Dev Watercooler: Ghostcrawler discusses massive changes to threat
by Mathew McCurley 
Aug 16th 2011 at 12:30PM
Ghostcrawler addresses the biggest point with the most passion -- threat isn't fun. It never has been, and threat stats aren't fun to balance. Personally, as a tank, the most contempt and frustration I have for World of Warcraft comes from my inability to control DPSers who can't stop pressing their buttons for a second. It's just not fun to get mad at unskilled players. Ghostcrawler wants interaction between new and experienced players to be positive, and when DPSers blame undergeared or new tanks for threat issues when they have successfully beaten Ragnaros to a pulp and taken his gear, it doesn't make for a positive experience.
With patch 4.3, threat is going to become largely a non-issue. Threat is being increased to five times damage, up from three times damage. Each tank will be given new active defense cooldowns, much like death knight's Death Strike. Warriors, it seems, will be getting the biggest redesign of the bunch, with rage causing a big problem with how warriors need to spend resources to maximize survivability. DPSers will largely be unaffected and will, in fact, have less time when they have to stop attacking or stop their rotations, because threat will be less of an issue.
Check out the full blog post for more information on the huge changes coming to threat in patch 4.3. There is a lot coming in the future, and we will be testing this stuff heavily on the PTR and have more information when it becomes available.
Threat revisited
One of the fun things about working on an MMO is that the game design will evolve over time, and you have the opportunity to make changes to reflect those design shifts. (And yes, we know that it can sometimes evolve too quickly).
Back in December, I wrote a blog about our vision for how threat should work. Since then, the game and the community have continued to progress and the designers have found ourselves changing our minds about the role of threat.
Why have threat?
Threat's role, just so we're all on the same page, is to make fights more interesting. Tanks spend a lot of effort staying alive, but they aren't under immediate threat of death one-hundred percent of the time. Plus, their staying alive is also dependent on their healers and other external cooldowns. We have always been concerned that if threat was not a big part of tanking gameplay that tanks might get bored just waiting around until it was time to use a cooldown. Likewise, if DPS and healers had no risk of being attacked themselves then the sense of danger facing a powerful creature could erode. Furthermore, every character's toolbox includes some cool survival and utility abilities and the game feels more shallow if those are exclusively used for PvP. It's fun for a mage to Frost Nova an attacker and Blink away. It's fun for a hunter to Feign Death. Yes your life would be a lot easier without threat mechanics, but our goal isn't to make fights as easy as possible. Our job is to make fights fun. Having too much to manage might not be fun, but it's also not fun to be bored.
That's been our traditional argument for threat needing to matter. Here is the case against it:
Why not have threat?
Throttling
Threat stats aren't fun
We don't need a more complex UI
So now what?
Given all of that, and watching how tanking has unfolded in Cataclysm, we've gotten over the concept that threat needs to be a major part of PvE gameplay. We have therefore decided to buff tank threat generation in 4.3 to where it's generally not a major consideration. We expect the community to gradually stop using threat-tracking mods as players realize they don't need them.
It's an important distinction that the concept of "aggro" will still exist. If a DPS spec attacks an add the second it shows up, then the creature is going to come at her. However, if a tank gets an attack or two on a target, then the target should stick to the tank. Worrying about who has the creature's attention should generally only be a concern at the start of a fight or when additional creatures join the battle. Worrying about a warrior or DK (the classes with nearly non-existent threat dumps) creeping up on tank threat after several minutes will almost certainly not be an issue any longer. (And if it is, we'll have to make further adjustments.)
We like abilities like Misdirect. It's fun as a hunter to help the tank control targets. We are less enamored of Cower, which is just an ability used often to suppress threat. We like that the mage might have to use Ice Block, Frost Nova, or even Mirror Image to avoid danger. We don't like the mage having to worry about constantly creeping up on the tank's threat levels. The notion of aggro (who the target is attacking) is a keeper. The notion of threat races (who is about to pull aggro) is going to be downplayed from here on out.
Upcoming changes
Here are the specific changes you're likely to see on the PTR for the next major content patch, 4.3:
You could argue that once threat is very easy to manage that a warrior tank could just go AFK. In reality, given today's boss encounters, an AFK warrior would end up standing in the wrong place, missing a tank transition, or otherwise do something or fail to do something that wipes the party or raid.
