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Q u o t e:

A: We will make sure they don’t feel gimp compared to the other 3 tanks. We’re not going to give them an ability that they can just spam endlessly to maintain AE threat. We think Thunder Clap and Shockwave already work well for that. We want you to have to manage threat, but we don’t want it to be insanely hard to manage. (You also might be doing less AE tanking in Cataclysm overall.)

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So for starters, let's look at "You also might be doing less AE tanking in Cataclysm overall". As has already been asked, but not yet responded to to my knowledge...if there's going to be less AE tanking, why are all three other tanks getting better AoE abilities/control?

1) Prot Paladins get an AoE blind+damage, instant cast, which neatly offsets their "weakness" of mobs running over consecrate.
2) Bears get Bloodbath, which gives them something to use with swipe+maul.
3) DKs get a cost-free outbreak, which despite rune nerfs allows for an instant pestilence at the very least, probably going right along with D&D/Bloodboil.

If AoE is less of a concern, why are the other tanks getting new abilities to handle AoE? This goes against what Ghostcrawler said just a few months ago about not making new aoe abilities for tanks. It'd be understandable if their existing abilities were tweaked (for example, new non-next strike Maul hitting many more targets), but creating new ones from scratch seems to be contrary to what they've been saying.

Direct GC quote:

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Q u o t e:
We’d like to see less AE overall, so buffing everyone’s AE tools isn’t going to be tops on our agenda. That does however mean that we really can’t afford to have a “best AE tank”, and while things are more fair there than they were in BC, they aren’t fair enough.

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So with all that contradictory statement vs. action occurring, here's blizzard saying on their twitter commercial: "We’re not going to give them an ability that they can just spam endlessly to maintain AE threat. We think Thunder Clap and Shockwave already work well for that. We want you to have to manage threat, but we don’t want it to be insanely hard to manage."

For the record, I don't ever remember seeing a warrior asking for an ability they could just spam for threat. What we've needed throughout Wrath is some means of aoe hitting new targets that spawn during add fights like thorim, Valithiria, Arthas, Gunship and so on. In these fights, we can pick up the first set of adds, but then new ones spawn in between the 6 seconds of "we can't aoe due to cooldown". 6 seconds is a very long time in these fights.

What we've been forced to do is use our two pickup abilities, and then spam single target abilites rapid fire, trying to tab or target new adds before they get to healers/dps. This is hugely inferior to the mechanics of the other tanks. Moreover, we have to work much harder to hold groups through AoE like Blizzard, Seed of Corruption, and so forth; other tanks have aoe hits that will hold aggro though these; we get our two on their cooldowns, and then have to tab through everything, hitting with single-target abilities and cleave.

The big one that hasn't been addressed yet is Cleave. Since Cleave is no longer going to be off the global cooldown, we're stuck when it comes to AoE; we can Thunderclap, backup+shockwave as before; but then we're left with the choice of using cleave for two targets or using our higher-threat single abilities for one target. This is a big deal.

What I'm hoping for is an increase of the number of cleave targets since it's getting "nerfed". Or if a slot is freed from our glyph+cooldown setup, having the glyph affect more.

Some of you seem to be confusing intensity with diversity. It's easy to imagine a world where a class has one AE tool that works phenomenally well and a different class that has several AE tools, none of which actually allow them to tank worth a hoot. There seems to be some kind of logic train (wreck?) here that because some classes got abilities that might be useful when AE tanking that we are wrong / changed our minds / lying about how often you will be AE tanking in Cataclysm.

Our goals are that you won't be spending as much of your tanking time AE tanking in Cataclysm as you did in Lich King. A second goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use different abilities than when you are single-target tanking. A third goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use more than one (or maybe two) abilities. None of those seem contradictory.

If you want to challenge our goals as being unrealistic or dumb, then feel free. But we're seeing a lot of this inductive (specific to general) logic where a player tries to poke a hole in one ability and use that to mean our goals can't possibly be met.

Try one of these arguments instead:

1) I disagree with Blizzard putting more emphasis on crowd control and single-target damage.
2) I agree or am ambivalent about that goal, but I don't see how we'll get there because of X reason.
3) I agree or am ambivalent about that goal, but I don't see how Y ability will help realize that goal.

