We base our tank recommendations on our tank simulator (which you can play with for you character to try stuff out as well).
I’m working on some pretty significant updates to our default tank gearing strategies to make them more adaptive – by that I mean they will dynamically adapt to your chosen talents and legendaries much better. We’re also making The Blender more prominent – that is a feature that lets you blend toughness and DPS gear in a way that gets you more damage without sacrificing too much toughness.
Off the top of my head, if I had to take a guess as to why haste is more popular in some other places (I’d have to investigate it in more detail to give a definitive answers, so take this with a grain of salt):
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Haste “feels” better to a lot of people. They don’t like waiting so long to cast abilities or having to worry as much about timing.
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Haste might give you more damage. The majority of other tank theorycrafters I have seen around the web have a strong preference for DPS gear over toughness. That perspective makes sense if you have good healers and you aren’t dying… but it is certainly not universal advice. Right now, we default to all-toughness gear recommendations. That is probably overkill for some people as well. Our next update will have The Blender turned on by default, which should strike a good balance between these two extremes.