By Gravity | 
35 commentsBlizzard, in the developer chat, has asked the tank community for some discussion and feedback on whether threat is fun.
Q. You talk a lot about changing how we heal tanks, but will aggro ever come back as a challenging part of the game?
A. Not sure. This is something we discuss a lot. I even had a meeting on it this week! On the one hand, some tanks really felt like the way to distinguish themselves was to generate maximum threat per second. On the other hand, threat is a pretty invisibile part of the game (it’s limited to the UI at best), and I know when I tank that I always feel pretty emasculated when someone actually pulls off of me. It’s challenging, but is it really fun? This is the kind of thing we’d love to get more feedback on.
Please include your feedback on large banners to be shown in the background during the Olympics. Failing that, the forums would work too.
So let’s talk about it. Please offer your thoughts. I expect the DK tank aficionados at Blizzard have come across this site and will read. Really take a moment to pause and think about this question, even if you just agree with my views.
Is threat fun?
Whether “threat is fun” can be broken down into elements.
Talent trade-offs between threat and survival
This is the fun bit for me. I like building, analysing and optimising DK tank specs. I do an awful lot of it. I analyse sub-elements of the trees, working out the value of Improved Icy Talons prior to 3.33, and I’ll consider it again soon for 3.33. Working out which of Blood’s discretionary threat talents give the best returns.
If Blizzard made the decisions between threat and survival really easy, and you only had to worry about which variety of survival talents to pick, rather than which mix you take of threat and survival, I’d say pwnwear’s audience would reduce. I get 10000 hits a day, and a very large number of them are from people looking for “best dk tank spec” or many varieties on that. Sure, I’ve a great reference here for DK tank specs along with Satorri’s work on tankspot, but that’s only relevant if people need one.
Why do they need help? I think one reason is the decision on DK tank spec is awkward and multi-factorial. We have three trees, and within each tree there are a few viable ways to spec which put you somewhere on a matrix between high-survival tank and high-threat tank on one dimension and between AOE or single-target threat on the other. I am not sure how much of my web traffic is from people wondering how to balance threat and survival, or get the best threat, though.
If you overly simplify it, by excluding the other dimension of ICC-raid or 5-man, which generates another set of possibilities, the matrix is like this:
| High threat | Blood or Frost | Frost or Unholy |
| High survival | Blood or Frost | Frost (ICC) or Unholy (5-mans) |
| Single-target threat | AOE threat |
Within each cell are further varieties of spec that suit raiding or 5-mans. Oh and I’ve also ignored decisions like reactive survival like [Rune Tap], Plan B survival like [Will of the Necropolis], and proactive survival like [Frigid Dreadplate], and debuffs like [Improved Icy Touch]. I find all of those to be interesting decisions.
Maybe people would need pwnwear just as much if their decisions were solely around survival, and not about threat, I don’t know. Perhaps threat questions could be moved in Cataclysm from talents to gear.
The question on how to spec for DK tanks is particularly complicated, and I personally enjoy analysing it a lot, but I don’t think that’s the same for all tanks. I’d like some opinions on that. Do you like it, or is it just an unnecessary complication?
Would you prefer to:
- only choose which survival talents to take, for example to choose within a spec between [Will of the Necropolis], [Rune Tap], [Frigid Dreadplate] and [Unbreakable Armor], but you couldn’t get them all,
- or balance survival and threat, such as [Will of the Necropolis] against [Sudden Doom]?
Other tank classes do not have as many variables to balance in the tank decisions as we DKs, since they only have one tree within which to make these trade-offs.
Gear decisions
Gear isn’t really a massive decision for tanks, but it could be if threat was more a function of gear than of talents.
Cataclysm presents Blizzard an opportunity to move threat from being largely generated by talents to coming from gear and their stats.
Today if a tank upgrade drops, the first factor you evaluate it on is survival. If it’s a tanking upgrade, you get it. If it’s a threat upgrade for AOE or 5-mans, you could let your fellow tank have it if it was a survival upgrade for him, but you would alternatively happily take it for your threat set. This gear might have more strength or block value, for example. It’s not going to have critical chance, though. The decision is fairly binary: was it a tanking survival upgrade? If not, it goes to secondary concerns.
What if you instead could use some gear that had crit and loads of stamina, because all your defence came from talents? Or if reforging allowed you to trade-in some hit for crit, or expertise for agility? Would that be more fun?
I think so.
Also, it’s not like I really need to do 5-mans in 41K HP of tank gear. That’s so much overkill. It would be fun to have more variety within my tank gear to generate significantly more threat.