That said, we ultimately don't want tanking to be just standing there soaking boss hits and we would like to have more stats on gear that tanks care about. To solve those challenges, we want to shift more tank mitigation to require active management. We'll still give all the tanks emergency cooldowns like Shield Wall and Survival Instincts. However, we want to move the shorter cooldowns like Shield Block, Holy Shield and Savage Defense so that they work more like Death Strike. Blood DKs have a lot of control over the survivability they get from Death Strike, but as part of that gameplay, they have to actually hit their target. The other three tanks will get similar active defense mechanics. This doesn't mean everyone needs to use the DK model of self-healing, but they can use the DK model of managing resources to maximize survivability.
Death Strike consumes resources to help the tank survive. We toyed at one point with the paladin Holy Shield being a Holy Power consumer and we think we could do so again. Heck we could make Word of Glory the thing you're supposed to do with Holy Power, so long as we balanced all tanks around that idea and didn't feel it infringed too much on the DK mechanic. We could make Shield Block cost rage, and change Protection warrior rage income such that they had to manage rage, the way Fury and Arms warriors now must do. If tanks generated more rage from doing damage and less from taking damage, then hitting a target becomes very important, but for mitigation, not threat management reasons. This is a bigger change than it seems though. We don't want a model where the Prot warrior ignores Shield Slam, Devastate and Revenge (since threat isn't a big deal) in order to bank all rage for Shield Block (because survival is). Imagine a rage model where you always had enough rage for your core rotational abilities (they could be cheap or even generate rage), so that you could funnel most of your rage into Shield Block when survival mattered and Heroic Strike when it did not. Redesigning Savage Defense to make it a rage sink is an even bigger change, but we think there is an opportunity there to make the rotation more interesting for druids (and all tanks really). Their rotation would help them achieve the goal that usually matters the most to tanks: living.
This is the kind of design for which we're really going to need a lot of feedback once it hits the PTR. We can implement and verify empirically how much threat a tank generates, but it's hard for us to replicate the experience of all of the various raiding groups and dungeon parties out there. We invite you to try out the immediate and eventually the long-term changes when they are available on the PTR and then in the live game and let us know how they feel. Do you miss the threat game? Are you bored when tanking now? Conversely, with the changes, is tanking more fun for you? Does this new implementation of Vengeance feel better? Some systems design calls we can make just by processing numbers, and some are more squishy and involve a lot gut checks and wishy-washy "but how does it FEEL?" language. Messing with this kind of thing is definitely somewhere in the middle.
Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft, and lead eater at the dinner table.
One of the fun things about working on an MMO is that the game design will evolve over time, and you have the opportunity to make changes to reflect those design shifts. (And yes, we know that it can sometimes evolve too quickly).
Back in December, I wrote a blog about our vision for how threat should work. Since then, the game and the community have continued to progress and the designers have found ourselves changing our minds about the role of threat.
Why have threat?
Threat's role, just so we're all on the same page, is to make fights more interesting. Tanks spend a lot of effort staying alive, but they aren't under immediate threat of death one-hundred percent of the time. Plus, their staying alive is also dependent on their healers and other external cooldowns. We have always been concerned that if threat was not a big part of tanking gameplay that tanks might get bored just waiting around until it was time to use a cooldown. Likewise, if DPS and healers had no risk of being attacked themselves then the sense of danger facing a powerful creature could erode. Furthermore, every character's toolbox includes some cool survival and utility abilities and the game feels more shallow if those are exclusively used for PvP. It's fun for a mage to Frost Nova an attacker and Blink away. It's fun for a hunter to Feign Death. Yes your life would be a lot easier without threat mechanics, but our goal isn't to make fights as easy as possible. Our job is to make fights fun. Having too much to manage might not be fun, but it's also not fun to be bored.
That's been our traditional argument for threat needing to matter. Here is the case against it:
Why not have threat?
Throttling
- As I said in the previous blog, it's not fun to feel throttled. It's not fun for the Feral druid to stop using special attacks in order to avoid pulling aggro. It's fun to use Feint at the right time to avoid dying, but it's not fun for Feint to be part of your rotational cooldown. We want you to spend most of your effort trying to overcome the dragon or elemental, not struggling against your own tank.
