Is it Time for Active Mitigation?

[Alisto]

Adding an active mitigation system to tanks would, imo, make them more fun. At least for me xD Though I won't speak for other players, my DRK right now really just feels like a DPS with extra defenses. There's no...regular 'feedback' that lets me know I'm tanking and not DPSing. For healers, that 'feedback' in combat is having to pay attention to health bars and the wibblywobbliness of them when there's damage going out. DPS get pretty numbers and such, and to a degree one can tell when something dies faster.

That isn't to say DPS and healers don't have similar issues somewhere - but it seems tanks have gotten the short end of the stick. There's almost zero 'okay, what exactly is telling me, from moment to moment, how good a job I'm doing while tanking'? Outside of damage reduction cooldowns every tank has, there really isn't anything. Blood DK from WoW, imo, is the best example - you can very, VERY easily see and have a direct impact on your mitigation from moment to moment, from the way your health bar is wiggling, the barrier you generate, etc. With, say, DRK, I don't really feel like I have any sort of influence over what my health bar is doing from moment to moment - while I do have damage reduction cooldowns, those aren't really engaging to use - they're just there to make sure my healer isn't overwhelmed and they don't change what -I- am doing. It's just a 'dear god I hope my healer is paying attention'. And then I just get a watered down DPS rotation where I dump everything every so often and then go back to 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3...etc.

On another note - I think it's important to note the differences between (because I've played it recently I'm gonna use WoW >.>) blood DK and, again, DRK, and active and passive mitigation. Rotations exist. I really don't see FFXIV getting away from them in the future. If a game does come out with a truly dynamic way of doing that sort of thing, more power to them, but I think it's...oversimplifying to say it's something you get from doing what you'd be doing anyway. The difference is, imo, most easily seen when someone asks the question - what happens when you DON'T press the button? If a Blood DK doesn't press Death Strike, it's immediately noticeable - both to the healers because now their tank is getting chunked, and to the DK (hopefully) because they have impact on their tankability from moment to moment and now they are not doing The Thing(TM).

The lowest CD thing a DRK has that impacts their mitigation is...a minute? And you press it once and done. We can count Hard Slash -> Syphon Strike -> Souleater, which takes..Frick, that's like 7.5 seconds? I think? But there's a difference between what is pressed and why it's pressed. I press HS -> SS -> Seater because the last one doesn't work without the previous too. There's no interactive system there I have to play with - it just doesn't work unless I press two other generic damage buttons first.

It's important to avoid oversimplification - Blood DK generates runic power with heart strike, which has interaction with the class's AoE skill. Death Strike, the dmg mitigation skill, has interaction with other skills (such as another AoE skill, Blood Boil, that can increase the healing). It has interaction with a buff the class has to maintain, Bone Shield, because it decreases the cost of Death Strike. And ALL of it - by virtue of impacting Death Strike - interacts with a 1min (ish) CD of Vampiric Blood, which gives a +healing% and more HP, so it directly empowers Death Strike.

THAT is the kind of synergy and interaction I at least am looking for in a tank. There's much more to it than just adding mitigation whatsits to something a class is already doing. They definitely aren't the same.

Edit: @ OP. Blizz definitely had some issues with their active mitigation ideas early on, though I do think they should get some credit for (relatively) successfully polishing it up over the years. Hope my ramblings have contributed somehow.