I prefer threat to survival

| Thursday, August 18, 2011
I'm a terrible player. I forget survival cooldowns. I use them too soon. Or too late. It's too much decision-making.

I much prefer threat management. Nail a rotation. Keep track of all the mobs. Know where they will come from and where they might go. For me, that is playing. It isn't decision-making, at least not on a high level, but a learned activity, something that is not perfectly identical every time, but of a known theme.

I know how to do threat. Or I used to, perhaps I've lost that ability in the intervening six months.

So this threat change thing, I don't like it at all. I'd have done the complete opposite. Make it so tanks survive just by being tanks, of the proper level and gear, facing in the correct direction, not standing in the wrong place. No more than one, maybe two buttons for survival, and those would really just be for when the boss is at half a percent and all the healers are dead, not for normal situations. In fact, add cooldowns for threat. Maybe a damage cooldown for a threat boost, or a "I am very offensive" cooldown for a temporary boost in threat generation.

I'm certain that this stems from how I see. I don't often notice my own character. It exists, but in the same way that my desk exists: my computer isn't on the floor and that's about the extent of the consideration it gets. Instead, I notice everything else. I see where people are, where enemies are, what is going on. Except if it is right next to me, or worse, my health bar. My perception is a doughnut: empty in the middle, delicious further out, and too far out there is no more delicious doughnut. Maybe I need to eat breakfast, I might be hungry.

But maybe what is truly at play is selfish sadism. I'm bad at keeping myself alive. I'd rather see aggro matter because aggro can kill DPS. I like seeing DPS die, at least, DPS whom I don't like. Potential aggro failure allows me to play passive aggressive, letting DPS die, rather than having to go to all the trouble to start a flame war in group chat.

Whichever psychological issue explains it, whether selfless self-sacrifice or selfish sadism, the result is still the same: make aggro matter and let the DPS cry over their deaths, not me over mine.

4 comments:

Kring said...

Thread generation should work like a Monkey Island sword fight.

Anonymous said...

Even before these changes in semi decent gear , as a dk to keep threat I could just spam any button and I had aggro .With deathstrike hitting and critting like truck single target threat is non issue , and instances like Za/Zg pretty much require proper kill order so threat on secondary or tertiary target from cleaves is more than enough. In short , threat was never an issue in this expansion for tanks that knew what they were doing , except for hard mode raiders where tanks were threat-capping the dps.The current change allows mediocre tanks to keep aggro as well as good tanks and allows high end tanks to focus on survival stats instead of threat stats without threat capping the dps. Honestly I see this as a positive change as it allows us to focus on our primary objective , staying alive .

Klepsacovic said...

"Honestly I see this as a positive change as it allows us to focus on our primary objective , staying alive."
There's the philosophical divide. I 'grew up' when staying alive wasn't something a tank could really do: warriors had one or two CDs on longish timers, paladins had one, druids had something. Survival was based on gear and healers. Aggro was the trickier thing, with fights like Void Reaver who actually dumped aggro so tanks had to really fight to keep up and catch up with the DPS.

Shintar said...

Survival was based on gear and healers.

That's an interesting perspective that I hadn't even considered. It's like they are trying to make us healers redundant by giving our job to the tanks... ;(

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