Active Mitigation

If you're paying attention to the Legion alpha, you probably already know that there have been some changes to how Active Mitigation tanking works.

A little more than four years ago–where does the time go?–Ghostcrawler posted a Dev Watercooler that would change tanking forever. In “Threat Level Midnight”, Ghostcrawler outlined what would come to be known as active mitigation, promising to “shift more tank mitigation to require active management.” We’ve been tanking under this new regime for the length of an entire olympiad now. It’s been tweaked and improved a few times from class to class as the expansions passed, and now the question is: was this new system an upgrade? Is tanking more fun now with active mitigation than it was before, and are there improvements that still could be made?

Blizzard makes it sound like Legion is going to feature a real push at redesigning the specs to make them more fun and to better capture the class fantasy of each. This is a very excellent thing, and very long overdue. While Protection Paladins are in an ok place, they could be so much better. Our spell effects could be better looking and more impactful, our abilities could have more of a “pow” to them, and our rotation could be tweaked to make it more fun to execute. It’s time for the traditional pre-expansion wishlist – let’s plunk ourselves down on Great-father Winter’s lap and see what we can dream up.