Dev Watercooler -- Threat Level Midnight

[jayremy]

It's not just the class homogenization that worries me in this new design philosophy they're working towards. A skill cap for tanks is fine.. but if you start designing boss encounters to require the tank to use a large arsenal of different mitigation cds, then the average unexperienced tank might be overwhelmed by the task of managing his survival by himself. DK tanking does require a fair ammount of practice.. otherwise they can be very squishy.

I highly doubt perfection of mitigation will be a requirement, likely it will more so be a thing that has a sizable margin for error, that is what it will be balanced around.

I great tank when it comes to mitigating things will be able to go above the expectations, where likely content will be balanced around a mediocre player, not a pro player or a bad one.

Bad players will likely not be hit very hard, at least no more than threat already has wasted them on, mediocre and highly skilled ones will have something more dynamic and or to work to.

I think the goal being, what is "fun" is appropriate. There will be always good amount of lead way when you design content around player skill versus raw data/numbers (like dps spec rotations to gear ratios and such).

[frott]

they won't admit that vengeance basically sucks as a concept.

in tank swaps: tank 1 tanks for a bit, maxes vengeance, tank 2 taunts.

unless tank 1 completely stops attacking (and can still have effects in the air) they will likely pull aggro back immediately over the new tank that has no vengeance.


hit and expertise is still boring here. i see this long blog post which amounts to "we're making threat more." it changes nothing about itemization (boring), stacking to 102.4 and having a DPS tank set for certain fights.

the survivability a tank adds from pressing buttons is completely arbitrary, every tank can practically AFK currently. Here are the fights for me as a paladin tank:

shannox: tank the one dog. when spear is thrown run away, daze them. move away from traps.
bethtilac: taunt a spider off a rope, go up. when is about to blow up, go in hole. when comes down tank it until stacks then run out. taunt back when other tank has stacks.
rhyolith: adds pop out, threat them away from people especially healers with ae aggro. when boss comes taunt it. might as well use DPS/threat gear because nothing hits hard.
alysrazor. grab egg, pull to worm just to kill worm fast. pull to other worm when tantrum. dps gear rotation, cooldowns useful at tantrum but not really necessary. interrupt adds. wait till 5 stacks on other tank and taunt bird. do that a few times.
baleroc: other tank gets 3 stacks, taunt. then taunt back after tank gets the rape blade. zzz.
majordomo: tank scorp. on cat, switch to add and position after leap so they're both facing. zzz.
ragnaros: taunt off tank at 4 (annoying aggro issues here if vengeance and knockbacks are bad). taunt scions. zzz.


None of these fights in regular are made more interesting by requiring me to push a button for mitigation, or threat problems. The bottom line is threat is automatic with 0 hit and 0 expertise due to vengeance if the dps waits like 20 seconds to really go all out at the outset of a fight.


Really blizz needs to fess up that the reason for this change is that a raid geared tank ABSOLUTELY SUCKS in 5 mans for threat unless they cap out threat stats... no time for vengeance / too much mitigation, and no tank bothers doing dungeons and having a dungeon set if they're raid geared anyway. It is no fun for a tank to go into a dungeon with a DK putting AE dots on everything immediately and pingponging threat where i'm relying on autoattacks and procs to multiply a magic number? Complete shit.


How about this, remove vengeance and have every dps and healer slowly gain a stacking "lowers threat" debuff. It's not fun, right? So why inflict that on tanks.

[Azrile]

Wohooo! I am loving this change. I primarily will have threat problems at the start of fights and in aoe tanking(play a druid). This will allow me to focus much more on my role in the fight. It will also allow well geared dps to dps normally when they are paired with a lesser geared tank in the dungeon finder. Those who are whining and complaining about this change can go drown in their tears.

Tanks rarely have threat problems with mobs they have hit. Most threat issues in 5 mans come when DPS jumps the gun on adds and attacks something before we get any hit at all on them. My biggest problem tanking heroics is when a ranged hits something before I do, then gets it out of range of my swipe, which just means i have to taunt.. no big deal.

The problems that happen in the first 15 seconds of a pull are still going to happen because you can multiple 0 threat as many times as you want, and it is still 0 threat.

