ActiveMitigation
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The Light and How to Swing It: Holy Shield and the future of active mitigation
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. It's been a little more than two months now since patch 4.2 brought us the redesigned Holy Shield. Since then, we've had ample time to see its true power, to see what an amazing addition to our toolbox it is. And that's only the beginning. Blizzard is gearing up in either patch 4.3 (or, more likely, 5.0) to introduce a new facet of tanking for all classes -- what it's deemed "active mitigation". Coupled with the (in my opinion, misguided) neutering of threat, the profession of tanking is going to change dramatically. In this column, I'm going to talk about the ramifications of the Holy Shield change in regards to active mitigation -- specifically, what it's meant for paladin tanking in the Firelands and how it points the way to a future of more control over our survivability.
