The Adventures of Prot-man!

For my Alt warrior i had my eye on some pvp boots: [Veteran's Plate Greaves]. I was gonna use them as Tank boots but as my previous boots didnt have any stats like defense on it i would only gain when getting these.
Simply said i gained 375 armor and 16 stamina, aswell as gaining some crit (not a very usefull stat for a tank but it won't hurt me) and resilience.
Resilience is actually not a bad stat to have for a tank as it reduces the chance to get critical hit (both by spells as physical) and reduces the damage taken from crits, it also dampens the damage taken from dots.
While defense already reduces the chance to get crit by physical hits (490 for level 73 mobs), it doesnt do anything for spelldamage.
So why not forget about Defense at all and just get to the sweetspot stacking resilience? Well, defense does some other things aswell: it also increased the chance you will be missed or block, parry or dodge an attack.. in the end it's better to avoid some damage at all then just soaking non-crit damage.

My conclusion (as flawed as it may be as i am still a beginner tank) is to forget about resilience, anything i get by chance is nice to have but it has a very low priority. A tank will mostly use it for limiting spelldamage crits and damage from dots which is not the majority of the damage we take... regular spelldamage hits will still ignore our full armour anyway and won't be reduced by resilience, better get some more stamina to create a bigger buffer for my healingbuddies.

But back to the item, i already gathered some honor a while back and still had 10k. I needed 7k more tho to get those boots and 40 Eye of whatsitsname. I can tell you getting honor as a protection warrior is a real pain, i even felt guilty showing up as protection on not contributing much but on the other hand most people were running around like headless chickens anyway so a noob more or less didnt hurt.
34 matches later i managed to get the 40 tokens and a lot of frustration... but then i could at least move on to Alterac Valley.
In it's current form AV aint that much fun but at least it's pretty fast and gives a reasonable amount of honor. More importantly i can really do some good in there for a change, often i end up tanking the various masters and in the end Drek, which actually puts a smile on my face as people will at least see me standing there making a change.
Saturdaynight 2 o'clock i got payed and i was off to Stormwind to get my reward after a looong day getting my ass kicked and giving the horde easy honor.... and all was well. :)