Quote Originally Posted by Zairava View Post
Something that's come to mind the last few weeks is "Is it really the amount of incoming damage that's the issue, or is it that we have too much potent utility at our disposal?".
What I can tell you, for certain, is that Thordan Extreme was way harder in Heavensward in large part because a Warrior couldn't just press Shake It Off and do the healer's job for them. This was true for the unreal trials that came before it as well, such as Sophia and Ultima, which are way more difficult at level 60/50 because of how reliant tanks are on the healers at that level.

At level 90 you just press Bloodwhetting and Shake It Off and the healers don't even need to worry so much.

We also didn't have so frequent mitigation back then. A short cooldown such as Bloodwhetting is a big one as it is, but the cooldown time of Sentinel, Vengeance, Nebula and Shadow Wall was reduced as well and we didn't have Reprisal on all tanks (Paladins could reduce physical damage and Dark Knights could reduce magic damage). So you had to really time your cooldowns right for the upcoming add phase.

notable increase in how much party-wide damage mitigation and healing these past couple expansions. So much so that we're invalidating raid-wides even on content launch.
I don't think this is true in Extreme and Savage. In the first Pandaemonium tier, I saw the entire party coordinating Addles, Feints, Reprisals, tank and healer mit, just to prevent wipes to simple raid-wides which were common without doing this. I've still seen how vitally important that is, even in the latest extreme trial, where I have seen a simple raid-wide dot wipe the party or simple phase changes wipe the party, prompting me to adjust my tank cooldown usage to help the healers out. The last phase can especially overwhelm the party if nobody gets the mitigation right.

I had not particularly felt like this was so important in the past. Sure I used Reprisal on aoes, especially aoe bleeds and sure healers were usually expected to have a shield up, but coordinating the mit to this extent with addles, feints and reprisals to prevent wipes felt ramped up to me and I am happy with this.

The problem here is, that the incoming damage has NOT been tuned to account for this in casual content, not even the end-game on patch content.
Raid-wides in casual content have never felt very threatening to be honest. The most threatening I have seen it is probably in normal raids on release day, but as soon everyone increased their item level, they became trivial.

Party/Raid-wide mits can be reduced in kits that aren't healers
I disagree with this. The job of a tank is to protect the party. Tanks should have the responsibility for putting up barriers and mitigation. The entire concept of a barrier healer steps on tanks' toes, but the concept of tanks having regens on Shake It Off and Divine Veil steps on healers' toes.