Why has Blizzard chosen to make Dodge and Parry bad stats?

[tlitd]

Zerdus : "So what's the deal? Why has Blizzard made it so that we are gearing like a DPS spec?"

Answer #1 : because Blizzard keeps trying to render avoidance tanking obsolete for the past five years.
Answer #2 : because avoidance tanking and reactive "healing" do not intertwine too well.


Arothand : "(...) it blew my mind that Theck and others were advocating not only HARD CAPPING Expertise (...)"

Are you new(er) to tanking ? Expertise has been (very) good for tanks ever since it has been implemented, in 2.3.

[Rivin]

Are you new(er) to tanking ? Expertise has been (very) good for tanks ever since it has been implemented, in 2.3.

I wouldn't say that. Expertise sucked throughout Cataclysm unless you were gearing for more damage output. Hit and expertise had no survival value. As I recall, expertise had very limited value for tanks in Wrath as well, although hit was good until Blizzard made it so taunts couldn't miss.

And even regardless of how good it was, hard-capping has never been something people advocated before now.

[tlitd]

Rivin : "Expertise sucked throughout Cataclysm unless you were gearing for more damage output. Hit and expertise had no survival value. (I) As I recall, expertise had very limited value for tanks in Wrath as well (...) (II) And even regardless of how good it was, hard-capping has never been something people advocated before now. (III)"

I. 4.0.6.
II. NB (sans Gormok)/Onyxia/LDW/Sindragosa/Halion. On top of that, T7/T8 weren't extensively tested for PH.
III. Halion is a trivial counterexample.

That much said, it should be fairly obvious that "no survival value" does not imply "it's worthless".

[Rivin]

That much said, it should be fairly obvious that "no survival value" does not imply "it's worthless".

Not worthless for everyone, but for most players it would've been. The average tank will want to focus on survival forever; they won't reach the point where they can ignore survival for increased damage output.

And when we've spent two years drilling "expertise is bad for tanks" into people, suddenly having the hard cap be a good thing can be a shock.

[MerinPally]

Not worthless for everyone, but for most players it would've been. The average tank will want to focus on survival forever; they won't reach the point where they can ignore survival for increased damage output.

And when we've spent two years drilling "expertise is bad for tanks" into people, suddenly having the hard cap be a good thing can be a shock.

I think the whole "stacking expertise to hardcap" is an easier pill to swallow than "stack haste as it's pretty equal to mastery stacking in terms of survival, grants more dps and more healing due to Battle Healer and SoI"

I sat there yesterday reading all through paladin things and blogs and chatting with old contacts on vent/mumble to get more information about this so I could update the guide and so on so forth, which is now done apart from gems which I'm about to do momentarily. There will be a weekend some point in the next month where I'll go home and play solidly for best part of 48 hours so I'll easily be lvl 90 and fully heroic geared so I can get a feeling for it as well.

With regards to your first point, Mastery > Haste for that tank who kinda dozes off mid fight, but it's hard to recommend that to those sorts of people when Haste brings extra perks Makes it hard for any so called "instructors" to guide people, because if you're not 100% attentive then haste will obviously fall behind mastery and that just causes a clusterfuck.

Edit: Read that back and it sounded like I was answering a question which wasn't asked as if I was guiding/informing but that wasn't how it was meant, it was meant as a conversation point, and I'm not sure how to edit it otherwise. I'm not exactly compus mentis right now, I feel terrible, I've not been able to speak all day. Breathing actually hurts >.>