Tanking Gear

the point would not be just to nerf pets

The key word is "just". This means it's meant as a nerf, and then some balancing.

Pretty scary stuff, but they are known to say fairly random things and then do the complete opposite so don't get too worried.

Pets scaling from buffs is a problem. If we had the tech, we would let pets benefit from buffs but prevent the pet from getting extra scaling from the same buffs on the hunter. That would solve some of the problem.

From a very recent thread (i.e. today)

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16904206957&sid=1&pageNo=3

Lets hope that if they ever get around to doing this, they'll balance it around the high end of the spectrum instead of the low end.

For example, in the raid boss MT build and gear set I have as the default set up in my spreadsheet, removing the extra scaling from buffs on the hunter takes pet HP from 41.2k to 36k, a huge drop for a tank. Pet DPS dropped around 15%, which would noticeably decrease TPS.

At any rate, its seems unlikely that we'd see such a sweeping change outside of a major patch, i.e. 3.2 or 3.3, so we'll almost definitely get a PTR and whatnot to test it out.

My biggest single issue with pets tanking though is the lack of carry-over from pet dps-tps. In terms of TS, growl and buffs.

As it stands now a 15% increase in damage from all sources to the hunter, for example, would increase my threat by 15% of it's base. Doing the same for the pet would increase the pets threat by 15% of it's base, but since the pets base dps is significantly lower than the hunter's the pets scaling means that pretty soon it cannot keep up.

If AotB were to increase the pets % damage to over 50% it would rectify the situation from the hunters point of view but then the overall tps will be lowered due to both TS and Growl being WEAKER rather than stronger than it was before and so hunter threat generation against any other player.

This is the single biggest issue we have to contend with as far as I am concerned. Even a little 'Produces additional threat' scaling somewhere can fix this.