Tanks will be in high demand and should be pretty plentiful when the WotLK hits the shelves, and for a number of weeks after ward. But if WotLK follows the same path as BC and vanilla WoW, tank availability should begin to dry up when the majority of guilds start to raid seriously.Having played two different tanks nearly the entire time I've been playing WoW (since Mar 2005), I know precisely why there is and was a Prot Warrior shortage. And it is exactly why I retired my Warrior in the Fall of 2006 and rolled my Druid, who remains my "main". Once you went Protection as a Warrior you couldn't really do anything else with him except raid or run instances. It was miserable trying to farm or solo play, and that just isn't much fun. As prot Warriors started to raid seriously they either stopped PUG'ing and ran with guildees only, or stopped running instances all together once they were able to start getting raid gear.
Prot Paladins are in a slightly different boat, in that they can largely solo and raid/instance tank regardless of where they're at. It's just that there are far fewer of them than Warriors. And Feral Druids; well they didn't really have an issue with spec in regards to raid/instance tanking and solo play because their tree pretty much gives them everything they need in order to be successful at either. That is until WotLK however. Enough on that for now!
Blizzard has finally claimed to have heard the long spoken complaints regarding the situation. And has addresses some of the problems by raising DPS of Warriors and making them much better AOE tankers than they were. It remains to be seen if Prot Warriors will be more fun to play solo than they are now though, and that is essentially what I feel will play directly into the tank shortage debate.
Of course, what ever Blizzard does with tanks in general will have zero impact on whether someone decides to drop out of the PUG scene. I know I stopped tanking PUGS a very long time ago simply because I got tired of wipes and repair bills caused by silliness.
