Threat Needs to Matter

[Blackass]

It's not as retarded as you think. The entire concept of threat and tanking is completely alien to 99% of games. If these bosses are sometimes thousands of years old and renown for their treachery and cunning, they won't care about a mere's mortal taunts and grandstanding. They will swipe at and crush underfoot whoever they please, in whichever order they please. The idea that casters and healers should not take direct hits is what's retarded.

Dedicated healers are another awful concept. Even clerics in classic Dungeons & Dragons fought with maces and wore chainmail. They get down and dirty and can take a licking!

This is exactly why I'm jumping ship when GuildWars 2 comes out. Threat is artificial and gimp. It's a poor simulation of how combat, even fantasy combat, is conducted.

Wrong. Using your D&D example, healers and other squishies were positioned at the back of the party so there was a reduced chance they take damage. The concept being that the high HP classes took the brunt of the damage. The 3 roles in WoW are fine.

[Monteverdi]

Vengeance nerf inc

[Neralyte]

From what I've seen tanking has taken a turn in the right direction. And although there are still some kinks to work out, overall I'm enjoying how parties have to work around threat problems.

I currently play a Frost DK and gearing up to go back to tanking, The main problem that I've faced atm is simply that it is very easy to do a lot of damage, and fast. This has always been a concern for me as a Frost DK. Yes other classes and specs suffer from massive burst threat as well, but it's brutally hard to control my threat across the board without dropping my DPS output my a large margin.

Example:
During a guild run last night (normal Vortex, players lvl 83-85) we out level and out gear the place so it was just a fun run and I got time to play around with my burst and threat values.
Our tank, an 85 warrior ilvl 333 (or there abouts) with backup from rogue TotT could tank every group fine, we used CC only on double adept pulls. But I found that assisting his target on the pull and dropping AoE after everyone else started would still see me forced to single target and changing to a fresh threat target every 10-15 seconds to ensure my threat didn't jump to high. More often than not, by the latter half of the pull I would have to drop my rotations completely and just auto attack or contend with pulling 1-2 targets from the tank.

Yes I am an agro whore and like I said, we weren't doing a serious run so I went harder than I normally would. But since DK's have absolutely no threat drop abilities I've come to dropping tank abilities like Icebound during runs and Off Tanking 1-2 mobs. It works pretty well, but in pugs it's definitely not something I want to have to rely on since healers hate DPS pulling agro and I don't have the self healing of Blood to support it.

Massive wall of text, sorry guys. But now that threat is more in line with how it should be, groups are going to have to be prepared for these kinds of problems. I for one enjoy the off tanking a little as I have the abilities to soak it, but not drop the threat. Frost DK's just have very unpredictable jumps in threat levels and this is going to happen more and more without a way to drop some agro, or the party compensating and assigning some off tank targets.

[mtawney1313]

Nice to see Ghostcrawler having to explain to tanks what their role is after years since the launch.

[Doddilus]

sooo... is he saying threat is too difficult to generate?

cause as a pally tank i have zero issues with threat and would even say i generate too much threat

[Domiku]

I wouldn't mind a threat nerf tbh i think its fine at the moment, sure you get the gogogogo dps who pull ahead i spam a macro at the start of every instance if its a pug stating if they pull im gonna /sit and watch them tank.. normally works if they cant read it they can pick themselves up of the floor and release and run before i care. hit my target watch your threat and blast the instance to hell having a good time.

[Idletime]

It's a simple rule when tanking in Pug normals and heroics, and probably the only way you will ever teach the lawlcrafters out there that routinely dps the wrong target and will be best for everyone. You simply have to teach some people how this game works, because half of them today came in after Wrath.

1) Mark your target. Make a macro for the attack that you use primarily that throws up a raid mark and executes the attack. Icy Touch, Judgement, Heroic Throw, Rend, Mangle, whatever. "Star is my target, assist me. Don't dps anything else."
2) If people choose to continue using AOE (busting sheeps, saps, whatever) when asked not to, then use the Vote to Kick option.
3) If people choose to dps whatever they feel like, do what I do. Give them a repair bill. Don't taunt it back until after it's killed that idiot. Negotiate with your healer that if someone pulls a mob without your mark off you, let them die. Eventually they'll rage quit. I had one persistent jerk get completely broken in one run, which I found hilarious. If enough people follow this simple rule, they'll either stop doing it, L2Play, or quit entirely. The more social you are, the better.

