Threat as a Gameplay Mechanic

Community WoW Community Council
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For quite a few expansions now Threat has been a fairly redundant mechanic just to cause frustration.

It had roots embedded in fantasy, but with how gameplay has shaped out it just leads to situations where you wish you didn’t have to deal with it at all.

Let’s take some examples both from a Tank v Tank perspective and a Tank v DPS perspective.

Tank v Tank

Fantasy: Your job as a pair of tanks in a typical raid encounter is to force the boss to fixate on you as you are threatening presences within the raid environment. You make the attacks go in a certain way to ensure the safety of the group as a whole.

Reality: You just hit taunt and hope your co-tank doesn’t do more DPS. This situation is all too common in the last few expansions with the wide disparity between DPS levels of each tank, if one can actually do a good amount of burst DPS and the other just does good average DPS, you need to really be mindful of the burst DPS tank not pulling threat and potentially dying.

Currently, there is an average difference of 2k DPS between the highest average DPS and the lowest average DPS of tanks. Once 4 set and double legendary gets involved this gap is going to be made even wider. The tanks on the bottom end of this spectrum just have a harder time playing the game purely down to gameplay tuning rather than personal play and that is just a bad feeling for the player.

Bonus Reality Point: You hope your co-tank isn’t an “LFR Tank” and just hits taunt on CD which makes the effect hit the Diminishing Returns threshold and you can no longer taunt when needed.

Tank v DPS

Fantasy: Your job is to be the most threatening presence in a group to ensure the safety of the rest of your party/raid. You are there to keep the enemy distracted so their attention is purely focused on you and you use your defensive capabilities to ensure their attacks are mitigated.

Reality: You are there to keep the DPS & Healers alive. However, both DPS and Healers have more snap threat potential than you so this is actually pointlessly challenging.

Healers will snap threat of anything new that comes in so you need to be ready for waves of enemies that come in to grab them off the healer.

DPS gain significantly more damage than tanks every patch so this means one of the following happens:

  • The DPS peel off the tank and die in regular gameplay situations (very common and is what is happening now)
  • The DPS have to throttle their damage and wait to do burst until the tank has threat (a very old gameplay model from Vanilla)
  • The Tank just gets stressed out from having to keep tabs on threat on everything, mitigate damage, keep positional requirements in check and eventually fall behind on one thing leading to their death.

Additional note: Some tanks are still target capped.

Threat as a Gameplay Function

To put it simply. What gameplay function does Threat serve in the current game?

To me, it’s a relic of the past and needs to go away if Tanks are not given the tools to deal with these situations.

We’ve seen in BfA that threat had to be increased every single patch to keep them in line with DPS threat and when that happens all fantasy is lost as overnight you are just more threatening as if you got a teardrop face tattoo and enemies are now worried for their lives.

Thoughts on the Current Patch & the Future

Right now I’d think that just giving tanks a blanket DPS buff would help to address the delta between tank & DPS threat. Giving more threat % to tanks is a pretty boring solution and it’s the last patch of the expansion so let people go wild?

Alternatively, the taunt threat modifier could be increased as well both in duration & threat boost to resolve the inter-tank threat issues however this would not address the issues where DPS peel off the tank in M+.

For the future threat needs to be re-evaluated. There needs to be an element of risk/reward in there. Vengeance in MoP handled this well but it went too far in the reward department as high-end play could allow you to get all of the rewards with minimal risk.

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This has been happening ever since bfa and it’s really annoying to have to deal with it every single tier until the bandaid x% tank threat buff. The annoying part is that tanks even do a lot higher dps than you would expect, yet dps can easily rip threat anyway.

I believe this could be solved if tanks simply got the threat buff baseline instead of having it tied to a certain borrowed power which gets removed at the start of next expansion and the problem just repeats itsself.

Alternatively maybe look into giving dps/healers more options to drop threat such as mirror image/fan of knives/misdirect/fade etc.

I personally feel like dps is already pretty decent for most tanks, it’s just that some tanks have a lot more snap threat than others which is where you get the issue of having to wait.

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I can’t really add all that much useful insight into threat in organised group play, but threat is a pretty important thing to measure in a lot of open world content, and I’d actually like more ways to interact with it as a non-tank. It sucks being targeted by a rare because you’re the one that deals the highest damage to it, and then not being able to do anything about that aside from running away or relying on a random tank or healer come by to help out. Conversely, it also sucks when you’re playing a class without a taunt ability, and there’s nothing you can do to save someone that’s being targeted and dying. A threat dump or more taunts would be welcome in those situations.

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I think one big issue is the devs don’t seem to know if they want threat to be a mechanic or not, and how to go about making it one when they do. Most of the time when they change things so it becomes a mechanic you have to manage, they overdo it and it becomes near impossible to manage it. At which point people complain ruthlessly on the forums and then they over-do a fix and make threat a non-issue. There’s a nice in-between spot, but I don’t think we’ve ever hit that.

