#0 - April 19, 2010, 8:55 p.m.
Q u o t e:
A: We will make sure they don’t feel gimp compared to the other 3 tanks. We’re not going to give them an ability that they can just spam endlessly to maintain AE threat. We think Thunder Clap and Shockwave already work well for that. We want you to have to manage threat, but we don’t want it to be insanely hard to manage. (You also might be doing less AE tanking in Cataclysm overall.)
So for starters, let's look at "You also might be doing less AE tanking in Cataclysm overall". As has already been asked, but not yet responded to to my knowledge...if there's going to be less AE tanking, why are all three other tanks getting better AoE abilities/control?
1) Prot Paladins get an AoE blind+damage, instant cast, which neatly offsets their "weakness" of mobs running over consecrate.
2) Bears get Bloodbath, which gives them something to use with swipe+maul.
3) DKs get a cost-free outbreak, which despite rune nerfs allows for an instant pestilence at the very least, probably going right along with D&D/Bloodboil.
If AoE is less of a concern, why are the other tanks getting new abilities to handle AoE? This goes against what Ghostcrawler said just a few months ago about not making new aoe abilities for tanks. It'd be understandable if their existing abilities were tweaked (for example, new non-next strike Maul hitting many more targets), but creating new ones from scratch seems to be contrary to what they've been saying.
Direct GC quote:
Q u o t e:
We’d like to see less AE overall, so buffing everyone’s AE tools isn’t going to be tops on our agenda. That does however mean that we really can’t afford to have a “best AE tank”, and while things are more fair there than they were in BC, they aren’t fair enough.
So with all that contradictory statement vs. action occurring, here's blizzard saying on their twitter commercial: "We’re not going to give them an ability that they can just spam endlessly to maintain AE threat. We think Thunder Clap and Shockwave already work well for that. We want you to have to manage threat, but we don’t want it to be insanely hard to manage."
For the record, I don't ever remember seeing a warrior asking for an ability they could just spam for threat. What we've needed throughout Wrath is some means of aoe hitting new targets that spawn during add fights like thorim, Valithiria, Arthas, Gunship and so on. In these fights, we can pick up the first set of adds, but then new ones spawn in between the 6 seconds of "we can't aoe due to cooldown". 6 seconds is a very long time in these fights.
What we've been forced to do is use our two pickup abilities, and then spam single target abilites rapid fire, trying to tab or target new adds before they get to healers/dps. This is hugely inferior to the mechanics of the other tanks. Moreover, we have to work much harder to hold groups through AoE like Blizzard, Seed of Corruption, and so forth; other tanks have aoe hits that will hold aggro though these; we get our two on their cooldowns, and then have to tab through everything, hitting with single-target abilities and cleave.
The big one that hasn't been addressed yet is Cleave. Since Cleave is no longer going to be off the global cooldown, we're stuck when it comes to AoE; we can Thunderclap, backup+shockwave as before; but then we're left with the choice of using cleave for two targets or using our higher-threat single abilities for one target. This is a big deal.
What I'm hoping for is an increase of the number of cleave targets since it's getting "nerfed". Or if a slot is freed from our glyph+cooldown setup, having the glyph affect more.