Tanks also have to do their jobs however. LOS the mobs, position them properly, and face them away from the party so they aren't taking cone attacks to the face. Melee that chooses to stand with the tank dies, easy as that.

There's nothing hard about tanking in Cata, it's quite easy. The hard part is getting people over the learning curve so some toughlove is in order.

[Nicolicious]

Tanks that have a hard time with threat is doing it wrong/plain stupid/sucks. I think a threat nerf needs to be done. Im a DK tank, the AoE tanking is abit hard. But its still to easy sometimes. And the Single Target Tanking. Wow, thats retarded. Im at around 5000 threat when the boss is done (If standing still most of the time). While the dps are at like 1000, maybe 1500. But when it comes to kiting Im usualy not that high over the DPS. But just enough to make sure boss isnt on the DPS. And for adds under boss periods I have no struggle there either most of the time. I have two taunts, makes it really easy for me.

But yes, DPS that dosent watch aggro/nuke one target, aka skull, cross etc. They sure are retarded.

[Bluey111]

so let me get this straight, they are going to punish the people that dont listen in groups? ITS ABOUT TIME

[jetaimaster]

Yes, there are many problems with how threat works in this game. And the way it has been working is something so ingrained in the current game design. To change it would require a complete revamp of the entire game.

[Kujako]

so let me get this straight, they are going to punish the people that dont listen in groups? ITS ABOUT TIME

Odds are they'll punish the tanks because DPS doesn't listen in groups.

[Bogrim]

Warning: Long post ahead. Read if you dare.

I’m not trying to bash pugs here, but I am amazed at how often a nuker will pick a random target instead of the one being tanked, then blame the tank for not holding aggro

Amazed? Really? I don't think it's that hard to understand once you've played both roles.

When you're tanking you're in the middle of everything, you're focusing entirely on the position and number of monsters you're engaged with. You pay attention to who's attacking what and tabbing through targets to hold threat. It's very fun really and it's what I enjoy about tanking.

But when you're a ranged DPS at 40 yards, what tools do you exactly have for telling which target you should be attacking? You're nowhere near the center of the fight and you can't exactly change your camera point of view. You're stuck with watching the fight from the sidelines as you have to figure out which target to start sending your arrows or magic bolts at rather fast.

These are the tools that Blizzard has implemented:

1) Assist the tank.

Assist allows you to acquire someone else's target such as the tank's. The problem with that is many tanks tab through targets to keep aggro so even when people assist the tank, they might just end up hitting that target the tank only meant to get a single Sunder on before moving on to the next target. Assisting the tank is not the ideal way of maintaining aggro especially since AoE threat was nerfed to the point where you can't tank groups by just hitting 1 button anymore. In fact, as a tank I barely keep the same target for more than 6 seconds as I tab target a lot to keep threat as a Warrior.

2) Hit the target with lowest health.

You can toggle the display of health bars above monsters to see how much health they have remaining and find the targets that are close to death. Killing the targets with lowest health helps the group a lot by reducing the damage output to the tank faster, but a lot of damage dealing classes rely on combinations and rotations and only switching to targets when they're low on health disputes their DPS a lot and makes the mob itself die even slower. The damage dealers need to be on that target from the beginning for it to have any effect. This also brings us to another problem: Monsters don't have enough health for it to matter. If 3 DPS focus on one target then that target will die before some classes can reach their highest DPS, so it's in fact more effective to pick your own target and kill that. How is that an effective design?

3) Make a kill order using marks.

A player can assign icons above the monster's head which can be used to indicate priority or special moves for the target such as "kill first" or "sheep this". This is probably the only in-game method that actually works because it's trivializing the problem, only setting up marks for every group is both tiresome and annoying and usually falls to the tank as well. But if you don't do it, then we're back to trash not mattering and just AoEing your way through content.


