Ghostcrawler, what happened to scaling back aoe threat for Cataclysm?

So far, in every preview, the strongest aoe tanking classes are getting aoe threat buffs.

The weakest aoe tank by far, Warriors, is the only tank that is getting an aoe tanking nerf. The change to Cleave is a significant nerf to Warrior aoe even if it hits for a ton, because we lose the ability to spam it on every swing while tab targeting.

I don't understand why both Paladins and Druids are getting significant aoe tanking buffs without any nerfs when both of those classes were already too strong in the aoe department since you said yourself that you want tanks to generate as much as Warriors. Just because these are previews doesn't mean you couldn't preview the nerfs to those classes since there were quite a few nerfs in the Warrior preview.

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Q u o t e:
But this isn't even about that. This is about AoE tanking. Ghostcrawler said they were going to scale back the aoe capabilities so that it would be more like Warriors and Naxx. I want to know what happened to that goal.

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That's still the goal. I guess I'm unclear of what part of the paladin preview you took to mean that we're keeping the same or even enhancing the ability for paladins to AE tank.

We tried to stay away from numbers as much as possible in the previews, except to give you a vague sense of the intent for some of the new abilities in terms of whether something has a short cooldown or a long cooldown.

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Q u o t e:
That new instant attack for prot paladins that does aoe damage and blind? And to be blunt, sounds superior to heroic leap for aoe tanking in every capacity?

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That attack could have a 10 min cooldown. I'm pretty sure we didn't specify in the preview, so I'm not sure how you'd decide it's better or worse in any situation. Maybe it has a 5 sec cooldown but we nerfed the threat generation from Holy damage so severely that paladins are utterly dependent on it now. I just don't think we gave you the information necessary to draw that conclusion, and this is partially why we didn't provide that information. :)

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Q u o t e:
Any elaboration on how you intend to separate the single-target and AoE tanking niches?

I'd be happy with even vague generalizations, though I would understand if you preferred to avoid saying anything that might get used as a forum bludgeon later.

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No, it's not really that. We just have a couple of different avenues we're exploring and we didn't want to have say models A, B and C in different large paragraphs. The ideas just need a little more time to bake.

And I'm not entirely sure how you're using "niches" but I am talking about wanting Prot paladins to use slightly different rotations against single targets than against groups. The addition of Crusader Strike (and maybe Holy Shock?) alone start to provide that.

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Q u o t e:
> GC said AOE threat being normalized between tanks > Previews don't make this extremely clear > GC also said the previews are just previews > there must be more coming down the line to make the first two observations align!

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Ding. Ding.