- I'd also argue that our encounters aren't really boring these days. We ask tanks to do a lot -- everything from picking up adds, to moving bosses around, to staying out of fires, to providing interrupts, in addition to the classic tank roles of staying alive and generating threat.
Threat stats aren't fun
- We put threat stats (hit and expertise for the most part) on tanking gear, because without those, tanks would be limited to choosing from among mastery, dodge, and parry. (In the current state of itemization, you are rarely choosing more Strength, Agility, Stamina, or armor.) Druids can't parry, and even for the plate users, there is a tight relationship between dodge and parry, and even mastery for the warrior and paladin. That gets us dangerously close to the old model of stacking a single uber stat (like Stamina or defense), which makes gearing choices too simplistic for tanks. Did something drop? Okay, put it on. (Contrast this to a DPS caster who might want more or less hit or might favor haste over crit, etc.)
- We want threat stats to be interesting, but the reality is that they aren't. Any decent tank will usually choose survivability stats over threat stats. Back in the day when taunts and interrupts could miss, you could argue hit was marginally useful. But in a world where hit is really just for generating threat, it isn't very exciting and tanks get understandably emo when we put too much on their gear. (DKs are somewhat of an exception in a good way -- more on that in a sec.) We do see some players try and get excited about threat stats or even proud of their ability to generate threat, but overall we feel like threat stats are a trap, and it's usually the case that improving your survivability will have a better net impact on your group's progression.
We don't need a more complex UI
- We have threatened for years (see what I did there?) to build in some kind of threat tracking tool into WoW. But is that really good for the game? Do we really need yet another UI element for players to look at instead of looking at the actual game world? We know many raiders in particular use third-party threat mods today, but that has really been borne out of necessity rather than a sense that watching threat is super compelling gameplay. (When we say "super compelling gameplay" you can mentally replace that with "fun.")
- I know this bullet will be a point made by players critical of this change, but I would feel remiss in not bringing it up. We want it to be a positive experience when Dungeon Finder matches experienced players with newer players. The skill and gear of the former can help make up for that of the latter. Who better to teach you boss mechanics than players who have done the fights before? Even better, the gear of a veteran tank can make up for the less powerful gear of a beginning healer (which doesn't necessarily mean a noob -- it could be the alt of a very experienced raider).
- However, this system fails and often spectacularly so when it's the tank who is the undergeared player. Even if a competent healer can keep the undergeared tank alive, the fully raid-geared DPS spec is going to constantly be on the verge of pulling threat. That's not an issue of skill. It's just numbers. It's also not a problem that is easy to overcome for either the overgeared DPS or the undergeared tank -- it's just not a lot of fun for anyone.
So now what?
Given all of that, and watching how tanking has unfolded in Cataclysm, we've gotten over the concept that threat needs to be a major part of PvE gameplay. We have therefore decided to buff tank threat generation in 4.3 to where it's generally not a major consideration. We expect the community to gradually stop using threat-tracking mods as players realize they don't need them.
It's an important distinction that the concept of "aggro" will still exist. If a DPS spec attacks an add the second it shows up, then the creature is going to come at her. However, if a tank gets an attack or two on a target, then the target should stick to the tank. Worrying about who has the creature's attention should generally only be a concern at the start of a fight or when additional creatures join the battle. Worrying about a warrior or DK (the classes with nearly non-existent threat dumps) creeping up on tank threat after several minutes will almost certainly not be an issue any longer. (And if it is, we'll have to make further adjustments.)
We like abilities like Misdirect. It's fun as a hunter to help the tank control targets. We are less enamored of Cower, which is just an ability used often to suppress threat. We like that the mage might have to use Ice Block, Frost Nova, or even Mirror Image to avoid danger. We don't like the mage having to worry about constantly creeping up on the tank's threat levels. The notion of aggro (who the target is attacking) is a keeper. The notion of threat races (who is about to pull aggro) is going to be downplayed from here on out.
Upcoming changes
Here are the specific changes you're likely to see on the PTR for the next major content patch, 4.3:
- The threat generated by classes in their tanking mode has been increased from three times damage done to five times damage done.
