How to get people to tank!

[Khalithar]

Snip

(Side note: I always enjoy reading your posts, just wanted to mention that.)

I was thinking about your thoughts on making mitigation more impactful and doing something about active mitigation and I thought on some other games I've played and how to accomplish that. I don't think WoW's current incarnation of active mitigation is the way to go, what did come to mind for me however were some older abilities in WoW that have since been redesigned and lost any resemblance to their old incarnation. One example is the WoW Paladin's ability Holy Shield, originally it was a buff you had to maintain which drastically increased your block chance for a certain number of blocks or for a certain period of time, whichever happened first, at which point when it ended or ran out, you could usually recast it right away (it had a duration 10 seconds and a cooldown of 8 seconds) and it's overall MP cost was negligible. Now, I'm not suggesting the same incarnation of that ability, but I think adding something in the vein of that on a short cooldown with noticeable enough effect on all tanks could make it more interesting.

What you said stood out to me, particularly this:

Should it still be just as front-loaded as now, where as long as you have all your CDs ready you can take on an army, and when you don't you take on an army of mice?

Because as much as I love this aspect:

Front-loaded mitigation toolkits give us a fairly large capacity range or periodic variance around which to pace our runs, which brings out the feeling of the tank as a dungeon leader, the pace-maker, and necessitating variance in that pace.

And I absolutely 100% agree with you on this, I've lately been thinking that perhaps the difference between when cooldowns are up and when they're not might be a little too much. Note, I'm just saying "might," I'm not completely convinced on it quite yet because I enjoy the front loaded mitigation personally, but when you do use them and you have nothing left it's not a very nice feeling either. Hence why I've started thinking that maybe adding some sort of extra active defenses of some kind might not be a bad idea with their use tied to being in tank stance. But since I like to give more concrete examples...

Paladin- While in Shield Oath, Rage of Halone gives a buff called Halone's Bulwark, decreasing all damage taken by 5-10% for X seconds.

Dark Knight- While in Grit, Dark Arts + Souleater creates a Blood Barrier, absorbing damage equal to the amount of HP healed.

Warrior- While in Defiance, rework Inner Beast so it will only cost 1-2 Wrath but reduce the mitigation some or maybe leave it as is? I'm not sure.

Those are my initial ideas, now obviously I don't know if they would work or be overpowered in the current incarnation of the game, but that's meant to give you more of an idea of what I mean by adding an extra mitigation tool we can use in between longer cooldowns.