Originally Posted by
Firefall
They are not moving away from Active Mitigation in general, just for warriors (and hopefully just at launch).
First they modified Ignore Pain, and increased the rage cost of Shield Block to keep it making sense mechanically with the new Ignore Pain.
Then they removed Ignore Pain because it is outside of the sort of Active Mitigation they want in BFA according to several posts on the matter (They want everything to be armor; then "reactive" stuff like heals are also OK.)
They then didn't change the cost of Shield Block back. So they kind of pushed themselves into a corner on what they could give us, because we can't get a second high rage cost armor boosting ability (blocking is effective armor in BfA.)
The new talent Bolster is a low rage cost, long duration ability. It's much more of buff maintenance than active mitigation as you will have enough rage to use it for 100% uptime once we're in raid gear, and doing so is going to be optimal in any encounter that we'd take it. They could make it proper active mitigation if they made the cost higher, duration lower, and effect greater, as it then would not be used on cooldown and instead in relation to incoming damage--but now that blocking is mechanically armor, that would cause it to compete with Shield Block in a confusing way, thus we instead get an Ironfur-esq ability but it doesn't interact with our spec at all, it's just guaranteed 100% uptime. It can't even stack duration so you could, say, pool it up and then spend extra rage on more Revenges instead for a while, it's basically just passive and could be macroed into some other ability if the cooldown lined up with the duration.
I fully expect them to revisit warriors (possibly all tanking) in 8.1. In the meantime I will say that we're pretty fun to quest on at least in War Mode, and have some interesting builds we can make with the PvP talents combined with our base talents. It'll probably get nerfed but with the Demoralizing Shout PvP and Base Talent, and Anger Management, you can maintain a 100% uptime on Demoralizing Shout and generate literally more rage than you have abilities to spend it on, which is pretty fun while zipping around and bashing quest mobs.