Block is something only paladins and warriors worry about but its not as strong or helpful as dodge/parry and that’s why its being buffed considerably in the next patch. The side-effect we all wanted but won’t get anymore, was the added DPS that abilities like shield slam and shield of righteousness would generate (that means more threat too for PvE).

Just thinking about it hurts my head so I’m going to stop here.

Avoidance (namely parry and dodge)
The main goal of the change was to make parry not so much less attractive than dodge as an avoidance stat. Since tank avoidance is so high already, we wanted to do that by nerfing dodge a little, not by buffing parry.

This hurts druids slightly more than other tanks, but the emphasis is on “slightly.” This is not the big druid nerf that some forum posters have predicted. We will continue to evaluate tank survivability and threat generation based on PTR tests with “Patchwerk” to decide if druids need to be nerfed or DKs buffed or look at Prot warrior dps or anything else.

This is also not the big avoidance “come to Naaru” that some posters predicted. Overall, we think avoidance is too high and the game would work better with lower tank avoidance, but suddenly dropping everyone’s avoidance by 20 or 30% would be a very big change with many ramifications for healing and gear among other things. It would also feel like a big nerf to the many players who didn’t understand why it would be better for the game in the long term. But I still expect it is coming at some point. (Source)

More on Block
I feel like we’ve been pretty candid about its future. You can probably find my previous comments relatively easily. We think block needs to mitigate much more incoming damage per hit, but to make that change we would also need to lower tank avoidance across the board and prevent every hit from being blocked (especially in situations with more than one target beating on you). To make Prot tanking more interesting, we have allowed block to become too much of a dps stat. In retrospect, we’d rather it remained a mitigation stat and that Strength was pushed up as the big warrior and paladin dps stat.

You shouldn’t overly worry about outscaling content. We said from the beginning that there would be three major patches to Wrath of the Lich King. We aren’t setting up a system that is going to remain on autopilot for 10 more tiers of content without our intervention. It’s totally valid for players to worry about scaling, and all things considered, we’d rather have mechanics that scale well. But if those scaling problems aren’t going to manifest themselves until you have item level 500 items, then you’re worried prematurely.

We would like to get Prot warriors into PvP in a legitimate way, but our first priority is making sure every class has at least one viable PvP spec first. By “legitimate” I do NOT mean that you sometimes can do a 19K Shield Slam when all the stars align. That’s not acceptable even if it is rare. Also consider that tanks do have a legit role acting like actual tanks when running flags or tanking AV-style NPCs. That may not be enough of a role, but I did want to point out that emphasizing BGs more and Arenas less also helps to carve out a niche for PvP tanks.

I know there are plenty of Prot warriors out there who couldn’t care less about PvP. Sorry. We have to.

We want Prot warriors to do decent damage in PvE. We don’t want them to do as good damage as actual dps specs — there needs to be a trade-off for such high survivability. This means we need threat multipliers or you won’t be able to actually hold aggro. It’s okay if Shield Slam can make big (yet not absurd) numbers, since you don’t Shield Slam all that much. That’s fun. As I said above though, it would probably work better if Shield Slam hit hard because your Strength was high, not because you built a gimmicky set.

The problem, GC, is that this doesn’t scale between 10s and 25s. Damage in 25s is considerably higher than 10s, but amount of damage blocked is not. If block becomes powerful, it could easily dominate 10s and still be weak in 25s.
If only there was a mathematical operation we could perform that would scale the amount blocked to the size of the hit. (Source)

Threat generation
There has been a lot of discussion about +threat moves being a crutch and tanks should just be able to hold aggro based on their dps. But that implies that your dps is as high or higher than a class or spec who can only dps. There will probably be +threat added to stances and abilities for the foreseeable future. That does not mean your dps needs to be 10% of a dps raid member. (Source)

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Q u o t e:
The problem with Crushing Blows is simple: RNG Spike Damage. 2 tanks could deal with it by pushing them off the combat table, 2 tanks (today) wouldn’t be able to.

In the current environment in order to retain crushing blows, Druids & DKs would need to have a way to push crushing blows off the table. The options are

1. Enough physical damage reduction to not care
2. Give them block (or clone) and a method to use it to push crushing blows off
3. Give them a way to push crushing blows specifically off the combat table.

