Dev Watercooler -- Threat Level Midnight

[Calamari]

You think it's bad for warriors? It could be worse, you could be a druid. At least now they've nerfed Innervate into oblivion so it's one less tool they need access to.

Innervate got nerfed pretty hard true, however I'll still take your overnerfed Innervate any day over having no Innervate or battle ress at all.

[Seezer]

there's more baddies than good players... true fact

False. There are more "average" players than baddies or good players. Average players can hold their own without welling up in tears because they can't get any phat lewtz. They just aren't exceptional. The baddies are the mages that gem for expertise, and the healers using the Agility staff. Baddies don't care either way. That's why they're baddies.

[Findus707]

Won't this have pvp implications also

It will! taunt now works on players! you can no longer target anyone else within the effect of taunt is on you!

[Nobleshield]

Speaking as a decently geared tank, I think this will be a good thing. I'm sick and tired of people who can't wait a few seconds for me to at least establish threat on a pull before they start blowing cooldowns; my guild is even guilty of this on boss fights, and they whine how I "can't hold threat" - of course I can't hold threat, moron, when you aren't letting me get threat to begin with. Threat shouldn't be a concern - I don't want to have to be watching my threat meters all the time as the tank to see who is going crazy and might pull, I want to focus on the boss either keeping debuffs up, moving out of bad stuff, watching for adds, or managing my own survivability. This change sounds like tanks can finally focus on the important stuff and not herp-derp mechanics like if that Arcane Mage or Kitty or Frost DK is going to blow their load immediately and get one-shotted, probably causing a wipe.

[Redblade]

Blizzard, bringing the game down to the lowest common denominator once again, wonder what's next.

[akts]

This, a thousand times this. My feral pulls threat from ANY tank at the start of the fight. If magically the tank gets misdirects and salvs spammed on me, I can pull like 30k+ at the start, but normally I have to spam cower

Hah, weaklings! At least you got that threat dump! It was sooo frustrating to have one of the (if not the) highest bursts in game, no threat dump AND no passive threat reduction. Fury warriors and frost DK would be very glad.

[epec]

Haha, another step in the wrong direction. "Ummmm we lost a bunch of subs so lets make the game even easier, um derp! That will fix everything!" /headshake

[pVVn3c|]

The end is neigh....

[lilbuddhaman]

Here's a novel idea:
Balance everything, such that it actually scales/works with increases/changes in gear, bosses, tiers, mechanics. Just a thought. It's what you claim to do every expansion, and like clockwork, at around the halfway point of the expansion we get the same line "We didn't expect stats to scale like this" "we didn't expect this mechanic to effect threat this much" "we didn't realize that itemization would put us here".
It's like you guys don't even have a balance team anymore and simply do random kneejerk buffs/nerfs. At least in the old days they would be truly thought over, instead of just thrown down twice a month like a blind man throwing darts...

[Neurodrill]

I actually quit WoW because of the Blood DK model, so I'm glad I'm not still playing when I read this. Maybe once the Druid/Paladin/Warriors see how frustrating it is to be utterly powerless to mitigate (all runes and cooldowns used..common thing for DKs) they will start QQing and DKs will get fixed.

Quit WoW because of one class change, and yet forum posting nearly 8 months after the change? I'm in serious doubt of the sincerity of the "quitting" statement.

[zrankfappa]

i dunno what everyone is crying about ... under geared tanks maintaining threat when grouped with better geared dps is gonna instantly make the random dungeon queues sub 5 minutes for dps. a truly brilliant move by blizzard. now i think they ought to make resilience reduce your average gear level.

[Redblade]

i dunno what everyone is crying about ... under geared tanks maintaining threat when grouped with better geared dps is gonna instantly make the random dungeon queues sub 5 minutes for dps. a truly brilliant move by blizzard. now i think they ought to make resilience reduce your average gear level.

I'm sorry but balancing the game after LFG is one of the worst things they could do, and this won't change the DPS queues in any significant way.

[Sammonoske]

You're acting like it was hard to begin with. While threat has never really been an issue before, I'm afraid now it will just be faceroll. Maybe Blizzard doesn't get why people like tanking to begin with. It's more of a challenge than dps. Making it even easier is not the right way to recruit more tanks.

Actually there was an issue with starting threat at the beginning of boss fights. Tanks would get an unlucky parry/dodge on primary abilities and a dps would pull aggro. Even if said abilities landed, dps would often ride the tanks on threat for a good while until vengeance kicked in.

This was (or still is) an issue with warriors at least. Heroic Throw can miss, shouts give no threat, Recklessness on pulls is a double edged sword, can't always charge. In a 10m environment, raid might not have a rogue or a hunter.