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Q u o t e:
I choose #2

I already said why, but to reiterate:

X reason=We don't have tools beyond thunderclap, shockwave and cleave. And cleave is no longer off the global, which is a nerf to our aoe capability. How is this being addressed?

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We could increase the damage of Thunder Clap and Shockwave if we needed to. I'm not convinced we'll need to, particularly in a world with the Vengeance concept. Warrior AE threat was generally fine in Naxxramas. It only started to slip in later tiers, and in comparison to (some) other tanks.

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Q u o t e:
Also #3, how does Heroic Leap help realize that goal? It seems far too limited and situational to be of much use beyond an occasional pulling tactic when the stars align and mobs are close together & stunnable.

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Not every new spell is there to help realize those goals. If we wanted to give warriors a new AE ability, we'd give them something either spammable or persistent. We're just not sure they need a new tool in that space. Any balance issue can be solved with number tweaking of existing tools.

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Q u o t e:
i am ambivalent about that goal, but i dont see every fight in cataclysm never featuring staggered adds that will need to be tanked. i dont see how giving warriors nothing to fill in this hole in their design will improve their gameplay in those situations.

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There will almost certainly be staggered adds sometimes. It won't be every encounter. In those situations you'll need to use your full tool box to handle them. Maybe you need to save Thunder Clap for a few seconds. Maybe the rogue and hunter help pull the adds to you. Maybe you Devastate and tab. Maybe you blow Challenging Shout. Maybe you blow Intimidating Shout until Thunder Clap has finished its cooldown. If we wanted you to always have an answer for every single add situation, then Thunder Clap would have no cooldown. That would make tanking easier for sure. Is making tanking easier really more fun? At what point is it so easy that you're just standing there getting beat on?

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Q u o t e:
The problem is that your preview simply didn't provide enough information to instill confidence that warriors aren't going to be dealing with the same issues aoe tanking that we have now.

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I don't think warriors have any AE issues now, except for two: some classes have to do less work to AE tank, and the threat generation doesn't scale with gear as well as it needs to. Again, we don't want to make tanking just hitting one button or a macro. It's not a matter of giving you an ability for any conceivable situation you might find yourself in. It's only a problem if you're horribly broken in those situations and I don't really think warriors are there. As I've said before, we like how warriors AE tank. It generally works. It didn't work when Tclap had a 4 target limit.

Do you really struggle for example in 5-player heroics? Did you struggle in Naxx? Did you wipe a lot on Ony whelps when a warrior tanked them?

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Q u o t e:
Not everyone has to be exactly as good at everything as everyone else. Its ok for certain classes to have a bit more difficulty with something than another.

The warrior AoE model doesn't lend itself to staggered adds (well, it might, depending on cleave). But that is ok.

With some savvy skill use, and a minimum of support from the raid, the warrior can manage anyway.

Do they never design encounters where gap closers are helpful, because it would be unfair to the non-warriors/druids? I make use of charge, intercept, and intervene in raids quite a bit.

The gaps between thunderclap and shockwave aren't that difficult to deal with. I don't feel there is much reason to try to plug those gaps.

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Yeah, this is kind of our feeling.

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Q u o t e:
However, all of your comments suggest that the reason we won't be AE tanking is because we won't be able to take the damage, rather than not having the opportunity to AE tank. I distinctly remember the exact same logic used before WoTLK came out: "Players should be able to hold agro on the mobs, we want the real threat to be the mobs killing the tank"

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Maybe I'm misremembering something, but the goal going into LK was that warriors should be able to AE tank rather than every group using paladins for trash, and that casters should be able to use their AE spells, otherwise what are they there for? We succeeded in both of those, but a little too well on the latter to the extent that anything with more than 1 mob became a job for Blizzard / Hurricane / Mind Sear, etc.

In Cataclysm, there will be more threat to the tank of dying if you try to just AE tank every pull. Likewise, AE damage won't be quite as awesome so that single targeting things will probably be a better strategy when there are say 3-5 adds. If it's a dozen twilight whelps, then sure, AE away.

