Tanks Rejoice!

We did recently buff the threat generated by Defensive Stance and its equivalents.

Note that with this change, the threat generated by tanks will be about the same as it is on live, which is that a tank can generate about three times as much threat as a dps class.

On live, remember that classes like rogues have an innate threat reduction, warriors have reduced threat in Battle or Berserker Stance, and mages had talents to reduce threat generated. We removed all of those. Until this recent change, that left tank threat slightly low relative to live. We hoped Vengeance would have made up for the loss of Tricks, Misdirect and (to a lesser extent) Vigilance, but in retrospect we think we were still underestimating how much they were buoying tank threat.

If you never used Tricks or Misdirect, then threat should feel about the same in Cataclysm as it does on live. If you use Tricks and Misdirect on live, then you might need Vengeance stacked before you feel the same, but at the same time Tricks and Misdirect still work just fine for establishing initial aggro before Vengeance has a chance to stack anyway.

Q u o t e:
Live
-----
DPS - 1000 damage * 0.7 = 700 threat
Tank - 1000 damage * 2.037 = 2037 threat

2037 / 700 = 2.91

Most dps classes effectively put out about 70% of their damage as threat. Also, in terms of final numbers, tanks usually put out slightly more than the flat stance modifier multiplied by their damage as threat. Calling it approx 3x dps' threat (average) for a given point of damage is probably realistic.

Really, all they've done is normalized all dps classes' threat modifiers and restored the relative threat generation of tanks.

Increases by 225% in the absence of dps modifiers was a nerf to tank threat generation.

Exactly. This change won't allow you to go asleep at the wheel while tanking.

Q u o t e:
it seems like Blizzard wants to take tanks back to the Vanilla days of "Tank 1 mob and CC the rest".

We think doing that sometimes and AE'ing sometimes is preferable to the world of AE'ing everything all the time. If all you are doing is trying to process dungeons as fast as possible to get to the badges, then I can understand that mentality, but it's not one we want to foster.

Q u o t e:
To word it another way, if a dps used an ability that generated 100 threat, if a tank used an ability which did the exact same damage, they would generate 300 threat.

He is NOT saying that the total threat output of a tank is 3 times the threat output of dps.

Yes. Sorry if my post was confusing.

Generating three times the threat of the dps would pretty much be Challenging Shout with no cooldown. Generating three times the threat per point of dps should keep things interesting without being brutally frustrating.

Q u o t e:

I asked before (with a good reason) can you please switch to AoE as your acronym?

We can't do a search using the forum search tool on just 2 characters, your tool requires us to use 3.

Heh. I never got the reason before. I figured it was just one of those "could care less" vs. "couldn't care less" debates. (And let's please not go there.)