I quit

[Yahallo]

Dark passenger I can't defend, it was a weird choice on their part. Moving MP away from Blood Price and into Syphon Strike made ST better by far. Complaining about not being able to pull half a dungeon and survive doesn't make sense as this was without a doubt not intended. Which is also clearly why they removed bloodbath from Warriors. I think the blood price change is good as it makes MP gain more stable while tanking rather than the more sporadic gain in 3.X. Tanks are currently very balanced, as balanced as they have ever been in fact.

Except you still have to be in Grit to gain the added MP from Syphon Strike. If you are Off-tanking, you shouldn't be in Grit, but rather be out of Grit and using Blood Weapon with Delirium to up your DPS and handle MP management. Moving the MP from Blood Price and into Syphon Strike doesn't do much for Off-Tanking; as it stands Blood Price isn't really that great of a skill anymore.

It's not like you have to spam the hate combo in tank stance even in VIT accessories. I never picked up STR accessories in 3.4/3.5 (we quit raiding after like 13 alex clears) so I've just been using the available VIT stuff with weak STR V melds. After a very brief tank stance opener (2x combo) you can use Sword Oath on the primals and keep them just fine even without a ninja. You do have to use some of your hate combo every now and then, but for paladin that basically means looking at the rate your DPS are building enmity and tossing out a Halone combo when you can afford to give up the MP from the lost RA combo (and still make 100% in time for Requiescat).

In a fight where you can use Shirk you don't even have to do all that though. Tank swap->Shirk gives you the lead forever.

Gameplay-wise, I prefer this to "One Powerslash and Done" Gordias tanking since it actually feels like I have to react to the situation a little bit. Why even bother having the hate combos exist if we're not going to use them after the very first part of the fight?

There's a giant difference between Single Target Enmity and AoE Enmity. In single target, it's currently not an issue, but in AoE it definitely becoming one; if the DPS are doing upwards of 4-5k DPS, they will start soaring in the enmity table; Twelve forbid, if they forget to use their enmity reducer or they split DPS. Also in 3.4/3.5, we had the hybrid Vit+Str damage formula for tanks (since, correct me if I'm wrong, 3.2), which by the way should not have been reverted back to the pure str damage formula, so you shouldn't have been running Str accessories as a tank, raiding or not.

But your single target MP regen doesn't rely solely on Blood Price. And as a whole, it's much faster to refill your MP now, especially if you're under Grit.

This is misinformation, there is no "delay" resulting in a DPS loss. What can be a DPS loss is spending too much MP on Blackest Night instead of Dark Arts, but that's without considering the times where TBN is used for mitigation, and that BloodSpiller ignore's the damage penalty.

Eh, there kind of is a delay. Each Bloodspiller is delaying your Syphon Strikes and Soul Eaters by one step, both of which are generating your resources, MP from Syphon Strike and Blood from Soul Eater. Delaying resource generation can potentially result in a DPS loss in the long run, but whether or not this really does result in a DPS loss has to be math-ed out more thoroughly. I definitely don't believe it is as good as Scourge however, mainly due to this bit of math:

Bloodspiller is a 380 potency Weapon Skill which increases to 475 while in grit. Dark Arts adds 140 potency, pushing base potency up to 520 potency, which increases to 650 potency while in grit. It costs 50 gauge.

To start off with, the grit bonuses just equals out to ignoring the penalty while in grit. While the move is your highest potency move and it is worth using when available in our rotation. However it’s hardly good compared to a move we lost: Scourge. Since they fill the same kind of function in our rotation, I do think it’s a fair comparison. Every 45 Seconds we will generate enough for 2 Bloodspillers. This means at 4:30 we’d have used 12 Bloodpillers in and 9 Scourges in 3.x. The former is worth 4560 potency, the latter is worth 4500. “But thats more potencies for the Bloodspillers!” I hear someone say. You also lose an entire Souleater combo, which is worth 750 potency, meaning the standing of the moves is actually 3710 vs 4500. Values with slashing up is 4191 vs 4590. The average Bloodspiller in this scenario is worth a total of 399 potency against the Scourges 510. It needs at least 30 extra base potency in order to break even with Scourge.

Now they stated that they could have made errors, but their math looks pretty sound to me.

Also, we lost the awesome Scourge animation and lightsaber-y sound effects; you can't say that doesn't suck.