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Q u o t e:
This is an odd comment. The answer is No, but not because the warrior was sufficient. It's because the mobs happened to do so little damage that the DPS were able to tank them (or you had another tank with you).

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But the goal is not "tank maintains aggro no matter what." The goal is the tank can control the situation enough for you to complete the content.

Your other arguments were that other tanks can AE better than warriors, which I agreed was a problem. That doesn't mean warriors need a new ability to fill the gaps though.

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Q u o t e:
I'm sorry ghostcrawler, but the parts I underlined are ridiculous; many warriors reading it will shudder instinctively. You cannot save thunderclap on staggered adds or the initial wave is going to run rampant; we have to use it to get them on us so we can use shockwave (we almost never can use just shockwave because of it's wonky direction/range). On pretty much any aoe encounter in a raid, challenging shout=I just grabbed the boss in addition to the adds I wanted, or I just grabbed the other tank's adds too and now have waaaayyyyy to much stuff on me.

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Then all you're saying here is "tanking is too hard," aren't you? Imagine the warrior was the only tank in the game. Would you be making these same claims? In an absolute sense, is AE tanking too hard? Or is it only relative to say paladins and druids (which again, might be a problem, but the solution isn't to make warrior AE tanking trivial)?

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Q u o t e:
Asking for another AoE tool is just like asking TC to not have a cooldown from GC's PoV

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Bingo.

I'm trying to separate a few different arguments here:

1) The paladin can tank better than I can.
2) I need another tool to tank.
3) AE tanking is too challenging.

All three are kind of getting munged up in this thread.

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Q u o t e:
1) The Paladin and Bears (and possibly DKs) can all AoE tank better than I can.
2) I don't need another tool to tank; assuming other tank's AoE threat is being significantly nerfed (though the class previews seem to indicate the opposite is true).
3) AE tanking is not too challenging.

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This was definitely my assumption. Some posters here seem to be arguing that AE tanking is too challenging and just needs to be made easier.

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Q u o t e:
3) AE tanking is not challenging in certain circumstances, unless you look at it relative to the other tanking classes.

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Then adding new tanking tools is probably not the right solution to that problem.

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Q u o t e:
Don't you see GC that the above list IS the reason why this thread is playing out the way it is. As long as #1 is true, as far as aoe tanking goes, then some warrior tanks will agree with #2 and #3. If a paladin has to expend as much effort to aoe tank as a warrior then #2 is removed from the equation and number #3 becomes a separate debate (one that the designers of the game are at the discretion of setting the bar for).

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I understand that is why it's playing out, but from the perspective of a designer trying to fix problems with the game, it doesn't help to have issues that are so conflated. If nerfing paladin AE tanking threat or buffing warrior AE tanking threat fixes the problem, then great. It AE tanking is too challenging for warriors even in that world, then we need to consider other options.

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Q u o t e:
Intimidating Shout - I don't use this in PVE and maybe I'm wrong, but there's NO positive aspect to using this as a tank trying to generate aggro. It doesn't generate threat and it makes the adds that you WANT in melee range run away out of melee range. Assuming they're not fear immune, which most already are.

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I didn't mean to imply that blowing Intimidating Shout is a swell idea on every AE pull. The context was a scenario that apparently comes up all the time where the warrior has recently used Thunder Clap and Shockwave and a whole lot of Morogrim-style adds pour into the room, leaving the hapless warrior without an AE button to push and solve the whole problem. I was pointing out that there are a lot of things you can do in that situation. Yes, if someone is about to die and you can't wait for Thunder Clap to come back up, then by all means use Intimidating Shout. That's what it's there for.

We're just not crazy about the sound of any of these ideas that have the warrior able to use Thunder Clap and have it tick away on the mobs or on the ground to make sure things will stick to you no matter what.

Warriors tanked for years without Shockwave and with a pretty wimpy Thunder Clap that only hit four adds. Yet, they still managed to handle a variety of fights, including this staggered adds situation that is the current hot topic button for this forum. I played a warrior tank a lot in that time period, and yeah, sometimes you lost aggro and sometimes you wiped. It's a lot easier today. I'm not trying to use one of these "back in my day, we tanked uphill in the snow" arguments, but I am trying to get a sense for how easy you really want tanking to be and still have fun doing it.

