Quote Originally Posted by YitharV2 View Post
You remind of what someone once said on Reddit.
The thing is that active mitigation was thrown in for Death Knights in cataclysm to help mitigate their lack of other tank mechanics. It was the only two-handed tank, and as such had a bunch of mechanics to help it to its job (a +max HP +healing received cooldown, a stacked defense buff that fell off when you took hits, built-in parry scaling with STR, self-healing from both a skill and consuming their own minion, and active mitigation to make up for their lack of a shield or super armor boosts). I had no problem with that being the Death Knight style of tanking, since at the time you had bear druids with their huge boosts to armor and HP from going into Bear Form, prot warriors with their straightforward passive defenses & mitigation cooldowns, and prot paladins with their AoE advantage and captain america shield.

That person does make a good point, since active mitigation is pressing short cooldown buttons to create a sort of rotation while tanking. I lean towards old school when it comes to tanking, which is why I prefer cooldowns that are reserved for "oh shit" moments or for planned parts of a fight where I need to mitigate or I die (like a boss getting a damage increase for 30 seconds every minute during a fight, forcing me to use a cooldown to survive the attacks during that phase). That said, I wouldn't be opposed to a job with active mitigation as a central mechanic, so long as it stays exclusive to that class.
I never played WoW. Just TERA. But personally for me active mitigation in TERA was fun because you got a "Defense Successful!" and 0 damage taken every time you blocked something (and depending on the boss, it could be every 3 seconds or something), plus now you get buffs for blocking. And blocking is also a component of animation cancelling which makes gameplay even faster. But to each their own. I understand not everyone will find that fun.
In fairness, TERA's mechanics are very different from your standard tab-target MMO. At least my short time playing it taught me that you simply did not want to get hit by avoidable attacks, so that requires a completely different mindset.
But I do know a lot of players find tanking in FFXIV to be boring outside optimizing their DPS.
I'll be the odd man out, because having the mob's attention (/yandere eyes "he has to look at me and only me!") and letting the DPS do their thing has always been enough for me.