AOE situations and adds
I enjoy trying to hold threat in AOE situations, albeit for DK tanks it’s more a decision of which tree you take than how you play. It’s less about your skill and much more about your tree and spec. For example, in my Unholy 5-man spec with the 2pc Tier 10 gear, my AOE threat is insane. I love it. It’s actually fun because I don’t have to worry about micro-managing AOE threat anymore.
I have a single-target oriented Blood tank spec for ICC bosses, and it doesn’t do AOE. I put nothing into AOE talents. It’s so bad, it’s not worth even trying to AOE tank with it.
That dichotomous trade-off doesn’t seem like fun to me, because it makes the dual-spec feature almost redundant for DK tanks. You have an AOE spec in one, and a single-target spec in the other. There isn’t a solo, PvP or fun spec. There is no offspec.
Many Paladins tanks go for a SoC high-threat offspec along with their maintank spec, which is a similar conundrum. Wouldn’t it be more fun if you just had one tank spec that did the job on both AOE and single-target?
So next, let’s look at when actually playing.
If I’m in a weaker AOE spec, or alternatively against very strong DPSers, I tab-target, spreading my melee strikes around the mobs, I share my special attacks around too, so they all get hit by something more than just my AOE abilities. I think it’s kind of fun, because I’m good at it, and it forces me to micro-manage the mobs, and rely on quick taunts or death grips when I fail.
However, I’m not so sure that’s the kind of fun Blizzard had in mind: surely only someone very anal like me can really enjoy that. It’s a hell of a lot more fun to just kick the crap out of everything, to feel like a hero, and have AOE be almost automatic (like it is in my Unholy setup).
Single-target situations
On some fights, managing your threat is a good mechanic to worry about, like Festergut when you have the zomgwtfbbq buff, and need to stay below the threat of your fellow tank. That’s fun… fun-ish, because unless you have blessing of salvation or have spec’d into [Subversion] then you’re pretty screwed. Previously, I have had to auto-attack in absence of those, which is no fun at all.
Likewise, if you are on top of threat by such a large margin that in fact threat doesn’t matter anymore, then threat isn’t fun, it’s meaningless. At that point, you couldn’t care less about which threat-maximising talents you’d picked. You get to instead focus on tanking, on staying alive, positioning, reacting to abilities and other encounter games that Blizzard intended for us to enjoy and overcome.
Single-target threat isn’t a fun mechanic.
If you don’t have enough, particularly, it’s a real horrible feeling. You feel like a loser. Tanks do whatever they can to maximise it because they’re holding back the deeps. They’re a glass ceiling. Then by having to bias their gems and spec to threat, they start to compromise on survival (possibly), which in turn can weaken their chance at beating the encounter
Kiting
Kiting is pretty fun. I like it. I’ve played a hunter too, and enjoyed it there even more. It takes some skill. You can improve at it, and feel good about that. Threat whilst kiting however isn’t much fun; you want the threat on the kited mob to just happen, really. Fortunately, that’s usually the case.
One example where I’ve enjoyed this balance is Blood Princes, where I have to hold threat on Keleseth and also run around picking up nucleii. I liked that, it is challenging at first. I hope it gets easier for me with practice. 
Buffs
Buffs play an enormous part in how much dps/tps you do. It can’t be understated. You can double your dps when going from zero buffs to full 25-man raid buffs.
In a 10-man raid, you are thus encouraged by the game mechanics to spec into raid buffs. That adds another factor to the trade-off which is arguably not so easy to optimise, given you don’t usually know who’s going to turn up and might have nerfed yourself if its a redundant buff.
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i must say i liked much, much more how threat went in Tbc . those times you actually had to FIGHT for the lead in threat versus the fellow dpsers, especially in aoe situations.
being a micromanaging lover myself, i understand it was too hard for many, so they dumbed down all the threat compartment, at the point where now it’s only boring, and someone even gets pissed if he looses aggro, because he feel he should HAVE IT regardless of how he performs.
i remember with pride and joy those old runs in heroic shattered halls with my my guildies, where with my warrior tank i managed the 7-8 mob groups by organizing the CC and using my Fear aggressively to tank and kill only 1-2 per time while the others were feared..and watching them return perfectly to me after the fear, just in time for the kill of the first ones.
we ended those runs with the real satisfaction of having done a great group work. now it’s only “spam your aoe while watching tv” for tanks and dpsers.
healers are terribly close to that also, spamming blindly Coh-Wg-chain heal is often the best thing to do.
thumbs down for wotlk here
“That’s fun… fun-ish, because unless you have blessing of salvation or have spec’d into [Subversion] then you’re pretty screwed. Previously, I have had to auto-attack in absence of those, which is no fun at all.”