- Vengeance no longer ramps up slowly at the beginning of a fight. Instead, the first melee attack taken generates Vengeance equal to one third of the damage dealt by that attack. As Vengeance updates during the fight, it is always set to at least a third of the damage taken in the last two seconds. It still climbs from that point at the previous rate, still decays at the previous rate, and still cannot exceed the current maximum.
You could argue that once threat is very easy to manage that a warrior tank could just go AFK. In reality, given today's boss encounters, an AFK warrior would end up standing in the wrong place, missing a tank transition, or otherwise do something or fail to do something that wipes the party or raid.
That said, we ultimately don't want tanking to be just standing there soaking boss hits and we would like to have more stats on gear that tanks care about. To solve those challenges, we want to shift more tank mitigation to require active management. We'll still give all the tanks emergency cooldowns like Shield Wall and Survival Instincts. However, we want to move the shorter cooldowns like Shield Block, Holy Shield and Savage Defense so that they work more like Death Strike. Blood DKs have a lot of control over the survivability they get from Death Strike, but as part of that gameplay, they have to actually hit their target. The other three tanks will get similar active defense mechanics. This doesn't mean everyone needs to use the DK model of self-healing, but they can use the DK model of managing resources to maximize survivability.
Death Strike consumes resources to help the tank survive. We toyed at one point with the paladin Holy Shield being a Holy Power consumer and we think we could do so again. Heck we could make Word of Glory the thing you're supposed to do with Holy Power, so long as we balanced all tanks around that idea and didn't feel it infringed too much on the DK mechanic. We could make Shield Block cost rage, and change Protection warrior rage income such that they had to manage rage, the way Fury and Arms warriors now must do. If tanks generated more rage from doing damage and less from taking damage, then hitting a target becomes very important, but for mitigation, not threat management reasons. This is a bigger change than it seems though. We don't want a model where the Prot warrior ignores Shield Slam, Devastate and Revenge (since threat isn't a big deal) in order to bank all rage for Shield Block (because survival is). Imagine a rage model where you always had enough rage for your core rotational abilities (they could be cheap or even generate rage), so that you could funnel most of your rage into Shield Block when survival mattered and Heroic Strike when it did not. Redesigning Savage Defense to make it a rage sink is an even bigger change, but we think there is an opportunity there to make the rotation more interesting for druids (and all tanks really). Their rotation would help them achieve the goal that usually matters the most to tanks: living.
This is the kind of design for which we're really going to need a lot of feedback once it hits the PTR. We can implement and verify empirically how much threat a tank generates, but it's hard for us to replicate the experience of all of the various raiding groups and dungeon parties out there. We invite you to try out the immediate and eventually the long-term changes when they are available on the PTR and then in the live game and let us know how they feel. Do you miss the threat game? Are you bored when tanking now? Conversely, with the changes, is tanking more fun for you? Does this new implementation of Vengeance feel better? Some systems design calls we can make just by processing numbers, and some are more squishy and involve a lot gut checks and wishy-washy "but how does it FEEL?" language. Messing with this kind of thing is definitely somewhere in the middle.
Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft, and lead eater at the dinner table.
The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new tier 12 armor!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 8)
Shinae Aug 16th 2011 12:43PM
Huh. I wonder why Blizz took it down. It's not like they can take it back now.
(However, they are welcome to change their collective mind, as they have in the past.)
Drakkenfyre Aug 16th 2011 12:54PM
That got me.
(Clicks link) (404)
"Man, what the hell?"
(cutaia) Aug 16th 2011 1:01PM
Which link are you guys talking about?
(cutaia) Aug 16th 2011 1:07PM
Oh, I see...they updated the blog post to indicate that the 3x to 5x part will actually be coming in a hotfix this week instead of waiting until patch 4.3.
You two must have clicked while it was down, but it's back now. :)
Homeschool Aug 16th 2011 1:26PM
Seemed to be a spot of lag between when the blue trackers found it and when the source link went live. Non-synchronized systems, perhaps?
Sqtsquish Aug 16th 2011 12:47PM
As a veteran dps, tank, and healer I endorse shifting a tank's attention away from threat to survivability much how a DK has to.