Anyway, here’s some thoughts on threat mechanics:

Tank v Tank

I personally have experienced this a lot. I do not tank outside of dungeons. It’s too much pressure put on the tank in raids. If you make one mistake, you wasted the time of 24 others in LFR, or your guild in regular raids.

However, when I’m in LFR and we’re waiting 30 minutes for a tank, I’ll switch to tank and just tank the rest of the bosses, because I’m capable of tanking, I just don’t like the stress. I make sure to warn the group I may mess up.

The problem begins with the fact I’m in LFR gear. Most of the time, I end up with a main tank that’s in heroic raid gear or higher. This presents an issue when tank swap mechanics start. Because I will taunt off of the other tank, but as soon as that taunt wears off, because they have 20+ ilvls on me, they will instantly pull the boss right back off of me.

I’m not sure how they could go about fixing this, but something really should be done to help it. (I can imagine it’s harder for say a druid to pull threat off another tank with the same ilvl that just innately does damage as well)

Perhaps they could add an “increased threat” component to skills like Shield Bash or Avenger’s Shield. That way when the tank swap occurs, the one not tanking can avoid using those skills, (yes, they’d lose dps, but if we buff their single target dps, it wouldn’t matter too much), but the one taking the boss could use them for an extra oomph of threat?

Non-Tank Taunts

There are cases in fights where a non-tank might need to taunt. If the off-tank dies and there’s no brez for a bit, and the tank swap mechanic happens. You have a better chance of surviving if a non-tank taunts. However, they’ve lowered how many classes have a taunt. It’s mostly other specs of a tank class. And most of those are melee, which means the boss will just kersplat them instantly.

One thing I wish they’d bring back for Hunters is Distracting Shot. I was able to save my groups wipes quite a bit in these scenarios by Distracting Shotting and then Deterrencing (now Aspect of the Turtle). It bought the tank enough time for the tank swap debuff to run out, and bought us enough time for the battle-res to be back up. And for times when my defensive was on cooldown, it was better for a hunter to die than say a Mistweaver that taunts. Hunters also have the mobility to run away for a decent amount of time, so it’s possible to outrun the boss until the debuff drops off the tank.

Pet Taunts

I don’t like that raid bosses are immune to pet Growl, Earth Elemental, and Void Walker Taunt. It made sense when these spells were auto-cast all the time, but now that entering and instance turns off auto-cast, there’s no point to restricting them. (Though they will probably need to restrict Earth Elemental since it still auto-casts)

Much like the above point, Growl and Warlock Pet Taunts could be used to replace an off tank to help a main tank if the off tank died. Losing a pet wasn’t much of a problem. We could just revive it.

Yes, there’s the risk that a hunter/warlock could troll and make the boss immune to taunt. However, to fix this, I suggest making Growl and the Voidwalker Taunt only work in organized groups, not in the group finder. In organized groups, the leader could kick a problematic hunter who is trolling. But I think overall, the risk is worth it, if it means guilds can turn those 1% wipes into wins.

Misdirection & Tricks of the Trade

These are great mechanics, but they don’t offer any incentive for hunters or rogues to use them. When TotT was first introduced, it came with a damage buff to incentivize rogues to use it as much as possible.

Misdirection has never given a bonus of any kind. I rarely remember to use Misdirect because of this. In combination with the fact threat is a non-issue right now, it’s a waste of a GCD because of that.

I feel like returning the damage bonus to it would be helpful. However, I recommend restricting it so it only gives the damage bonus to people in tank specializations. (To prevent rogues giving it to each other like they used to)

That said, I would like Blizzard to also double-back on each ability and make sure every class ability works with it. As it stands now, I’ve never had Misdirection work with any Survival skill except Raptor Strike. Wildfire Bombs, Carve, Serpent Sting, etc just don’t do anything with Misdirect. Defeats the purpose of the skill if only 1 of our skills works with it.

Threat Removing Skills

Skills like Feign Death, Vanish, Invisibility, Fade, etc. are great aspects of the game. However, one of the pure DPS classes lacks an ability to remove threat - Warlocks.

At one point, they had the ability Soul Shatter, that they could sacrifice 10% of their health to remove 50% of threat from all nearby enemies. This was removed I believe in Legion? After they removed the glyph that allowed Warlocks to tank.

I’d like to see this ability restored on retail at some point.

That said, I feel like there could stand to be a few more classes given a temporary dump like fade. Like why is an enemy even focusing on a shaman when they fade into the Astral Plane, for example.

Tank Damage

I do agree tanks could use more single target damage. In fact, I think they could do with a significant boost. However, I also believe these should ONLY be PvE boosts. I do not believe they need an AoE boost though. Tanks already dominate the charts on AOE fights.

Tanks are already god awful to fight in PvP, and I think if they got a significant damage boost, they’d be even worse.

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After playing through dungeons this week on Alpha. Can safely say that the state of threat is the same with the exception that DPS have more potential to do opening burst AoE and Tanks do not (of the ones available, outside of using cooldowns).

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