#6 - Sept. 25, 2010, 9:10 p.m.
We actually never implemented threat decay. We're not sure we'll need it.
The bottom line is that being a good tank is a mark of pride for tanks. It's not fun to do a job well that any guy off the street could do with no practice or experience. Getting better at your job is a major motivator for players to play.
Threat is part of that. Back in the day, you got excited when you had a tank who knew how to generate threat. It was a source of bragging rights for the tank.
So just autoattacking, or just Thunder Clapping, shouldn't be enough for you to never worry about threat. You should have to pay as much attention to your rotations as an Affliction lock or Frost DK needs to do in order to be competitive on meters.
We don't want to go too far though. While it's not asking much for a mage to wait a few seconds before unloading with everything they have, it's also not fun if you feel that tank threat is constantly throttling you. In particular, we're trying to clamp down on the situation where say at minute six or seven despite everything the tank can do, the dps start to creep up on you. Vengeance was implemented almost entirely for this reason -- it helps keep tanks scaling their threat as dps classes gear up.
Finally, we don't want the tank to be solely at the mercy of others to generate threat. We don't want abilities like Tricks of the Trade or Misdirection or dps classes using their threat drop abilities on cooldown to solve the whole problem for the tank. All of those abilities still exist, but they won't turn a bad tank into a good one and they won't make a great tank feel 100% at the mercy of others.