[xXCHAOSXx]

So what, now I could rend, thunderclap and that's enough to hold threat?

[jayremy]

So what, now I could rend, thunderclap and that's enough to hold threat?

Maybe maybe not, but in the near future if that was all you did, you would die because the healer couldn't heal you. Issues being is all that "passive" mitigation is going to be nerfed, you are now going make use of active mitigation in place of threat building abilities.

There will be room for error on the mitigation, but mitigating damage is something you wont just leave it up to gear to do, but timing and wise choices of managing resources.

Full fruition of Blizzards plans will not take place til weeks maybe even months from now.

Prepare for some sweeping tank changes, for all tanking classes, even DKs in the future to fulfill this goal.

TRUST ME for whatever reason you can find, it will likely be the best for everybody. Stop looking at the changes to threat and ignoring the fact mitigation will come into play. Try to imagine the fun things that would come from that style, again "try" to and you will likely understand.

[frott]

Maybe maybe not, but in the near future if that was all you did, you would die because the healer couldn't heal you. Issues being is all that "passive" mitigation is going to be nerfed, you are now going make use of active mitigation in place of threat building abilities.

Well, I'm at combat table coverage cap right now: every attack at me is either dodged, parried or blocked. I've killed regular rag this way. I'm pretty sure I could do the entire raid without ever pressing any activated cooldowns, even holy shield.

With 0 hit / expertise, I wait about 20 seconds of doing a perfect rotation to have more threat than anyone could pass if they tried. Now that time will be reduced, so my "dps abilities" will go in the toilet. Except oops, they have fights like alysrazor where i have to do dps to kill the birds, so they can't just replace dps with mitigation.

Taking my current stats of being as capped in combat as you possibly can be, them just making it so that i have to activate my mitigation doesn't change anything or make the game more interesting. It's a mindless rotation either way, right?

they simply won't admit that vengeance sucks, and they miscalculated (or something) about combat table coverage. They removed defense but essentially all that happened was mastery became defense and crushing blows became "unmitigated hits." In fact its even MORE CRUCIAL to get combat table coverage as an unmitigated hit does more damage than crushings used to. Oops.

[Duronos]

I really hopes this doesn't destroy Tricks of the Trade...

[aztr0]

Here's the situation. Blizzard realized that there will be issues with threat when it comes to random dungeons. I was in that position recently. A tank was about 346 ilvl gear and a warlock was at least 371 ilvl. The demo warlock decides to go all out once the tank pulled. This change will help undergeared tanks hold aggro from dumb DPSers who like to go all out with their high gear levels. When I told the warlock about it, he just saids its cool I soulshattered. Ugh... messing up the boss placement and all that crap, is not fine, especially with some other nub healer healing the instance for the first time.

[Flaks]

According to the new blue posts they'll be making mitigation more active. Can't wait to see how that turns out. I might start tanking again.

[Karot]

Haters gonna hate. Half the Wow population hates changes, the other half welcomes it. No matter what it is. *yawn*

[destero1]

About a time to get rid of the threat. For the most of the fights it has been a non-issue quite a long time now, all it does it gives a ~15sec window where dps can pull the mob from you and after that it becomes obsolete. Tank switching is something that has to be done more carefully after this fix, but IMO things like tank switches should be unforgiving. (hell, stopping those auto-attacks should not be that hard..)

Playing actively a blood DK and having other tank classes @85 as well, I'm really waiting to see how Blizz will include active mitigation part to other classes. A good thing about active mitigation is that it shifts the survivability from gear to skill. This might allow the freshly dinged proficient player to actually start tanking quite early before he even has a full eq set. And in harder encounters it really rewards the skillful instead of those who might have a tad better gear.

I'm a bit worried, tho, about the "casual catering", meaning that the "active" part of the mitigation might be so low that you don't actually have to do anything right if you're not doing any hc progression.. But well, considering that even now LFD features "less-skilled" "tanks" with shitty specs and wrong gear requiring more HPS than one actually has to push during hc raid encounter, maybe it's ok that quite of bit of the mitigation still stays passive.

[Fallenjack]

STOP REWARDING BAD GAMEPLAY.

Tanking started to be fun beginning of Cata , than with all the nerfs its an AOE grind fest again. A little challenge is not a bad thing blizz, some of us do enjoy things not being handed to us.

