Stamina = Rage

You're reading it backwards (which is our fault). As your health increases, the rage you get per damage point decreases. However as you go into harder content, you are going to be taken a lot more damage. The intention is that you get about the same rage income no matter how the boss actually deals damage (fast vs. slow attacks, or raid auras vs. adds for instance).

You are also getting rage from fully avoided or partially mitigated hits, which is huge.

You can, I suppose, try to strip off all your Stamina gear in order to generate more rage, but you'll have survivability problems, and we have a mechanic in place to make sure tank damage and threat while tanking maintains high anyway.

Q u o t e:
Okay, GC - but you do realize that as your gear improves and you gain more health, your rage income decreases on older content, right? Which means that players are still going to be rage-starved on older content, especially if that older content is balanced around a certain health ratio.

True, but it will be worlds better than it is today for a few reasons. 1) You will be getting more rage per swing, since you won't be penalized for your lower dps relative to Arms / Fury. 2) You will be getting full rage on anything avoided, mitigated or absorbed. 3) You have shouts and things to fill in the gaps. 4) Your dps when tanking will be higher than it is today. 5) If we go with scaling bosses, as we've suggested we might do, then you will also crit more often on weaker creatures.

If after all that you still feel like you don't have enough rage, then pull things faster. :)

Q u o t e:
You seem to imply that you're going to take the "cautious approach" again in terms of rage gen, IE put it where you think it'll probably be a tad too low and then buff it later if necessary.

We wanted to overemphasize that because we suspected that we would see a lot of "You tried to normalize rage in BC and it felt bad, therefore normalizing rage will always feel bad."

Q u o t e:
it'll be worlds better, but you'll still have to take off gear or room pull for proper rage generation when we are running baseline heroics in three tiers up from heroics gear because that's where the badges are?

isnt that...the same, really, with a few sparkles added in?

It's not the intent that you have to take off your pants when running content overgeared. It can feel like that today, but that is something we want to fix.

I'm not trying to be coy here, but if it helps, imagine you have an Armored to the Teeth talent such that you may not have more rage when tanking overgeared, but you'll have more threat and damage.

Q u o t e:
What if you got *more* rage from avoided hits? If that were true, not only would it be better to avoid hits because you'd live longer, more avoidance would lead to more rage.

The Shield Spec talent does that today. Maybe 5 isn't the right number anymore, but it kind of solves the same problem. It's kind of nice in that it provides an analog to the dps warrior who is (somewhat unpredictably) critting and getting more rage. The tank would be avoiding to get more rage, which in turn makes avoidance slightly more attractive and helps the overgeared tank scenario.

Q u o t e:
That could never work though; having one tank that stacks avoidance for resources compared against the other 3 who stack EH...it'd get ugly fast.

I don't think you'd stack avoidance over Stamina just for the rage though. Stamina still provides survivability, which is usually more valuable. Even in the worst case scenario, tanks should have more steady rage income than they do today so I can't see gearing for rage (gearing for threat, maybe).