Removing tank buffs and incorporate them into rotation?

[Shurrikhan]

I mean splitting them over the load of the weaponskills for exmaple rampart, say your 1 2 3 attack combo each added damage mitigation giving a portion of the protection that rampart give, then make it stackable and give it a short duration, this is obviously overly simplified, but the idea is to make the tank weaponskills moves that mitigate.

And will these have cooldowns?

At the minute tanks pretty much have 1 single target rotation and 1 aoe rotation, If they removed the tank buffs they could potentially add in additional weaponskills combos split all mitigation buffs across weaponskills and OGCD attacks. That gives us actual potential for growth, would have proper rotations and not just press 123, press the take less damage button and keep pressing 123, throw out OGCD when available.

Gauge-spenders aside...

DRK has, for all intents and purposes, a single ST rotational weaponskill and a single AoE weaponskill (Spell, technically, to further screw SkS) that, by being split over 3 or 2 GCDs, respectively, is disproportionately weakened by being interrupted (be that by other combo skills or the fight ending).

GNB has a further higher potency ST skill on a cooldown. WAR functions similarly, but with effectively two charges on said skill and a softer cooldown generally. PLD has both a softer cooldown and may use it a further time in two-target situations; it also has the outlier of a 6-step filler combo and making its 9-step rotation ranged once per minute. Simply put, WAR and GNB use their stronger path after 9 filler GCDs while PLD uses it after 6.

But consider that DRG, for instance, has no more GCD rotational complexity than any of those, despite spending 10 buttons --up from, say, WAR's 6-- on CD-less weaponskills.

tl;dr: It's not about the buttons in a combo or rotation, nor the number of combo paths, but how one uses them. (Depth in practice is not significantly correlative with button count in this game, nor necessarily in any game.)

2.0 Drk was a good example of this, your weaponskill combo when hard slash>spinning slash> power slash. The other rotation hard slash>syphon strike>delirium (and i believe you used to chose between power slash or souleater as a finisher or delirium) and you had your aoe weapon skill but the didn't add the combo to Drk till like shadowbringer.

DRK did not exist in 2.x. Assuming you mean 3.x, that is still not an example you'd wish to follow, unless you intend for the alternate combo (Power Slash) to only be used at most a couple times per ~5 minutes, and almost all of that use to be right at the start (after which time they can be macro-swapped right off your bars).

Generally speaking it's always more fun for the player to have more options not less.

I have to expect from what you've posted thus far you're greatly underestimating how narrow of constraints something must operate under for it to be an actual option.

I can elaborate upon request, but the short of it is that options (and, ideally, its consequent decision-making) requires constraints enough for one's actions to actually feel like decisions and that those options have, in themselves, varying strength based on context (whether internal, as per interaction with prior or later actions, or external, such as in preempting or responding to raid buffs, incoming damage, likely procs, or whatever else).

Throwing more buttons to press without deeply considering what would be optimal under what conditions and how many competitive paths of action those conditions can allow for... will typically just produce bloat.