Homeschool Aug 16th 2011 1:26PM
Speaking as a healer/DPSer, and a newbie tank, this is quite the relief. Tank survival has traditionally been the role of the healer, and at times, that can be INSANELY stressful. (Such as when healing to keep the tank alive pops you to second in threat, just in time to be targeted by some disabling effect that prevents you from healing the tank...)
Changing the tanking game to be focused around awareness and active survival will be a great improvement from the healer standpoint, at least. Seems like for a tank, it'll simply be less threat racing (can you generate it faster than your DPS?) and more like stance dancing (rotation dancing?), where the tank shifts their rotation in time with the ebb and flow of damage.
Perhaps we'll even see tanks judged primarily on their relative damage TAKEN per second.
Boz Aug 16th 2011 1:40PM
I was always of the mind that survivability was more the healer's job, and the tank's job was to get smashed in the face so everyone else wouldn't have to. To this end I would have hoped healers would have gotten tools to improve tank survivability and tanks tools to focus more heavily on threat management.
I'm not sure I'm relieved; managing threat has always been a part of my job no matter the role I have played. Almost every class has some tool (e.g. Fade, Feign Death, etc.) to manage their threat (I said ALMOST, Arms Warriors). Active threat management is/was supposed to be a part of the game. In random Heroics I understand that the above might be an issue, but for raiders this just eliminates one aspect of the game.
I am deeply concerned that the removal of threat will lead to even more meter-humping on the part of DPS rather than focusing on mechanics.
We will have to wait until it hits live, however, to see how it pans out through the player-base at large.
Daedalus Aug 16th 2011 2:17PM
@Boz:
I see where you're coming from, but I think GC's point is a good one: has any of that ever made a fight more enjoyable?
As dps, I can say that while it's definitely been something I have to watch, the times I've had to ratchet down (or even switch to wanding, in the case of really undergeared tanks...) just aren't fun; they're stressful. Not in the hectic, fun, last-phase-of-Cho'gal-all-hell-breaking-loose sense, but in the tense, teeth-grinding, come-on-you-damned-meat-shield-get-your-threat-up-and-let-me-work kind of way.
And while I think the threat design definitely had a place before, the way blizz is designing fights these days, everyone's got enough to worry about just with timing their attacks/defenses/heals properly while still maintaining situational awareness and keeping track of what the boss is going to do next.
Plus, you can bet that if they're taking away one more thing to keep track of, they'll feel more free to add in a few more... ("Well, they don't have to worry about threat any more, so lets add 3 more phases, some exploding fireballs, and maybe a giant add or two.")
Como Aug 16th 2011 2:42PM
It all depends on how they do it. I like the idea of more classes playing like a dk but they should focus more on mitigation then self heals. Healing a dk in heroic raid level situations is a pain in the ass at best. I've had more then a few times where the tank is low and so are some dps. Clearly as a good healer I say fuck the dps and keep the tank alive but then there is a 50/50 shot the dk just healed up, making most of my heal useless and now we're down a dps.
If they do go with a lot of self healing I hope they make is small but consistant heals instead of building up a bunch of death ruins then blowing ds when you need it. It's just to much of a pain to know when you have to heal the tank or not and in heroics where every bit of mana counts this is a big issue.
Minstrel Aug 16th 2011 3:16PM
As a newbie tank and veteran healer/DPS, I love this change. I agree with GC that threat was a mechanic that could make things tougher, but it wasn't a "fun" challenge. IMO, fun is managing your procs and cooldowns well, positioning and general awareness...not throttling your DPS to manage your spot on a threat list or tabbing around to make sure threat is being generated evenly as a tank.
Of course, as a newbie tank, I'm hardly the best at it so this may be a reaction of relief...the thing I found most stressful is going to be easier. I love tanking bosses, because then I can largely just worry about positioning and awareness. Tanking trash was always what was stressful to me, due to the number of things that DPS could potentially pull away. I don't know if most tanks find trash harder, but that seems backward to me.
In any case, I think worrying about tank cooldowns, positioning and awareness (which are mostly the tanking skills that matter in raids) rather than threat will be beneficial for newer tanks.
