Is threat fun?

#0 - Feb. 28, 2010, 5:30 a.m.

Blizzard, in the developer chat, has asked the tank community for some discussion and feedback on whether threat is fun.

I have a tanking blog with my views on this and some analysis, please visit and offer your thoughts.
http://pwnwear.com/2010/02/27/is-threat-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.

Would appreciate your thoughts!
http://pwnwear.com/2010/02/27/is-threat-fun/

Ghostcrawler

#41 - March 1, 2010, 4:32 p.m.

When threat doesn't matter as a tank, then maximizing your rotation doesn't matter much either. To use the warrior example, you could skip Devastate, Revenge and Shield Slam and just autoattack and use defensive cooldowns. Is that fun?

On the other hand, many of the requests we see are for harder hitting attacks, especially on the AE front, so that in essence it's less work to tank multiple mobs at once. Is this really what you want?

I would assert in the current game that threat is almost never an issue. It might be an issue in the first few seconds of a fight (including when new adds join the party) or when the dps severely outgear the tank (such as in a Dungeon Finder situation). Especially in a world with Misdirect, Tricks of the Trade, and Tauntable bosses, tanks on single-target raid fights get so far ahead of the dps and healers, that catching them would be almost impossible. We could definitely tone this down a little such that tanks needed to fight for threat a little more than they do now. Some players would welcome that change and some would say that Blizzard hates tanks and makes them work too hard.

Discuss.