Just switch presence to Blood and DPS for a while until its your turn to taunt again. Works for me.
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Twitter: Cimegs5088
I think when he mention Subversion, he did awared of the options of switching to other presence.
Twitter: gravitydk
Indeed, even in blood presence, I’ve had that problem.
Twitter: Cimegs5088
As a tankaholic since wow release (warrior for most of the time), i musta say, threat is fun and a vital component of this game that distinguish it from others.
I did aware that if threat isn’t an issue there would be few times more tanks in the population, however, it’s not healthy in long run. Yes you could do so much more when threat isnt a concern, if you’re heading this direction, u end up burning out from this game faster than the game staying this way. Why? it’s just the same as not letting survival be a prob for tank, then might as well give invincible tankage to tanks, it’s just not gonna happen. Tanks’ population will eventually dropped again after people are burned out.
Another thing that distinguish wow from other game, is the balance of stats, blizz did us a favor by simplified the stats systems, but to totally scrap the threat system (not to mention that defense cap will not be an issue anymore in next xpac), you will soon see people stacking on green gears with stam for quite awhile unless blizz planning to give huge stat budget increment to gears as ilvl increase, which, again, is bad, and something they did mentioned that it isnt what they intended to do.
i am indeed feeling frustrated on losing aggro to warrior due to certain tps spike on their side (ss crit + dev crit + snb + ss crit..) occasionally, as well as the single target snap aggro that is almost unmatcheable by other tank class, i still want to improve on my gear/playstyle/built, etc, instead of asking blizzard to make a downies game. I also aware of the strength of each tank class, so i guess there’s always a trade off, whcih contribute to the fun part of this game.
Conclusion is, i said threat system should remain in game, and it shall be made harder, nowadays just impossible for dps with equavalent or slightly higher gear dps to pull aggro, which, lost the sense of achievement when one did the tanking job. (was well respected, if not the best warrior tank on server in vanilla and bc due to the good multi tanking, but nowadays, people are expecting the tank to be able to hold aggro no matter what class, whcih is sad).
I like threat. It is another dimension to the game that all players have to be mindful of. Tanks need to generate enough threat that they are not a cap for dps, dps needs to be mindful of the threat they generate so they don’t pull aggro and potentially wipe the raid. Healer threat doesn’t seem to be an issue at all.
With hunter misdirect and rogue tricks this helps to generate snap aggro for tanks and over long fights or fights where the boss has an aggro wipe mechanic it helps them keep aggro. Also dps race bosses like festergut 25 man where the first tank is not as geared as the 2nd tank so they may not generate as much threat as the better geared tank.
This game is easy enough without taking another fun aspect of the game away. I remember back in burning crusade you had tier 4, tier 5 and tier 6 guilds, now everyone is in a tier 9 guild and it doesn’t take much effort to get the guild to tier 10.
Disclaimer: I’m playing pretty casual, couple times a week at most, raiding mostly one evening a week only!
I find threat really fun when survivability is NOT a major issue. When a Boss can kill me in two swings, I concentrate on staying alive first (and thus finding the correct equip for that), generating threat after. Yes, the Damage Dealers will have to cope with it and keep an eye on the threat meter… but that’s part of their job, isn’t it?.
That is – in my opinion – the wrong turn that the game designers took by making it almost easy to generate a decent amount of threat and hard to survive. The main tank’s threat should be the raid damage output limit. If one want to make it a real progression factor, then let’s use enrage timers or increasing debuff like Toravon’s that will make the raid fail if the damage output is too low and the combat lasts too long.
At the moment threat is not fun for me because it is hard to survive and the damage dealers are used to a high amount of threat and don’t even care looking at the threat meter.
This post very nicely organizes a number of things I had noticed but that I hadn’t thought about with this level of depth. It’s nice to see it all in one place.
I think that what makes tanking fun is when the things I do as a tank matter in terms of the success of the raid. Keeping up threat, interrupts, positioning, collecting adds or other engaging tasks all help to keep tanking fun for me. For this reason, I find tanking Hodir and offtanking for Iron Council 10 to both be very fun even though the threat requirements are very different. Even Patchwerk can be fun if I approach it as a race to produce the biggest tank dps.
