Given that the onus was always on the DPS to throttle themselves, it seems like a stretch to call this a tanking change.
True enough, and they say as much. Threat races just aren’t for either the DPS or the tank, and by extension the healer probably isn’t having a good time either.
The way I’m reading it though is that it’s easier for a tank to keep aggro. Whoever attacks first/attacks before tank gets threat up will still get aggro, so it doesn’t change anything with DPS pullers.
However, I’m a career Hunter, so I don’t understand tank threat management in the first place. Will the following compensate enough for that?
Like **BT **said, it’s a question of what the tanks are bad at. Not having to micromanage a max-TPS rotation could very well free up brain processing power for things like CD management and moving your ass out of the big animations of death on the ground.
Tanks looking for threat/DPS stats should be taking Expertise over Hit to begin with anyway. That’s not going to change. Pushing Parries/Dodges off the table (even partially) does more to up your DPS. At least it used to–it’s possible this has changed and I’m an idiot. (It’s possible that Expertise’s edge over Hit had to do with survivability due to its ability to reduce parry-haste hits from bosses, which don’t exist anymore.) However, what will not change is that getting to 8% Hit and 26 Expertise should be absolute priorities for any tank looking to maximize their DPS. I don’t think there’s any melee class where Crit is prioritized over those caps. Expertise will also stay useful longer for tanks, since we can’t remove Parries by standing behind things.
The onus was on both: on the tanks to understand their own max TPS rotations, and on the DPS to not go beyond what the tank could generate.
This isn’t to solve the problem of DPS pulling before the tank (which would get your ass kicked in a raid). This is to deal with the problem of the tank pulling first but having the boss peeled off of them by DPS who are simply putting out too high of numbers compared to the tank, especially early in the fight before Vengeance can stack high enough to give the tank a DPS boost.
Most DPS abilities create threat at a 1:1 damage:threat ratio. This means a damage dealer doing 20k DPS is also doing 20k TPS. Most recently, tanks generated threat at a 1:3 ratio, so a tank doing 10k DPS would be putting out 30k TPS. (Some tank abilities also generate higher threat than their base damage.) This change will mean that if a tank is doing 10k DPS, a damage dealer will having to be doing over 50k DPS to peel off of them.
Whoops, just noticed I left out a word. “Threat races just aren’t fun”
KK. As a non-raider I was thinking this was more of an issue for Heroics, where tanks didn’t queue because of RDF idiots. I didn’t really think of it as making things easier for raiders because I’ve always seen that as a magical world where people know their stuff so tanks are impeded by mechanics, not other players.
Yeah. The problem with the threat races is that people do know their stuff, which means the DPSers are putting out ridiculous amounts of damage which threatens the stability of the raid. And telling a DPSer to go slow is like telling the Mythbusters they’re not allowed to blow anything up for an entire episode.
I desperately want someone to make an addon where you enter a word and it inserts a link in chat* to wowhead searching for it. Like LMGTFY.com (Let Me Google That For You). Seriously. Not everyone in the guild is going to know where a random lvl80 Northrend NPC happens to be.
*Sadly, I know, that’s against TOS.
Putting this behind a spoiler window just in case:
They’re dropping the Deathwing Raid into 4.3?! Doesn’t that seem early to anyone else, unless he’s not the ultimate baddy for this expansion? I realize Lich King was dropped in 3.3(.x), but we had 3 Raid Tiers in Wrath before that (Naxx/OS/EoE, Ulduar, ToC) happened, not two. Still, 3 new 5-mans sounds nice.
That blows. I’m going to end up going the whole expansion without seeing the inside of a raid, apparently.
I feel the same way. I love my job and working nights, but it has really made it almost impossible for me to commit to a raid schedule on Cairne. I’m half-tempted to move one of my toons to an Oceanic server just so I have a shot at raiding this expansion. 
