If you still have a person or two in your guild who fills this role, appreciate them. Once they realize how excruciatingly boring it is, they probably won't keep doing it for long.
Druid tanks can deal with this problem the best; they can at least go kitty form and do some amount of damage. Prot Pallys don't do crazy damage as off-tanks either, but they're totally ridiculous at AoE tanking (again, gimmicky fights, wouldn't want to do it if I could).
But oh, the warrior off-tanks.
What do we do if there is no boss for us to tank? Pretty much waste a raid slot, that's what. If there is no other tank, we can take one or two adds, although in a boss fight situation, the adds have to be taken down so fast (and usually with AoE -- Pally preferred!), that we end up running around endlessly, desperately trying to hold a mob --any mob-- to feel like we're contributing. When the adds are down and everyone shifts back to the boss, the most we can do is swap out our shield with another weapon and dance over to fury to contribute that extra 50 dps for 30 seconds until the adds respawn. Since we are still occasionally tanking something, we have to keep wearing just enough survival/threat gear to keep from actually doing damage to anything.
It's nearly impossible to really quantify off-tank performance improvement over time except for maybe burst threat, which doesn't matter past a certain point and not at all if your add isn't the first thing being killed. DPS classes, however, can easily watch with satisfaction as their damage numbers increase over time with gear. It's also often hard to feel like your job matters to the raid much at all as a warrior off-tank. I once read a book called The 4 Signs of a Miserable Job. Having a job that is immeasurable and irrelevant are two of those signs, and yep, it's pretty miserable to experience.
Yes, there are bosses that require multiple tanks, but nobody really likes those, especially if the raid has to deal with threat management or taunt resists. You also have to figure out what you do with your second tank on all the other bosses in that instance that only need one tank. The answer is obvious - bring a druid!
I've read a few things about Blizzard wanting to make tanks more useful while not actually tanking in WotLK. I just don't see how this is possible. Even if I could do damage while off-tanking, it doesn't remove the boredom factor. It also ignores the fact that any tanking gear I manage to get is probably worthless. I'll never wear it if I'm never the one tanking the boss because it will be avoidance overkill on trash.
Since joining a very tank-saturated guild, I have been experiencing this problem a lot lately. Maybe it's just worse for me because I got used to the main tank spot. All I know is I'm really not enjoying the game like I used to, and I haven't figured out what I'm doing to do about it.
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