On the beta, Thunderclap is too weak. It barely holds threat off of a healer. For an ability with a 6 second cooldown, shouldn't it hit as hard as Swipe? Hotr has half the cooldown but hits harder. Swipe has the same cooldown and hits a lot harder. Different classes are different but I still think Thunderclap should hit a lot harder than it does now. It hits for less at 85 than it did at 70.

Not to mention, we have to spend 4 talent points and 2 glyphs to maximize this ability. Isn't that a little too much? It's supposed to be our AoE pick up ability, but it doesn't hit hard enough to do that. Blood and Thunder barely helps because it's extremely clunky to use. You won't be starting the pull with Rend so you'd have to use it when you'd normally use Shield Slam or Revenge on the primary target. I don't see why Bloodbath couldn't have made a return from the Wotlk beta. On the other hand, Thunderstruck is a really interesting talent if its purpose is to minimize the loss of threat of having to apply the Thunderclap debuff to a boss, but since the duration of the buff is only 20 seconds, that doesn't really work.

And because of Shockwave's stun, I find myself saving that for when I am getting hit really hard. It's more of a survival ability at this point when I am getting clobbered by adds.

You can't just compare the numbers on abilities. You have to look at the whole package. Convince us that a warrior generates a lot less threat than a druid when trying to hold several targets, or that the warrior has to work a lot harder to hold several targets, and we'll change it. Saying "We don't have an X spell" isn't very persuasive.

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Q u o t e:
Bottom line, NO TANKING CLASS CAN AOE TANK ANYMORE. This is an intended change. It totally screws us over for existing content, but Blizzard seems unconcerned about that.

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That actually isn't an intended change. We don't want AE tanking* to be trivial. I'll use some examples:

A) Pile of 20 whelps. Go ahead and AE tank this and ask your dps to AE too. You probably don't even need Shield Slam.

B) One giant. I wouldn't use Thunder Clap at all on this, except as needed to keep the debuff up. We want Thunder Clap to be terrible for holding single targets. (I don't think many tanks would argue this point.)

C) A pack of 4 targets that you plan to burn down one at a time. Here is the biggest point of contention. Thunder Clap should be fine for establishing initial aggro (though Shockwave will be better), and it should be fine for keeping add #3 off of the healer. But you should feel like you have to go to town with single target abilities on add #1 that the dps are all focused on. Then you should switch attention to add #2. In Lich King, it was too easy to just hold this whole group with Thunder Clap spam, and to be fair, the dps would just AE as well.

D) The same pack as in C, but this time you decide to CC add #3 and #4. In this case, you should be able to live fine without Thunder Clap at all (unless you really need the debuff).

* EDIT: Good lord, I'm getting old.

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Q u o t e:
Problem with your anecdote is that Blizzard is specifically going to say let that bad dpser die. It's his fault for sloppy play. And I do agree with them on this.

There's a difference between allowing DPS to die because they are aoeing things that should not be aoe'd, whether it's due to lack of gear or design, and dps dying due to pulling threat from aoeing things that are meant to be aoe'd due to design or overgearing.

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Right. If you are trying to AE tank and a bad dps is attacking the wrong target and dies, we call that justice. If you are trying to AE tank and a healer pulls aggo, then threat generation is just too low and we need to buff it.

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Q u o t e:
Its aOe not AE.

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You probably say tomatOe too, huh?

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Q u o t e:
If you take GC at his earlier word, that Prot Warriors are not supposed to be balanced around Blood and Thunder, Prot Warriors do less than half the threat of Bears, around a third of the AoE threat of a Blood DK, and (depending on how you adjust Prot Paladins with HotR) something like half the AoE threat of a Prot Paladin.

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If we find the same result, then we'll make adjustments accordingly.

We had already nerfed Swipe before I saw this conversation, because it was pretty far out in front of other tank AE dps. Thunder Clap's coefficient is something like 0.10 and that could probably be 0.20, which would bring it more in line.

We are also talking a lot about just buffing tank threat across the board, because we've heard a lot recently that it's still too twitchy.

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Q u o t e:
As a warrior tank, what do you expect us to do differently between scenario A) and scenario C)?

fundamentally, the difference between 4 mobs and 20 is nil, thunderclap, blood and thunder, shockwave hit all of them, cleave and revenge hit some of them, we tab target the rest.

