I went to a site with theorycrafting but holy shit do those guys talk over my head. You think you're smart? Listen to nerds argue about the mathematical benefits or detriments of stats/abilities in WoW.
Tell me about it. I can try to make it a bit easier with less math.
It would take awhile to go over all the stats you would need. I will give you a tiny breakdown of what you would need as a tank in the future. The big thing is that you have to worry about two different things, Survivability and Threat.
Survivability is your health, avoidance, and mitigation. The more health and mitigation you have, the more "hits" you can take before you die). Avoidance is different in that it completely nullifies all incoming damage from that last strike when it occurs. Having higher rating in avoidance stats increase the chance for this "monster miss" to occur.
Right now avoidance -> mitigation, so you will want to concentrate on dodge and parry. Stamina is still very important and you always want to take the gear with the highest stamina count (you can always reforge something else into parry or dodge), but right now due to the way they are handling mob strikes for smaller, faster attacks, avoidance is winning out and will make the life of your healer much easier.
I could get into block (only on warriors and paladin), which is a sort of mix of mitigation and avoidance (a chance you will take less damage on a strike rather then the full hit), but block seems to be rare on most items now, only appearing on shields from what I can see. Most block chance seems to come through Mastery, so you will want to gather some Mastery at times to fill out once you feel comfortable with your parry and dodge.
Threat is the amount of hate you gather on the enemy, so that they won't attack the other, more squishy people in the group. Since tanks have skills that naturally increase threat generation, the most important thing you have to worry about is making sure you can hit the mob in the first place. This means Expertise and Hit are the two most important stats. Hit reduces the innate chance your attacks can "wiff" on the target, while Expertise simply reduces the bosses innate chance to parry or dodge your own attacks (thus nullifying the strike, much like you do to him). Critical, haste, and such all come a far second for tank classes.
If you ever need any help getting the hang of stats, you can always ask me and I can give some advice. I am still learning all the new systems myself, but it's not hard to get the hang of once you get past all the "math".
