One of the old problems World of Warcraft has had is that as the tiers go up during the lifetime of an expansion, the dps does far, far higher dps, while tanks just produce somewhat higher threat.
Threat must always outstrip dps, or the whole system falls apart.
Back in Burning Crusade, the main job of damage-dealers was to stay just underneath the threat cap. Hunters could do outstanding dps because Feign Death would wipe their threat. It was simply an accepted fact that if you pulled off the tank, that was your failure, and not theirs (well, ok, if the tank was single-targetting in a group of five and the healer pulled off them, that was their bad.)
Now, a compounding problem back then was that for all three tanks at the time (Warriors, Druids, and Paladins. BC was actually the time when Paladin and Druid tanks started being taken seriously, though the raids were still literally designed around only Warriors tanking the bosses) is that the better geared they got, the less they had to work with resource-wise. Because Warriors and Druids generated Rage mostly by getting hit, and Paladins generated mana via Spiritual Attunement, which gave them a percentage of the healing received as mana (no damage = no healing, and thus no mana.) So once you started to outgear an instance, you had to sit down to take a crit or run without pants to be able to keep up in threat.
One of the awesome things about Death Knights during Wrath was that their Rune system was totally independent of how much damage they were taking, so there was no "Gear Penalty."
Tanks are the only role that can actually suffer from being better geared. The only hazard for dps of being overgeared is that you might out-threat the tank, which is easily remedied through a technique I like to call "just stop for a second." Healers, of course, have no penalty whatsoever from being overgeared (unless they're REALLY overgeared and generate too much threat.) I suppose the only penalty for healers is that they might get bored.
So, you had the problem that in very high-level content, tanks would be desperately pouring out as much threat as they could so the dps did not have to hold back, but on lower-level content they were running on fumes the whole time.
The solution to the first problem that Blizzard came up with was Vengeance. This universal tank passive was weirdly complicated. You would get a percentage of your damage taken as attack power, up to a maximum based on your max health. The idea was that as tanks got better geared, they'd get higher stamina, and thus higher Vengeance. In a sense, it mirrors a Wrath-era Protection Paladin talent that granted spellpower proportional to our stamina. More stamina? More threat.
The problem, though, is the damage-taken part. Another way of putting it is that the problem is that it varies significantly when it really ought to be a static effect.
They of course want us to be the ones getting bashed by the bad guys, but what this leads to is a bunch of other issues.
1. At the beginning of the pull, when everyone is at equal threat (zero,) you have no Vengeance. If an Arcane Mage lights them up with a crit, or a Warrior charges in and Bladestorms, those things are not going to come after you. The pull is when threat matters the most, even before you take fluctuating attack power into account, and this is where Vengeance is non-existent.
2. The Tank-Swap is a tried and true method for Blizzard to give both tanks in a raid something to do without having to come up with two different things for them to do. However, when your AP (and thus threat) is based on how much you've been hit, the guy who's got three stacks of a powerful bleed and has been getting maced in the face for the last 30 seconds is going to be way higher than the guy who's been standing there, waiting his turn, getting little more than the raid-wide aoe damage. Especially in these days of "active mitigation tanking," the first tank is not going to want to stop their rotation when all they're seeing is huge damage pouring in.
3. We're also recreating the old problem with Rage and Mana from BC, but now Death Knights and Monks get to experience it. The better geared you are, the less damage you'll be taking, so your threat will scale inversely with gear. Now, the new Vengeance does say "unmitigated damage," which I hope means that blocks and absorbs (like Blood Shield) are ignored when calculating it. Still, you'll probably be dodging and parrying more as you gear up, so it's still a loss of Vengeance. (Avoidance may actually refresh Vengeance, but if you get "unlucky" and get a string of avoidance after a stretch of low damage or at the beginning of the pull, you're SOL.)
These problems are pretty huge, but there's another which I think is essential to the reason why Vengeance as a mechanic is so deeply flawed:
It does not scale with gear in any positive way.
The whole point of Vengeance, after all, was to allow tanks, who were stacking stamina, dodge, parry, and mastery, to boost their threat against people stacking attack/spell power, crit, haste, and their version of mastery (which is a dps stat for dps characters, obviously.) In Cataclysm, at least, it kinda-sorta scaled with Stamina. However, with the stamina cap gone, the only thing it scales positively with is damage taken from enemies.
