Hiya guys. Need some help from the gurus of warcraft here. I have always played clothies, mage/priest/warlock..but now i'm stumped.

I have a friend in the guild, dwarf warrior, that refuses to act as a tanker.

We have all reached level 70. We are all running lev 70 instances now and gearing up for 10man and perhaps 20+ man raids in the future but for some strange reason he refuses to respec.

His reasons:

1. I have all this elite gear and can churn out high dps. you actually think i'm crazy enough to sacrifice all that to become a punching bag?
2. I can tank well enough... I've been accumulating protection gear so all i need to do is wear em and switch to defensive stance (is this correct? i'm not sure)

Also as a warrior attempting to tank in arms specialisation, i find that he is unable to hold aggro. He claims in every instance run that its the fault of the mages (me included) for dpsing to early. So we let him get 5 sunders in, we release frostbolts & combination of arcane spells for threat reduction and guess what after two shots..mobs start running to us???

My priest OOMs in every run. He says the warrior is taking so much damage that his heals cant keep up and worse he is holy specced. This warrior also has a habit of not following Marks that have been assigned by the leader e.g. feels that he is uber enough to solo a single mob by himself when the rest of the team is resting..that kinda thing.

and whats even worse...he can't progress further than sethekk halls cos he still believes that he can tank??!!

He basically says we clothies have no idea what it takes to be a tanker.

So Main Tankers out there...please oh please tell me how one respecs and gears to be a good tanker cos I really am in the dark in advising my real life friend.

Help much appreciated.

Being a healer, one tends to remember good tanks and mediocre tanks. So, least healing required is Prot Tank < Fury < Arms. When I'm in a group with Arms Warrior, I tend to heal a lot more. Believe me, it's a lot more.

Whoever is tanking, they must be given a few seconds to gain enough aggro to hold the mobs. If non-tankers pull aggro, it's ok. Let them take a few hits. Because a good tank is able to pull them back to him. Look at Shattered Halls. The tank has to tank multiple mobs. The team will have to take a few hits, no choice, even if it means that your HP is going to drop by 50%. Deal with it - mentally of course.

Not following marks? Then the tank doesn't deserve to live. Let him die. Running instances or raiding is a group effort for survival. Whether he's tanking or DPSing, should be following instructions. If your team members can handle it good. If not, he shouldn't contribute to unnecessary stress.

I have a friend who is an Arms warrior who tanks. He's pretty good but even he says he has problems in BM when it comes to the 2nd and 3rd boss. Even with Prot gear. But he's ok tanking TK, CF, HP. This friend is also very interesting. He absolutely refuses to install addons or threatmeter but as he got to the higher level instances, he got threatmeter in the end, just so that he doesn't pull aggro off the tanks or that he knows what his own aggro is while tanking.

I have another friend, who is one of the best Fury/Prot warrior I've ever seen tanking. All DPS classes can continually cast spells (of course not the high-threat one but they do not need to wait  a few seconds before casting). But he decided to respec to Prot/Fury for heroics as it was easier to get through those instances that way as he did not have the gear.

Your friend sounds like he's literally gone into defensive mode. Being a good WoW player doesn't mean that you've already reach your match. A good player would try different specs/builds, different strategies, etc. It's expensive yes, but doable.

As for your healer going OOM, healing gets a lot easier at +1K heals. Below that figure, it can get hard. But if your healer is getting OOM by that tank in Sethekk Halls, because of him not following marks, eep. Downranking healing helps too. And I absolutely love Prayer of Mending.

He's not tanking if he's using bloodthirst.  And if he's getting critted in the first place, that's not exactly making him easier to heal is it? 

And yeah, that brings me back to the first post i made - no one should be forced into a spec.  But that also means that if your spec is not as useful to the group/raid/guild don't expect to see that much action.

i don't get it,

Why is everybody having pain respeccing to prot? once you hit enough people, you won't be bother doing normal 5 mans anymore, it will be raids and heroics.

sets and quaz are not arguing 
sohz what did you guys do last night?