Is Threat Fun?

11:45AM on 04 Mar 2010 by shieldbreakr
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Recently the developers queried the Tanks of WoW to discuss threat. One of my blogging compatriots, Gravity (of pwnwear.com -- go read it if you haven't yet), opined on the subject at great length with focuses on gearing and spec decisions. He also posted a helpful starting thread on the official tanking forums, which unsurprisingly turned into a giant woe-is-me tanking whiner thread in about eight seconds. However, I think I can answer this question without quite so much verbosity: no, threat is not fun. It is artificial and seems like a clunky game mechanic to get around the fact that people can't even get out of the damned fire, not to mention a boss that actually might move around.

Fundamentally, raiding is a group puzzle solving game with timing mechanics. If you're good at Dance Dance Revolution and can solve sudoku puzzles, you're probably overqualified to be a raider in Warcraft. The entire raiding scene can be summed up with: tank(s) hold the boss(es) in some spot, DPS shoots their magic missiles at the boss, healers heal the tanks (and occasionally bad DPS who can't play DDR). At around a third into the fight, everyone presses the green left arrow, then the right red arrow, then back back, forward forward, and everyone gets back into positions to start tanking/shooting missiles/healing scrubs. Repeat at 66% into the fight, dps hard the last 10%, oh we won. Collect purple pixels, yay, I'm awesome.

Inside of this group puzzle solving game, everyone has a particular job and as the tank your job is to hold the boss in one spot and keep him focused solely on you. You do this by maintaining threat. Threat is really a misnomer since you would figure the threatening people are the ones actually killing the boss (or the ones healing the ones doing the killing), but this ability for the person who does the least damage, can take the most damage, and does very little else needs a name, so threat sounds great. Threat can be considered invisible damage (like what Ovechkin does instead of scoring goals) because it really is only there to give the tanks a way to keep the boss on them.

The reason we know threat is artificial? Watch as many arena videos as you feel like sitting through and notice how many strategies revolve around killing the prot warrior/paladin first. Now consider how many involve picking on the guy wearing toilet paper and doing all the damage. Alright, I think we can move on..

The upside of threat, if you can consider it an upside, it that it is pretty easy to build as long as you know which three buttons to mash like a golden retriever just fell on your keyboard. Most every tanking class has a tanking buff (frost presence, def stance, righteous fury, being a druid) that drastically increases the threat you generate from seemingly innocuous moves. Ever considered what taunting really is? Every NPC enemy in the game is basically Joe Pesci from Goodfellas. I just shouted at a mob and now it wants to kill me and only me.



Another key problem with threat as it is now is that once you have established yourself as the primary recipient of the mob's full attention, everyone else can go to town with their magic missiles. The pace of threat for any tank that doesn't need a rectal/cranial extraction is so large that no DPS in the game could ever overcome it. Bash, bash, bash, AFK go to make a sandwich while DPS mashes out their rotations.

With addons like Omen it is easy to calculate the exact point in which a boss will never leave you (unless someone else talks about their mom) with mathematical precision. 3.8 million threat, nearest rogue has 1.8 million threat and the boss has 3 million hit points left. Unless that rogue is doing 60% of the dps, you can go make your sandwich now because the fight still has about a minute and a half left .. then ten more while people argue over purple pixels and optimal resurrection order.

So the question should be asked: if threat is so kludgy and artificial, what can we do to replace it?

Fortunately the answer is relatively simple and has already been half implemented: increase tank DPS, lower threat per second, add more movements and threat clears to fights, lower boss damage, increase boss AOE damage, raise DPS class stamina, lower healing throughput, and make more encounters with more than one boss.

- Increase Tank DPS : Already implemented and they are pretty good at it. A slight increase across the board should be made to rebalance after they are no longer the only people standing in front of the mob full time.
- Lower TPS : Needs to be done in order to make the real champions of threat optimization champions again. Remember that tank in Molten Core who viewed pack tanking as his personal crusade? That guy needs to be held up as a hero, not just called out when he f*cks up.
- Add more movement/threat clears : Supposedly the bosses we are fighting are generals and bodyguards and strategic geniuses that outsmarted the burning crusade, why do they act like idiots in a battleground that don't kill the healers?
- Changing Taunt : Changing how threat and taunt works should make it more universal across both PvE and PvP by causing an exclusive targeting mode for several seconds (where your target is forced to target the tank) then released again. Instead of just working on hunter pets and voidwalkers off the leash, tanks would be able to force rogues to look at them for 3-5 seconds every 30 and have a chance to break up killer combos. This makes prot/tank specs useful in both PvE and PvP.
- Lower Boss Damage / Lower Healing Throughput : Right now, no one but the most geared can stand in front of the ICC/ToGC bosses. The incoming damage is just too high. Because of this, the incoming healing needs to be equally as high. As a result, we are in a mexican standoff between increasing boss damage, increasing tank avoidance, and increasing healing throughput that has to end at some point. Pre-nerf, my DK was sitting at almost 60% avoidance, Cataclysm gear would put it out at 80%. The avoidance nerf was needed and is a direct result of the super high boss damage/healing rotation system that WotLK has produced. Luckily, Blizzard has already mentioned this as a problem and seems to be solving it in Cataclysm.
- Multi-boss Encounters : I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been fighting single bosses for years now. Twins, Princes, and Emperors were a real treat because it makes the fights that much more complicated (without even more needless taunt cycles). Multi-boss encounters are fun and sprinkled in a bit more liberally would give tanks more things to do besides let one guy stand in the corner w/ the boss while everyone else hits him in the back and the Offtanks feel like wastes of space (or secretly hope the MT dies so they can have a moment in the sun).

That is my thoughts on threat. No, it is not fun. Yes, it needs to be changed.

Think I'm wrong (and I probably am)? Drop a comment here or on the official boards with your thoughts. We have the opportunity to help change the game, why not take advantage of it?

Tags: tanking pve