Blizz using itemization to keep pallys ontop

Both items have 179 stam and 76 defense.

Generally, I might suggest "Is this a bug?" and not "Obvious bias!"

Q u o t e:
Well I'm glad it was a bug then, but im curious even tho it was datamined, why was it present on all of the the different ilvl pieces. Maybe a lack of oversight by the people who do itemization for tanking stats?

Many of the stats have gone in relatively recently. If you tried out the PTR a few weeks ago, bosses weren't dropping loot at all. We recently went back and changed our paradigm for how we wanted to handle sockets on these items. Sockets have a budget and in this case the other stats were not adjusted correctly for the socket change.

We are adding over 1400 PvE items to the game in 3.3. There are going to be some bugs. Usually we catch them all before they go live, but some still slip through. We don't try to catch them all before we make a PTR build. Sometimes we're right in the middle of doing something (e.g. changing sockets in this case) and it's not worth holding up all the massive machinery that generates a build just for a few simple bugs that aren't really going to affect the PTR experience anyway. Also consider that item bugs generally aren't as serious as class bugs since the former only affect a smaller percentage of the latter. Bugs are bugs though. I won't try to justify them.