I'd love for someone to paraphrase my nub comments and get some responses from GC because we seem to be going into the expansion with the same major liabilities we had before. Our OP'ness on trash is the only reason half of us ever got a tanking slot. That and the fact that on farm content you can get away with only 2-3 tanks if one is a prot pally.
Summary
* lifebloom/PoM/ES mechanic with SA - SA needs to work on self heals
* no DPS -> 'blue' rage mechanic - 'blue rage' only via SA (or spriest)
* core holy shield ability affected by silence - needs to be immune to silence
* silencing bosses - on live this makes us by far the worse tank on some fights
* magic immune bosses (defeats 80% of pally threat)
* mana burning bosses (name one rage burning boss that doesn't also burn mana - now list how mana mana burners )
* no ability to avoid fears
* no 'last stand' ability - this is pretty damn important on fights with silences/fears/etc
In essence, if WotLK is going to have mana, silencing or magic burning bosses, then there has to be a ying to that yang. The devs are aiming to homogenise the tanking classes yet being a caster class has incredible limitations in a lot of fights. This needs to be balanced by an exceptional niche ability to fight the bias of warriors (and now droods with their recent buffs) as the premiere tanks. We have this niche currently with our AoE tanking capability, but will not maintain this advantage in WotLK.
I will say the buffing of AoE tanking of the other 3 tank classes was a very good choice (it was stupid that people only wanted to 5 man with pally tanks). However, this now means there is an opportunity (and in fact a requirement) to either further homegenise the tanks or give prot pallys some other significant niche advantage. Just being a 'betterer' AoE tank will not get us a raid slot.
Don't get me wrong, pallys are not completely gimp. I've MT'd every fight but Illy, Archy, Kaz'rogal and RoS Ph2. And of every fight I've managed to make myself a useful part of the raid. But I cannot understand the logic that 'being able to heal' should mean we cannot be equal or better tanks.
I won't digress too much, but this is a problem all hybrids face. You design encounters which require 6-8 healers. Someone has to heal. You've made 4 classes capable of healing. Why on earth should that capability (if specced for it) mean we're weaker in our other specs? Doing that simply pigeon holes us in that role. Why bring a pally as prot if you can get them to go holy and bring a better tank instead? The other tanks still provide hands down better debuffing that we will ever have so it's no like you'll bring 4 prot pallys to a raid - what danger is there in buffing us?
As the absolute hands down, miles in front, premiere AoE tank in BC we were still mostly not used in progression fights due to our disadvantages. If this was not the intent with the prot pally in BC, then you may need to review pallys for WotLK.
On the positive note, a huge number of problems have been corrected:
* 1 strike - before if we had an unlucky resist on a threat transition we were buggered - 8 secs between strikes or maybe frisbee if it was off cooldown
* hit itemisation - related to above, due to the wacky mechanics of SoR/JoR we couldn't (and it wasn't worth) maxing melee/spell hit
* crit itemisation - similar to hit - now crit is not entirely awful as most of our strikes are considered melee so 100% dmg bonus
* BoSanct - while I personally consider this massively unbalanced, it's crazily good right now - so good I almost wish it couldn't be used on other tanks tbh
Ok, I digressed way too much with a TLDNR, but this is pretty much how I see the core issues as listed in the frontal summary. I'd love to hear that encounter designers are factoring these limitations in and not designing fights that exclude us.
Whether Bliz wishes to acknowledge it or not, every fight that is virtually 'untankable' by a prot pally as a progression fight diminishes our viability as a tank in a progression raid.
cheers