So yes, as you go into higher tiers of content, the bosses will probably be hitting harder. The problem is that this makes Vengeance really only useful in content that is cutting edge for you. As someone who might, for example, like to run 5-mans for VP and, you know, fun, you're out of luck.
Going Back to the Drawing Board:
I think we can say that the point of Vengeance is to allow tanks to have their threat scale even as their gearing focus is to focus on defensive stats. Let us consider that the whole point of the passive ability, and rather than just point out what is wrong with the current implementation, come up with a better one.
The question of tank gear itself is kind of an interesting one on its own, and is something I wrote an article about recently. While we're starting to see actual tank stats on Tier gear for Druids and Monks (with the Guardian spec introduced, Druids now have four options for Tier sets, and Monks are new, so they just went with three sets for them,) for the most part the Leather tanks are expected to use standard Rogue-style Agility Leather. Having only played my Druid tank a bit during Cataclysm (and often running him as Balance,) I haven't gotten a great feel for Vengeance on Leather tanks. But it seems like the problem of not having those dps stats to scale up with as you go from tier to tier should not be an issue. Sure, Mastery's going to be defensive, but you get the full benefits of all the crit and haste on your gear.
Plate tanks, on the other hand, have historically not gotten any crit or haste (current Paladins and Blood DKs' weapons being exceptions) on their gear. In fact, even given the prevailing wisdom about Paladin gearing, the automated loot in LFR that gives me "appropriate to my spec gear" will, I assume, never give me Mastery/Haste gear. With plate tanks, tank gear is tank gear.
Now, the one thing that all tanks are going to have a lot of is Stamina. Not only is it buffed by our spec bonuses, but we gear, gem and enchant for it. If you take the original Vengeance, and rather than getting rid of the Stamina part, you get rid of the "damage taken" part, you could just give all tanks an AP bonus based on your stamina (like the old Guarded by the Light, as I referred to earlier.)
This means all tanks get a static AP boost to offset the lack of Strength Gems and Crit enchants. While dps'ers are using those, we put in our blue (or Purple or Green) gems. They go up in equal measures.
1.) If the fear is that tanks will be doing too much dps when they are not really tanking, the solution is easy: we already get 5 times as much threat from our basic tank threat-boosts. Just scale Vengeance to make sure we're doing like a third as much damage as our dps and we'll be fine. No one will go with a tank spec to do dps (even with dps gear, a tank's passives and just their suite of abilities won't be suited to doing dps.)
This would really be my favorite solution. Vengeance would just give X% of your stamina as attack power. Done.
If, for some reason, there's a problem with this (and being a total armchair quarterback here, I fully admit there could be something I overlooked, especially if it relates to PvP,) there are a couple other ways you could go:
2.) Get rid of tank gear entirely, and let all tanks benefit seriously from dps stats. You get rid of Vengeance, but you resolve the issue by having tanks stacking the same gems and enchants as the dps. They get their dodge and parry from haste and crit. Their Masteries are reworked to be both offensive and defensive. The only thing differentiating a tank from a super-resilient dps is that your suite of abilities is ill-suited to dealing lots of damage, but AP, Crit, and Haste all go up just as much as they do for DPS.
3.) Make defensive stats offensive. Through passive spec abilities or just reworking things a bit, your dodge and parry and mastery will all now do things that increase your damage. Actually, this is somewhat like the first solution, but would have to be a bit more complicated, given that it's three stats instead of one.
4.) Go back to the Wrath style of tanking. During Wrath (and earlier) threat was not a given by any stretch. The definition of a well-played tank was one who could hold threat. Tanks geared for survival, but they played for threat. In other words, while you were stacking dodge, parry, defense rating (it was a thing,) block rating (it was a thing before mastery,) and block value (blocks used to subtract damage, rather than reducing it by a percentage,) you would let the healers worry about keeping you alive while you tried to spread the threat around frantically. This was the era in which I played a lot on all four tanking classes, so you can probably guess what I thought about this style of tanking.
The thing is, Vengeance as it works right now is really wonky, and frankly, I think it makes tanking less fun. The whole "Active Mitigation" change was to try to make tanking more engaging now that threat is (at least supposed to be) a non-issue. If they really want that to be the case, Vengeance has got to be redesigned completely.
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