Hey, if you've been DPSing or Healing, have you noticed yourself pulling aggro in groups more these days? If you've been tanking, have you noticed that it's harder to get threat on enemies who are wailing on your DPS?
Well, there's a reason for that: tank threat has been nerfed by about two-thirds.
The history of tank threat is kind of interesting, and we've actually been here before:
In Vanilla, BC, and Wrath, tanks had various abilities and such that would increase threat they dealt. Warriors had Defensive stance, Paladins had a buff called Righteous Fury. Druids had Bear form (and Dire Bear form at 40 to go along with Warriors and Paladins upgrading from Mail armor to Plate) and Death Knights, the new guys on the block back then, got Frost Presence, because it was actually Frost that was initially envisioned as the tanking spec for the class. (During Wrath, all three specs could tank or DPS, though Blood emerged as the preferred tanking spec while Frost turned more toward DPS, which meant you often had Blood DKs using Frost Presence and Frost/Unholy DKs using Blood Presence - Unholy Presence was seen more as the "PvP" presence.)
And these buffs generally increased threat by a modest amount - I know Paladins actually only got a buff to the threat of their holy damage, which, granted, was most of their damage. I don't recall the actual boost, but it was probably only doubled at most.
The thing is, tanks used to be sort of oddly focused - the idea was that you geared for survival and played for threat. There were defensive abilities and indeed cooldowns, but you mostly relied on your healers to keep you alive. Wrath saw particularly spiky damage (mitigated in the last tier, where they threw a debuff on avoidance that was actually an excuse to lower damage in general, leading to smoother damage intake.) But a tank's main priority was maintaining threat on enemies, and you had to fight the DPS to do that. In BC, Paladins actually had a practically mandatory buff for all DPS called Blessing of Salvation, which significantly lowered the threat they generated (and this was when Blessings were long-term buffs, meant to be constant.)
In Cataclysm, things started to change a bit. There was no "Active Mitigation" model as we had starting in Mists, but they sought to make tanking a bit easier by hugely buffing tank threat. This came in two stages as I recall, to the point where pulling off a tank was a herculean effort for DPS (one that they weren't supposed to do anyway.) Tanks, having tons of threat for free, actually avoided any and all DPS stats, including hit and expertise, meaning that tanks would actually miss with a ton of their attacks, but didn't matter, because the ones they did hit with would generate all the threat they needed.
This didn't feel great, though, and in Mists, we saw probably the biggest reimagining of how tanks worked. Death Knights were actually ahead of the game - when Blood was made the true tanking spec and Mastery was introduced, Death Knights now had this core rotational ability that would heal them for an amount similar to what a Warrior or Paladin would mitigate via blocking for the past few seconds, and then get their absorption shield based on that healing and their mastery.
So Death Knights were already kind of "playing to survive," and this meant that being able to actually hit the target made them more resilient (I think that during Cataclysm, Death Strike would do its heal regardless of whether you hit or not, to keep it in line with other tanks.) Anyway, generating the resources to use those active mitigation abilities became a priority, which made hit and expertise attractive again. In fact, we got to a point where Paladins actually wanted haste rather than traditional dodge or parry rating (something I kind of panicked about on this very blog - I think the one comment I ever got was someone expressing the internet's typically polite and sensitive criticism of my stance.)
In Warlords, things shifted again with the removal of both hit and expertise (essentially giving us the cap for them baseline) and also ridding us of dodge and parry ratings, so that we would simply use the standard secondary stats (except for bonus armor, to be found only on rings, trinkets, and necklaces.) Legion rid us even of those stats, and so we're now in a state where tanks are using the same stats as DPS.
The thing is, until BFA, we still had those Cataclysm-era threat buffs. The idea back then was that as tanks focused more on defensive stats, they'd fall farther and farther behind in damage and thus threat. But with the same stats being used, we've kept pace a lot better with DPS.
As such, they've decided to remove those buffs.
In a lot of ways, this feels a bit like bowling with gutter bumpers, only for the bumpers to be taken away. The "game" of maintaining threat was set aside in favor of other games - positioning and focusing on survival. And I do think that those latter challenges to tanking have, in fact, gotten more complicated. There were a lot more fights back in the day when the tank could simply plant their feet. But now we have to be a lot more conscious of threat.
Given the current environment, when Mythic dungeons are as far as one can get, trash is a big concern. I've definitely wiped more to trash than bosses in dungeons. And it's typically in trash fights where threat is the hardest to maintain - DPS will often ignore which target you're attacking, even if you mark them, and it's very easy to have just gotten a pack under control when someone gets knocked back into another pack and pulls them. (There are also way more enemies who flee in fear than there have been since, like, vanilla.)
So I would definitely say that tanking is harder now than it was in Legion. Is it too hard? I don't really think so, but I'm also someone who has been tanking for like eleven years, and it's a role that I find very rewarding, but a lot of players are sort of scared off by it. I don't know how to encourage more people to play tanks, but I don't think this change will get a lot of people to sign up.
It's certainly not the end of the world, but unfortunately I think that it's going to take longer for DPS to learn to manage their aggro.
Also, having run Freehold on my Havoc Demon Hunter with a Monk tank, can I just please ask that Ox Statue only aggro enemies already in combat? We pulled like every mob within a mile of us every time that damned thing went down.
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