Blizzards Tanking Philosophy Question

#0 - Jan. 17, 2009, 7:52 p.m.

Does blizzard want tanks to be far out in front of the DPS while they are on a boss, threat wise? Or do they want tanks to always be fighting to stay slightly ahead. What I mean is that when all persons in a raid are fully geared out, should the DPS be holding back slightly and staying in line with the tanks threat or should the tanks be generating more TPS to accommodate the massive amounts of damage that the dps is doing? Is it the tanks fault if threat gets pulled off him or the dps fault, in a perfect situation where all persons involved have all the top gear and use all the right "moves"? (Theoretically philosophically based on blizzards idealisms)

P.S. I know you must hate when persons put GC or Ghostcrawler in the title, but I see your on the Tanking forums atm. :)

Ghostcrawler

#4 - Jan. 18, 2009, 1:04 a.m.

We wanted to make threat easier to manage, especially at earlier tiers of content. However threat generation is still the responsibility of the tank as well as the rest of the group. If your tank has trouble with threat generation, then you may run into encounters where you can't beat the timer.

It is only my opinion, and some groups can still make it work, but often the tanks complaining that they can't hold aggro or always asking the dps to slow down are the ones who choose gear and talents solely for survivability over threat-generation and try and argue that they don't care how terrible their own dps is.

Ghostcrawler

#12 - Jan. 18, 2009, 6:44 a.m.

Q u o t e:
or require a prot paladin in teh raid. right GC?

I'm going to assume you are getting at Blessing of Sanctuary here. We think that is a valid concern and something we plan to address. It was intended for a nice utility buff for Prot paladins, but we agree that its benefit feels too mandatory, or alternatively that some classes have trouble tanking some encounters without it.

(Rest assured that we are not trying to nerf Prot paladin threat generation or really anything other than the semi-mandatory nature of BoSanc.)

EDIT: for proper use of its