the tanking experience: threat

[hung]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3300854

threat will go from x3 tank dps to x5...

What do you dps-ers think, has tanking threat been a big problem? I know that some DPS burst dmg (especially on pull) has caused issues, but generally speaking we tanks are able to maintain aggro the longer the fight goes on right? Especially once vengeance kicks in. I know i'm probably one of the less 'threatening' tanks in our core (well... all tanks look not threatening next to Nyrrin/Tex), but do you have to throttle your DPS to deal with me?

Well if that's the case, i guess your worries will be over soon.

[janin]

I actually liked having to throttle dps to avoid pulling aggro. In vanilla, it was a big part of being a dps class - maximize damage while not pulling aggro. However, except when there's a big gear mismatch (e.g. pugging), this hasn't been an issue for a while, so I don't think it'll make a huge difference.

Adam

[Chamomile]

Yeah, these days the only times I pull aggro is off the initial pull or sometimes when I'm spreading dots / dps on secondary targets.

[Devinoch]

On fights where we change targets a lot, I am definitely throttling my DPS for the first minute or two, which results in a chunk of downtime, because that's time spent I'm not getting CDs for AW/Z back, and if we're doing a lot of target changing, especially with tanks who don't crap threat out all over the place, I know my DPS is getting toned down a lot, and that's even with burning through my Salv cooldown. If Salv had a shorter CD, I wouldn't care as much, but on some fights, I have literally backed away and stopped doing anything other than autoswinging (or even autoswing) because I'm straddling the threat threshold. This isn't bad for Tex (unless I blow everything RIGHT at the start, which would be my own damn fault) but I know you in particular don't generate as much threat as either of the paladin tanks. Dorian has a similar problem, so I don't attribute it to any particular player so much as paladins pound out lots of threat, and the other tanking classes don't as much. So yes, I will be very glad to have all tanks doing more threat. It'll let me unthrottle a bit on the DPS.

~c.

[tethealla]

I usually only get myself killed in AoE situations. The new swipe does a lot of damage. The other time I can get myself killed is if I use feral charge+ravage. It quickly places me behind the target and does a high damage attack. This second one will still be a possibility of death depending on how hard the tank did his/her initial hit.

From a tanks perspective, I'm curious how things will shake themselves out. In the short term, our job just gets easier. We're getting a boost to threat. This may allow us to regear/regem/reenchant some of our threat generation away for survival.

I'm more interested in the longer term. The article went into some ideas of making our survival more active like the DK. This could be fun. Right now the druids "block" procs off of a crit. It could be interesting if they make that more active like that prot pally ability was made recently (holy shield?).

I am really happy to regain some UI real estate. My UI is overly cluttered as it is and the ability to remove open makes me happy.

[Dorian]

The article went into some ideas of making our survival more active like the DK. This could be fun.

Fun he says. More like now you will all learn my pain :-p. This is what active survival looks at the very minimum level.

1) Keep both diseases on the target, for the melee speed slow and physical damage reduction, using a combination of outbreak (both diseases on target for free 60 second cooldown), plague strike (1 unholy rune), and icy touch (1 frost rune).
2) Death Strike (1 U 1 F) when you get a big hit so that your shield and healing is as large as possible.
2a) Try to keep both unholy and frost runes on cool down while having one blood rune off cooldown so that if Runic Empowerment from Rune Strike Procs the Rune that will come back will either be a Frost Rune or an Unholy Rune.
3) Keeping blade barrier constantly refreshed which requires both blood runes to be depleted and gives 8% damage reduction for 10 seconds
3a) Only have both your blood runes depleted right before one of your blood runes comes back.
4) Keep bone shield up whenever possible as it provides 20% damage reduction for 4 hits.

Those are the major things you need to do in order to survive that don't involve boss mechanics and standing out of fire, there's probably another half dozen things that you can do which makes the above easier like blood tapping correctly so that you don't have to worry about the blood rune replenish proc off of runic empowerment. Personally, I can't pull this off for extended periods of time without getting into Rune Tetris Tunnel Vision. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I do wish that blizzard made it a little beat easier on death knights by giving us some passive mitigation. I agree that activation mitigation is a good idea in some ways, but at a certain point I want to fight the boss not my class. Not that I'd reroll or anything like that, because when you do have it going you feel all warm and fuzzy.

[hung]

To be fair dorian: all tanks do number 1 in your list... we just have different ways of applying those debuffs. And your #4 I would put as analogous to some of the mid-length cooldowns/self buffs, also shared by all.

Really the biggest difference (the 'active survival') is the fact that as a DK, you monitor your incoming dmg and you have ~something~ you can do about it. Namely, you change your ability usage from something DPS/threat optimized, to something healing/mitigating optimized. You have a ~choice~. The rune-tetris argument can be made equally by DPS DK's can't it? I assume its similarly difficult to maintain optimum dps rotation than to maintain proper death strike timing. (so its really a class resource argument, not a active/passive argument?).

Tankadins used to be able to make a similar choice with holy power, but I think that's been shifted more into a mid-length cooldowns now. Basically, the other 3 types of tanks don't have much choice in how we spend our resources.

Personally as a warrior, the only real decision i get to make is the order in which i apply my debuffs (and when i blow my cooldowns... but that's universal to all tanks). In some ways, I think rage tanks (and warriors specifically) have become the simplest tanking class. Gone are the days when carpal tunnel was an expected side effect of 'doing it right'.

[Dorian]

I think I probably got more into the resource management than active vs passive mitigation, I wrote that post on too little sleep, so I concede that point. However, I would like to point out speaking from a Frost DK perspective that Rune Tetris dance is so much easier than the tanking one, because I don't have a "worthless" rune to worry about. The problem for Blood DK's is that the blood rune doesn't really help your survival. Okay so rune tap is great for the 10% heal, but the rest of the time you're trying to get unholy or frost runes to proc off runic empowerment so that you can deathstrike. You don't really have much choice when it comes to how you use your unholy and frost runes, if you don't use them for death strike than you're doing it wrong, and hey look death strike turns those runes into death runes. Those death runes are going to be used to death strike so really you gain no real benefit out of them being death runes since you would use them as the frost and unholy they replaced. I think the best comparison I can make is this. If a warrior or paladin had to hit a button every time they wanted to block I think that would feel very similar to DK and the deathstrike. But maybe I'm just ranting it's been a long day, so don't take this too seriously .