Sqtsquish Aug 16th 2011 4:00PM
I would prefer to see other tanks manage health spikes like DKs have to and just adjust healing situations to help deal with it. Block is too powerful....and too preferable for healers. Blizz should just tone down unavoidable aoe so decent dps requiring healing won't be such an issue.
Fix the DK tank scaling issues by "breaking" every other tank's mechanics? It is about time to see tanking about trying not to get squished.
Skarn Aug 16th 2011 4:03PM
@Boz: I disagree. I think Survival is entirely the tank's job. That's the only reason the tank is in the group! The rest of us already make the boss pretty mad by ourselves.
I must first admit that my tanking experience is extremely small. Back in BC sometime I did some tanking on my druid (around level 50) in a few dungeons. I've also done a tiny bit of tanking on my warrior (also around level 50) in Cataclysm. My biggest experience with tanking is on my Death Knight in Wrath. Again, just leveling dungeons, but this time between levels 70-78. Clearly I have no raid tanking experience, though I have much raid leading and raid DPS experience. All that out of the way, here are my thoughts:
Tanking was fairly boring. Especially as a Death Knight at that moment in time. I felt like a DPS that was allowed to pull aggro. I didn't feel like I was doing anything to stay alive, which felt like the point of tanking. The reason a Prot Warrior tanks is because he can take it. I don't tank on my hunter (more than 5 seconds, heh) because I turn into a squishy paste. That, to me, is what makes a tank, well, a tank. The ability to SURVIVE. I don't bring the tanks to raid because of their spectacular ability to kill bosses or even really to show me how mad they can make the bosses. I can do that just fine all by myself! I don't do that though because I would die. I'm no tank.
On my DK in those 5-man dungeons, I felt like I didn't have much to do. I'd pull the mobs, then I'd just sit there and go through my DPS rotation, sometimes hitting Icebound Fortitude if the pull was rough enough. I felt exactly like I do as a DPS except that I was allowed to pull aggro and my DPS sucked. I didn't feel like a tank, I didn't feel like I was doing anything to SURVIVE, which is the tank's purpose and reason for being. Oh sure, I could hit a cooldown once a minute, but that wasn't FUN.
I haven't tanked at a high level in Cataclysm, so it may well feel different now. The idea and concept behind these changes has me excited. I don't think a tank's main job should be about threat. It should be about survival, since that is exactly the tank's purpose in the group. Fighting for threat doesn't really make you a tank. It makes you a weak DPS.
Skarn Aug 16th 2011 4:18PM
Bah, I knew I was gonna forget something!
You might say that this change will make all tanking like those leveling dungeons, since you have nothing to do with "auto-threat." Here's the problem with the current threat game: It's too binary. You either have threat or you don't. It my brief tanking experience, either I did it right and was bored while the mobs beat on me or I did did it wrong and the mobs killed the DPS/healers. There was very little room for error. If I ever didn't have threat, someone was dead. (This was especially annoying on AoE packs where it was hard to tell if they were all on me, especially if one or two swapped to a melee DPS. At least if they went after ranged I could see them move.)
So no, I don't think threat is very interesting. On my hunter in raids, while attacking the big boss, threat is irrelevant to me. On occasion I might be getting close to the tank's threat so I just FD. Not really that exciting. (Neat to be able to say I can manage threat better than someone else, but not fun in-and-of itself.) On the other hand, what IS fun is pulling adds to the tank and then using FD to leave them on the tank. For example, on Rhyolith if Fragments spawn on the other side of the island for some reason, I can do a Multi-shot (doesn't need MD) to grab 'em all real fast. They run after me while I go stand by the tanks and when they get there in the tank's nice aoe area (where I happen to have a slow trap too), I FD and the tanks grab 'em. That's pretty fun, but has nothing to do with threat itself, just the aggro concept. It's all or nothing, but the incremental threat on a single-boss (like Baleroc) is just boring and irrelevant.
vocenoctum Aug 16th 2011 5:02PM
Seriously? Aren't DK's currently complaining about having to dump Deathstrike non stop? As a healer, DK's generally are the spikiest bunch to try to heal and now they want to make other classes feel like that?
