I've never played the new Star Wars MMO, so I'm sorry if I'm not entirely correct; I'm just going off of what my friends who did make the switch are telling me.

My buddy, who was a long-time Warcraft tank alongside of me, absolutely hates Star Wars' tanking system. He literally went on a 15 minute rant last night about everything from not having the tools you need at the proper levels (something about not getting your taunt until nearly 10 levels after your first Flashpoint) to the mob AI being ridiculously hard to control (something about most enemies being ranged attackers who strafe around instead of rushing you when silenced / interupted). Again, I don't know much about the game because I haven't been a fan of the Star Wars franchise since Phantom Menace destroyed my childhood, but a lot of the problems he spoke of sounded pretty damning when determining if a game had a good tanking system or not.

Regardless, Star Wars is a fairly new game that is sure to iron out its problems in time. However, the whole "Acidic Star Wars fans vs. Die Hard Warcraft fans" battle has lost its charm (if it ever had any to begin with), so I'd appreciate if you didn't post her just to basically say "Star Wars did it better," especially when the game you're comparing models to hasn't even hit Alpha yet.

As a tank going on his fifth or sixth year in the business, I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to Active Mitigation. As a Paladin tank, I can't tell you how much more sense it makes that I'd be using my Holy Power to Protect myself and others instead of dealing damage like some watered-down Retribution Paladin; after all, the idea that Holy Power should have been used to survive was present in our community almost immediately, as Word of Glory had to have a Cooldown slapped on it because we would ONLY use it to heal ourselves in a raid situation during T11 content. I hate to say it, sir, but I would be inclined to say that your opinion is in the minority when it comes to active mitigation.

See, people say tanking is boring, not after one or two fights. Or even 5 or 10. They are saying it's boring after they have t-whatever gear and have run the content a hundred times. Sure it's going to get boring after that. I'm old fashioned (and probably just old) but I like the less is more. Less things flashing at me. Less hoops to jump thru while playing a game. Active mitigation will probably lead to less tanks, not more. Is this something we want?

No way to know who is the minority. We just have to disagree on it.

Personally, I'd rather see more variation in activities required for tanks rather than just sit there and take it in the chin and stare at monster balls.

Blood DKs have had active mitigation all along. Plain and simple, the only way we're up to par with other tanks is because we use Death Strike. Death Strike gives us Blood Shields, and mastery increases the size of those Blood Shields.
Frankly, I see Blizzard moving more towards this kind of design than anything else. I don't mean self-healing for all classes. I mean shield tanks will want to use a main ability to increase their survivability, while druids will probably have their emphasis on critting slightly increased. Somehow the devs are going to tie this into needing certain levels of expertise and hit. However, if there's no direct survivability benefit, then tanks won't gear hit and expertise. (Remember, they tried to get tanks to have hit and expertise in t11, by t12 the tanking community told them how dumb that was. There was simply more benefit to taking actual "tanking" stats.) So, rather than increasing threat, so-called "dps stats" would have to increase your ability to stay alive and take big hits more effectively. Personally, I hope tanks won't have to be expertise capped or hit capped, but that we might have to be halfway capped.

I actually think the active mitigation model might make things *easier* for new tanks, because it's closer to the DPS model. No longer are tanks that reforge to hit or expertise (they do exist, I've seen them in pugs) total noobs - instead, they're just going for more active mitigation. The concept of using base abilities as a buildup to a big ability is mostly a DPS concept (rogues, feral druids, and ret paladins in particular), but with active mitigation, it becomes a tank concept too. That makes the transition from DPS to tank a lot easier. Doubly so if they tune the new PvE content around tanks gearing less for avoidance and more threat.

As a long-time tank, I'm excited about the new system, and I think it'll be a boon for the role.

@shatnerstorm2

I agree, I think it might work better. When I first learned about tanking, the whole idea was foreign to me. In no other video game (that I had played) did you have the goal of having all enemies focus attacks on 1 target, while everyone else wailed on the enemies. Active mitigation makes quite a bit more sense than the whole threat via damage concept. Of course, the fact would have to remain that all mobs should be focused on the tank, while DPS burns them down.

I'm not sure it would be a tank-shortage panacea, though. I just started tanking after the 500% threat buff and there is still a lot to learn and do as a tank. Of particular note is the requirement to basically memorize every single boss encounter in order to queue for random heroic dungeons. No other game has as punishing of a learning curve that I can think of. Also, where most games will give you gameplay-related challenges of increasing difficulty throughout the life of a game to teach you basic and more advanced mechanics, WoW doesn't teach you tanking aren't taught to you by giving you tanking-like challenges as you level up your character.

Although rotations, threat generation, and gear acquisition can be simplified for tanks, Blizzard really could do a lot better at providing low risk tanking-learning situations where a mistake didn't cause a wipe and repair bill for a minimum of 4 other real live people.