A Quick Note on a Dead Journal

I haven’t played WoW much at max level since I lost my job back in March, but a friend bought me a time card to level alts with him and a couple others over the summer, so I have been keeping tabs on the Warrior game again and the big news hit on the upcoming threat revamp today, I figured I could jot down some notes to forward.

Here is the article I am referring to: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3300854

Point one: Yes, Threat has become insignificant from what I have been hearing and even a friend said on a low dungeon run yesterday, “You held threat, big deal, you are a warrior, you just do.” So the general opinion is the tank has threat if they don’t they are a moron. DPS only care if they are catching the Tank, and Tanks only care if the DPS is pulling, otherwise threat is ignored. It’s a breakpoint, it either holds no problem or breaks regularly, and it’s usually the former. Obviously Threat is not in a place they want it based on previous articles.

Point two: Yes, Tanks are the babysitters on the group in a sense, pick-up these adds, move the boss over, and watch your own rear while doing it (fire, etc). Keeping a decent threat rotation up while handling awareness isn’t hard, but making it harder would be pouring more stress on one role, a required role you don’t want to burn out (Partially the reason I stopped trying to play). So they have decided to go the other way and say, forget threat and focus on the other Tank focuses, bringing us to…

Point three: Tanks focusing on Survival and Resource management will be the key. Cooldowns costing a bit of Rage to use won’t be too bad, as long as it’s A) not too high, B) useful enough, C) not overhauling rage generation to drastically.

With those points in mind, I want to see the concepts discussed in action. Making the Tank’s damage input matter more in a fight would help prevent rage stockpiling for cooldowns (devastates, revenges, & shield slams do add up), but can’t make it too high or they will have to focus too much on a “rotation” and basically become a lesser dps, and making it too low means no point in hitting abilities at all.

What I want to see come of this is making the Tank more of a fight controller. Instead of just moving the boss/adds out of bad, perhaps there is a bonus for moving them into certain zones, like air strike targets, or runes they have to be moved onto in a certain order, but the runes position are random and change each battle. Likewise, how about points where the boss remains in one place, but the tank has to run to activate a machine or run across the room for some reason (carrying a debuff of some sort so ONLY the tank can do it.) The Tank becomes the Active Role of the raid, the DPS burn the targets, the healers keep everyone going, and the tank sets the events and phases rolling.

I want the Tank to be more than just the babysitter, let the tank be the action hero of sorts, everyone else gets to bring the boom, let us have the flash.

 

EDIT: Have an example to how this could work. We have a boss of unstable energy we will call Glowmore. Glowmore summons slime adds that have to be rounded up and merged by one tank, while the other handles the boss. When an attack made by Glowmore is dodged, parried, or blocked, the character (Tank) that did so gets a “buff” that does damage over time (damage is equal to X-% of character health so that for a tank it is minor compared to a non-tank.), but also this buff creates a shield against a kind of area damage. At set intervals, Glowmore moves to recharge stations, where he casts a random area spell (so dps & healers have to keep moving) and begins charging a large AOE. The shielded tank has to run to a cut off switch in an irradiated area and shut off the charging station before the AOE goes off and wipes the raid. This stuns the boss for 10 seconds allowing the tank to reset to position before the previous stage begins (the tanks could even swap roles at each recharge).