Originally Posted by
rahdek
You brought up some really interesting points, and if Albert gets this onto the feedback forums, hopefully that will help steer the devs into a better system.
Having said that, I think you're confusing being active in a fight with active mitigation. For instance you listed all the abilities you use during a normal boss fight, shout, TC, rend, devastate, etc (not in that particular order), and yes hitting 5 or 6 buttons at a regular interval along with hitting your cd's when you need to does make you an active tank, that doesn't necessarily you're actively mitigating incoming damage.
Since DK's are currently the paragon of active mitigation in the current state of WoW, I'll use them as a comparison. Now this is what I think Blizzard is trying to get at, but again it's my interpretation, and may not be spot on:
Currently DK tanks have a couple abilities and mechanics to help reduce incoming damage and there are some addons out there which a large portion of the DK tanking community use to make this easier. Death Strike which heals you for a portion of the damage you've received, with a minimum of 7% of your health pool. So as most people know, the harder a tank gets hit, the bigger the heal they receive when using DS, with mastery stacking a shield for a percentage of the healing done. There's lots of ways to use DS, ranging from spamming it to try and build up a shield, to using it only when the heal is gonna be big, depending on the playstyle of the individual it'll affect how the player uses DS.
Now this entire mechanic is actively mitigating incoming damage, regardless of how you use DS, you're using a damaging ability to reduce incoming damage, not a cooldown, and I THINK this is the playstyle that Blizzard is trying to achieve with all the tanks. The implementation of it is, as suggested above the most difficult thing about it, and it'll be a difficult mechanic to test, for what may or may not be a plethora of reasons.
Now you mentioned how you now have less buttons to press during a normal encounter, because they've combined some abilities. On my DK tank in general I'm using only 3 or 4 abilites. Outbreak, HS, DS, (pestilence + blood boil for aoe, and IT and PS if outbreak misses), this is neglecting cd's (bone shield, IBF, AMS, etc). I may not have many buttons to hit, and yes, when I overgear content dear god it's boring as hell to be tanking, but from a progression raiding standpoint on an encounter by encounter basis, I'm using trying to time my DS for when I need that heal the most, or during low damage periods where I know a big spike is coming up, I'll be trying to build up my shield.
How Blizzard will incorporate these kinds of mechanics to warriors is beyond me (good thing I'm not the one developing this game), but it seems like that's the general direction that you're being moved to, and not necessarily having all these different buttons to actually press during a fight.