Idea: Make Heroic Strike more like Revenge.

Q u o t e:
The only time we can't spam HS is on trash.

On bosses i barely have any white hits...

This is the heart of the problem. HS in theory is something you use when you have more rage coming in than you know what to do with. In theory you stop using HS when rage is low, and then pick it up when rage is high

The problem is that bosses hit really hard these days and we have given warriors a lot of ways to make their attacks cheaper. As a result, warriors are often flooded with rage while tanking anything remotely dangerous. You can literally HS every single white hit.

We can't just cut the rage per damage number without a lot of testing, because that would affect not only tanks in low-rage situations (like tanking a heroic with great gear) but it will also affect dps warriors, especially in PvP. Hitting a warrior is always a double-edged sword in PvP because you are giving them resources.

A long-term change would be to make even more of tanking warrior threat come from damage done and really scale back the threat from damage taken. Maybe you would HS after a big dragon breath or something, but you wouldn't be able to turn 90% or more of white hits into Heroics. Of course we'd have to make sure threat overall didn't suffer, so you can see how this gets to be a pretty big change (bigger than 3.1 in any case).

The other approach is to let HS be a toggle or something else that can bleed off rage without requiring the player to hit the button virtually every 1.6 sec (or faster).

Yet another approach is to get rid of the on-next-swing concept. Make HS something you do when you have lots of rage and make Devastate something you do when you don't have as much. Again, we'd need to make sure that the tank could do something if they felt aggro slipping away.

Even longer term we need to think about whether we're even happy with this model of tank takes damage and converts it into threat or not.

Q u o t e:
GC, I'm wondering if your thoughts could be applied to feral tanks in a similar way. I often find myself in the same situation described by warriors in this thread, with Maul becoming a mandatory replacement for every normal white hit.

Yes, it is 100% the same problem in our opinion. Rune Strike suffers as well, perhaps even more since DKs don't even have another high threat option.

You can make an argument that tanks should get very little in the way of resources from being hit. (This would have some PvP implications we would have to solve.) Then we would just balance threat around damage done, which in turn would make +dps gear slightly more interesting to tanks.