I didn’t mean this to sound smug because it just doesn’t matter which tank is on top on threat. But it was kind of nice for one shining moment to feel like I wasn’t playing the lowest common denominator of tanks (which has been what it has like for most of Wrath and probably will continue to be until … well … who knows?). I like my warrior and it’s been fun, and it’s been perfectly competent to handle all the content so far.

But I’m not really happy with always feeling as though I’m working twice as hard and never being quite as good. Realistically, that’s silly because like I say, who cares which tank gets more threat from their standard rotation/ priorities? But I think there’s some of that behind feeling that some of the other tanks might like a share of feeling what it’s like to be effortlessly on top.

Also, I’ve no idea on heroic ICC because I don’t have a 10 man group and will prolly never see it ;P Which is the other main reason I’m pretty much done with raiding now.

As the paladin in question (I believe the quote was “Jesus, your threat, Spinks!”), I’ve most of the time had few threat issues. It’s only been in the last few months that I’ve had the other face of barely being able to keep up with others in threat – frequently loosing, for example, DBS back to the Runed tank even when using Avenging Wrath. Also, my feral colleague is getting her sweet revenge back at my AoE overpoweredness by swiping ghouls on the Lich King back from me. I suspect she’s rather enjoying my outraged cries into the bargain.

For threat in general – again, DBS is the only normal fight I have ever had threat issues with.Excluding stupid mistakes like DPS (particularly Hunters) opening fire while I’m pulling a boss into position or something, DPS can’t touch me, nor any of the other three tanks, which is something I’d really like to see brought back in. Even Festergut’s Gastric Bloat debuff ensures that the one fight in iCC where we really might have to pull our A-game with threat is a tedious “Taunt at 9, cooldown at 3″ fight.

This is why heroic Lady Deathwhisper is the awesomest fight of the expansion – being untauntable. She represents a mechanic wthat was prevalent in vanilla and TBC, that for some reason was completely repressed in Wrath (seriously, which completely brilliant developer had the genius to make Grobbulus, Sartharion, Ignis, Rotface etc Tauntable?). Lanathel had the potential to keep some form of threat-management involved… while instead we can quite literally go afk except for two 5s intervals after air phases *without anyone, including the other tank, noticing*.

People were very respectful of tanks in vanilla and early TBC. Towards the end of TBC people got less content if a tank got aggro: “we’ll just get a paladin next time”. During Wrath it was firmly the tank’s job to keep aggro no matter how badly the dps played. Dps who held back so as not to overnuke lost meter ranking.

I very much liked the original method because it felt to me like we were a team solving problems together by all playing well. By the time I quit I felt like a kindergarden teacher leading a badly behaved bunch of kids around a museum, having to watch them all the time.

So I quite enjoy the idea of needing to watch my threat on some fights (ie. leave revenge off the priority list for a few seconds), switch from single target to AE tanking, or ramp up the threat up on others.

That said, I kinda like the situational awareness necessary to keep from drawing aggro. I don’t mind aggro dump moves, since they allow me to make mistakes and not cause a wipe. It’s better not to make mistakes, sure, but having a way to reactively escape is good, too.

As for threat — if I pull aggro on my Paladin it’s usually because I hit Beacon of Light too late (or too early). Beacon is a mega-threat producer. I’ve had Ony come running after me because I put it on the tank as he was running towards her. That’s a scary sight!

On my warlock it’s sometimes harder to tell who’s fault it is when I pull aggro. I usually view it as my fault, unless I’ve waited 5 seconds or so and still drawn aggro for casting haunt.

They also added an authenticator blank under password. Of course my happy fingers still hit enter after password–but the authenticator pop-up still pops-up. Good UI programming if you ask me.