Words of Replicant Jesus

Ghostcrawler Post:

Protection — We want more tanks in the game. Main tanks. We think it’s fun to have a diversity of players and see how different spells, abilities and class mechanics get used to solve problems. A Protadin with the right skill and gear should be able to tank any fight in the game. Previously, we tried to push Prot into the offtank and AE tank roles. While your abilities are still really well suited for AE in particular, overall our philosophy has changed and we want you to be able to do anything the other tanks do. Note that this means other tanks will get better at AE tanking though. Prot represents a special challenge when not tanking because you can both heal and do dps and some players want to do either. Or both. One final comment, that you have already seen, is we want you to gear like a warrior: collect Strength and Stamina and use tanking weapons instead of caster weapons.

Emphasis is mine, something I have been professing for some time now ever since I got my hands on Hammer of the Righteous which got a change in the last patch before the current one.   The tooltip caught up to the change which tied the damage of the ability with the DPS of the weapon and not the speed making it desirable for fast tank weapons.  That are plentiful in Wrath of the Lich King and current content come 3.0.2 when it launches.

Currently based on the spreadsheet created by the Mainktankadin theory craft poster, Psi-Ven, found here; there is still an edge with spell power weapons but that edge is actually fairly small when you look at the data.  Small enough then I will probably hedge my bets with physical damage weapons and gain defense through my mainhand for the first time in a long while and have it be a gimmick.  Looking at the chart we can see that the difference between the top end TPS weapon and the lower end is less then 200 TPS less then 10% of the total theoretical TPS and that data does not even take into account the base 1.49% bonus that all tanks recieve since they baked the bonus from Blessing of Salvation into our threat stances.

This does not change the data in favor of physical weapons since the ratio should remain fairly close to what it is now, but we are generating much more threat then previously beleived; a basic assumption would be multiplying the totals by 1.49 netting a range of 5006.4 to 4768 TPS a difference of about 5% at level 80 in tank gear.  So overall I type all this to say that the difference is minimal and that to ensure making the critical cap you sacrifice very little going with a solid tank weapon instead of a spell power one.

I love these changes.