Is this a fix I personally was looking for? No. I would have liked Blizz to make hit and exp more appealing. Yet they remain as trash stats.

[Deleted]

My personal opinion is I'll need a pillow for raids now so i can power nap. Threat gen has not been a problem for most of our guild tanks, due to the fact they are not far off the Hit and Exp caps.

Imo, Blizz should make Hit/Exp more valuable, because a lot of Tanks don't have any. I'm not saying those with no hit/exp are bad tanks, but tanks with no Hit/Exp choose this path because Mastery is a much better stat to have, however no Hit/Exp means you miss alot of attacks which reduces your threat generation. My personal choice is to get close to the Hit/Exp cap.

Our Arcane mage blows all CD's and timewarp at start of Majordomo Staghelm, yet I still keep threat becasue I choose to have Hit/Exp close to cap.

Maybe if blizzard looked into making Hit/Exp more a requirement then they wouldn't need to make Threat buffs. Has it stands, I may aswell remove omen add-on once this goes live, there will be no need for it

[Xaraxia]

Well, I'll be tanking now. Multiple-target threat management was my only real complaint on my bear. Everything else (positioning, cooldowns, etc) is just a matter of learning the fights. Holding AoE threat against raid-geared toons quite literally left me in tears one night (yes, I'm a girl - deal with it).My husband is a DK. As a tank he's fine, he loves the complexity. He generally doesn't tank PUGs because he got sick of the community. As DPS the other night he spent 40 seconds doing nothing but white damage so as to not pull threat in a BoT/BWD run (he was bringing his main to an alt run to make up numbers). It was painfully boring for him.

[Sephiracle]

People who are saying this is an unnecessary or unimportant change have never played a Fury Warrior or Frost DK with any credible effect in this expansion.Those of us who have know this is a huge change.

Two classes having threat problems doesn't mean you should buff tanks threat across the board by 3-5x. It means those two classes are either dealing too much damage, or need passive threat bonuses.

[Yalingo]

Us boomkins are happy

[lvlark]

[druid tank speaking here] So us tanks get about two thirds more threat? I've been tanking Zuls recently with dps outgearing me quite some, and I had to struggle for threat, but I liked it. It made me proud that I could do whatever the fight asked of me AND push out enough threat to keep aggro, even though it was the first time I went into Zuls. Plus it makes sense you know? I'm the tank, but that guy over there shooting fire and ice at you is much more dangerous in actual fact.. Yet since I'm a big scary bear and also hitting you (like a truck instead of like a train) you're still attacking me. I think this story can get away with this current factor three, but with a factor five? Don't think so. So Blizzard better give us something back for it. Luckily, it looks as though they are going to do that, with survivability becoming more active instead of just passively stacking stats. I'm hoping they'll do this right. And if they do it right, they're gonna give us something back in terms of gearing. Right now it feels pretty boring to me. Hey look I got an upgrade! Gem Agi/Sta, reforge anything that isn't crit or mastery to dodge. That's pretty much stat-stacking to me. What Greg Street is hinting at (you'll need hit/exp/crit/perhaps even haste for generating resources which you'll then use for your surviving abilities) sounds appealing to me. Unfortunately for us tanks, they're first taking something away from us, and in 'a later patch' giving us something back. From the viewpoint of my hunter though, rejoice. Worrying about threat all that much when you're DPSing, while it might sound logical, feels stupid.

[Deleted]

Now if only they could fix the whiney, doomsayer, cynical, self-righteous, selfish, annoying, ignorant, anti-social "community" !

[jayremy]

Why do I think this change is an Amazing Idea?

Well for months, maybe treading years now I have been talking about this, so many times in pasts posts; so here is the reasoning:

-Tanks don't worry about threat, why should they? A stupid simple transparent number that you obligatorily have to keep track off isn't fun. -What is fun for tanks then? Panning to see how the field of play is going for party members, pick up loose adds, focusing more on when to use mitigation spells (they are tanks, their job is to MITIGATE damage) because a great tank will tank minimal damage using his skill, not stats. Also if surviving isn't an issue worry just then about unloading and positioning.

-Shifting the focus from threat being the challenge of tanking to mitigation being the main challenge seems way more appropriate for a role that is put in place to TAKE LESS damage than other players/roles in the groups. Instead of trying to perfect (sometimes illogical) rotations for threat (blood and thunder for warriors comes to mind), rotations can be made to be about mitigating large portions of damage.


Ideally with random numbers and assumptions off my head thrown in I would so a skilled and good tank, that knows the best way to mitigate appropriately and skillfully, will probably mitigate 10-25% more damage than a typical tank. I hope for more of an impact than just 10-25% but I think more tweaking to base tank mitigation and all end game content might need to be made to match it unfortunately.