Summary

• Showing that threat management tools are very disparate amongst classes
• Pointing out that Blizzard has said "threat management will be noticeably harder in Ulduar"
• Positing the question: is there a point to equal DPS, given the first two points?

Stealing from Lhivera, who did the analysis without cooldowns considered here:

(this does ignore soulshatter, a ~1.5 second cost, 35%-effective threat reduction and invisibility, a ~5 second cost, ~70%-effective threat reduction *if* you don't get hit by any damage in the first 3 seconds.)

Threat per point of damage, from best to worst:
0.60: Arcane
0.70: Demonology
0.79: Destruction
0.81: Frost
0.86: Affliction
0.90: Fire

The Problem with Threat

One problem is whenever you try to talk about it, you get lots of:

• l2p!
• lolz use md
• ur tanks suxxorz

But I truly think there are some threat management issues in the game right now, specifically enhanacement shaman, mages, and warlocks.

It's not that fights are undoable at all -- they're quite doable, and your tanks can just gear for more threat rather than mitigation.

But looking ahead to Ulduar, we've been told threat management will be a bigger part of the game. Looking at things as they are now, this raises a lot of concerns in my mind about how threat works for some classes in the game.

Enhancement Shaman

Covering the one I know the least about first (and the easiest): Enhancement Shaman

Their problem is that their threat reduction only covers melee threat -- and yet a large percentage of their DPS comes from spell damage. Time for an update, that seems like something ripe for a small fix in a patch.

The mage/lock question is a bit more interesting, because it comes down to what is the difference between a hybrid and a dps class? Threat management used to be one of the distinguishing factors -- should it still be?

Hybrids vs. Pures

All the hybrids have high innate threat reductions: they all have a minimum of 30% threat reduction, some getting far more (spriest threat reduction is still clearly balanced for insane VE/VT threat generation even though that's not an issue anymore.) But they also have no active threat reductions: so if tank threat drops below a critical threshold, they have no choice except to AFK.

Almost all the pure classes have very poor innate threat reductions: Mages have 10%, Hunters don't bother, and Warlocks we'll cover later, but it's in the 8%-14% range realistically, with 18% at the high end. But they also have active threat drops.

Rogues are the exception, with a 30% threat reduction, but them being in melee range somewhat justifies this. (It'd be more justified if there weren't a long-standing bug with any mob that targets someone for a random secondary behavior: if you're over the melee-range tank threat at that point, you will pull aggro even as ranged. The 130% threat ceiling is a myth.)

Unfortunately there's two problems with this:

1. On any fight that matters, base threat reduction is far more valuable, because it's probably involving phases, or stages, or multiple mobs, or AE -- something involving threat resets in some way.
2. All the active threat reductions aren't equal:
   • Hunters have 100% every 30 seconds that costs 1.5 seconds (may be higher depending on current bugged state)
   • Rogues get an absolutely free 100% drop every 3 minutes on top of having 3x the innate threat reduction of the other pure classes
   • Mages have 100% at a ~5-second realistic DPS loss every 3 minutes
   • Warlocks have 50% at a 1.5 second cast loss every 5 minutes.

In a real fight, it's reasonable to expect to be able to use vanish twice given its low cost (rogues aren't gcd-bound, and vanish costs 0 energy) and FD as many times as you want.

A warlock only gets 50% (which isn't an issue now but may be in the future), and mages have to spend 4-5 seconds (invis casts for 3 seconds only, but you still need to remove the buff and retarget the mob — the effective time lost is higher than it seems, especially when you realize human reaction time after the game draws the invisibility effect, and then removes it... 4-5 seconds might be optimistic)

Is threat management a valid class distinguisher anymore?

Not everything in every class needs to be equal -- that's true. But in a world where the goal is having similar DPS across all classes, why are the threat tools not also similar?

Everyone who has ever played a DPS class knows the threat ceiling is very very real. It doesn't matter if GC gives all classes equal DPS if the threat ceiling is such that mages and locks can't compete on any interesting fight. Or if the hybrids can't compete on any fight that requires a threat-dump (i.e. a long single mob fight.)

