Active Mitigation vs Reactive Mitigation

Well, the big patch has hit, and while we are still 17 days away from the actual expansion, we're now functioning roughly as we will in Mists (minus our level 87 abilities and level 90 talents, of course.)

As someone who was an omni-tank in Wrath, and played my Paladin and DK tanks throughout Cataclysm, I'm still a bit skeptical about active mitigation. Now, of course, for the DK there is basically no change. DKs have been "AM" since 4.0 dropped. And for the most part it's worked. Still, I remember the days before Vengeance, when you geared for survival and you played for threat. I miss that dichotomy, even if it was somewhat binary (you either had threat or you didn't.)

Now, one thing that I am looking forward to is being able to gear for hit/expertise as a tank again. Cataclysm made tanks feel very silly. They were badass champions, protecting their frailer allies, but they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn from a meter away. Hitting only three times out of four was still enough to generate threat, so it got to be that if you didn't reforge away as much hit and expertise as you could, you were "doing it wrong." Of course, this made pulling a hell of a dice roll, but the idea was that you just had to stack up some vengeance and hope you got a few good hits in.

I suppose tying hit to survivability via the active mitigation model is a good idea, but here's where I become a bit worried:

Death Knights were the first real experiment in Active Mitigation tanking. The big thing about them is that they are reactive. If you get hit by a massive swing, you hit your Death Strike (granted, you probably just hit it on cooldown, but it comes up enough that you can probably always get one in the 5-second window after taking a massive smash.) That means that you can still deal with any of the big spikes you don't have a DBM-style mod to track, because you can react to them.

However, if you look at Shield Block/Barrier, Shield of the Righteous, or Savage Defense (haven't played the Monk on the beta for a long time, and he was never really high level enough for any of this to matter too much,) all of these reduce incoming damage after you hit them. Meaning you need to be able to anticipate the damage. Granted that Death Strike, because of Blood Shield, can be used proactively, but it also works great after the big blast, and that's something I think is missing from the other tanks.

Here's the problem: I love tanking, but I am in a minority on this. Most people hate having the responsibility for the run's success on their shoulders (no one can screw up an attempt the way a tank can,) and I fear that active mitigation will make tanking harder for those who are trying to learn. Now, I realize many would hate to "dumb down" the game for the sake of the newbies, and perhaps, in the end, this will turn out to be a success of the "easy to learn, difficult to master" design philosophy.

I think the things to bear in mind is how to make tanking user-friendly, while still offering the depth that veteran players will want. Reactive Mitigation, like Death Strike (and to an extent, Bastion of Glory-empowered Words of Glory) could make tanking feel much more intuitive.

Of course, we also don't know quite how Mists dungeons will be balanced. I doubt we're going to see the agony-parade of the 4.0 Cata Heroics, but I also doubt we'll be going back to Wrath's easy-breezy ones.