More Active Mitigation stuff. Sorry.

I know I've been talking about Protection Paladins a lot lately, but I thought I'd throw in some more thoughts about Active Mitigation (AM) and how to make tanks fun to play and easy to learn while still allowing for veteran players to be able to see an improvement when they play better.

Actually, first I'm going to talk about a serious problem that's faced the game for a long time: the Tank Shortage. Most players are totally uninterested in tanking. There's a huge amount of pressure on tanks to perform well. Not only are tanks non-combinational (meaning that having another tank in your group will not make you any more effective - at least on a boss fight,) but they are, as a necessary consequence of the design of the game, forced to set the pace of the run, know the most about how a fight works, and be at an equal or higher level of gear/skill than the rest of their group.

No matter how much you boost threat, the threat game is always going to be part of the Tank's job, because no matter how high your threat is, you first need to get the enemy's attention and hold it. If you aren't smacking the enemy on a regular basis, someone will pull off you.

Survival for a tank needs to be something that is intuitive. The original Holy Shield, seen way back in Wrath, was a good example of this. It lasted 8 second and had an 8 second cooldown. It was a rotationally-maintained ability that basically said "yes, I'm holding up my shield. I am properly tanking." Of course, when it was a guaranteed part of the 969 rotation, there was little interactivity, but I think it kind of fit as a sort of tanking version of "Slice and Dice." It's not a particularly exciting ability, but you're expected to maintain it.

Shield of the Righteous, Mists-style, is almost there. With the new Bastion of Glory aspect of it, what I think needs to happen is that they make Shield of the Righteous into a new Holy Shield. Now, a flat physical damage reduction is probably better than increased Block, as you no longer have it devaluing Mastery or risking Paladins sitting at the Block cap (and also not making it into RNG-dependent block value.) But the current implementation of 3 seconds makes it an absurdly small window - one in which you'd be lucky to reduce the damage of two boss auto attacks.

So, a proposal: Shield of the Righteous reduces incoming damage by a smaller amount, but for something like 8 seconds - or a number under what they'd expect you to be able to get enough Holy Power to refresh it. Protection is now concerned with maintaining their defensive bulwark.

Bastion of Light's super-buffed Word of Glory, then, becomes the short cooldown - to use when damage gets heavy.

The Main Point:

The biggest concern I have about AM is the notion that we have to sit on our defensive abilities. A compelling gameplay style is one in which you always have something to do. I think all tanks need to have something they can hit that doesn't have a cooldown and boosts their defense by a small amount. Tanks and boss damage are then built around the assumption that all tanks are maintaining that defensive buff. We then have our short cooldown ability - one that is exclusive with the maintained buff (by tying it to the same resources, such as Word of Glory and Shield of the Righteous) - which is the "and now the damage is really pouring in" ability.