Never done this before but here goes, i think tanks are being messed up at the moment in SOD.
Specifically when it comes to how they are now designed to interact with gear and how the tier sets are being designed. This is not a game play criticism as much as it is a homogeneity criticism. i actually find that paladin and warrior is decently fun to play, even if it is very derived from later retail expansions and isn’t very as new and unique is one might have hoped.
Lets start with the tier sets.
when you look at them all items are basically a mix of the same stats
Paladin: Block value, stam, str, Def rating and sometimes some hit %
Warrior: same stats basically no really differentiation between items its all just the same
Druids: Stam, str, Def and Bonus armor here my issue is not so much with the items being very similar just weighted differently, though that is still boring, but the fact that for some reason druids now get defense rating, which is borderline useless and it seems to be something that was just shoehorned in because this AP buff from Defense was introduced and why there is a tanking and feral dps set i dont see a good reason for, part of the appeal for a druid tank was that as a tank you scaled/used baiscally the same stats as a feral dps, so when needed you could swap between tanking and dps mid fight easily and still be a good DPS with the gear you used for tanking, that kind of dies with the way this gear is stated. finally there is also the question of why druid tanks get 0 hit on their tier sets
Rogues: again all items are very much the same just with different levels of stats and again i dont see a big need for defense rating scaling with AP to be something that rogues need. Rogues have a rune that makes it so they cant be crit and they get endless dodge by going after agility the gearing theme was already solved
Warlock: kind of the same as rogue, why this defense rating??, i know it gives some avoidance yes, but that was to an extent at least already solved via the rune that gives you avoidance from your crit rating, so warlock tanks could be geared around that instead of this defense homogenization that seems to be the theme of the day for tanks at the moment. and uncritability was already handled through their rune.
In short for this part it seems there is very little creativity in the SOD team at the moment when it comes to how tanks should interact with stats. it seems to be just here is some stam and a second primary stat (str or int) and this is what you get to play around with it is super boring that all tanks just seem to work in the same way. If you look at TBC all 3 tanks worked in kind of a different way:
Druids: Would go for basically feral DPS gear and a bit of defense/resi to reach crit cap
Paladin: would go for a lot of avoidance, Spell dmg and of course crit cap
Warriors: Would go for some DPS stats but also mix in more Defensive gear than a druid would
the gearing and stats path was kind of different for each tank. i get that in SOD we are basically drowning in tank classes (though not always people who want to tank) so all cant be unique, but does it have to be so freaking boring and similar a small thing would be to just have to gear in each tier set have some different stats. throw some block% and some Parry % and dodge chance% in the mix, make the items feel different so it isnt just another item of XYZ stats for your class i find the current approach very boring.
secondly id like to touch in the Def to AP or SP thing they seem to be going for now. First let me say i think the idea to some extent makes sense for warriors and paladin, is the execution perfect? no, but the issue addressed is real. Warriors and Paladins have to forego a lot of damage output talents if they want to go for their Deep prot end talents (shield slam and holy shield) and they have never been worth it to get and without any kind of added bonus to them they never would be. However, i dont see a reason to give this to druids, warlock, shamans and rogues, it just leads to the, in my opinion, annoying gear/stats we now see.
There was no reason to introduce this deff to AP/SP for these other classes, they dont forego lots of dps talents to pick up some kind of tanking talents because they never really had any tanking talents. IF their output was not where it needed to be all that was needed was to just buff some of their abilities not introduce a whole new stat that they suddenly need to take into account, these classes had their uncritability handled by runes already they didnt need to worry about defense on their gear (I dont know enough about shaman tank so pretend i am not speaking on behalf of these guys). Warlock avoidance could have been handled similar to their rune that gave avoidance based on crit. Druids and Rogues already got a lot of avoidance from agi stacking, which druids no longer get on their tanking gear?? These were the gear and levers you should have tinkered with if something was of, not just blanket slap defense into every tank just because it was easy or because there wasnt time to think through what was being done.
Finally i would like to rant a little about paladin scaling, please make up your mind on what we should scale with and go all in on that, right now we scale with block value, AP and SP and through that indirectly Str, Defense, int and Agi. personally i always prefered the TBC pala scaling (though the scaling wasnt too good) where it was about Spell power. I like adding block value into the mix. But let our warrior colleagues be the AP scalers. that being said i can live with scaling of AP if that is the way it goes, but please pick one path and go all in on that, dont do this thing where we basically want everything but cant then get enough of any one thing. Again i would like to say i prefer pala tanks focusing on SP it makes us different from warriors, but that is just my personal preference.
I think that covers my concerns or pain points which are boring tier gear, homogeneity in the design or philosophy behind tanks and paladin scaling.
i am not saying that this is all that is wrong about the tanks currently in terms of game play, here i can only say that i am okay with the tank i currently play but again a little more creativity and less taking stuff from future expansion would have been welcome.
Now i’ll leave to all you people to explain to me how stupid and wrong i am about all this, cant guarantee i will read your replies about how wrong i am.