What is the best class for tanking in Cata?

[Kanevil]

Better in what sense? Taking less damage? Doubt it.

I held better aggro and I did in fact take less damage... lvl 79 in cata greens ftw.

[Deleted]

DKs, no doubt. You can more or less ignore them while healing since they can keep themselves up for ages. Yeah, it's nice with other tanks with amazing avoidance, cool, I don't have to heal hits that miss the druid, I STILL have to heal the ones that do. With DKs, I don't. They heal themselves.

[SuperNick]

As a healer working through the raid content, I have to say that prot warriors are my least favorite tanks to heal. While they may have slightly better avoidance or something, they have by far the weakest self heal and cooldown options. Especially while learning raid encounters, tanks who can give their healers a hand during difficult moments through massive self heals and cooldowns are fantastic. Sadly for warriors, thats where they are the weakest.

Exact same for me. Absolutely hate healing our war tank on Cho'gall 10 man.

Bit more on topic: Our pala has really amazing survivability. "Best" is just a matter of opinion though. What's best to one person or class might not be the best for others.

[Deleted]

I'm just going to start by saying this, since 90% of the tanks haven't figured it out yet

Any tank who opened his eyes since 4.0 and figured out they're not supposed to go for pure stamina anymore. The healers really don't care about you having 20k more hp than me if I take 25% damage less (source: my last baradin hold run).

There is no real best tanking class, we all have our benefits, just like we did in wotlk, and those benefits are pretty much the same (some gained, some lost, for example charge is a lot less usefull now and ferals do a lot more dps)

Felt I had to quote and bold that because I'm sick of seeing tanks in huge amounts of stam gear with little to no avoidance/mastery etc.

Purely from the perspective of a healer, I find warriors to be the best tanks. The damage is usually nicely smoothed out and not very spikey which makes my life oh so much easier, they also appear to be quite technical tanks to play, which typically sees baddys drop them for other classes leaving the better players behind (this is just my take on it).

Paladins are my second favorite as even the worst ones tend to know how to drop consecration and I don't end up pulling mobs with heal threat and they also tend to know about their self heal abilities (hello lay on hands!) as I assume they figured those out while leveling.

Third are bears, because they are crap for aoe tanking and they just feel like they need more healing overall.

And in last place, even though it feels so cliched to say it are DKs, because they're typically played by baddys. I honestly believe skipping out 55 levels of leveling makes many people worse players and coupled with the fact that a lot of DKs are rolled literally because you can skip so many levels (which says a lot about the player in general), all adds up to a generally poor experience.

Again, these are just my observations and not qualified with any experience of actually playing a tank (although I've started to level a warrior based on these observations as a bit of a hobby).