I dont think it will matter that much. If you want to roll Gnome or Orc, go for it.
Donât tell anyone but tank shaman wonât work in raids either because they also rely on a fire ability rune for aoe threat, and thereâs no way to reduce nature resist on mobs (unlike other elements where you have CoE and CoS) so earth shock will eat full resists and youâll require 16% hit to reach cap (not possible in tank gear).
Oh and paladin tank wonât work either because they have no way to become reliably crit/crush immune, unlike warriors with shield block.
Bears and warriors it is.
Auto attack damage on a warlock tank will be irrelevant, no melee stats couple with spellpower weapons having low dps makes it irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. You could make the arguement for shadowcleave but searing pain is going to be the real work horse for threat.
It should still be possible to tank fire immune mobs, remember meta gives an innate 100% threat increase, though theyâll definitely outclassed by the other tanks in those situations. Who knows, we may get a rune later on that converts searing pain to shadow damage to get around this problem.
Could Rune that issue away. You will most certainly see Paladin tanks in MC.
Curse of Recklessness becomes a Taunt.
I read the stuff, doesnât take much to understand.
Yeah, I was right on the range though, it becomes a cleave. But itâs still a spell, not melee.
Sure you can do it but no serious team is going to make it their main tank because theyâre going to have random deaths when they get crushed/crit on a thrash.
Doesnât meta make you uncrittable? or at least close to it?
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Perhaps youre right. Warrior Tanks will be there to fill their roles. The SoD devs said there would be a time and place for each tank.
Meta just gives you very high armor like bears. Bears get crit and crushed all the time but they have higher armor than warriors and take less damage from it. Warriors rely on imp shield block to be crush/crit immune. The problem with warlocks is that they rely on elemental spells for threat, and those elements are tied to several of the main raid instances. You canât have a warlock maintank who relies on fire damage threat when you need someone who can reliably tank all instances and zones, including ragnaros, firemaw, etc. that have high resists.
Yeah I just want to be able to enjoy warlock tank. Hope they fix this problem in a later phase.
Staff of warden, defence on cloak, tank rings and youâre set! Itâs easy to swap runes around so if they donât need you to tank it takes 5 seconds to go dps. Maybe Firestone will be a thing!
Why would melee matter?
Meta gives you 6% crit immunity.
As mentioned crit immunity isnât the problem with warlocks as designed, threat is because theyâre using searing pain (fire) and shadowcleave (shadow), and those two elements have high resists in two of the major raids (MC and BWL). Spell damage is also inherently problematic because you need 16% spell hit to cap in classic, which would require some radical changes in gearing to hit on a tank build.
Crit immunity is a problem for paladins, because they rely on block but donât have a reliable way to keep block up. Itâll be up 80% of the time, but there will be windows where you get popped while itâs down. So itâll be possible, but no-one will build a raid around that, given that it will be unreliable compared to bear/warrior.
Auto-attacking is a huge component of threat for tanks, and warlocks are getting a 100% bonus to all threat in meta. So having +5 weapons and a vastly smaller glancing penalty would greatly increase threat generation, with no way to compensate on other races besides human because edgemaster is mail.
Shadow doesnât have high resist in molten core lul.
You are confusing hit chance and resist bud.
Blizzard has said locks can compete with warriors. They were asked this directly.
Sorry 
Auto attacks are going to be largely irrelevant for warlock tanks for reasons iâve mentioned before, not to mention you open yourself up to parry hasted attacks for barely a 1% damage increase (quite likely even less than that). As for spell immunity, sure it looks bleak with the info we have now but many more runes are going to come out before MC so weâll have to wait and see what all of our options are first.
They donât rely just on fire they have shadow cleave in meta form. They also have a taunt. They can also apply shadow dots and drain life dot which generates healing agro and has 100% uptime.
They can also take haunt to increase all shadow damage and get heals from it.
Plus there are more runes we havenât seen that are available before 60.
There is also more gear with hit so I think they will be hit capped easily. They showed level 25 gear with hit on it.
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And you know this how?
Warlock tanks will be very popular.