Originally Posted by
Malkiah
because the wow community bases its perception of the value of a class on a very narrow niche execution of content done by esport champions operating at peak levels of efficiency for the purpose of competition, so whatever classes they use the community just automatically think are amazing because they saw this one guy do it good on twitch.
i have every tank at about 418-425, i'll tank a 10-12 each week on each of them, i do almost exclusively pugs - so my anecdotal experience is about as randomized and hodge-podge as you can get.
but from that experience and of course utilizing my own personal playstyle which causes my opinions to shift based on what i'm personally good at, i seem to be the most successful in terms of tanking on my guardian druid. it can feel pretty gear dependent but IMO once you're in even a moderate spot it's just a good truck-along tank spec that you don't need to be tricky with to do well, at least in terms of mitigating.
VDH is fun as you noted but not especially great at the mitigation aspect which can put a lot of pressure on pug healers and waste a lot of your self-healing if they're not prepared to let you cover for your own increased damage intake.
i feel like blood DK has the same issue, only on top of that it's not really at all fun to play - the niche gimmick of grip can be nice but other than that it's just kind of boring.
paladin feels like a solid middle of the road, i'm not very keen on how both mitigation and damage output can be very RNG dependent, but the kit is reliable.
being honest i simply don't care for BrM or war tanking, because both of them are kind of shit at it if you're just chugging along and not constantly maximizing 8 buttons worth of little tricks every second in order to actually get their gimmicks to work.
i guess it's fine if you play it enough and are used to it and so don't have to actually think about the rotations at all or when to use certain abilities, but when i play either of them i'm just jittery about all the shit i have to push at the right time in order to be even marginally effective and runs are just that little bit more stressful than they would have been otherwise.