Woah! Did not see that coming.
I love this new change. Right now threat is BOOORING. There were, as of yesterday, only a few areas where I would notice the existence of threat as an issue. I mean I paid attention to it all the time but only in these situations would it affect my game play.
Bosses – Threat was meaningless after the first 30 seconds of any boss fight I have done. Really. After that if you are still having threat problems then you have messed up your build. Now I am not tanking Heroic raid bosses, and I am only 3/7 in Firelands but this has been my experience. So threat was meaningless on boss fights… kinda. If I had a threat problem at the start of a fight I would just blow Berserk on that boss and the problem went away. So I cared about threat, slightly, at the start of a boss fight.
Two tanks – If I was in tank spec and me and another tank were swapping on a boss I would have to throttle my TPS/DPS so as not to pull the boss off my partner at the wrong time. Now this was fine… but vengeance made this sometimes annoying or turned trash packs into a threat tug of war. While those situations might have been amusing they were not really intended game play. Two tanks fighting over a trash pack with taunts so they can get more rage/vengeance was kinda silly. Amusing, but a waste of time and sometimes a deadly distraction.
AOE – Yeah, sometimes people would pull off me in an AOE heavy situation. It was minor. It caused me to be better at taunting mobs back but it was really not that INTERESTING or fun. If Bliz finds this new change makes AOE threat too easy they should nerf tank AOE damage again.
DPS on the wrong target – Yeah, this was the biggest source of issues. But it was still not that big a deal. And I know 5x versus 3x will still not save an undergeared tank from an overgeared person on the wrong target. So this situation might be somewhat easier now but it is not going away.
Shooting things before they reach my melee range – Yeah again. This is still not changing with the new system.
Now all tanks might not have the same experience. I have known some to complain about people pulling off them early in a fight. I don’t complain about that. I see it is a personal failure if I let that happen so I darn sure am not going to whine about it. It is really not that hard to prevent right now. You don’t pull with a taunt, you open up with your best hits, you use DPS cooldowns early, you taunt back fast, and you learn a really well tuned dps/tps rotation. That is it. It works for warriors and bears, which are the only tanks I have played, and the other tanks have more than one taunt anyway.
What does “harder” mean?
Is this going to make tanking easier? Yeah kinda. More forgiving certainly. So? Are there any other roles that will wipe the group if they screw up the first 5 seconds of a fight? No. Really. In my experience the two hardest roles to play are an undergeared healer with an undergeared tank and an undergeared tank with a party of trigger happy morons. Look at it this way; Tanking is too hard. No, I have no issues with it. There is only 1 measure of ‘too hard’. It is not the opinions of elite tanks out there on forums or blogs. The ONLY measure of tanking being hard versus fun is the queue time of DPSers in LFD. Yeah, there are fewer morons out there trying to tank pugs but there are also 45 minute DPS queues.
Look, any hardcore raid tank can tell you the real measure of a tank is doing the fight mechanics and using their mitigation right. Threat is BASIC. Nerfing threat does not nerf the really hard parts of tanking. This is only making it easier for people to START tanking. It is not making it easier for them to get really good at it.
Now these ideas for upcoming changes to the mitigation moves and resource use… very interesting. That could put some nice challenge back the tanking. But it could put it back in a way that does not scare off new tanks too fast. I look forward to seeing what they do with it.
Update (1 ay after)
Last night I ran with a guild alt run in BWD. I can say for certain anyone that thinks threat is being phased out, or that this is some HUGE change in mechanics is wrong. Threat works like it always has. I was on a high dps hunter and outgeared a lot of the other people there. If I picked the ‘wrong’ target and dropped the hammer hard and early I would pull off the tank and they would have a heck of a time getting the target back. (Sry guys, I was doing that For Science!)
Threat dumps, forced attacks, taunts. They all worked the same as before. They all ‘feel’ the same as before. The only thing that changed is now tanks have a roughly 60% easier time picking up and holding threat. That is all. Nothing to see here. Move along!
This is NICE. Now I have the option of, instead of blowing MD on every pull, just counting to three before dropping the hammer. And even doing that I sometimes had to FD. Much less than before though. As Ghostcrawler pointed out being forced to use threat reduction as a part of SOP (standard operating procedure) is not fun game play. If I wanted to blow dps cooldowns on the pull, or open up before a boss was positioned I had to use MD, same as always. This just really isn’t that big a change. It is, if anything, just a step back toward where things were in Wrath.
They did not remove threat. Seriously, they didn’t.
The bonus to threat (nerf) was not the only change…
The nerf to Ryo was very apparent last night. I was driving for SR and right off the bat we noticed that Ryo was turning faster. With good switching DPS, faster turns, and fewer volcanos I could direct the boss over both active and inactive volcanos to “pick” the area where the next volcano had to activate. Twice we got a volcano to be activated almost right infront of Ryo. I think all the active volcanos were run over in less than 20 sec from spawn. For driving it helps to think of where you want Ryo to be in about 10 sec and call that to the leg damage.
I had heard about the volcano spawn time nerf but not the turning speed one. Nice.I won’t feel too bad getting him down the first time after a nerf. We did get him to 11% without it. There was just too much randomness there before. I am glad the took some of it out. Honestly if they had ONLY changed the turn speed I would have still been happy.
F that fight..its annoying for a fight where you can do things right and you then RNG bonks you….I am glad they changed it…..other fights in FL are fun. Rhylith is not lol
[…] for More is unequivocally in favour of the changes: “Look, any hardcore raid tank can tell you the real measure of a tank is doing the fight […]
I just updated the post with my thoughts after an BWD run last night (after the change).
[…] Looking for More goes over the threat adjustments, and tries out tanking with the new changes. […]
I agree with your update I logged in straight to a random ZA and noticed the first pack at the door stuck to me like glue after rend / thunderclap and that carried through but otherwise no real threat changes during the run, I think the trigger happy dps I was with was disappointed to not be pulling aggro actually.
Yeah. I think once a few more people run something and see this is not the end of the world and the changes just make things a little more comfortable for tanks then the hysteria will die out.
[…] far my favorite post on this subject comes from Reversion at LFM. I don’t consider this a nerf. This is a change to make the role of a tank function more in […]