I understand it reduces threat by a certain amount when you use it, but then what’s the point of the duration afterwards? Do your spells generate less threat for 10 seconds, or what? I’ve googled around but it seems like nobody has a straight answer.
My understanding, especially based on the comments posted on that spell on Classic Wowhead, is that up to X amount of your threat is ignored for the duration of Fade.
So let’s say you cast Fade on pull, and X = 1000, then your threat will be counted as 0 for aggro purposes until you generate 1000 threat on the boss, and if you end up at 1500 threat, it will count at 500 until Fade ends at which point the full 1500 will count for aggro.
This is people recommend “pre-fading”, so fading just before a pull or before a threat reset or before new adds join the fight. The idea is to give some time to the tank to get a safe threat lead.
Fade removes some threat so the tank can get the mob back. You should not DPS and should only heal as necessary during Fade.
When Fade ends, so does the threat reduction. By that point, your good tanks can get the mob back.
Improved Fade only reduces the cooldown.
ok so it just lowers your threat by X, and at the end of the duration, X is returned to your threat amount. makes sense
As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, it effectively places you at the bottom of the threat table, but “remembers” what your previous threat was. So if you had 1000 threat, and the tank only had 500, you use fade. The tank then gains 300 more threat before the fade is over, but is only 800 to your 1000 threat, the mob goes back to you. I don’t believe it has a maximum that it can ‘forget’ to put you at the bottom.
What I’m unsure of, is if threat generated during fade is added to your saved threat value. I believe it is, but would probably need to test it.
As of Wrath that’s correct.
Prior to that, Fade had ranks and set values for each rank. Wrath changes did away with that and just removed all threat for the duration of the spell.