Did people really dislike threat management for DPS?

[inboundpaper]

I disliked it based on a lack of tools, Warriors didn't have shit to drop threat.

[Deleted]

Threat management was fun. Many people say that classes in TBC were joke, rotations were simple and other cliches to make themselves feel better about current state of game but they forget about threat management. It added extra layer of complexity to raiding back then and it was fun. Much more fun than watching 10 procs.

In today's game it won't work. People don't know what threat is, pugs will disband in masses, tanks will have hard time gearing up because everyone will look for overgeared tanks for their groups.

[Sierra85]

i enjoyed threat mechanics back in the day. i would like to think that maybe in WoD it could be brought back?

[Alltat]

It was interesting on trash, as it required you to focus fire rather than just AoE everything and cleave whatever targets you felt like. It sucked on boss fights. The only people who enjoyed it on boss fights were tanks (because it made their performance matter more) and bad DPS (because it didn't affect them but kept anyone better from making them look bad).

[Deleted]

My main has been an enhancement shaman for several years now and I've always hated having to manage my threat. For a long time I thought blizzard wanted enhancement shamans to tank because of the high amount of threat I had all the time and wind shear barely made a fucking difference.

Worst part of threat management and wind shear being the only skill to remove a tiny bit of it was being on interrupt duty for fights like the omnotron defense system... hated it.

[Vankrys]

threat management is a pillar of group play. Getting rid of it is like driving an automatic car. You really miss the gear shift. it makes driving convenient but something is missing.

[Deleted]

threat management is a pillar of group play. Getting rid of it is like driving an automatic car. You really miss the gear shift. it makes driving convenient but something is missing.

I would agree with that if everyone was equipped with the same tools to manage their threat...

[announced]

threat management. well for dps we didnt really have to do much. mages had greater invis.. or just invis.. or mirror images to handle threat
locks have soulshatter.. which works fine
hunters have feign death/misdirect
rogues have tricks
ret pallys got bubble/salv/ whatever else

i do miss threat management though, but only for normal/heroic raids. dont put in flex/lfr.. or you will have wipefests like crazy.

[Deleted]

i do miss threat management though, but only for normal/heroic raids. dont put in flex/lfr.. or you will have wipefests like crazy.

Exactly why the should put it on LFR and Flex: Make better gamers.

[Cannibalus]

Not another classic/tbc was better cuz insert crap mechanic here....

[Vargur]

This is one of the things that I miss from earlier expansions (primarily TBC). While I do agree that it could've been improved and handled a bit better, I actually liked the concept of managing your threat as a DPS class. It was fun, and made it a bit more interesting to play when you didn't just stand around and do your rotation. It also made it easy to tell a good tank from an OK one.

Did Blizzard remove this element of gameplay due to player feedback, or did they just grow tired of it themselves? I'd love to see this type of threat management return. Perhaps not in LFR (that would be disastrous), but in Mythic perhaps. What do you think?

Slowly but Shirley damage meters took over and people only cared about that. Which is a good thing.

[Denkou]

As a Fury Warrior since 2006, hell no. Begging Paladins for Blessing of Salvation gets tiresome, especially when they don't give it to you. Having absolutely zero tools to reduce threat and having to watch Omen was not fun.

There was one time I was in a guild Karazhan run. We were on Nightbane and had him around 20% or so. I was second or third on the DPS charts, but Omen showed me to be dangerously close to the tank in terms of threat, so I relaxed a bit and started typing in raid chat, just making random remarks and smalltalk. My raid leader asks me via Vent why I'm typing in raid chat instead of focusing on DPSing, to which I replied that I was gonna pull threat if I kept at it. He told me not to worry about it and just go all-out, so I popped every cooldown I had, got a few execute crits and pulled aggro, and next thing I know I'm a corpse on the ground and everyone is laughing at me.

It was actually pretty funny because I was "THE" Fury Warrior in the guild and they knew how hard threat management was for me, and we had Kara on farm anyway and not progression. Still, not something I'd want to deal with after having to deal with it for 4+ years.

[Tradu]

Attach threat management to boss mechanics. Penalizing DPS for doing their job too well is bullshits.