(Again, I'm totally bought into the argument that AE tanking on live may not be as easy for warriors as paladins and druids. I'm trying to establish how AE tanking should feel in an absolute, not a relative sense.)

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Q u o t e:
It was emphatically not fine in naxxramas, unless you mean to say "warrior aoe was what we would ahve considedred fine, but paladins and death knights were so OP as to be on another planet entierly and made warriors completely pathetic-looking by comparison."

Is that what you meant to say, GC?

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No, I meant warrior tanks could tank all of those large pulls just fine in Naxxramas. Since nobody was really pulling off of the warriors, it wasn't a really noticeable deal if someone else could do it with fewer buttons.

I'm just reading a lot of "tanking is so hard" threads, and A) we don't really agree, and B) if it's any less challenging I fear a lot of tanks may get bored and move on to other classes. There are some annoying parts of tanking we need to fix, and we definitely want to fix the threat scaling problem and any major disparities in AE tanking. But if you're looking for an experience even easier than tanking Naxx, I'm not quite sure how to provide that given my A and B above.

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Q u o t e:
Trash IS NOT fun.
AE tanking refers to trash.
Stop making changes to stuff that most people try to skip.

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This attitude always surprises me a little bit. You want a dungeon with no trash at all? Should we maybe make the bosses skippable as well since they're also getting in your way? :)

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Q u o t e:
We tanked for years like that in a completely different environment. The zerg AOE wow culture that developed during this expansion has completely changed the landscape.

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I agree with both of those sentences. Now guess what I'm going to say next. :)

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Q u o t e:
Ghostcrawler, if you want us to use that set of "a lot of things you can do", you have to make the abilities work for us. Intimidating shout for example is worthless in 5 mans and raiding. Using it in a 5-man is a tremendous risk of pulling many more adds, even when it works on the mobs in question.

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I feel like you're setting up a situation in which the only acceptable answer is "No cooldown on Thunder Clap." If you just dismiss all your other tools as unreliable or not perfectly suited for the situation, then yeah, you're going to end up in a place where you are waiting 6 long sec for Thunder Clap to come off cooldown.

I used Intimidating Shout a lot tanking heroic Shattered Halls on my warrior. If you took it off your bar, I'm not sure how you got through that dungeon.

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Q u o t e:
You keep saying how "easy" tanking is. Can you please explain to me then why Mage has one of the easiest and highest DPS rotations in the entire game? 2-4 buttons? You're out here moaning how "easy" tanking is, while mages can sit with a juice box in one hand and mouse macro'd abilities on their left and right mouse buttons topping the DPS charts.

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Your post makes it sound like I've ignored this question, but it's something that has come up often on the forums. You can probably find a response I made within the last couple of months on mage dps. The short answer is that it's not the number of damage sources that counts. It's the number of things that affects those damage sources.

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Q u o t e:
This seems to be an argument for "tank niches". That is, paladins and druids are possibly being considered as the AOE tanks. Warriors and DKs would, presumably, have some other niche(s) to fill in Cataclysm. I think this is a bad idea and I try to explain why below.

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The quote you are responding to wasn't an argument for tanking niches. I keep trying to ask the question "Is tanking on your warrior too hard if you ignore all the other tank classes?" The answer I keep getting is "We can't tank as well as the other tank classes."

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Q u o t e:
CC existed for two reasons back then, and I think everyone's forgetting the latter. One, trash could actually kill your tank.. quite easily. Two, the tanks couldn't really hold an infinite amount of garbage like they can now. We've all been spoiled by Wrath (and a lesser extent TBC; 4 target TC/swipe wasn't amazing but Paladins were) and getting back to the Vanilla state where trash is dangerous, requires cc and you can't just trust one guy to grab and hold all of it without assisting and focusing... well, that's going to be a very painful transition for some, I think. Mostly idiot dps.