Rumour says we’re getting a 5-man War of the Ancients. This pisses me off, because I’m going on a hunch they’re going to do the Knaak-ified WotA with Rhonin, Krasus and Brox. I still have enough faith in Blizzard that a Mal, Tyrande and Illidan-cenric event would be a raid, not a 5-man. There’s also so much Azshara, Xavius and Burning Legion content that I believe they wouldn’t trivialize it into a 5-man. I mean, it would make me happy because I could do a 5-man, but they never have as much payoff as a raid. Halls of Reflection was full of lore goodies, but it didn’t have nearly as much impact as the ICC raids, obviously. I mean, the Battle of Mount Hyjal got a raid, I just can’t conceive the WotA without a massive raid.
I got in on the end of a Firelands trash run with my guild last night and got to sample all the mobs, so I’m a little more confident with joining a PUG trash run. Of course, I missed the run where there were 2 Hunter drops with no hunters in the party, but meh.
Like **BT **said, it becomes a serious problem with geared and talented players, especially ones that don’t have any personal threat dumps. (There’s an old joke-only-seriously that Warriors have a threat dump, and it’s called a battle rez–which is especially problematic now that you have a limited number of brezzes per encounter.)
Good DPS can and do hold back, use their threat drops/hides, etc. to keep from peeling off the tank. But that doesn’t mean it’s fun, especially when a threat-dropping ability becomes a part of your rotation.
I’m curious. Are there any raid encounters in Cataclysm like Saurfang or Festergut, where tanks have to swap off regularly? If DPS threat runs that close to tank threat, it’s got to be an unholy mess keeping the right tank in the lead while both (or three!) are trying to stay ahead of the DPS.
Yes, there are some like that, but it’s not a big deal. The taunt puts the taunting tank ahead of the other tank, and as long as they can continue establishing threat, the DPS generally can’t pull off them. Ragnaros is a tank swap fight, for example, and the only trouble I ever have with it is that the other tank (a paladin–I’m a DK) sometimes pulls off me right at the beginning before I get a good stack of threat going. The only other boss with a tank swap component in Firelands is the last stage of Beth’tilac, unless you two-tank Baleroc. Some of the trash requires tank swaps, too.
:eek: Awesomeeeeee.
:smack: Right, I forgot about taunts. (One reason I never tried to tank. :p)
Oh, and since I don’t think anyone else has mentioned this yet…
COSMETIC ARMOR *AND *GEAR STORAGE! WOOOOOOOOOO!
Of course, now I’m crying inside about all the gear I’ve deleted over the years that I wish I could have saved.
On a fight with tank swaps, one of the jobs of any tank who isn’t currently the boss’s target is to manage their own threat so as not to peel back off the current target. Sometimes, this involves stopping DPS altogether, or even (in the case of a fight like Festergut, where the previous tank is dealing with a massive damage buff) swapping out of your tanking stance/buff and calling for a Salv.
Ugh, so you were imagining the tanks having to just over-threat each other to swap? That would be insane. (The only fight I can think of that worked that way was Heroic Lady Deathwhisper, where she was immune to taunt, but that fight *also *involved her putting a stacking threat-generation-reducing debuff on her primary target. DPS just had to be careful not to out-threat the other tank at the point when the current target was no longer generating any threat. That way, as the current target naturally fell off the top of the meter, she would turn to the next-highest person, which should at that point be another tank.)
Yeah, no kidding. I’ve actually saved most of my old tier sets (which is why my toons’ banks are always chronically overstuffed) so I am SO looking forward to being able to offload all that stuff. I won’t know what to do with all the space!
Of course, I think they have a way to know if you ever owned something, so maybe they’ll let you get it back if they can verify that you owned it, even if you sold it at some point. Not sure they keep records that far back, though.
Yeah, but in fairness, I haven’t actually played since the beginning of the year, and haven’t raided since ICC. Details get a little foggy. I remember now of course that tank swapping goes off like clockwork only because of taunting.