World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

A long time ago, you mentioned that you would have liked to see threat for Tanks in WoW be something that they geared towards. Obviously that didn't end up happening, but I'm curious as to why you felt that threat was a compelling mechanic. Was it really more fun than, say, Active Mitigation in MoP?
First, understand that I was coming from the point of view of a high-end raiding tank, because that is what I played before going to Blizzard. As a tank, gearing for threat was fun for me. It was interesting to have to consider stats like +hit and other dps-related stats, and not just stack armor and health (and really, the gear options didn't really let you stack armor and health very much) after hitting the defense cap.

While it has changed a lot since those BWL days, generating threat used to be the sign of a skilled tank player. Surviving was more of the sign of a skilled healer, since tanks only had so many tools to keep themselves alive. A lot of the boss fights at the time were designed around tanks having to manage threat, so that's what you focused on.

There were a couple of problems with the threat model, even though I enjoyed it. It was somewhat invisible and even a little game-y. You weren't focused on killing the boss, or even the boss health. You were focused on an invisible number that could be estimated to some extent with third-party mods. In design-speak, it wasn't a very satisfying experience, and the clarity was really poor. In a dungeon, losing threat might temporarily be exciting and the party might CC or blow defensive cooldowns to survive, but in a raid, losing threat was probably a wipe.

Secondly, as a dps spec (and sometimes a healer) the way you were supposed to handle threat was to throttle yourself. Some classes had threat wipes, but others just had to be slow with their dots or hope they didn't crit or something. It was a theoretically interesting tension of how far can you go without going over, but I think for a lot of players, they just felt like the game was constantly throwing a speed limit in front of them while they were trying to drive as fast as they could. The throttle was interesting but it wasn't fun.

Active mitigation was an attempt to get back to a place where tanks cared about their rotation and not just their gear and cooldowns. Why hit Shield Slam if it didn't help your survival, your dps was marginal, and your threat dominance was a foregone conclusion? I tanked less in the last few expansions, so I can't really comment as a player on whether the BWL model or the MOP model was more fun for a tank. So many other things in the game had changed by that point as well that it's hard to really compare the two. (Source)

Do you have any babies aka champions, games, missions, expansions etc that you put extra effort on or loved and had tons of pride in
Pride is a weird thing in this business, because if you love something too much, you may not be objective about whether or not the design is really working. One of the first things I was taught in game design was that you have to be willing to kill your babies. It is sage, if gruesome, advice.

That said, here is a list of things I worked on that I got very attached to (arguably overly attached to):

- The original Death Knight design in WoW
- I loved naming WoW talents in general
- I named a bunch of LK raid items, such as Bryntroll
- The Black Market in WoW
- Dungeon Finder in WoW
- Transmog in WoW

you'll have to let me know what you think of the new DK when you get to play again
Did you add that 4th spec we were always talking about? (Before I break MMOC, it's a JOKE.) (OccupyGStreet)
I had a paper design for the healer DK spec but said something about "not making any sense at all", w/e
We used to brainstorm about a healing mage spec that uses time to unwind wounds. Not that every mage is dying to heal (OccupyGStreet)