If you’re wondering what all the fuss about Ghostcrawler’s latest dev watercooler post is about, well, you should probably go read it. Some of these changes have already gone live on the realms, while others won’t until the next patch. The basic gist is as follows:

Threat generated by tanks has been increased from 300% of damage dealt to 500%. What this means in practice is if your tank is doing 5k DPS, you’d need to do over 25k DPS to pull threat off of him or her. (You need to do roughly 110% of tank threat to pull once he or she has aggro, so you’d actually need to do 27.5k DPS to pull off of a tank doing 5k DPS.) This change was hotfixed in, so if you’re noticing your tank is suddenly doing a lot more threat per second, that’s why.

The way Vengeance stacks is going to be streamlined. Vengeance currently ramps up somewhat slowly. In the current model, every time you take damage as a tank, you gain 5% of the damage you take as attack power. So if you’re hit for 20,000 damage, you gain 1,000 attack power. As you take more and more damage, this stacks up to a maximum of 10% of your health, so for a tank with 165,000 health, this caps at 16,500 attack power. In the new version, when a tank takes that 20,000 damage, he or she will gain one-third of the damage of the attack as attack power immediately, or 6,600 AP. This is more than six times as much attack power gained as in the current model. Vengeance will otherwise work the way it does now.

These two things combined by themselves mean that, except in cases where the DPS simply blows all their cooldowns immediately upon seeing the trash coming or as soon as they see the boss while the tank is sitting down to eat, threat will be almost trivial for a tank to gain and maintain. In addition to this revelation (which we are already starting to play with right now, as I experienced in a recent pickup Zul’Gurub instance), Ghostcrawler talks about how tanking will be redesigned to remain active with this new design philosophy.

This is really groundbreaking stuff, and it means that patch 4.3 will see the complete dismantling of the legacy of vanilla WoW tanking design. Once, gaining and keeping threat was the most important role of the tank, more important even that survival, and many endgame tanks were warriors 31/5/15 specced into Defiance in the protection tree to ensure threat. These changes can be seen as driving a final nail into that kind of tanking’s coffin.Continue reading The new tanking threat paradigm and youFiled under: Druid, Paladin, Warrior, Death KnightThe new tanking threat paradigm and you originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments
If you’re wondering what all the fuss about Ghostcrawler’s latest dev watercooler post is about, well, you should probably go read it. Some of these changes have already gone live on the realms, while others won’t until the next patch. The basic gist is as follows:

Threat generated by tanks has been increased from 300% of damage dealt to 500%. What this means in practice is if your tank is doing 5k DPS, you’d need to do over 25k DPS to pull threat off of him or her. (You need to do roughly 110% of tank threat to pull once he or she has aggro, so you’d actually need to do 27.5k DPS to pull off of a tank doing 5k DPS.) This change was hotfixed in, so if you’re noticing your tank is suddenly doing a lot more threat per second, that’s why.

The way Vengeance stacks is going to be streamlined. Vengeance currently ramps up somewhat slowly. In the current model, every time you take damage as a tank, you gain 5% of the damage you take as attack power. So if you’re hit for 20,000 damage, you gain 1,000 attack power. As you take more and more damage, this stacks up to a maximum of 10% of your health, so for a tank with 165,000 health, this caps at 16,500 attack power. In the new version, when a tank takes that 20,000 damage, he or she will gain one-third of the damage of the attack as attack power immediately, or 6,600 AP. This is more than six times as much attack power gained as in the current model. Vengeance will otherwise work the way it does now.

These two things combined by themselves mean that, except in cases where the DPS simply blows all their cooldowns immediately upon seeing the trash coming or as soon as they see the boss while the tank is sitting down to eat, threat will be almost trivial for a tank to gain and maintain. In addition to this revelation (which we are already starting to play with right now, as I experienced in a recent pickup Zul’Gurub instance), Ghostcrawler talks about how tanking will be redesigned to remain active with this new design philosophy.

This is really groundbreaking stuff, and it means that patch 4.3 will see the complete dismantling of the legacy of vanilla WoW tanking design. Once, gaining and keeping threat was the most important role of the tank, more important even that survival, and many endgame tanks were warriors 31/5/15 specced into Defiance in the protection tree to ensure threat. These changes can be seen as driving a final nail into that kind of tanking’s coffin.Continue reading The new tanking threat paradigm and youFiled under: Druid, Paladin, Warrior, Death KnightThe new tanking threat paradigm and you originally appeared on WoW Insider on Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments