Do warriors really need another Cleave?

I don't think warriors need more sustained AE threat. You have Incite + Deep Wounds for Thunderclap and also Shockwave. Maintaining threat is supposed to take some effort. I don't think tanking would be any more fun if you hit Tclap and never had to hit a button again.

The actual problem, in our minds, is threat scaling. Warriors (and all tanks) could AE tank just fine in Naxxramas.* It only became a problem over time when the dps of the dps classes grew so much more quickly than the tanks, largely because the dps classes have so many dps stats on their gear while plate tanks have Strength. Tank damage was pretty close to 50% of dps damage in the first tier of content, which was our goal, but has slipped to 25 to 30% of dps (your mileage may vary) in Icecrown.

We need a system that keeps tank damage scaling at the same rate as dps damage. However, that system can't be dependent on gear stats (unless you're willing to see tank gear go away) and can't be as ridiculous as deep talents that say "You get 5 AP per point of Strength."

I think you just notice threat issues more on AE pulls because things like Tricks and Misdirect mask any problems on single target pulls. Separate problem.

And yes Paladin tank AE damage and threat generation is still too high, largely because of Seals and HoR, but long-term we're going to nerf that instead of making all tanks able to trivially maintain threat in all situations. Referencing the other thread on threat a little, why as a tank would you even care what buttons you push if maintaining threat is a foregone conclusion?

* - AE tanking was fine in Naxxramas. AE damage was, and has remained, over the top. We prefer a model where the risk of tanking too many mobs is that the tank dies, not that you can't maintain threat on them all (within reasonable limits of course). We also prefer a model where the dps do AE damage on some pulls and switch to single target dps on others.

EDIT for some horrendous grammar.

Q u o t e:
That's just it...I mean I assume he KNOWS that Incite and Deep wounds only come into play on crits, and that TC/Shockwave only crit a small percent of the time, but his statement seemed to say that we're balanced around it.

Yes, you're balanced around it. Yes, I can read the tooltip on the talents. I'm saying the solution, in our minds, is not "I hit Thunderclap and it autocrits, applies Rend to everyone and then ticks for 10,000 K for the next 30 minutes." We might as well just remove the cooldown from Challenging Shout if that's how Tclap is going to play.

Dude pulled aggro does not represent a failure of class design any more than you sometimes dying represents a failure of class design. Both are going to happen sometimes unless you're absolutely at the top of your game. That's part of the challenge of playing your role. For our part, we'll make sure you have the tools to do your job, and for the most part you do. I don't think the tools are the issue, as I said above.

I'm talking philosophy here, because I assume that's usually more interesting to a wider audience. Philosophically, tank threat generation is working correctly (i.e. as we intend) with perhaps 4-5 exceptions that we would like to fix:

1) Paladins can do a little too much AE tanking "splash" damage, often without even setting out to do so.
2) Tricks and MD take too much of a burden off of the tank / hide issue #3.
3) Damage and therefore threat generation aren't scaling well at very high levels of gear. <-- this is the big one.
4) There is too much incentive to AE every pull, which puts a burden on the tank to AE tank every pull.
5) You could probably add that bears need a button to hit besides Swipe.

Q u o t e:
I don't think they're going to go back to the days of CCing every pull. I mean, I think they tried that with the new ICC heroics and we can see how well that worked out. What they'll do is make it attractive to want to CC, but it won't be mandatory.

Holding aggro won't be the problem. It will be dying from the healer going OOM or not being able to spam heal the tank fast enough. Of course, once a tier or two passes and everyone overgears the instance it will go back to being an AoE-fest.

Yeah, overgearing the content is fine. Being able to zerg an instance is one of the fun parts of overgearing. We're not worried about that. But on content at appropriate level, it wouldn't be so bad if *some* of the pulls required more crowd control and single-target damage.

Q u o t e:
Can we please get some sort of definition of "long-term" in regards to goals? We're CONSTANTLY being told that you have all these "long-term" goals all the while, we're sitting here playing in an environment knowing that the people behind the game aren't happy with the current state of it. Couple that with the "we're keeping an eye on it" and you have yourself some really frustrated players when push comes to shove.

"Long term" is a way I try and caveat "soon." I can't give any more specific timelines than that or players get really upset if we change our minds or miss those timelines. There are players who get frustrated when we announce Cataclysm changes, because they want those changes *now*. Sorry. I try and be as honest as I can be about things given the realities of the situation.

Q u o t e:
Wait, what? Both ToT and MD work brainlessly well on AE moves (FoK / Volley) for producing often-amazing threat leads for the tank on every single mob in a pack. I'd argue that threat issues become more noticeable when you're missing Rogues/Hunters, which gets to my next point ...

Fair enough. My point was more that tanks would probably be complaining a lot more about single-target threat in Icecrown without rogues and hunters. Using Tricks or Misdirect on a pull or when new adds show up feels awesome for the rogue / hunter and tank. Using them rotationally to keep threat high feels crappy for both. The tank feels gimp and the dps dude is annoyed by the maintenance required. For sake of argument, imagine that Misdirect and Tricks have the taunt tooltip that specifies the threat transfer only happens if the enemy is not already attacking the target.

Q u o t e:
Why in the world would we want to make AOE tanking more "challenging?". Heroics are something that most want to just get through so as to move up to raiding. There should be nothing challenging about them. They are 4 tiers below the game atm. Trash in raids is also something that we just want to get through in order to get to boss encounters. It is already a pain, as are respawns that pop in two hours or less, or having to waste more valuable raid time moving through trash that was already cleared the previous day.

There is nothing challenging, or should there be anything challenging about trash or heroics. Rather then nerf pallys, they should beef up the other classes so as to make the nuisance that is trash mobs easier and quicker to move through

.

