Generally speaking, if you are in the appropriate level range for any of the old world non-raid dungeons, you will be able to survive.

I'm a warrior who just hit 70. What should I get to tank well in non-heroic dungeons?

For non-heroics, the bosses will be level 71-72, and will not hit very hard. Generally blue drops with stam and defense on them and green "of the champion" gear to fill in the gaps will get you where you need to be. Being uncrittable and uncrushable is not as important in normal 70 instances simply because most bosses in those instances don't hit hard enough to strain your healers. A Greater Heal is still going to heal 4000+, even if you're taking crushes and crits. Since your health pool will easily break 9K at this point, the healer can heal half your health every 3 seconds. There are very few normal bosses that even crit for that much.

Sorry Adam, it's not that obvious you are targeting 17.5k +sta tanks here. I think a good indicator is "especially towards the end of the article". Not saying it's not a good article, I can just understand dusknight's point of view.

@Adam: You have to get 102.4% to be uncrushable, not 103.4%

Dusk, you're 100% right. The main tanks in my guild have always worked on building defense and avoidance before focusing on stam. That's not to say they neglected stam, but having a huge health pool just does nothing for you when a string of unlucky crits take you down.

It's all about balance and the question is silly just by its very nature. It depends on so many factors. Uber geared tanks aren't good for lower level instances. They have so much avoidance that they can't generate the threat or mana they need to maintain threat. If you think about that, more stam is never a hindrance.

For a warrior's MT set avoidance comes naturally. You keep your def at 490 then you stack stam, period.

There is no minimum dodge/parry/block value, at least for prot warriors. If you don't believe me take off all your gear and pop shield block. For a warrior 5/5 in Deflection and Anticipation dodge+parry+block= 26.35%. Add in a 5% miss rate and that's 31.35%. If you could somehow have a shield with 0 stats in order to pop shield block, you'd be 101.35%. So your "minimum" you need at 70 to get uncrush with SB is a whopping 1.05% total spread across all gear slots.

I also don't know where a new warrior would have a lot of options in gear selection. When moving from greens to blues most upgrades are pretty obvious. The only real decision process comes in around the middle of T5 progression. It all comes down to enchants and gems. Enchants are mostly stam oriented with some warriors needing a wrist defense enchant. The +12 dodge to cloak is nice too. With item level points set how they are with avoidance stats versus stam, stam is ALWAYS the best choice unless the socket bonus has a stam boost worth of obtaining it. If 2.4 rolled around and suddenly I could get a +20 parry gem I'd definitely throw some of those in.

I always have to laugh at the "unlucky string of hits" theory avoidance tanks throw around. Unlucky strings of hits is exactly why you're stacking stam to begin with. It gives you survivability and breathing room. If an avoidance tank takes an unavoided string of six 3,000 hits, they're dead. Same situation, I'm alive. The hilarious thing is when you look at a so called "avoidance tank" their avoidance/mitigation isn't really all that much higher than mine. I'm sitting at 16,500 unbuffed with 22.6/17.09/24.0 in my full stam set. If I were to replace my 18 stam gem slots with +8 dodge (just to simplify) I'd get 7% more avoidance but at the cost of close to 3k health. With the above six 3k hit string, there's a 65% chance (0.93^6) that 7% more avoidance won't save you. I'm alive, you're dead.

@Tinkwisker: If a string of "crits" takes any tank down, they're doing something horribly, horribly wrong.

Then there's the healing argument. Gear choices are mainly important in boss fights. In most boss fights all the most clairvoyant healers are spamming heals anyways since the large mana pools and regen allow them to. Even though I'm an EH tank (effective health, look it up) I never have issues with my healers running out of mana mid battle.

This is correct; there is no "defense cap." There is only such things as "hit caps."

No Warrior or Paladin tank is even entering Kara with only 490 defense. And by the T5 or T6 range, tanks are running with 15-17K unbuffed health AND ~550 defense or so (fight depending).

"In my opinion, once you hit about 17,500 health you can start gemming and enchanting for different aspects of your tanking class." - Adam

Wrong.

Getting the stamina first and only then adding to stats like dodge/parry/block is just silly. My own experience taking a Paladin tank alt freshly (wearing blues, green gems in the sockets) into Kara had me at 11.5K unbuffed health and 526 defense. Also remember that some Paladin tanks may have to gem heavily for spell damage early on as many of the tank drops have no spell damage components. This is especially true as the AoE tank role requires massive spell damage to out-threat the AoE damage classes.

wtb: 17,500 stamina

Yeah, but at that much stam, you wouldn't need to focus on defense, avoidance, or mitigation. Hell, you wouldn't even need to respec to do pvp.

Per item level point defense is the second best avoidance/mitigation stat next to dodge. Parry is the one with the crazy cost (for good reason).

A tankadin has NO spell damage on their armor if they are smart. Spell damage sword. Rest is generic warrior tanking gear.

Blizard itemizes for some specs like monkeys write novels.