Take a look at the Dragon Soul raid - at least on LFR, though I think this applies to normal mode as well. On any given boss fight, are there jobs for multiple tanks? Now, I should specify that I mean different jobs. If one tank picks up the boss, but then they simply trade places every time the tank-swap debuff falls off, it doesn't count. Also, "switch to your dps spec" doesn't count either. I mean multiple things for tanks to do. Morchokk: standard tank swap. Zol'nozz: single tank. Yor'sahj: tank swap. Hagara: single tank. Ultraxion: tank swap. Blackhorn: tank swap. Spine of Deathwing: (not sure what it's like on regular, what with the barrel rolls and everything, but on LFR it's basically a single tank fight.) Madness of Deathwing: tank swap on Mutated Corruption, otherwise you're tanking the same kinds of adds.
Essentially, there's one set of instructions that goes to both tanks in every single fight (again, with the possible exception of Spine of Deathwing.) Now, I know it probably sounds a bit selfish as a tank to demand special attention from encounter designers, but it is my belief that the more things you have tanks doing, the more dynamic the fight is going to be for the rest of the raid.
The tank swap is a tried-and-true way to make a single-tank boss into a two-tank boss. It's a piece of the boss design toolkit I have no problem with Blizzard holding on to. That said, I think they've been more creative in the past.
A lot of people decry "more adds" as a fairly uninteresting boss mechanic as well, but I think what they're missing here is that adds can come in all shapes and sizes. For instance, Freya's six waves of adds in Ulduar were really the main challenge of the fight - if you could get through them, the rest of the fight was simple. So you had one tank holding on to the boss while the other was desperately picking up lashers and elementals and hiding under mushrooms. And all three types of wave had very different strategies to beat them and different hazards to watch out for.
Professor Putricide gave the off-tank a big abomination to drive around, not exactly tanking the oozes, but making it easier for the rest of the raid to deal with them. As a Paladin/DK tank who often ran with a Warrior or a Druid, it was almost always my job to kite the ooze on Rotface while the other tank was dealing with the big guy in the center. And though I know a lot of people complained it was too easy, I adored the gunship battle, flying over to Orgrim's Hammer to have a polite chat with Varok Saurfang as he attempted to smash my face in while my druid buddy took care of the Reavers trying to bring the Skybreaker down.
Part of the appeal of raiding, as opposed to 5-man fights, is that the fights can be more complex. When you have both tanks focused on the same target, or one of the tanks simply doing sub-par dps as a "back-up" or forced to switch specs, it leaves you with fights that have only a single focus. While this can certainly be compelling sometimes, such as the "gear-check" fights where you're trying to push your dps to the limit and desperately trying to keep the tanks alive, these fights should be the exception rather than the rule.
I like LFR, don't get me wrong. It serves a valuable function - allowing people who don't have the time or the patience to schedule their raiding with a guild to see the content and get the cool-looking loot. But the worry I have is that, by designing for simplicity, to ensure that LFR always succeeds, we might be sacrificing compelling game mechanics. I am all for accessibility (Wrath of the Lich King was my favorite expansion so far,) but let us not confuse accessibility with simplicity.
This is actually what worries me about "Active Mitigation." I have always considered tanks to be "external-focused," concentrating on the battlefield and positions of enemies, allies, and what locations are safe, much the way that dps are. Tanks were given simpler rotations because they're also expected to be moving enemies around and popping cooldowns when they need them. Healers were always more "internal-focused," certainly worried about staying out of the fire, but it was their role to keep an eye on the team - cleansing debuffs and keeping health bars full.
If tanks are going to be expected to spend most of their efforts watching their health bars, are we just going to find ourselves playing a numbers game with a big boss never leaving the center of the room?
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