it" the locks want it, but keep in mind balancing. Locks would not truly have much avoidance and would have to be a primary if not purely mitigation tank, none of the tanks are this right now the current tanks and even the soon to be monk tank heavily on avoidance to be able to tank. If you have 3 (soon to be 4) tank classes who rely on avoidance and one that is mostly if not purely mitigtion you'll have problems balanacing, either warlock tanks will end up being the "ZOMG BEST TANK CLASS!" leaving the other 4 in the dust or the mitigation might be not be even comparable to the overall damage reduction of the other tanks and they would be left in the dust.

I would be fine with having lock tanks but not at the risk of screwing over the other 4 tank classes

I would love to see warlock tanks, but I suspect that for every demo warlock who was thrilled to become a tank, you'd have another who was enraged at having his/her damage nerfed to tank levels. I can see why Blizzard would be very, very cautious with this.

History of GC, though all of time.

Here, have candy!

5 minutes later: LOL JK.