I think my least favorite fights to tank are Deathbringer Saurfang and, especially, Rotface. They’re terrible. In the case of DBS, at least I get to play the taunt game and be careful with AOE. As for Rotface, my job as MT is incredibly boring and never important. Those aren’t fun encounters because there is no way to distinguish myself as a good tank; the costs for switching to a weaker tank are low.
I think threat works as an encounter mechanic when it feels like it matters. The debuff on Festergut is, I think, a novel way to make threat interesting. As for gearing, I agree that it feels survival trumps almost all other considerations and that this does not present (to steal one of Ghostcrawler’s favorite phrases) an ‘interesting decision’.
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First off, thank-you Gravity for an excellent DK tank resource. I’ve been following for many weeks now. (I have a bear main and your work has been critical in me getting used to the predictive vs. reactive tanking of DK vs. bear)
For me, the aggro balancing is essential – both to my enjoyment of tanking and of the game. Reduced down, WoW is a ‘paper scissors rocks’ sort of balance between enough DPS to kill the bad guy without the healer running out of mana while the tank keeps enough aggro on the DPS so they don’t die. Encounters which do not have this balance feel more like button mashing than anything remotely interesting.
For me, this drives the reasoning to seek more knowledge of the game and class mechanics. I have played healers, dpsers and tanks and have found my understanding, enjoyment and performance increase as I work toward mastery in either.
I can’t easily envision a game in which I spend my time being purely defensive with some mechanic that more-or-less guarantees the bad guys focus on me. From a DPS point of view, I don’t want that either. When I pull off a tank, things get interesting…both in how I manage the situation and figuring out what I did so I can avoid doing so in the future.
‘Aggro’ in itself may not be ‘fun’ but the challenge it creates as a component of an encounter is critical to the encounter being fun…and the game being fun.
…for me at least.
Thanks again for some great work here!
I played vanilla and missed BC completely during a few years off of the game… but now I absolutely looooooove heroic Halls of Reflection. It’s a rush every time and it’s such a rhythmic place to tank… especially in randoms where people can go from facepalming and expecting to wipe 6 times off the first pull to the last 3 adds in the tunnel where everyone has an attide like… “we effing got this.” Although… it can still be insanely frustrating if your highest DPS is like 3.5k.
I’m really happy with my Unholy tank spec on single target, and for it’s versatility, but I finally broke down and made a “survivability” based Frost tank spec I’m fairly happy with for the sake of dungeon achievements and a boss like Toravon, where 6 extra seconds on IB can make or break you. Well that and pretty 5k crits on HB and Obliterate. I kind of look at it like a Priest dual specced Holy and Disc for raid vs tank heals.
Outside of respeccing though it comes down to adaptability for me and that’s where I have the most fun. Tweaking your rotation or using things you wouldn’t normally use to keep everything facing your direction. It does seem almost too easy in raid environments sometimes… but I do appreciate the time I can spend nursing my CD’s.
Twitter: cspenn
For me, especially since I run far more heroics than 10/25s, threat is a much greater concern for me than survival, though certainly survival is still important. I focus all my talents and choices based on AoE threat largely because I have two solid taunts (well, one taunt and one sorta-taunt that doesn’t change aggro) for single target. Hence I have a very strong Unholy tanking build for its incredible AoE threat (especially combined with 2pT10 D&D) and spam the taunts whenever they’re up.
I don’t focus much on single target threat because it’s largely moot – I get overwhelmed anyway. Two of the mages I run with are so stacked in arcane with haste and crit that it’s not uncommon for them to crit three times in a row for 27K each shot. I could build single target all I wanted, but against the RNG, I will likely lose and have to taunt anyway. Better to get a running start on the secondary mob threat tables and spam taunts on the primary to keep up with the pewpewlazers.
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I don’t think producing threat as being particularly fun, what’s enjoyable to me about tanking is control. To me, this is still the difference between a good tank and a great tank. Good tanks can hold threat and survive. Great tanks do that while making everyone else’s job easier. When I run heroics on my rogue, I hate tanks who don’t move mobs when melee can’t get at their back due to ooze or whatever.
Threat itself isn’t fun to me because it’s a threshold thing. If a good tank is one who holds threat from DPS who are not holding back, what’s a great tank going to do? Even more threat doesn’t make any one else’s job easier.
What I’d like to see is more active survival oriented abilities. Suppose a tank had a short cooldown ability to absorb a blow and turn it into a dot instead. He’s still taking the damage, just over time instead of as a large chunk. That’s just an example (and please no balance discussion on whether that’d be op or not, it’s just an example), but the point is that a great tank really does have better control over their damage intake, I see that as being more fun than doing 20% more threat than the guy who’s already out-threating the DPS.
