What Does Protect Actually Do?

[LarcSekaya]

It's an 8% damage reduction for tanks and people are glad it's gone? I don't get it. That's feels like a heavy nerf; why is this a good thing? When you're in a group of 8 that quickly translates to quite a bit of mitigation across the party too...

That’s only presuming that they don’t reduce overall mob damage or increase base defense of every class. There’s other ways to make up for protect being gone.