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That's why I keep trying to emphasize it so there will be fewer surprises when it happens. Honestly though, I suspect you're unlikely to see anything like the trash before the second boss of heroic Shadow Labyrinth again. I don't want to speak for the encounter designers, but the kind of model we talk about a lot is something like heroic Pit of Saron when you're in appropriate gear. Many of us overgear it these days, but if you don't you'll find some of those pulls particularly near the end can be scary. Maybe it'll be slightly tougher than that, but the point is we don't want to go back to two dozen pulls in between bosses. We'll also be sure to keep some "burn the lot of 'em down" moments, because variety in encounters is good for pacing.

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Q u o t e:
One question I have in mind is whether the same trend will persist in Cataclysm. Will gear scale to a point where a large pack of trash in heroic dungeons can be easily handled by a well geared tank. When that happens, we're back to the state of play where AoE tanking and AoE dps becomes the norm.

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We have no problem with you blasting through a dungeon when you outgear it. Part of the fun of getting so powerful is seeing what you can do when you get to go back and pick on those old bullies.

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Q u o t e:
We know from GC posts they are doing some things in Cata to change the nature of aoe pulls. GC made a recent post that they are toning down aoe damage abilities such that single target dps will be the best option even for pulls up to five mobs. Pally aoe threat is being nerfed in some way. Bears get another button to push but we have no idea what kind of threat our abilities will generate, and if the dps is mostly single target burning we won't be spamming Swipe any more at any rate.

I really think this will become a non-issue for the most part come Cata.

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Yep.

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Q u o t e:
When the game goes back to less AE and more CC in cata the skill level will go back up -- and at first it's going to be a blood bath when people who have forgotten how to play will be forced to relearn

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They might even need some kind of training mode before they're ready for heroics. Fortunately we have a new feature in Cataclysm called normal modes. :)

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Q u o t e:
GC!!!!! All we want is a aoe move that stays on the ground just like Pally and DKs have. Dont have to be a new move just let TC stay on the ground for a few secs and were set.

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And our concern of doing that is it makes tanking too easy, which risks it becoming boring. We have the same concern about the other classes too.

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Q u o t e:
I agree with both of those sentences. Now guess what I'm going to say next. :)

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Thanks for all the guesses, but the correct answer is "Bartender! Hit me."

I'll abstain from using actual quotes here, but these things were basically said above.

Using Demo Shout to tank:

-- We don't like the feel of this. It hits for no damage and puts a debuff on the target that isn't visible and doesn't change the target's behavior at all.

Getting a new tanking AE to use when SW and TC are on cooldown:

-- What's the point though? Why not just remove TC's cooldown rather than add yet another ability you're supposed to spam in rotation?

On warriors losing Cleave:

-- You're not losing Cleave. You don't have infinite use of it, but you're not going to have infinite use of any of your abilities, because things will cost rage and if you spend rage unwisely you're going to starve yourself. Use Heroic Strike vs. single targets and Cleave against groups. Besides, I hardly see how Cleave is this panacea for the staggered adds scenario seeing as how it hits a grand total of one additional target (two if glyphed).

On tab targeting:

-- We really don't want to see a scenario (for any tank) where you just stop using your single-target abilities completely. It's fine to supplement those with an AE attack, but not completely ignore them in group situations. (As an aside, the paladin doesn't really do this now because he uses the same rotation for both singles and groups. The druid doesn't do this now because Lacerate doesn't hit hard enough relative to Swipe. Both are easily fixable though.)

Let's take four scenarios that cover the majority of encounters:

1) If dozens of twilight whelps are streaming in, fine, just AE tank them and have the dps use Blizzard, Hurricane, Whirlwind, etc. I think you all know how to this by now. :)

2) If you're doing a four pull and the mobs hit really hard, then CC one or two and dps the others down single target. You'll want to keep threat on all the loose mobs, but not by spamming an AE ability unless you can buy yourself plenty of room. I know everyone is scared of CC, but we actually made a pretty good spread of CC abilities in LK, and then sadly nobody ever got to use them. In Cataclysm we are making sure to spread abilities around even more.

3) Now, if you're doing a four pull and you think you can get away without CC, then ideally you'd use your AE attacks but still pick a target to focus on. That's the one that gets your Shield Slams and Heroic Strikes and that's the one dps should focus on first. Keep in mind in today's world the warriors are Whirlwinding and the Rets are Divine Storming even the single targets, which generates threat on the off targets, which means you might lose those targets if you aren't tabbing among a bunch of them. In Cataclysm, everyone should be able to focus on one mob at a time again.

