Is it Time for Active Mitigation?

[Jpec07]

With your active mitigation idea, we actually have an example of this outside of DRK, though it is based on MP instead of stacks. It's PLD's Clemency. By timing your clemency so that it goes off immediately after big damage does, you can save yourself from a lot of pain. (Is it optimal? no. But it's worthwhile to at least know how to use it.) It's what separates Big Deeps PLD from Raid Saver PLD. The flaw in SQEXs design philosophy. By making the content easy enough everybody could do it with enough dedication, the community tends to lean more towards DPS than not DPS. But every time they implement mechanics like these, it's at the cost of DPS.

Clemency doesn't really count as active mitigation, though, because (1) it isn't really necessary to survive, and (2) it isn't exclusive to the PLD using it. Don't get me wrong; saving a group that's going south with some well-placed Clemency casts is one of the most satisfying things in the game, but it doesn't count as active mitigation. Now, could SE retool PLD such that self-casting Clemency becomes one of the most central components of its gameplay? Certainly, but I don't think that would really be that engaging.

Technically all tanks in XIV already have active mitigation, you have to press an ability to mitigate damage for a set amount of time which requires you to know when high tank damage is going to happen. The active mitigation in WoW might as well be passive since damage is constantly high and you're trying to keep your mitigation rolling as much as possible, not all that different from earlier versions of the game where you just stacked defensive stats to have said mitigation at all times.

Defensive cooldowns != active mitigation. The FFXIV model of mitigation centers entirely around ordering and managing your cooldowns, and in high-end content around stacking them appropriately, but that method of managing incoming damage is neither engaging nor fun. Most tanks do have some form of active mitigation in the form of self-healing based on certain attacks in their rotation, but it could be removed from the game and no one would notice.

To give an example of what I'm talking about, I'll describe how I remember Blood DK working the last time I played it (roughly - and my memory is shoddy af right now due to the state of the world at large). Over time, you slowly generated runes. Spending those runes gave you rune power, and you could then spend that rune power to create your Blood Shield, which was a massive shield that sat overtop your normal HP pool. A well-geared Blood DK could tank entire dungeons without needing healing once, and this was a big deal because healers didn't really have any oGCD heals (outside of an "ohshit" button or two). But the entire blood DK gameplay was built around the idea that, in order to survive the dungeon and do a good job at your role, you needed to pour everything into your Blood Shield and keep up as best as you could.

As it stands, there are a few clear obstacles that would need to be overcome in order for FFXIV to be able to entertain the notion of active mitigation as a design paradigm. Tanks would need far less passive mitigation and far fewer defensive cooldowns, healers would need to be nerfed, oGCD heals would basically need to be scrapped, and instances would need to be designed in such a way that tanks actually needed to care about incoming damage from mobs and bosses. Unfortunately, with the 2.5s GCD in this game, I'm not sure that such a design could actually work (WoW has the benefit of having a generally ~1s GCD, which makes the gameplay much more fast-paced).