Originally Posted by
Relapses
As others have mentioned, it's pretty hard to judge the delta between tank survivability at the end of an expansion and tank survivability at the beginning of one. Just as an example, DH started off being the meta tank for S1 of SL because the class is so good at getting away from incoming damage (didn't hurt that it was literally bugged for the first 5 months either). Pair that with Moonkins and Mages being meta DPS picks, two classes which benefited heavily from DH's 5% spell damage buff, and you have a recipe for DH being vastly over-represented despite the class itself having some pretty glaring weaknesses when compared to other tanks. It wasn't until Tier that DK became meta. In S1 & S2 almost nobody played DK because it did very poor damage and the use-case for DK tanks was pretty non-existent. (It was a slightly-worse-but-more-self-sustainable Druid up until that point.) It isn't just the high DRW uptime that made DK viable. It was the fact that the high uptime came with a 50-100% buff to their damage which made it viable. DK was now the best tank in both AE and single target. DH, on the other hand, only really scaled in effectiveness with big pulls. And because of the weird reset-nature of its set bonus, prolonged bouts of shit RNG could kill you and your single target boss damage was ass. Why play a DH when DK does the same thing but better?
Moving into DF it's hard to know how things will pan out before tuning passes start to happen. It looks like Warrior is the clear winner so far, in terms of both gameplay and survivability but there's a possibility it'll change in the first few weeks. It looks like Prot Warrior, VDH and BrM are the best overall tanks for now. Prot Paladin seems to have a lot of bugs so it's hard to say how it'll pan out. DK is... definitely brought down to reasonable levels of power but has the potential to still be a pocket pick for certain situations. The only tank that really seems to be down bad is Guardian which has seemingly lost its whole identity.