1) We're much more concerned about tank single target dps than we are tank AE dps. Especially in Icecrown, there are virtually no fights where the tank's dps contribution on an AE fight is really going to amount to much. You can make an argument that the single target dps can be relevant on e.g. Festergut (though again, I still don't think there are that many cases where the difference between success and fail are the tank's dps).

2) You may find Devastate boring, but Devastate is a very easy ability to buff because even small tweaks have large effects given how often it is used. Buffing say Shield Slam (or even Def Stance) would make the PvP balance we're trying to solve even worse. You'd have to buff Revenge enormously to see a difference. Any buff to Heroic Strike affects dps warriors in PvE as well who aren't hurting at all. Some of the ideas about e.g. Rend are interesting, but we're pretty sure the last thing the warrior needs is yet another ability to manage while tanking. Long term that might be the kind of thing we consider, but given that we're looking for a safe and easy buff, that's not the kind of thing we want to mess with now. (Consider that even if we did a PTR, who is going to be on there when the competition is new bosses in Icecrown?)

3) There are differences in how tanks generate AE threat, and therefore damage. Warriors are jealous of the DK and especially paladin persistent area-based damage, and the others are jealous of the warrior's burst AE threat on incoming adds. Druids are jealous of anyone with more than one button.

So, yes, one way of handling this is to give every tank a burst AE attack like Thunderclap, a sustained AE attack like Consecrate, and a mass taunt like Challenging Shout just for good measure. That's the kind of thing we are really reluctant to do though because it just works against the justification for having 4 tanking classes when they all perform the same way including using the same kind of tools. Now, on the other hand no tank should be horribly gimped in any of those situations, and except for rare exceptions they really aren't. We're mostly talking quality of life issues here. (One such exception: DK offtanks on Yogg had trouble picking up adds and the dps couldn't afford to wait. As long as there aren't a ton of fights like this though, we don't think it's a systemic flaw.)

4) Long-term, the paladin manner of generating AE damage and threat is probably too good, especially given how simple it is. To be honest, we have very mixed feelings on the whole AE tanking game. We brought the druid and warrior more in line with the paladin for fear of recreating the Shattered Halls / Mount Hyjal experience, where other tanks just weren't competitive. What that has led to of course is the AE tank + AE style of damage for almost every pull. You need the tools to be able to tank legitimate adds fights (imagine lots of incoming mobs), but does that mean every pull needs to devolve into that? We'd like to see less AE overall, so buffing everyone's AE tools isn't going to be tops on our agenda. That does however mean that we really can't afford to have a "best AE tank", and while things are more fair there than they were in BC, they aren't fair enough.

Sorry for going off topic here, but these kinds of questions have come up a lot lately, so I figured I'd just share some of our discussions publicly.

There was some confusion on our end so here is the clarification on this change going live.

The hotfix is live, but it requires a server restart before it will actually affect your gear. Some of your realms have been restarted for various reasons, but some have not. They will all get restarted at the next maintenance period (typically Tuesday AM in the US). We might go ahead and restart all servers just so that we know everyone is having the same experience.

Listed below are recent fixes we have applied to the game. Keep in mind that some of these changes may not be active until after the realm has been restarted.

To review previous in-game fixes, please visit: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=21723843880&sid=1

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• Blood Queen Lana’thel will only be available after the Blood Prince Council is defeated.
• Blood Queen Lana’thel's Essence has a longer duration.
• Kinetic Bombs no longer aggro Blood Queen Lana’thel during the Blood Princes encounter.
• Blood Queen Lanathel should no longer cast Vampiric Bite on pets.

Skipping to the last boss in Heroics (Source Re: Let us skip to last boss in heroic please)
While there may be some instances in which you can do this manually, our intention wasn't to make this an exceedingly quick way to get two Emblems of Frost. This is more of a method to encourage players to participate in the Looking for Group system and help those who are playing through the dungeons get ready for the epic encounters that await them in our currently available raid content. Thus, implementing a "skip to the finale boss" mechanism would be counter to those goals.

Resilience Boost Hotfix (SourceRe: Resilience requires additional alteration)
We don't want resilience per se to bring with it the "kiss / curse" of also nerfing your own healing output or heals received. We want players to like resilience on PvP gear. It shouldn't be a hard decision. We'd prefer a model where resilience improves your survivability without any real downside.

If we implement a healing change, it would be temporary because health pools will be larger in Cataclysm, proportionate to healing, so we don't think that will be a problem. Burst damage may be less of a problem too for the same reason, but we're less confident of that. If it isn't a problem, then we can change the resilience scaling again.

Rated Battlegrounds (SourceRe: PvP is dying alive do you even care? )
We have announced our plans to add a rating system to the Battlegrounds to bring back much better rewards and premade teams for Cataclysm. This is a system that has been under development for quite some time, and development will continue on it until we get it right. Adding this type of system into the game isn't trivial. We want to make sure Battlegrounds provide new levels of competition, properly measure success, and adequately award players according to their performance.

We'll be sharing more about this system as we get further along in development of the next expansion.