4) On the single target fight, like many bosses, you'd just use Thunder Clap for the debuff and otherwise keep up your single target rotation.

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Q u o t e:
Is funny how you keep quoting people and answering to absolutely nothing GC.

your points seems to be, you can do it so is fine, we know the rest can do it better and easier but that doesnt concern us because you can do it to, just worse and doing more work for it.

why is it fine? why everyone else can do it better and easier, you are concerned about us being bored while tanking, yet we get worse than bored, frustrated when a pally comes over and pulls every single mob away and we are left with the one we taunt just so we got rage to keep TC up on the rest...

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I keep asking the same question and getting very few of you to answer it. In fact many of the answers even say something to the extent of "I don't like your question. I just want to tell you that I think paladins are more powerful than warriors."

My question (is warrior tanking too difficult or is paladin tanking too easy?) has a lot of relevance because it determines whether we buff warriors to the paladin level or nerf paladins to the warrior level. Complaining about paladins on page 26 of this thread doesn't accomplish much when I said many pages earlier that we think there is an imbalance here that we intend to fix. Now we are trying to decide in which direction to fix it. I like the warrior tanking style myself, and I am concerned about making it less fun for warriors who also like it.

On the other hand, we want to make sure there are enough tanks in Cataclysm, so making tanking extremely challenging and prone to failure risks thinning those ranks.

On the third hand, making tanking boring also risks thinning those ranks.

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Q u o t e:
Warrior tanks are leaving in droves to be anything else because it's just that much easier to do.

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Except there is no evidence that this is happening. It's fine to share your feelings or even your concerns, but let's try to keep the arm waving to a minimum. It's just a distraction from the conversation unless you have compelling data to back up your assertion.

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Q u o t e:
I'm pretty sure he meant challenging shout instead of intimidating shout.

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No, I meant Intimidating Shout. Back before warriors had the AE tools that they had in LK, you used (or you should have at least) Intimidating Shout if things went wrong. The example up above was Thunder Clap was on cooldown and streaming adds were coming in and the tank was presumably losing control of the situation. Intimidating Shout could buy you some time to get things under control again. It could also make things worse if you weren't careful. I'm sad to hear people say they're too cautious to ever use it. It was a lot of fun.

Tanking is just a lot easier today overall, which is probably a good thing, but you do lose some moments like that where you could play smart, save everyone's life and feel like a hero. I don't remember the dungeons where I tanked everything perfectly. I remember the ones where things almost fell apart and I managed to put it all right again. The challenges are more memorable than the milk runs.

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Q u o t e:
Is there any evidence of this? You made tanking far easier for WotLK, and I thought the Tanking population went up. 2 Longtime DPSers in my guild even rerolled tanks for this expansion.

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It's hard to pull the evidence out of the data. Even if tanking did drop, it's very hard to figure out why in the absence of an exit interview or something.

I'm going mostly on the feedback from tanks who say they miss something from back when you really had to give 110% to kill a boss. Now days threat often isn't an issue and the target is tauntable anyway, and you have a lot of cooldowns and so do the healers. That's not to say tanks never fail, but it just doesn't feel as challenging as it used to, and yeah, some long-term tanks miss that. You used to classify tanks as good or bad in good part due to their ability to generate threat.

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Q u o t e:
It is NECESSARY to have situations where bad tanks will fail. If bad tanks don't fail, then there won't be good tanks. You shouldn't have a way to immediately recover if you make a mistake. Maybe that mistake won't wipe you, but it might kill someone. It SHOULD kill someone. Tanking poorly should have consequences. Tanking well should be apparent to the people you group with. They should say "Wow. This is a good tank." In Burning Crusade, when I tanked heroic Shattered Halls or Shadow Labs, I often got major compliments from my group members. They were surprised that a warrior tank could make those instances seem as easy as some of the Paladins they had run with.

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Yeah, I can relate to a lot of that.

The question is how many of those situations we can afford to have before we're left with a few good tanks and a lot of tankless groups. :(