For me, threat is…interesting, but also annoying. I don’t know that I’d like to have no threat at all in the game, because then tanking would be nothing but “hit it once so it stays on me, then survive and worry about nothing else.” However, what annoys the crap out of me is that threat gen in different situations is so vastly different…and moreso that threat gen by various DPS specs is so vastly different.
Take AoE, for example. I’m tanking as frost at the moment, because a) I love DW and b) I -hate- not having an AoE snap aggro when everyone insists on nuking the entire pack as soon as I get near it. Frankly, in that situation, threat is irritating, not because of the mechanic itself but because if you’re not specced deep frost, there isn’t really a snap aggro to glue a whole pack to you at once. That should be a basic part of every tank’s toolkit, in my opinion.
And it annoys me to no end that I can go into a heroic with some classes and have no problem with them pulling off me, even if they start full-tilt right after my HB lands, but other classes can do the same, draw everything to them, and get turned into a fine red mist…and have been doing -less- damage than the first guy. All DPS specs should have the same (very significant) threat reduction 9and for the love of all that’s holy, having been working on my newlyish-80 warrior, don’t make an additional threat move part of -any- DPSer’s normal rotation!!).
i don’t agree much with you. again, being in love with the tbc period, i liked a lot when as dps you actually had to measure your dps to not aggro the boss, even in 25man raids.
it added a lot of depth to the dps class, instead now as dps (Well 95% of the dps classes in game), you just blindly spam your dps rotation as best as you can from the start to the end of the combat, it’s very boring.
in conclusion, in few words : thigter threat margins means ALL the party-group-raid is forced in much more teamplay, for implicit reasons.
and teamplay is the ending goal of this game, if i’m not wrong
fortunately a few classes in game still have to watch aggro a bit; fury warriors, kitty ferals, destro locks until few patches ago..maybe frost dw dps if you don’t spec subversion (wich is wrong anyway).
it could be a very interesting idea to add a spell to each class that if used in the rotation can bolster up your dps, but also does a bit of innate threat (like heroic strike) : that way you have a normal rotation for safe threat, and good dpsers can insert that X skill to their rotation as a filler to prop up the dps until they are near the aggro limit.
that way dps classes could really fight for dps meters with skill, and not just thanks to their spec potentiality, wich is the thing we have seen in wotlk (dumbed down rotations overall, easy threat for 90%classes).
Well, I’m not a huge fan of having to watch threat -that- tightly to begin with, but even so, if it was -all- classes, that would be one thing. That’s why I say all DPS classes should have the same threat reduction – the fury warrior should be able to do the same amount of damage for the same amount of threat as the rogue or the mage.
If they were to add extra-threat options for everyone to increase their DPS, that’d be fine too, but again…same amount of extra threat for same amount of gain. It’s frustrating as hell being one of those DPSers that has to watch threat and being out-DPSed by someone that has no threat issues at all, let me tell you (coming from someone who played a lock as a main for a while and has been working on a fury warrior lately).
Also, not only do DPSers all need the same threat reduction, they also need comparable threat dumps, if it’s an environment where you need to watch your threat that close. Otherwise it’s objectively better to stack only those classes with a lot of threat reduction, very good threat dumps, or both (arcane mages, I’m looking at you) for DPS, and that effectively means the other classes/specs simply won’t get played. If threat was as big an issue as you seem to be suggesting, why would anyone bring the fury warriors and locks and such to any raid? They would have to throttle their DPS significantly, whereas other classes/specs could go all out, or at least much more so. Going with a tighter threat model would be fine, I suppose (not my preference but it would work ok), but to do so, Blizz would seriously need to rebalance threat output per damage among all the DPS classes or else very quickly there would only be the low-threat-per-damage classes seeing any raid time.
Twitter: Cimegs5088
1) Threat is another aspect of game that make it fun.
2) DPS watching threat is another aspect of game that make it fun.
3) old Blessing of Salvation is pure bad for the health of game in long run.
4) It’s ok if a tank is running aoe rotation and an equivalent gear dps with fully buffed go all out on dps on 1 single target and pull aggro, but not a tank running aoe rotation and it’s so high that impossible for dps to pull aggro in whatsoever condition.
5) Dual spec kind of kill the game on 1 big chunk, due to the flexibility of having 2 spec that does 2 different thing, instead of players having to “design” what they need while balancing the stats and abilities with the limited balanced talent point budget.
just my 2 cents