We recently buffed tank threat significantly and suggested that we would fill in any potential lost gameplay with new gameplay. What I meant by that was that if tanks don’t need to hit their buttons to generate threat, they may realize they don’t need to hit most of their buttons at all, and just stand there waiting until the right time to Shield Wall. Going a GCD or two without using a combat ability is fine with us. Standing around much longer than that gets boring quickly.
What we proposed is that tanks should ideally want to hit their buttons because it keeps them alive. I didn’t elaborate on that too much except to say it would feel more like the Blood DK method of tanking, which prompted some players to state that they didn’t like the DK model, or to point out that the DK model is not just active but reactive. Fair enough.
To better explain what we meant by that we need to define active mitigation. We define it as hitting buttons regularly that have a meaningful impact on your future mitigation. You should occasionally alter your rotation depending on what is going on in the fight, but you should still mitigate regularly and not save everything for the really big, predictable hits. DKs have a little of this, but Death Strike is ultimately a heal, which is a response to damage, not damage prevention. I also think the DK model gets a bad rap because of some other mechanical problems, which aren’t really problems with active mitigation per se. So let me go into a bit more hand-waving about what active mitigation could mean for other tanks, and then I’ll share a little DK info.