Indeed. I never enjoyed playing with bad tanks when I first started(just before WotLK), because it just meant I had to stop doing my job when I reached a certain cap that was set by another person's lack of gear and/or skill. I wouldn't mind something similar to WotLK in terms of threat, but in that case ALL DPS specs would need a way to work around it, some kind of threat drop, redirection or active reduction. But at the same time, I honestly prefer active mitigation being what tanks play around, and letting DPS play to their full potential.
The way I see it, threat should be a danger, but not something that completely bottlenecks DPS because of something outside their control.

[Zka]

Yes, threat mechanic was really interesting, especially back in BC when aoe tanking wasn't that easy (except for protadins), even heals could take aggro on a multipull. The only problem was that tank threat barely scaled with gear. DPS outscaled it by far. That's why interesting things started to happen like tanking with partial dps gear, using sit macros for extra rage, dual wield tanking (I did that on maulgar's caster add), whatever.

[Gestopft]

As a DPSer, I loved it. It was yet another way to gauge a DPS's skill.
Good DPS will output grand numbers. Stellar DPS players will do the same, while keeping his/her threat low.

Unless they played a Warrior.

The issue here was that not all classes had threat management tools. Ranged have a higher threshold, and classes with threat drops could go all out while others had to hold back. Hunters could go all out all the time and never have to worry about threat as long as they used their tools. Warriors just had to wait. Some DPS's ability to contribute was directly correlated with their tank's skill level and others weren't.

Exactly, what was fun about improving your character when all it meant was that you had to nerf yourself because the tanks could no longer keep up?

This too. Tank damage didn't scale as much as DPS damage. They introduced vengeance eventually, but that hasn't worked as well as they hoped.

The other issue is enrage timers. You can't beat an enrage timer if you have to throttle because your tank doesn't do enough damage. I think they ultimately decided that enrage timers are a better way to make sure DPS are pulling their weight (and to prevent you from loading up on healers too much), and make gearing up a noticeable reward, not a potential frustration. They decided that how fast you kill a boss or whether or not you can beat an enrage timer should be dependent on the DPS, not the tank.

[Deleted]

Unless they played a Warrior.

The issue here was that not all classes had threat management tools. Ranged have a higher threshold, and classes with threat drops could go all out while others had to hold back. Hunters could go all out all the time and never have to worry about threat as long as they used their tools. Warriors just had to wait. Some DPS's ability to contribute was directly correlated with their tank's skill level and others weren't.

Or enhancement shaman, only threat drop I had was death.

[Yousend]

As a tank, I've never cared about my TPS because it was never an issue for me. Maybe early in BC when I just started tanking, but I don't recall anyone ever telling me my threat was bad. We publicly shat on our bad TPS tanks, but never me. Then came WOTLK and tank DPS was a better metric (At least in T7). I started caring more about my DPS (Therefore threat) and my actual threat as a Warrior. Then came Cataclysm, where if you missed your first attack, you lost threat otherwise you had it for the rest of the fight... Pretty much the current state of the game.

I don't mind lack of threat game as long as I can compare DPS between tanks. TPS was basically the tank's DPS.

[Deleted]

Or enhancement shaman, only threat drop I had was death.

Darn if we needed for healers (Paladins with salv or other healers given more abilities for it) or Hunters/Rogues (and possibly other classes) using their threat increasing talents on the tank - I hate how an MMO requires people to actually use their skills for the benefit of the raid or situational awareness.

Can't have that, you might lose 0.1% of DPS! Gasp. Horror. ePenos not growing!

ITT: DPS who stand in puddles, take every avoidable damage, never use their cool downs for anything except growing their ego on the meters and cry in the corner when they aren't in top 3.

[Ciddy]

I was fine with it, but my main was a fury warrior. So threat management was hell on me for a long time. Raiding in BC, I was constantly begging the Paladins in my guild for a short-duration Salv buff and was very lucky if I even got that. I had to watch Omen like a hawk, and if I got too high, my only threat drop was to step back and /dance at the boss for a few seconds. It sucked when you had no threat reduction or aggro drop abilities.

edit: I think we briefly had some talent for a while in Wrath that made us put out less threat while in berserker stance, but I can't remember the details on it now.

[Deleted]

Was a ridiculous mechanic, and when I've wanted to DPS in the passed I generally wanted to hit stuff in the face, not stand there and wait for the tank to get threat again because you're doing too much damage.