Then you seem to be in the camp where Challenging Shout should have no cooldown. In other words, threat isn't a game you want to play and all mobs should attack the tank (at least raid trash and heroic dungeons) since that makes tanking easier for you. I can understand that viewpoint, but our problem is that not all tanks feel the way you do, and we want them to still have fun as well.

We've also made no trash raids, such as ToC. Some players like the efficiency of doing nothing but bosses. Others think clearing a dungeon on the way to the bosses is part of the raiding model and makes it feel more epic and ultimately more rewarding for them. But I really don't want to derail this discussion onto the value of trash or not. Suffice to say it's part of the experience and will have to be tanked. It shouldn't be pull-your-hair-out frustrating to tank, but it shouldn't be AFK-able either.

Q u o t e:
But hey, if the cook thinks he's putting out some bad food, I guess it's ok as long as they are planning on fixing it sometime down the road. Who cares if it tastes bad now.

We have three options to approach issues like this, really. We can lie and tell you we don't think it's a problem. We can say nothing. Or we can tell you that we think it's a problem and eventually want to fix it. This is the road I try to take as much as I can. The fourth option, fix it immediately, isn't on the table as much as you might really, really want it to be, or we would have already done so.

Q u o t e:
I highly doubt we will see GC post on this thread again, he tends to not come back to threads where he has spouted ignorance and in turn been roflstomped for it.

I think you are mistaking "I disagree" for "LOL I PWNED GC!" :)

Q u o t e:
If Warriors are balanced around Rend, why is it not in the Protection tree? Or at least at a lower tier in the arms tree?

That's kinda like saying Paladins are balanced around Imp Lays of Hands -and- Heart of the Crusader at the same time.

As someone above pointed out, Deflection is not in the Protection tree either. We're not really trying to encourage the 0/0/71 talent spec.

At the same time, going for dps talents as a tank can be an interesting choice. If it's a fight with a lot of quickly spawning adds, having more damage can be useful in picking them up. If it's a dungeon without a big risk of you dying, then going for dps can speed things along. Yet when you run into a situation where keeping you alive may be hard, then you can consider dumping those talents in lieu of something to keep you alive. I understand that given a choice between threat and mitigation that most tanks will choose the latter every time. Still, some of the most fun gear decisions I have had tanking were deciding when I could afford to sacrifice survival for threat and vice versa.

I can't believe I'm letting myself get sucked into this, but these two statements are at odds with each other:

Q u o t e:
A couple of designers looked at the cooldown, evaluated how often it really mattered, concluded not often, and thought the ability would be simpler to understand, less frustrating, and perhaps a small DK buff without the cooldown.

Q u o t e:
There's no metric. There's no philosophy. There's just a subjective decision being made. They give DKs a massive survivability buff because they think it makes tooltips read cleaner.

Before I had my yacht, gin and pony, this is what we would call science. Make a hypothesis ("looked"), tested the hypothesis ("evaluated") and decided whether the hypothesis could be rejected or not ("concluded").

The community (or rather a subset of) looks at the cooldown being removed from Will of the Necropolis, perhaps notices for the first time what the talent really does, perhaps disagrees with that course of action and leaps to the conclusion that the inmates must be running the asylum. Short of publishing a peer-reviewed paper that demonstrates our decision was made for sound reasons, we're not going to be able to walk those nay-sayers through all of our logic, nor would they be likely to be swayed by actual evidence anyway, nor do we want to get into a position where we have to ask the community's permission to make a change we think is right for our game. :)

None of that is to argue that some of these decisions aren't very subjective. They are. You can't turn a system as complex as WoW into some kind of mega equation that accurately predicts every outcome in the game. And really, who would want to? It's a game with a lot of math. It's not just math.

Really, though, we're off topic (again). This is why I am often reluctant to post. A thread trying to understand our philosophy on aspects of tanking became another stage for "If I was a WoW designer, I would have avoided all these foolish mistakes!"

Q u o t e:
I forgot these were actually scientific submissions to be reviewed and critiqued by peers, and not general discussion forums where making any short or glib comments get ripped apart by people looking for a fight.

Heh. We went for the same analogy.

Q u o t e:
Again, you are wrong. You do realize, don't you, that it is literally (as in mathematically) impossible for warriors to generate enough AoE threat on their own, using those tools, to keep threat off of aoe dps when that dps reaches a high enough gear level.

I would be very curious to see those numbers. You're making a jump from "Sometimes AE pull off of me" to "AE will always pull off of me," and that's just not what we're seeing. I totally buy that a warrior may work harder to generate as much, or less, AE threat as a paladin. We've acknowledged that is a problem. But that is the comparison I would make, not the comparison between "Sometimes I have to do stuff to maintain threat" and "Under no circumstances should I ever have threat problems."

It isn't the goal that dps can never pull off of you under any situation. If that was the goal, we're wasting an awful lot of the game space on all of these +threat and -threat talents and abilities, when we could just institute a rule that mobs will never retarget off of their initial target (which would hopefully be the tank). I don't think that would make tanking more fun, though it would definitely make it easier.

The threat-related goals still remain:

1) All -- Get threat to scale better at higher dps levels.
2) Paladin -- Nerf the threat capacity of HoR and SoC.
3) Druid -- Something to do on AE packs besides Swipe.
4) DK -- More burst threat, which the Icy Touch change should accomplish.
5) Warrior -- As I've said, we're pretty happy with, minus points 1 and 2 above.
6) I'll add that if taunts retain the ability to miss at all, it should be something you can gear your way out of. It's also possible we'll just make them always hit.