Healers aggro broken

as hunter i’m constantly off tanking due to the fact that the healer seems to have massive threat, so i have to peel the mobs off them so the group wont wipe. whats up with that, why are healers throwing out so much threat

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I was doing WC and a priest was instantly pulling ago with shadow word pain, even when waiting several seconds after everyone else attacked.

It seems untuned or bugged at the moment.

Because groups arent using CC. 2 heal = 1 damage for threat. If I cast my healing touch on the tank, heal him for 1000, thats like I had slammed every mob with 500 damage. Do that a few times without someone putting real threat on the mob, and yeah, ima have aggro real quick.

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You’ve unlocked the secret role that hunters have.
Pulling aggro off of healers is a hunter’s duty and honor

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oh i know lol, most hunters act like they’re a clothy ignoring or running away from mobs that have been pulled. i’ve stacked my agility as high as i can and i generally can tank better than the tank, due to the fact i throw out way more damage and i’m dodging and parrying so often.

That is how it was in vanilla.

As a hunter I parked my pet next to the healer. As ranged I could do my damage and keep an eye out for our healer and when attacked I sic’d my pet on the mob and then turned my dps on to protecting the healer.

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If the tank is decent the healer should be fine as long as they give the tank a few seconds to get threat and aren’t spam healing (which isn’t great for the mana anyway so two reasons not to do it). Granted if the healer has to spam heal then the group needs to address that issue, first. If the healer is throwing out dps that can make the issue worse so try to only do that when you trust your group enough (wanding is fine). Sometimes I’ll pull a mob but it’s not so often that I find it’s an issue and at least as a Priest I can Fade it.

It is working just fine. Threat was something that had to be managed. CC was needed, kill orders were used. The AoE meta that we had the first 2 weeks of Classic was not accurate of how it used to be.

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Yes this is worth re-quoting. Make sure one person in the group is marking. Makes everything so much smoother.

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Welcome to vanilla healing where saving another’s life means you get the heat unless someone can grab it off you fast.

It gets better with cc and tank threat generation, but large emergency heals will get the baddie’s attention in a hurry. Off-tanking it is much appreciated. :slight_smile:

It doesn’t split the damage?

It might. Its been so long i cant remember.

There are probably a fair number of tanks who aren’t doing it right, unfortunately.

Also, shamans using earth shock and priests using mind blast will generate a lot of threat and can pull aggro from a tank, in that case it’s the healer’s fault.

That being said, don’t worry too much about this, elites don’t hit very hard in classic, it feels nerfed compared to vanilla. They can probably handle an elite or two beating on them.

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It’s a learning process between tanks and healers.

Priest aggro in general is insane, whether shadow or holy/disc. I played a mage in Vanilla, so learning to heal in Classic has been a real challenge–fun, but challenging.

I understood that threat was an issue, but I never dealt with it on a healer or tank level, so in practice, it’s a little stickier than it appears on the spreadsheet, kwim?

It’s about the tank learning how to build it and hold it. It’s about the healer learning to minimize it, dump it, and avoid creating it.

It takes time. My tank and I are getting better at this. I had a great conversation about this very thing on this forum with a lot of people yesterday. Great suggestions were given to me, and my tank and I tried some things. We had a marvelous cathedral run, and I only stole aggro about 1/3 as often as before I talked to the folks in that thread.

So…just develop a relationship with a tank (I highly recommend having one as a leveling partner), and figure it out. It isn’t broken. It’s the primary dynamic/mechanic of your class in groups. It’s working as intended. You have to learn how to play through it.

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Have I just had good tanks and healers? I haven’t had any issues with this.

Healers threat has always been pretty strong. It doesnt feel broken to me in any way. Priests especially are threat machines

It doesnt take much to hold aggro from healer threat. This sounds like a tank problem lol

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A few reasons why,

  1. if the healer puts a bubble on the warrior, he generates basically no rage, his 1 hander swings generate less than 10 rage per swing and he gets nothing from being hit until the bubble breaks.
  2. If the tank uses bloodrage, he takes a bit of damage, if the healer uses a heal over time or direct heal on the pull, the healer will get aggro (same is true if the healer did not top the tank off before the pull)
  3. The tank is getting trucked and is not using the correct abilities to hold threat, such as tabbing and sunder/revenging or demo shout. If a low level warrior uses heroic strike for any reason, he is bad, watch out for him. He shouldn’t even cleave, it is worse than tab/sunder.

Those are the 3 primary reasons.

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Are you certain about that math? From what I’ve gathered it is indeed 500 threat but divided among every enemy around, not 500 each.


As of Priest threat, as a Tank I only tend to lose aggro when they cast Mind Blast which is basically ranged taunt everything else seems fine. Occasionally I lose aggro on a random enemy just from the heals if I didn’t manage to build strong threat yet, mostly happens when an add joins late into the pull.

Mind Blast is basically a taunt. So if you’re using that as a priest you’re going to get aggro.

I actually moved bubble to a more emergency keybind. I was doing a lot of bubbling and then some people here said how much of a pain it is to get rage if you aren’t taking damage. So now I save the bubbles for me or other range who happen to get aggro and let the warrior lose 1000 health before throwing that 1000 heal on them.

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from what i can tell many people are having trouble adapting to classic from retail, i quit at the end of wraith so things seem familiar to me, focus targets, the need to mark targets and pull back, using all cc abilities from all classes.

from my experience in classic the tanks just rush in and start randomly tagging targets so it makes it about impossible to focus anything and they end up pulling extra groups or pats which i have to intercept before the get the healer. they don’t try to communicate much so cc is about impossible. i think i’ve seen tanks tag a poly sheep about 100 times at this point, and they immediately hit any target i freeze. turning the pull into a mess. not saying all tanks are bad but many just don’t want to lead communicate or mark targets. they seem to just want to charge in and hope everything works right as if the dps are mind readers.

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