Yeah, you’re definitely coming into this with a heavy glass-half-empty bias already. First, having abilities that make trash easier isn’t something to just discard - with the sole exception of TOC, raiding spends a LOT of time on trash. Further, with the addition of so many add-heavy fights, there are plenty of scenarios where these abilities are valuable in boss fights. Having two prot warriors enables you to do a mass-AOE strategy on the lashers in 3-tree Freya thanks to the combo of challenging shout and chained shockwaves, and the Shadow Strike ability of the burrowers on heroic Anub’arak is utterly trivial to handle with Shockwave, and spell reflect is extremely useful on Mimiron either for head tanking or to get the assault bots to beam themselves with their damage amp, just to give you some offhand examples of where these things matter in difficult content. Third, you’re looking at only half of what Vigilance does. It increases your threat output, it also reduces the target’s - this is every bit as valuable or more than the threat output, by giving your hotter DPS a larger buffer to work with, and smoothing out the spikes while Salvation is only useful for long-term threat disparity. Complaining about being balanced around a great ability is really rather silly - that’s the entire point of great abilities.
The density of raid buffs is exactly what it sounds like - how many key abilities are condensed into a single class. A prot warrior brings a buff shout, an armor debuff, an area attack slow, an area AP debuff, a spell interrupt, an offensive dispel, a permanent threat reduction buff, a damage redirect, an instant threat reduction, an immunity breaker, and, if you really want it, an area snare. This is a much larger toolkit than any other tank has (heck, practically any other class period) and it opens up a lot of freedom in how you build your raid or subgroups to deal with specific scenarios.
Warrior damage output while tanking is a moot complaint since the devastate buff, and the grass isn’t exactly that greener in terms of survivability on the paladin side. Sure, they get higher block rates, but also lower block values, less threat from block value (making it a less effective stat to gear for) and no ability to turn it into a serious survival cooldown. Shield Block is enormous on Algalon or heroic Anub’s burrowers, effectively becoming a second shield wall on a much shorter timer. The slightly higher stamina scaling on paladins, even with the high level of gear available these days, still has yet to overcome the base HP deficit they’re starting from (warriors are the highest, paladins are tied with shaman for the lowest) or the crappiness of librams versus a ranged slot item.
You can fixate on individual deficiencies in specific class comparisons, but doing so misses the bigger picture that’s actually involved. With the addition of buff drums and runescrolls in the next patch, you can easily build a balanced raid without a druid, paladin, or death knight, but I challenge you to build one without a warrior that isn’t lacking several crucial ingredients.
(Can you tell I’m a raid MT? I love debates like this
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