If you go with #1, you have lots of problems where Druids & DKs are just too good at physical damage, which completely displaces Warriors & Paladins. If you go with #2, then your just spreading the War/Pal mechanics to everyone, at which point all the tanks start operating the same. If you go with #3, then you’ve effectively removed crushing blows from the tanking environment… which is different from now how? Oh, you’d have to push a button every 5 (or whatever) seconds to prevent crushing blows… snore…

Crushing blows were designed to keep players from doing things they shouldn’t be able to do. In classic and to a limited degree in TBC it was to keep Warriors as the premiere tanking class. Given that in Wrath that isn’t the goal any longer, then its natural to see Crushing blows removed from the raid game.

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I like Angua’s explanation.

Crushing blows were basically like another way for mobs to crit — sometimes (and you didn’t know when) a really big hit was going to come. It might have made healing exciting but the only way to handle it tanking was to randomly throw up your short cooldown defenses and hope that sometimes they overlapped. Of course sometimes you’d get a crushing blow right after a normal hit and a special attack and you’d be liquid.

The way more bosses work these days is that a big hit is going to come at reasonably predictable intervals. If the intervals aren’t predictable, at least they have cooldowns so you know when they aren’t going to happen. Then timing the use of your cooldowns with these big hits is a test of skill for the tanks, and often the healers.

We recognize that blocking no longer provides the mitigation it once did, and we think that is a problem. But we don’t think bringing crushing blows back is the way to fix it.

My opinion: discipline priests and anybody else that can add to your mitigated damage through armor or shields are the most valued tank healers in the game right now. Period. Leave the raid healing to the shaman, holy priests, and druids and keep holy paladins and disc. priests on the tanks.

Mitigation through armor and shields means you know how much damage the tank will get and having raw HP and strong cooldowns means the tank can take those hits. Blizzard has been buffing boss damage simply to compensate for healers having too much mana regen; and healers have that regen because avoidance (dodge, parry, miss) is so random that a tank can easily get 2 shot by a boss, so the healer must be spamming the tank with heals constantly in the event the boss will connect and drop the tank to 200 HP.

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Q u o t e:
Block used to be good when every encounter didn’t try to 2-3 shot the tank and mitigating damage in small chunks over time could be the difference between your healers going oom.

Bliz has painted themself into a corner by making healing more about output than smart healing and tuning the encounters accordingly. The fights are structured so that wether the tank actually needs it or not, a heal needs to be on the way just in case you get hit. In a case like that, block is 99% useless because it’s not enough to save you.

Block is simply an outdated mechanic in todays raids, good for tanking adds and little else. One of 2 things needs to happen before block can become relevant again.

1- Block chance is lowered and block amount is increased so that it is powerful enough to actually affect survivability.

2- Boss encounters and mana regen are completely overhauled so that small amounts of mitigation are relevant. This would involve severely nerfing healer mana regen in raids and lowering the burst damage from bosses so that overhealing was not required.

3- Non blocking classes are nerfed to compensate for the uselessness of block.

Personally I would like to see #2 since it would would reward smart playing rather than chaining cd’s and spamming heals the entire fight. Although, at the moment, it seems we’re headed for option 3.

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Quoting this because it’s a great summary.

We did recognize that healer mana was too potent in Naxxramas, and we did take some steps to fix it. Unfortunately, nerfing mana regen has two negative effects:

1) Healers feel really singled out. They feel like we are making the encounter tougher merely by making their jobs harder. Now, obviously when we think we need to make a change to the game we’ll make it even if it upsets some people. However players having fun in their role definitely factors into that.

2) If raid-buffed mana regen is at acceptable levels, then it tends to be much too low when solo, in 5-player dungones and in Arena. This is not just a Replenishment issue — there are plenty of stat scaling buffs that may not be present in smaller groups either.

I’ll also add that high avoidance plays into this problem too. When tanks can dodge or parry 50% or more of attacks (to pick a random number) then bosses have to hit twice as hard when they do connect.

We might have to increase the health to compensate. Just don’t use the BC druid too much as role-model. They became so powerful that we had to add Sunwell Radiance.