Quote Originally Posted by pandabearcat View Post
But the combo system sucks butt. Pressing 3 set in stone buttons is the same as pressing one button 3 times. Perhaps thats why I play SMN as my dps class.
The combo system gives a sense of structure that most melee DPS in WoW lack. Despite the whole positional business, they are easy to get into because of the combo system. Not to mention it's a sort of legacy system from 1.0, again for the purpose of giving combat some structure.
No active mitigation, all tanks functionally identical aside from 1 or 2 cooldowns...it is a nightmare. I would highly suggest removing the bloat and putting tank survival in the hands of the tank...active mitigation, a slew of very powerful, all impactful cooldowns (make DA > DD baseline, remove goddamn foresight). A cooldown should be at least 20-50% reduction...make bosses hit much harder, but make tanks have more ways to keep themselves alive.
I'll be the first to say no to this. Active mitigation being copied on to every tank beyond Death Knights is what killed my desire to tank in WoW. I was a prot warrior up until WotLK and was pretty happy with how it played (I thought Vengeance was a bad idea so I didn't really tank much in Cata, and MoP as I said killed my desire to tank).
right now tanks can do jack all about their survival 80% of the time...so they go to dps stance. Right now healers have 0 mana problems...so they just bomb heals.
The minimal discrepancy in survivability in and out of tank stance is part of the problem. If DRK and WAR became much more likely to receive a crit to the face when not in tank stance you'd start seeing every DRK and WAR stay in tank stance (PLDs stance dancing is clunky, so by design the job is encouraged to stay in tank stance).

Of course, the developers are also to blame for part of this, since they seemed to want to encourage stance dancing, specially for WAR.