05-08-2011, 09:39 AM
I'm a long time lurker but first time poster here, but just wanted to chime in my opinion here, because this is something that I am greatly concerned about. I run a 9/13 25 man raiding guild with a secondary 3/13 weekend/casual group, and we have very good tanks and dps. Our dps frequently rank in the top 50 on world of logs for dps output. Having tanked for all of BC and Wrath, getting many server first including H Lich King etc, and doing a lot of tanking in cata, but going dps after the first couple weeks of cata, I have the benefit of being on both ends of the spectrum - dps and tank.
How I feel about tanking is basically this: The more gear you acquire, in general, the less you get hit, and when you do get hit, you get hit for smaller amounts. What this leads to is less vengeance. Unfortunately, less vengeance means less threat, getting hit less means less rage (if you are a warrior like myself) and here we are back at square one, rage/vengeance starvation, exactly where we were in wrath and BC with simple rage starvation. So you have dps, who have doubled or tripled their output since the start of the expansion, and tanks who have either stayed the same or dropped slightly with their gear scaling. Unfortunately, many of the heroic raid bosses DO hit extremely hard and thus maximum avoidance and mastery is required to down some of these difficult fights. So the problem comes in when your dps have doubled or tripled their dps output, but tanks have actually scaled down a bit on their threat with the addition of better gear.
I have always felt that tanks should be rewarded for having better gear with better threat, not the other way around. There are a few solutions to this, one of which would be to give tanking gear a threat modifier stat and have that modifier increase based on something else, possibly mastery since that is valuable for any type of tank and basically every tank stacks it. So as a tank acquires better gear and gets more mastery, his/her threat also increases. There is also some value to giving tanks a bit of baked in expertise and hit. Not cap necessarily, but enough that, should they choose to go all out mastery/avoidance/stam, they aren't "whiffing" every other hit.
Now on to the 2nd part of this, which is dps threat management. One thing really bugs me, and that is that there are 2 classes that have absolutely no threat reduction, while others can either drop threat completely or significantly reduce it, or have baked in threat reduction in their talents. Those 2 classes are warriors and Balance druids. Basically, I am a very highly geared fury warrior, sitting in 4 piece heroic t11 with many other heroic pieces, currently totally ilvl 368. During cooldowns, I push 50-60k dps. When not in cooldowns, roughly 20-24k. Overall, I average roughly 28k dps on fights that I have 100% uptime on the boss. So if I was a hunter or a warlock, I would be ok with that amount of burst dps, since I could feign death or soul shatter, or a mage with invis and images etc, but I'm not. I retain that threat for the entire fight unless I die. It is extremely frustrating when you are competing and trying to rank on fights, but you are limited by your tanks threat, and you know that your tanks are pushing as hard as they possibly can to keep up, but are limited by being well geared and the system in place.
So with wrath and cata, blizz has sort of "homogenized" the classes. This is a bit sad, but it's also a good thing because it brings us closer and closer to balance. The one glaring thing that they have not homogenized that really needs to be rectified is the threat dumps available to each class (or lack thereof).
The botom line, or the TL;DR, is that tank threat needs to be less about the amount of damage they take and more about the tanks skill and gear level (and it needs to INCREASE with gear, not decrease). Granted, you will always have terrible tanks and terrible dps, it's part of the game. I see dps in pugs pushing literally only 5-10k, while I am pulling 25-35k. To me that seems a little bit absurd, however I am glad that Blizzard has made a game where skill, research, and class knowledge still matters greatly. I just wish that applied more to tanks than it currently does.
How I feel about tanking is basically this: The more gear you acquire, in general, the less you get hit, and when you do get hit, you get hit for smaller amounts. What this leads to is less vengeance. Unfortunately, less vengeance means less threat, getting hit less means less rage (if you are a warrior like myself) and here we are back at square one, rage/vengeance starvation, exactly where we were in wrath and BC with simple rage starvation. So you have dps, who have doubled or tripled their output since the start of the expansion, and tanks who have either stayed the same or dropped slightly with their gear scaling. Unfortunately, many of the heroic raid bosses DO hit extremely hard and thus maximum avoidance and mastery is required to down some of these difficult fights. So the problem comes in when your dps have doubled or tripled their dps output, but tanks have actually scaled down a bit on their threat with the addition of better gear.
I have always felt that tanks should be rewarded for having better gear with better threat, not the other way around. There are a few solutions to this, one of which would be to give tanking gear a threat modifier stat and have that modifier increase based on something else, possibly mastery since that is valuable for any type of tank and basically every tank stacks it. So as a tank acquires better gear and gets more mastery, his/her threat also increases. There is also some value to giving tanks a bit of baked in expertise and hit. Not cap necessarily, but enough that, should they choose to go all out mastery/avoidance/stam, they aren't "whiffing" every other hit.
Now on to the 2nd part of this, which is dps threat management. One thing really bugs me, and that is that there are 2 classes that have absolutely no threat reduction, while others can either drop threat completely or significantly reduce it, or have baked in threat reduction in their talents. Those 2 classes are warriors and Balance druids. Basically, I am a very highly geared fury warrior, sitting in 4 piece heroic t11 with many other heroic pieces, currently totally ilvl 368. During cooldowns, I push 50-60k dps. When not in cooldowns, roughly 20-24k. Overall, I average roughly 28k dps on fights that I have 100% uptime on the boss. So if I was a hunter or a warlock, I would be ok with that amount of burst dps, since I could feign death or soul shatter, or a mage with invis and images etc, but I'm not. I retain that threat for the entire fight unless I die. It is extremely frustrating when you are competing and trying to rank on fights, but you are limited by your tanks threat, and you know that your tanks are pushing as hard as they possibly can to keep up, but are limited by being well geared and the system in place.
So with wrath and cata, blizz has sort of "homogenized" the classes. This is a bit sad, but it's also a good thing because it brings us closer and closer to balance. The one glaring thing that they have not homogenized that really needs to be rectified is the threat dumps available to each class (or lack thereof).
The botom line, or the TL;DR, is that tank threat needs to be less about the amount of damage they take and more about the tanks skill and gear level (and it needs to INCREASE with gear, not decrease). Granted, you will always have terrible tanks and terrible dps, it's part of the game. I see dps in pugs pushing literally only 5-10k, while I am pulling 25-35k. To me that seems a little bit absurd, however I am glad that Blizzard has made a game where skill, research, and class knowledge still matters greatly. I just wish that applied more to tanks than it currently does.