Opinions: Should tanks work for aggro?

[ADVSS]

The difference is when people talk about active mitigation they’re specifically referring to relying on a multitude of short cooldown, short duration skills akin to Shieldtron, ARR/HW Inner Beast, and similar effects, but made highly specialized to certain damage types or increase specific stats (parry/evade) in order to justify their uptime. They work best when mitigating damage according to random spikes. FFXIV handles mitigation primarily through long Cooldown, long duration abilities that fit well with their predictable encounter patterns, and are broadly applicable. I believe WoW uses a form of the former, but I know it also differs in how mitigation stacks together, primarily based on how it affects their accuracy formulas linearly instead of multiplicatively.

Basically, adding active mitigation is adding more button bloat for an effect (reacting to damage outtake) already achieved by stance dancing, that better fits a game we aren’t playing. Let the devs transition towards that over time if they want to. For now, I’d prefer to turn off tank mastery.

I have to disagree with you on the button bloat issue. it would be button presses, not bloat. People complaining that tanks get slapped like a wet noodle, having a long cd on a middle length timer wouldnt be any different than having half that cd duration on a shorter timer(or, imagine if it had more than 1 charges). it just would give you more button pushes in between periods where youve burned out all your dps cooldowns and are just spamming 1 2 3 till something pops/fills up. It barely would cause anymore skill gap than we have, except inexperienced players may actually have a chance to use a cd they accidently burnt earlier than when the tb comes along.

You could also argue that stance dancing was more button pushes, but theres a big difference between what im talking about, and going back to stance dancing, which was entirely unnecessary skill playing(make tanking harder to dish out more damage) and not optional at high end at all.