[Deleted]

If only patch content could happen over night like this Ghostcrawler's crazy ideas gets hotfixes.

[Vincent]

So now... All other things being equal, like moving, being on the right target, knowing the dance, etc... Skill at DPS: the perfect rotation for the fight and expert use of abilities and management of resources. Skill at Healing: the perfect anticipation of needs in the fight and expert use of abilities and management of resources. Skill at Tanking: randomly mashing keys What happened to teamwork being the most important skill? Ya know, being able to play your class well in any sort of group? I raided as a rogue up through Ice Crown and raided as a tank since Ice Crown... It's clear, finally, that Blizzard has little no idea what its vision is or, really, what it's doing. Add fun, yes, but dumbing things down rarely if ever equates to fun. I'm afraid to look down for fear I will see a shark.

[biglookdog]

DPS have cooldowns to lower threat, give tanks cooldowns to Increase threat gain? could also make it like, during the cd, tanks hit chances are 90%.Poping your cd right at the begining of a fight or during burn phase isnt all that hard. This way the game wont be dumbed down to a suitable age group of 5+.The meaning of Maximizing dps has evolved since vanilla. It used to be focusing on the target your tank is currently on or assigned you to focus on to right now....aoe as much as you can and soon....spam all you have

[Felade]

What I will not miss:

Our fury warrior randomly dying because the boss parried the tank.

Hollering at DPS in 5 mans about threat.

Having to hold off on DPS as when DPSing.


What I am looking forward to:

Blood Shield is a fun mechanic. It will be nice to not have to focus on threat so much and worry just about survival. Also, having an interesting rotation the ENTIRE FIGHT not just the first five seconds will be awesome.


What I am going to miss/am worried about:

I am a little sad/worried about tricks and MD. Those are pretty cool abilities. We already have about 25 bajillion abilities that help people take less damage though so I don't see them being turned into mitigation cooldowns.

I will miss Fade being awesome on my Shadow Priest.

I am waiting to see what the point of doing your rotation right as a tank will mean. They will have to change things pretty drastically. If, for instance, warriors generated Rage by doing their rotation, and could use Rage to survive better, I think that would be interesting.

I will miss my AE threat being uber as a Warrior tank.

What will happen to talents like Incite, or Blood and Thunder, or even Heavy Repercussions, which are designed to generate threat? This design is going to have to completely tear out the old talents and glyphs as well.

[sKoToNy]

I miss the days of Vaelastrasz and Broodlord in BWL, where threat actually mattered even more.. Personally I find it very engaging that I have to fight in order to get the attention of the boss and know when to press my mitigation tools when needed..

[Vasz]

Translation:

I hate when Blizzard work on things that matter to other players instead of things that matter to me.

I can guarantee there is not a single tank out there right now thinking "Thank god, my TPS has been poor all the way through firelands."

Why do they have to do these things anyway? No news or changes for weeks and half way through firelands expansion, they change thret into something ... meaningless.

It seems everything that Blizzard said they wanted to do in Cataclysm (healer mana regen, tank tps, raid/dungeon dificulty) is all slowley being undone.

[ashblond]

I fail to see how i am contradicting myself, tanking firelands is EASY as hell, managing threat + mitigation via CD is no big issue, im stating the facts, if you cant handle threat + mitigation, stop tanking, you just dont have what it takes, done make threat easier so nobrainers can keep threat while tryine to figure out wheter to hit 1 2 3 or 4.

That's why Blizzard made this change - to make all tanking more challenge and engaging by active mitigation and cooldown management, instead of the current passive, what you called "EASY as hell", tanking.

So why are you complaining???

[Vasz]

So why are you complaining???

The same reason why all other tanks are complaining. Tanking was easy as balls in wotlk, and when Cataclysm dropped Blizz took the stance to make it harder, and more exciting. Then half way through Cataclysm, they change it back.

The whole point of vengance was to help with damage scaling and threat .... why didn't they just buff threat back then, insted of adding another mechanic to the game?

It seems to me that they just dont have a grasp on what they are doing any more. Making changes just for the sake of it, and whats worse ... half way through firelands AND cataclysm. Why now? Why change tank threat right now?