Generally, within this blog, I want to keep things general - talking about overarching whole-game issues. However, my main is a Paladin tank, and my primary alt is a Death Knight tank. Tanking is kind of my thing. During Wrath, I had a tank of each tanking class (my druid, Selarion, has been slightly neglected in Cataclysm, and Rechtar, my warrior, kind of got put aside in favor of Ardten, who is Arms and also a werewolf.) If I could, I would tank on my shaman, rogue, or mage (I made a Paladin in the first place because it was the closest thing to a Plate-armored wizard at the time. If they ever make a Battlemage class I'll seriously have to reconsider which toon is my main...)
Anyway, as a Paladin tank, my rotation's been put through the ringer every single time a new expansion comes out (in fairness, I don't really remember what it was in Vanilla, as I think Jarsus was about level 20 when Burning Crusade came out.) While I miss the reflective damage of Holy Shield and having a permanent Consecration (which might be coming back, if it's mana-affordable,) I have generally been happier with each iteration of the rotation than the previous one. (Except that I detest the current incarnation of Holy Shield.)
Still, relearning how to tank each time is kind of annoying. So when I hear about a sweeping redesign of not just Paladins, but all tanks, I am somewhat apprehensive.
As a little tank growing up through BC, and later Wrath, the way that tanking worked was basically this: Your gear determined how well you survived - the amount of armor (also granted by agility then,) health, dodge (either through dodge rating or agility,) parry (which was not affected by strength then except for Death Knights,) block rating and +block value (of which you got a tiny amount from Strength but was also independently found on gear) was the main thing that determined if you were a living tank or a dead tank. Survivability was a gearing problem. It just took a while to get a good set, like it does for anyone.
Threat was the other side of the coin. And that's what determined if you were a good tank or a bad tank. A good tank maximized their threat, making sure to hit everything, and hit it hard. The reason you took hit and expertise was so that when that Arcane Mage unloaded on your target, it wouldn't suddenly find you uninteresting.
Cataclysm has killed threat as an issue for tanks. With Vengeance, and then later the buff to tank stances, and then a buff to Vengeance, you basically have to either be really, really unlucky with misses or badly placed mobs (or some druid who thinks it would be helpful to Typhoon away all the mobs when you've just gotten them into position) to lose aggro, except when dealing with another tank in a raid situation.
With threat dead, though, Blizzard wants to make the challenge of tanking to be better survival. Now I'm not really happy about this. If I wanted to worry health bars (my own included) I would play a healer. Tanks used to be more of the focus for the dps. The tank keeps the enemies organized, and is more about smashing faces than huddling behind shields. Really, that's what I find interesting about tanking - keeping the mobs under control.
So here's what I want to see from Active Mitigation. Let's emphasize the "Active" part. Looking at the new Mists of Pandaria Talent Calculator, I'm glad to see we're not losing too many offensive abilities. (Holy Wrath is gone, but did that every account for more than 1% of our damage?) I was very worried about Crusader Strike reverting to a 4.5 second cooldown, but with more Grand Crusader procs, a shorter cooldown on Judgement, and Holy Power flowing from both, as well as a potentially constant Consecration (assuming we have the mana to pay for it) I actually think we'll be all right.
So far the only real "Active Mitigation" parts of the rotation are that Shield of the Righteous now gives us a bonus 25% block value (amazingly, this is basically a reversion to the 4.0 Holy Shield, which I thought was great.) Then we also have a cooldown-less Word of Glory. Basically, we're making the decision between lower incoming damage (and given the big swings some bosses hit us for, that could mean quite a lot) or we can heal damage we've already taken (nice if the healer's running or something and can't cast.)
As it is right now, I think we're in pretty good shape. Shield of the Righteous becomes something akin to Death Strike - a rotational ability used offensively but that helps us survive. It's very early to say whether our rotation will look like this when 5.0 comes out, but if we can keep tanks from looking like a big shield with a sign that says "hit me, please" I'll be happy.
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