Really?
Fortitude was always a greatly wanted buff, so much they made it in a scroll form for those poor souls who can’t find a priest.
In TBC you’d usually get at least one priest spec into 23/38 for improved Divine Spirit which was a great buff as well (nerfed in WotLK).

And then you had famous Razuvious fight in vanilla, coming back in Naxx25 at 80.

Oh, and the fear ward issue.

And the TBC era of cc with shackle.

Actually the most funny or sad part, depending how do you look at it, is I see it all the time “LF healer for X, shaman / priest preferred”. Ok, I get it, Shamans = Bloodlust, but why Priest and what’s wrong with Druid or Paladin healers? Why everyone wants only Priests and Shamans?

I am actually looking forward to the healing changes, because I think gearing for survivability can be interesting if it actually has an impact on how healers heal the tank. Right now, it doesn’t really. A well geared tank and an undergeared tank will basically be healed in the same way, just one will be more likely to die due to random factors than the other.

Survival via movement/stance dancing perhaps for tanks rather than just stacking stam/armour etc.

I personaly love that tanks have different flavours and that even two tanks tanks of the same class can have widley different gearings and play styles…I rather hope that doesnt go away…I was rather hoping mastery might add more of a special snowflake feel and be balanced so that there isnt just one EJ ‘minmax’ answer. I suspect I’ll be disapointed there at least.

Shield Wall and similar cooldowns are in an interesting middle ground. Reducing the original cooldown of 30 minutes is a good thing – same as for Combat Resses, it made it an ability yuou could use instead of forever pondering whether you might need it on the next boss. 2-5 minute cooldowns give you the ability a couple of times per fight, and I suppose there is some glee to be had in “Hah, try and kill me now!”. However, it’s hardly going to keep you entertained the whole fight long.

Abilities like Demo Shout and Thunderclap aren’t amazingly interesting. They’re very important, but you really don’t see the impact. I was looking at Blood Princes the other day, who have a staggering damage range – I clocked attacks anywhere between 16 and 26k. Now, that will include when Demo Shout was up or not – but frankly, just looking at the incoming damage, it’s hard to tell unless you get an attack from the extreme end. The same with Thunderclap – I honestly would not notice the lack thereof without checking carefully through combatlogs. It is made worse by the fact that Paladins apply both abilities without any thought at all. Druids and DKs maintain the melee de-haste without doing much out of the ordinary. There’s just no real engagement there.

Threat is a slightly different game – just about every ability you’re using during most fights is threat related. Hence, a fight built around threat engages you for the whole fight. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one threat based encounter this expansion, and that’s a hardmode, and its only half the fight – Lady Deathwhisper. Virtually every other boss is tauntable (which on a fight like, say, Gormok is really necessary, I’ll grant), and tank threat is laughably better than DPS anyway.

Movement, as you mention, is also interesting, because it’s a constant thread to keep track of throughout the fight.

I honestly cannot see where the interest is associated with Survivability. Half of it comes down to filling your gem sockets with Solid gems like there’s no tomorrow (which I find irritatingly mindless, although I’m not sure mindlessly stacking strength, spell power, dodge, or whatever is any more exciting), and the rest involves bitching that class X has a better cooldown than you do (yes, even Paladins moan about that!)

I think the best fights though are those that have a large number of different things to keep track of, whatever those threads are. Flame Leviathon (with 3-4 towers), Mimiron, Frwya, Yogg Saron (notice how many awesome fighs Ulduar had!); (notice how many Trial didn’t!); Professor Putricide, Valithria and the Lich King – they all force you to be aware of a huge number of different things going on. You’re really, really engaged in the fight, because otherwise you wipe. A popularly reviled fight (Northrend Beasts springs to mind, especially heroic), doesn’t really engage the mind like this. Saurfang and lanathel also lend themselves.

The rest was some house keeping on Curses to allow different combination etc.

Also note that Tanks in generel will do way more damage than before. The offtank role may become “switch stance and you will do fine dps”

Personally I did understood some aggro related comments the other way around, but that just subject of how you read them I guess.

I share your opinion about the Tank Tool Box, although I am not fully convinced, that we should have the same abilities. Why having different classes then? Besides they always said, they never wanted to copy classes. When Paladins asked for last stand, they received ardent defender. Looks like they are giving up that idea.

By the way, I never been really good at movement while tanking, so I prefer the survivability game.