Replying to myself is bad, m’kay, but who would I be fooling anyway? I have nothing to say which could be remotely of interest to them in anyway. As it is, the raiders in the worldfirstmobile and me could just as well be playing different games altogether.

What is most efficient to them is continue working with the most experienced tank they’ve had since Nef or C’Thun, not to experiment. On a recent thread on their own boards about tankadins, the Nihilum GL plain stated that he would never consider anything but a warrior as the MT. And that’s fine.

My plea isn’t aimed towards guilds which can clear a 25-men within 3 weeks of its release, or even 10 weeks. It’s for the “normal” raiders who blindly rehash what the top 5 are saying… forgetting that if their tank was as skilled as Nihilum’s, he wouldn’t be playing with them, or they would have cleared BT & Hijal in July.

A hardcore raid will not take 2 Protection Warriors to a raid. They will take 1 Prot, a Fury OT, and a Druid. If they need a second Prot warrior, they will leave him outside the instance, and summon him when necessary.

As for gear, most of their paladins will be collecting Prot and Ret gear from the leftovers. Heck, I have pretty decent Prot and Ret sets, and I’m a primary healer.

Finally, gear is not as important as it once was. Remember that Nihilum beat BT and Mount Hyjal in mostly T5 level gear. They didn’t need to spend time farming the instance to gear up.

Not at any time. Even Nihilum cannot take a healadin, just respec the guy and have him tank, they still have to gear him up. In the race to drive the Worldfirstmobile on new content, unless their traditional line-up gets severely nerfed somehow, they won’t change a winning team at the risk of missing first kills. Only when there is a lull like between BT and SWP like now do they even have the luxury of considering other means of actions.

And again, from their perspective, it makes perfect sense. If your main warrior tank happens to be one of the world’s best players who has spent two years honing his skills, why change it? He will still have two years of experience at tanking any and all content. And that’s fine, it’s also not something I argue against.

My point is that due to their visibility, they reinforce stereotypes by their example. Using different tanks for different tasks isn’t something you have to consider when you have both the best players and the best gear at your disposal. My call is to the guild and raid leaders who are stuck with the notion that a warrior is one size fits it all while they are actually struggling from Kara to TK because of that.

The question about what do you do with a paladin tank on a one-tank fight when the warrior is MT is a bit of a strawman, you even go to mention that a two-warrior raid won’t know what to do with the second prot warrior either, so it’s not as if the raid was worse off in any way - and with a gear switch, while the pallie remains a mediocre healer, he can still lend a hand here and there, even if it’s only healing hunter pets so they stay on target longer to add DPS.

The issue with tanking is slightly different: What do you do with a surplus tank on a one-tank fight?

If the extra tank was a Fury/Prot warrior or a Druid, they could switch forms/gear/weapons and add reasonable DPS. A paladin would add mediocre DPS or mediocre healing.

Honestly, much the same problem happens to the second Protection Warrior in the raid. Fights that don’t require a second tank leave him doing nothing useful.

Yeah, a Prot paladin is great on AoE packs and trash, but she’s not that useful the rest of the time. And currently, Protection Warriors are just plain better suited to tanking the big, hard-hitting boss.

It’s not so much about what you are contributing when you are tanking, it’s about what you are contributing when you are not tanking.

Also, you may disagree with me about the effect of the hardcore on the game, but Korgath used to be a dying server. Then Death & Taxes transferred onto it, and the server was revitalized. That’s pretty powerful evidence of their impact.

The hardcore don’t play the game as it should be, they play the game as it is. If something changed, and paladin tanks became hyper-powerful, the hardcore guilds would switch to that, and switch their warriors to DPS. For example, the status of Druid Tree of Life healers changed significantly in the patch that altered Lifebloom, and the hardcore led the way in that change.

Now, before you say that I should let the warrior tank other fights, such as Attumen or Curator, I agree, but right now our only full-time (non-DPS) warrior is a relatively recent 70 and wearing a mix of greens, blues and I think 1 or 2 Kara Purples. In other words, he’s still too weak to replace me in any fight I don’t do too badly on. As soon as he gets his hands on some really decent tanking gear I’ll start standing back for some of those fights.