The problem here is the trash. The only thing that decides whether coordination is necessary is if the trash is too dangerous to fight uncontrolled. Even if you hit random targets the tank can usually pick it up even if it's frustrating and the healer can usually heal through it even if it's draining his mana. As long as it's possible for the DPS to put the burden elsewhere, they will. Not because they're lazy but because trash is boring. That's why we call it trash. There's way too much trash in instances that's not moderately interesting. People level up in instances like Scarlet Monastery that favors pulling trash packs together and just AoE'ing the crap out of it. At the same time, there's no way for the DPS to really follow the tank's threat management because they're either too far away to actually see the fight or lack the tools to easily coordinate the group's attacks.

In Wrath, the only thing that made coordination and crowd control necessary was if the trash either hit too hard for the tank to withstand the damage or had abilities that threw the fight into chaos. This worked when players stepped into heroics for the first time in their quest gear, and it worked when players stepped into a new tier of raid with new gear. The problem was never AoE threat or people attacking random targets, the problem was gear overpowering players to the point where the risk of death went away.

In Cata, the only thing that has really changed is the tank's way of generating threat. Instead of encouraging teamwork by making focusing trash necessary, you're punishing the tank by trying to make it impossible for the tank to keep aggro (emphasis on try because I'm still AoE tanking the same way in anything but heroics). Aggro isn't the problem here and neither the solution. You have to stop being so incredibly lazy when you design trash. You just redesigned the entire old world and guess what? Trash is still trash! It's only in a heroic that you'll see otherwise, so it's not a freaking surprise when damage dealers step into their Cataclysm dungeons and don't know a dim about teamwork or crowd control because it has become a heroic thing only.

They can't see the center of the fight. They don't have the tools to easily follow it either. You have to go out of your way and mark targets up to the point where it becomes too obvious. Here's what I would do if I were to encourage more teamwork:

1) Give the players more camera tools. Seriously don't stick the camera just to the player's point of view. There are a few spells and abilities that can do this such as Far Sight and Eagle Eye, but make a default feature that allows you to toggle your camera to follow someone else's point of view like the tank's. This will make it 100% funnier for ranged DPS to follow the fight and pick the right targets.

2) Health bars display above mobs health? How about threat amount? I use an add-on called Threat Bars to display health bars differently depending on how much threat I have on them, but this only works for avoid losing threat. There's no way of telling what targets have the most threat without actually tabbing through most of them with some threat meter add-on and then looking for the highest numbers. It seriously shouldn't be hard to tell what target the tank is generating most threat on without having to mark everything up.

3) INCREASE the health and damage of ALL trash. There's no point in asking players to learn teamwork if it's NOT necessary. You're catering incredibly much to the undergeared tank player that can barely take any punishment through most leveling instances instead of just giving the tanks proper gear through quest rewards (which there is almost none of outside instances and crafting professions). Then reduce the amount of trash in instances with too much of it and allow players to maintain a decent time rate without having to spend forever clearing buffed trash.

4) Make teamwork rewarding. I can't stress this enough. As a Warrior, I can Sunder my target to increase physical DPS so that physical damage dealers do more damage to my target. That's a great reason to attack the same targets as me! Except that I barely have ANY globals to spare when I'm tanking trash because I constantly need to hit Thunder Clap, Revenge and Shockwave on every cooldown as well as tab target when that's not enough. Give the tanks more and better tools for amplifying damage on their main targets so damage dealers should / will want to hit them over picking a fresh target to better do their job.

5) Face that bad groups will fail and that's what they're intended to do. You can't create a learning curve if everything is face-roll. You really have to get to the absolute end of the game before players actually wipe over things like not using Polymorph or Sap to reduce the amount of damage on the tank. Give the players these tools early and force them to get used to it. Encourage players to play dungeons and get into the learning curve. Make the player's level a statement of his or her progress on that learning curve as well.

It's NOT saying normals should be hard to get through, but it IS saying that damage dealers need a responsibility in the group when it's not challenging beyond the mashing of buttons. Having monsters that's better left crowd controlled is a great thing and having reasons to assist the tank is a great thing. The group environment should inspire teamwork, not just require a tank and healer for another joy ride. This is the problem with WoW's random dungeons atm.

