Ghostcrawler wrote:
Back in December, I wrote a blog post 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. Enough that we’re planning to apply a hotfix this week to change how threat works.
Dungeon Finder
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.
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 a hotfix this week 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.
December blog:
Ghostcrawler wrote:
Threat Needs to Matter
We want tanks to care about the buttons they hit instead of just relying on auto-attacking to control their target. We don’t necessarily want very complicated tank DPS rotations, because as I mentioned above, tanks do have other things to keep track of. But we want their combat abilities to be engaging. Good tanks should be those who control, survive, and generate sufficient threat.
TLDR version: Make threat so easy that even lobotomites can hold aggro (never mind that threat hasn't been at all challenging since early TBC) so LFD queues will shorten.
The dumb thing is, it's going to backfire. Most LFDers don't tank not because threat is hard, they don't tank because they don't like responsibility, and making the button mashing easier won't change that. DPS in LFD like nothing better than putting the tank on follow, and quite frankly, anyone so retarded they sit in a queue for 45m then spend 2-3 hours spamming one button isn't going to change their attitudes or be able to figure out how to pull mobs.
What it will do is further bore and aggravate the beleaguered tanks currently in LFD and encourage more to quit (and increasing role disparity even further). This change won't create more tanks than it will drive away.
But what this about-face is really all about is just more proof of what everyone who isn't a lobotomite already knows, which is that the devs have no real vision for the game and are just randomly cycling through different schemes, desperately trying to stop the subscription hemorrhage.
Ghostcrawler wrote:
In an upcoming patch: 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.
Also Mr Street's math makes no sense because it will make threat even more stupidly RNG depending on weapon speed (threat curve will be dramatically different with a 1.6 speed weapon rather than a 2.8 speed weapon, or if an attack misses or crits). Not to mention that now that Vengeance doesn't go off AP, tanks will be hitting as hard as heroic raid bosses
even when they aren't tanking.
idk, why am I even writing this? not like anyone cares or disagrees, and I should cease to marvel at Blizzard stupidity.
