Traversing the Rifts

World of Raids publie un article particulièrement intéressant concernant les Tanks, et leurs particularités classe par classe : 

The Tank
As most raiders know, being the tank is one of the three most stressful jobs in raiding. It requires preparation, patience and above all, teamwork. Having three amazing tanks doesn't do you much good if they don't talk at all and don't coordinate their movements. What is least understood about tanks by the general raid community is the strengths and weaknesses of having two or three class combinations for your tanks.

For this article, think of the Death Knight and Paladin as the "Spell Tank", considering the fact that a major portion of their threat is dealt by spell damage. Warriors and Druids fall into the "Physical Tank" category.

Generally speaking, in a raid setting, your tank setup does not matter (like Auriaya, Thorim, Twin Valkyr, and Gunship Battle). However, for certain fights, using a certain tank class (for fights such as General Vezax, Lord Jaraxxus, and Lady Deathwhisper (10)) can cause wipes for what seems to be no reason at all. In truth, these wipes are generally caused by Tank Synergy issues.

Synergy
"Professor? What is Tank Synergy?!"
Good question. As the name implies, Tank synergy is how, on the base level, certain tank classes work together, or are affected by boss mechanics. Tank synergy factors in the Tanks in question's gear, talent choice, proficiency in tanking using that class, and obviously, the class' abilities. Sometimes on certain boss encounters, using a certain combination can be fatal. In 10-mans, using a warrior+paladin setup or a druid+DK setup would be the ideal. (See chart below) But the ideal does not always happen. Sometimes you are stuck with Warrior+DK, DK+DK, Druid+Druid, etc. Each class has their strengths and weaknesses, displayed in the chart below.

	Strengths	Weaknesses
Death Knight	able to tank with any talent tree (ideally) many well meshed, powerful survival cooldowns abnormally strong against casters able to switch to dps quickly and easily good AoE threat many ways to heal self large visible health pool	unique and clunky resource system tagged by community as weak tanks raid buff severely time limited, but quickly refreshable unable to block two single target taunts (AoD takes a bit of time to cast, and is not considered)
Druid	abnormally large visible health pool able to switch to other forms (utility) able to heal self and others(although sparingly) powerful raid buff curse removal (while not being hit) battle resurrection capability (while not being hit) Fear Removal Tool	race limited (now and Cataclysm) fewer survivablity cooldowns unable to block or parry(Savage Defense is considered a "block") weak(er) against casters one single target taunt and one long cooldown AoE fixate
Paladin	diverse raid buffs short CD multi-target and single target taunts able to heal self multiple survival cooldowns debuff removal solid AoE Threat	some survival cooldowns are not chain-able weak against large groups of casters low(er) visible health pool race restricted on Horde (PRE-CATACLYSM)
Warrior	benefits significantly from block value vs pallys large visible health pool many utility abilities powerful and chain-able survival cooldowns race-selection non-issue fear removal from self strong against casters	controlling resources requires discipline weak(er) AoE Threat buffs are severely time limited long cooldown heal self ability one fixate, one single target taunt and long cooldown AoE fixate

For those unaware, there is a difference between a fixate and a taunt. I purposefully made the distinction. A fixate is any "taunt" that contains the words "forces the target to attack you" in it's tooltip. This means that you need to build threat on it manually.

As you can see, each tank has at least one line of symmetry or is the polar opposite of another. Learning what each player who plays a tank can do is nearly as important as learning what their class can do. More often than not, each class can transcend their base, for lack of a better term, designation with the abilities and practice of the player."