Tab targeting provides a minimal increase in threat distribution in scenarios such as C where you can expect cycling abilities like cleave and revenge to hit every mob in the span of 2-3 GCDs and you can reliably single target everyone with something in the span of say 2 thunderclap cooldowns.

What exactly do you expect us to do to raise our threat from barely adequate to hold 5 mobs off the healer to enough to tank for AoE damage against 20 mobs? The rotations for every tank are unchanged from 4 mobs to 100 mobs for the most part so either we can tank for AoE DPS and anything that doesn't hit hard enough to warrant CC can and will get AoE'd down, or we can't, and the only things that will ever be AoE'd will be those whose damage is trivial enough to be tanked by the DPS.

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Unless you're doing something unusual, healer threat is generally pretty low, and tends to go lower if there are many targets. The biggest danger tends to be when adds spawn and a heal lands before you have done any threat against the new arrivals. If you are targeting Thunder Clap (I'm going to use Thunder Clap as my example, but this discussion is not limited to warriors) so that everything is in range and healers are still pulling, then something unusual is probably happening. Maybe you're taking so much damage that the healers are just spamming heals on you, which might suggest you need to somehow manage some of the adds that doesn't involve all of them beating on you so much.

You're probably at more risk overall of having dps pull off of you. Here are the scenarios again about how that could work:

One target -- if a dps pulls off of you, they are either blowing cooldowns before you have a chance to respond, or your threat generation is much too low for some reason.

Many targets -- in this case, the dps are probably AE'ing. Usually they will kill things pretty quickly, but they might get a few adds on them. These situations are always a little chaotic, but also don't last very long. We don't do many huge AE packs of mobs that hit brutally hard.

A few targets -- in this case, you might be CC'ing one or two, tanking a few others, but burning down the targets one at a time. If the dps are on the right target and pulling off of you, then we're back to situation one. If they are on the wrong target, then they are playing badly and should be corrected and / or mocked, depending on how you roll.

On the one target scenario, you may not need to Thunder Clap on cooldown. The cooldown is 6 sec and the debuff duration is 30, and the threat is not so massive that you should just always Thunder Clap any target. On the few targets scenario, it's at your discretion. Thunder Clap may help keep aggro on the targets not being dps'ed but you might also break CC. On many targets, you should Thunder Clap your heart out. You can tab target your other abilities around, and many tanks do, but you can't realistically tab target them all, so it's not going to make a massive difference. In the few case, you are going to want to spend most of your single-target abilities on the dps target, but perhaps start shifting over to the next target so that you have a headstart when that becomes the target.

That was a long explanation, and it's possible your question was just a thinly veiled jab at how your single target and AE rotations aren't that different, but I think the prioritization of how you use them is.

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Q u o t e:
He was saying that our AoE threat is mostly fine right now because of tab target and cleave, but that's for smaller groups. He's saying we struggle holding larger groups because we don't have other options.

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And I'm saying you can hold them well enough. If the mage catches a couple of whelps, it's probably not going to kill him before the whelps die. If we did AE packs of giants or devilsaurs or Marrowgars, then it would be critical for a tank to be able to hold a very large number of targets. But we don't. "Tanking" those large packs is really more about trying to decrease the damage done to others. You aren't going to be able to control it that well. Generally if you find you can't control N number of targets, then it's a reasonable bet that we don't expect you to control that many. You're supposed to CC some or just burn them down, depending on the scenario.

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Q u o t e:
So what is the design goal? You either want tanks to be able to hold large groups of mobs, or you don't. If you do, then warriors need more AE threat. If you don't then other tank classes need a nerf. It is really that simple.

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No, that's like saying we want you to live or die on boss fights so they should either be easy or impossible. On hard encounters, we ask for tanks to sometimes do difficult things.

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Q u o t e:
Here's the scenario:
- We at the point where everyone over-gears the content.
- We will no longer be using CC as it really does slow down the pace of dungeons.
- AOE damage is high enough to eclipse that of single target damage

Then the question is: Should tanks have sufficient threat to hold agro in this situation?

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If you are overgearing the content by that degree then it's unlikely the dps are going to die quickly if they are a little sloppy. We don't spend a ton of effort balancing outdated content that you outgear.