When I rolled into Outland I found a group of 67s and we decided to do some of the more difficult dungeons like SL where even though I had amazing gear, we still had to pull carefully and use crowd control like Death Grip to bring casters to the tank or a frost trap at the healer to protect him from the stealthing rogue patrols. It was absolutely an amazing experience and I didn't even have to hit 85 to get it. In the end of our runs everyone was incredibly happy and sad that they had to part way with such an amazing group knowing full well what an amount of boring trash they had to go through to be able to experience something like that again.

[Rogglando]

This is blizzard slapping Tanks in the face! aswell as other players!

Blizzard: Tank! Learn to use your abilitys! Dps! Stop overaggro and atack the tanks target!

Epic post !

[Quadrajet]

I think this is trying to address the issues people have been having lately...the fact that you can't come in and AOE faceroll heroics anymore.

I think this is trying to satiate tanks by explaining (in very general terms) how THREAT works to everyone else, without coming right out and saying "DPS LEARN TO PLAY"

[Zauber]

More condescending one-way arguments from Blizz. One-way comments, such as "We want tanks to care about the buttons they hit instead of just relying on auto-attacking to control their target. " is laughable. They're insinuating that tanks are just sitting there auto attacking when that's NEVER the case. Just one of the MANY little irritating things to laugh at with a blue post.

This.
Last time I autoattacked something was in wotlk random heroic with a bunch of 800-1000 dps, when I was just curious, how much time will it take them to bring down 4 mobs without tank's 50% damage done

[Deathstroke]

inevitable nerfs coming. /engage palpatine voice "i have forseen it..." /end voice.

[shadowkras]

Im the only one that understood that as "tank threat nerf incoming"?
Although its weird, they said vengeance would matter more as we outgeared the content, nerfing it 2 weeks after the release sounds stupid, even for blizzard standards. Cool so a few guilds cleared all raid content on first week, thats less than 1% of playerbase.

Dps pulling 15-16k still give trouble to tanks depending on the boss (some of them just hit like little girls), they have to stay sharp on their toes if vengeance isnt doing the job for them.

[Deleted]

As a druid offtank i can overaggro with auto-attacks if vengeance is stacked too high. Vengeance basically force me to don´t mash buttons for half of Argaloth encounter. How is that fun or challenging?

[Ghier]

I think any kind of nerf to instance groups would be a horrible decision right now. Heroics are very demanding that you CC correctly, pull correctly, heal correctly, have high DPS, etc etc. One missing link is often a wipe. A nerf to threat would probably be the straw right now for a lot of people... the DPS are required to do their absolute best and if they pull something on them in a heroic theres a high chance they are dead and the tank could lose threat on the other mobs trying to get that one back. My main is a prot pally and I really cant see any nerfs at all to instance groups making sense. My opinion is that tanks should probably do more threat and less damage. The fact that tanks aoe constantly puts them ahead of a lot of the DPS. Heroics would still be challenging if all a tank had to do was hit a mob once and keep threat forever tbh. If you dont CC the healer cant keep up with the dmg anyway. Even when you do CC the healer still has to spam heals because ill be getting hit for 30k by 2 mobs and the healer just doesnt have a 70k+ heal. Im usually around 140k hp and healers just cant fill that back up quickly. GC sounded to me like he wanted to put a "Threat for Dummies" guide into the game or something. I dont know how to make it much clearer than a screen flash with sounds and "HIGH THREAT/ATTACKING YOU" in big letters on your screen.

[ZeroWashu]

My only problem with tanking, I have all four tank classes, is their taunts need to work similarly to Paladin. It is like four different development teams implemented taunts. By working like Paladin taunts I am referring to how Righteous Defense works, it requires you to target either the mob or who they are attacking. This makes it easy to use in a crowded area; like when walls tend to cut off PoV depending on your orientation; whereas the other taunts all require that you target the specific mob.

In other words, make the tools we have more consistent between classes and easier to use. I am not looking for a similar taunt between classes though they have them, I just want them to work through the interface the same way. Target either the mob or its target and the taunt should work.