Threat

This post was originally published for our supporters, but is now available for everyone.

I have been pretty up front since the Battle for Azeroth alpha/beta tests that I didn't like the way tank design was going.

In Battle for Azeroth, tanking is going to be harder.

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?