Threat as a gameplay mechanic

[Petergrippín-stormscale]

From the community council forum:

Threat as a Gameplay Mechanic

As someone who is only tanking M+ I can’t say much about raiding, but outside of agreeing with threat feeling outdated, the biggest frustration I have atm is the disparity between tanks. My main and favorite tank is Blood DK, and there is no big secret that threat/dps output is one of our biggest downsides in dungeons. In the opposite end of the scale you have Prot Paladins who rarely have to think about threat because of their tremendous burst damage.

I’m sick of having to constantly ask people in group to hold back at the start of every pull, while the clock is ticking. It shouldn’t be a negative thing if people are doing high dps but it’s gotten to a point where I am considering to re-roll to a different main so my friends won’t have to deal with this issue, which ruins the fun for all of us.

Bandaid fix is to just crank up the threat modifier but it doesn’t really adress the huge disparity between tanks.

I know that threat multiplier was nerfed after Legion because of degenerate playstyle from MDI players who pulled an entire dungeon and just kited it until everything died but this isn’t possible now anyway, at least not for the majority of players. Too many casts going off and deadly debuffs would limit the size of pulls even if the tank could just tag mobs and run.

I don’t think I ever enjoyed threat as a mechanic. It’s either something I forget about if I play the “correct” tank, or it’s a constant source of stress and frustration. I am at the mercy of my class choice and/or people in my group not pressing any buttons at the start of a pull. Tanking should be about leading the group, positioning mobs and surviving damage. While tank balance in general has been pretty good in Shadowlands - every spec is viable at the highest level, dps/threat disparity has been bad and mostly left untouched since launch.

It doesn’t apply only to tanks. Rogues and Hunters never have to worry about aggro because they have multiple tools to deal with it. Meanwhile you have specs like Fury Warrior, Havoc DH and Elemental Shaman who’s only option is to not do anything at the start of a pull. How is that fun or interesting?

[Razhgul-outland]

the best way to fix this is just give dks something around 10 to 15% dmg aura buff atleast but they wont do it cuz dks are fine in raid and threat in raid is not a problem and as you may understand blizzard balance everything around raiding so no hope for this issue my friend.
the dk tierset was good in dmg and then they nerf it to 3sec internal coldown which is not legit garbage and useless no hype for tierset now unless they atleast fix its 2set so it gives us 2 or 3% strength also they should remove heartstrike at the 2set and make it all the abilitys then maybe you have a chance to have fun with dk

[Weffi-silvermoon]

well to be honest, the hole tank dps healer combo is becomming outdated now in some ways.

[Dejarous-draenor (Dejarous)]

Honestly they need to bring back vengeance.

As a concept it was great, it was just tuned so broken they removed it, instead of iterating on a good system.

[Petergrippín-stormscale]

I’m not sure if something happened going into 9.2 but it’s so bad now that I can’t group with certain specs a Blood DK. Today I was running Spires and had 2 hunters and 1 Elemental Shaman in the group. Even with 2x misdirect it was impossible to maintain aggro. The shaman even waited 4-5 seconds before doing damage, but his burst dmg is 10-12x my dps and there is nothing I can do to stop him from ripping aggro.

I’m starting to wonder if there is something wrong with threat modifiers now, because it got significantly worse since previous patch and I am playing with the same group of friends. This threat nonsense that Blizzard thinks is a meaningful mechanic is killing the fun of tanking.