Now the undergeared tank doesn't need to worry about losing threat and a DPS dying, he'll die first.
Boz Aug 16th 2011 5:25PM
To emphasize, "...survivability was MORE the healer's job..."
It is always the tank's job to survive, but removing the challenge of threat management the tank becomes primarily a damage reduction engine for the healer. This is an oversimplification (since tanks position mobs, silence/interrupt mobs, etc.), but if I were to summarize to a new player each role, now both the tank and healer's PRIMARY job is to keep the tank alive, rather than the tank's primary job being to hold the attention of the mob(s).
Basically you now have two roles focusing on the same task: Managing the tank's health pool.
I would have preferred to see some of the damage reduction cooldowns transferred to the healers to allow them to better time their existing big heals and cooldowns, since it can be a challenge to communicate cooldowns between healer and tank. This way tanks could focus more on threat management. However, that's giving more tools to a role (healer) that is already overburdened with a ton of spell management, making the current model a more elegant solution, likely.
It is always every player's responsibility to stay alive, but the primary role of the tank - to me - had always been first and foremost to hold the attention of the mob in question while staying alive.
It should be interesting to see if this makes tanking a bit easier and more desirable/palatable.
Skarn Aug 16th 2011 5:34PM
@Vocenoctum
You're not looking at the big picture. If ALL tanks are equally the spikiest to heal, then it doesn't matter. Once they add more active mitigation to all tanks, it'll be easier to balance them all around that. They can also then balance boss encounters around the same concept.
James Aug 16th 2011 6:31PM
As a raid level DK tank, I feel sorry for the other tanks getting this change. At the moment DKs, while not being underpowered in any way, play very counterintuitive at raid level tanking. We sacrifice using any blood runes, and refreshing deseases outside of outbreak due to the fact that runic empowerment will proc more death strikes, and using runes on anything but death strikes can kill you. "Fine", you say, "just spam deathstrike!" but there is an aweful catch 22 there. If we use a death strike prior to the boss' swing we get a very slight heal and a worthlessly weak shield, but if we use it after a boss' swing, we get a bigger heal and a much better shield. This is why death knight health spikes so much, but we heal that health back, unless a healer tops us off befor we can get in several death strikes. This is a common reaction for healers, the tank takes a large ammount of damage, so you use an emergancy heal, but in doing so, weaken the death knight for the next hit, in which this process is repeated untill the deathknight either dies, or the healer runs oom. This is why death knights are in general the least appealing tank to play or to heal, they are counterintuitive and require the healer to put too much thought into healing the tank (ie. "Does he have runes for deathstrike? Should I get a big heal ready just to be safe? Will I gimp his heal and shield, effectivly weakening his mitigation and effective health?")
TL;DR: Death knights need some major qol fixes befor blizz decides to force all tanks to play with this handicap
vocenoctum Aug 16th 2011 8:03PM
If all tanks suck it'll make it easier to fix them? :-p
Not that DK's suck, it's just not how I like to tank.
I don't mind the threat changes, but tanking IMO is about directing the fight, moving stuff, picking up stuff, not just trying to stay alive. I don't really want "trying to stay alive" to be as active as they seem to think.
And from a healer standpoint, no matter what they say, when the tank dies it'll be because "why didn't I get enough heals?". Not only does my priest have to yank someone out of fire, now she also needs to work around the tank getting parried.
I understand the situation for Randoms, I really do, but I also know that they have a bonus for damage to compensate for "strangers in a dungeon", why not just boost Threat in a random?
It seems like they can't fix it, so they're just going to move the game to "tank staying alive" instead, like the supposed change to healing paradigm...
Karcharos Aug 16th 2011 10:42PM
I suspect a big part of the threat issues tanks are having in 5-mans is because a big chunk of them are raiders chasing chaos orbs who are raid-geared, but also raid-gemmed, enchanted, and reforged. They follow EJ theorycrafting, more or less, which is smart for raiding, but an absolute f***ing nightmare in a 5-man.
If you're grabbing as much avoidance and mitigation as possible, you're going to be flailing at things like a buttered drunkard. Mobs will stick to you like you're made of teflon, and you will generally Not Have Fun.
I'm reserving judgement on this until we see something more concrete.