Blizzard can kiss my 80 Prot Pally's light-loving, lily-white ass. I miss being able to solo Vanilla/TBC content. I died in Ramps tonight, on trash. Time to take all of that caster heirloom gear and roll a mage.
I have yet to try tanking a dungeon, but is it really that bad? I am rather surprised since with Sanctuary going towards defense cap I found mostly a boost in all my other avoidance stats.[/QUOTE]
The main problem I've found (once I got a decent rhythm going for a rotation) is a lack of AoE for more than 3 mobs at a time, and a drop in overall damage dealt. I was able to easily handle H Ramps with my fiancee's hunter tagging along, but I really needed that DPS support to take the larger groups down before I got too many mobs on me and they ganked me. Even then though, it was pretty difficult to keep aggro off of her hunter and her cat, even with the cat's growl turned off.
Now, I haven't tried a full five man group, or even tried anything with a healer, but this is a big enough annoyance to me that it really pissed me off. Up until patch I was able to solo/tank heroics through Zangarmarsh and had managed to drop the first two bosses of MC by myself - and probably could have kept going if I hadn't been bored and tired. Hell, I accidentally dropped Doomwalker solo a few weeks ago, not knowing who he was. My biggest complaint is that, since our little "friends only guild" has only 4 members, it means there's no way in hell we're going to be able to finish off the old world raids before they disappear.
Now, I will say that once I had that hunter in with me I had very few times when I needed to use WoG to keep myself up, and I never had problems with mana. And, overall, I do think Pally tanking in WotLK was a little too easy - unless you had DPS with way too high of Gear Scores pulling aggro off of you by burning all of their cooldowns at once before mobs had a chance to run into your Cons.
If I had to postulate on what actual level 80 dungeons are going to be like, I'd say you'll be ok if you can convince the DPS to avoid blowing their big cool downs before you have a chance to build some threat. I don't think we'll be using Hand of Reckoning to pull anymore, it and Righteous Defense will be our best friends for pulling mobs off of our clothies. It is nice that at least some classes have lost their AoE spells - hunters lost volley - but we're definitely going to be headed back to the days of raid marking targets and gnashing our teeth at DPS who don't follow the order.
Now, strangely enough, Ret pallies may be more viable as off-tanks for large groups of mobs than prot pallies, because of their greater AoE possibilities with Divine Storm, especially if they're running with a big, slow two-hander like they're supposed to. It's something I played with on the PTR and it was much easier to hold and clear large groups of mobs specced Ret and wearing my tanking gear than it was specced Prot and wearing that same gear. I wouldn't want to put a retloladin in the MT slot, and they would definitely need a healer tasked just to them, but it might be interesting to play with if you can't find any other tanks to go along.
And yes, mages are insane right now. Even at the early levels they're much easier now than before.