Warlocks

Warlocks are a special case threat-wise that I want to go into detail on:

Their trees are terrible right now, in terms of splitting up the hit and range talents making them very unusable. I posted many times about this in beta but it was never addressed.

However their threat talents aren't as bad as they make it out to be, because at least 2/3rds of their damage comes from one tree if they're affliction or destruction (and if they're demo, so much of their damage is threat-less since it's the pet that it matters far less.)

And they also have 8% of their total damage coming from a demon, which means, if their total damage output is scaled to the same as a mage's (which it's supposed to be), they get 8% of their total damage threat-free.

Therefore, affliction warlocks have the following options:

• 8% threat reduction with no talent points
• 10.8% threat reduction with 1 point in threat reduction
• 13.6% threat reduction with 2 points
• 18% if they actually spec into full destruction threat reduction too (not recommended, they give up too much to do it)

Basically, they're on par with mage raiding specs -- sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower. (see below for caveats)

Soulshatter still requires careful use however, since it's a one-time skill: blow it early and you'll feel like you have terrible threat management tools. This skill would be far more useful at a 2 or 3 minute cooldown just because warlocks would have options.

As it is now, your option is "when the boss is at 50-60% health" and any sooner and you've wasted it: you'll do less total damage because your soulshatter was too early and you will be threatcapped at the end.

Mages

FFb/Fireball are still the mage raiding specs, regardless of what the Arcane mages will have you believe. Those specs are what I address below, because at least your first mage will always be that spec due to needing to provide improved scorch.

Arcane provides 40% threat reduction, but that's an anomaly I expect to be corrected. Either all the pure classes will be boosted to rogue/arcane mage level, or arcane mages will be brought out of the hybrid threat cellar and into the non-rogue pure-class world of 10%.

Invisibility looks very good on paper but suffers from some key disadvantages:

• It takes 3 seconds to take effect on its own
• It has a visual rendering time plus human reaction time which means you don't cut it off right at 3 seconds, and there's no cast bar to let you know when it's done
• You have to actively cancel the buff (another minimum of 0.2 seconds for human reaction)
• The visual effect has to clear (not instantaneous)
• You have to retarget your last target (not too bad when it's one mob -- *sucks* on Sartharion)

Mirror Image is actually a very nice mage spell in that it helps us handle the obscene burst our spells can do: if you get a lot of FFb crits in a row, or blow cooldowns early, Mirror Image holds your threat "invisible" for 30 seconds so your tank can hopefully make up the threat differential by the time those 30 seconds are over.

Unfortunately, you get all the threat back plus what you generated in those 30 seconds at the end of it -- so like fade, while it's a nice thing to deal with an emergency, it doesn't actually address the basic threat management problem.

For Raidleaders: the use of raid threat-reduction tools

Finally, a treatise on why Vigilance and HoS are best put on FFb mages up until the point that the threat ceiling is an issue for everyone (at which point your raid is suffering, but at least move the threat tools off to the hybrids because the mages can invis.)

My assumption is classes are supposed to do about the same total damage. Therefore a class's threat reduction is expressable as a ratio of "threat per point of damage". Damage is assumed to be equal so therefore you can compare threat-per-point equally. Obviously for hybrids they may be doing slightly less damage output per fight, but the principle is still the same.

No talents

If I go into a fight 0/0/0, my threat at the end is exactly 1:1 with my damage.

If a warlock goes into a fight 0/0/0, their threat at the end is exactly 0.92:1 with their damage due to the demon (about 8% of a warlock's dps when it's not the infernal/doomguard.)

Talents

Now, mages can talent easily for -10% in their primary raid trees, so we can reduce that to 0.90:1

Warlocks can talent easily for -5.6% (affliction only) in their primary raid trees, so they can reduce that to 0.864:1

Obtainable threat drops

If you take threat drops into account, Mages can get Vigilance and HoS if there's enough protection warriors and paladins for one per mage, for what (using TBC-era numbers for the value of a mid-fight percentage threat drop) works out to be an effective 0.66:1 ratio.

Warlocks with pet, affliction-only threat reduction, and soulshatter have an effective 0.57:1 ratio.

(the assumption here is that the TBC-calculated value of soulshatter was that a 50% threat drop used around 60% mob health was a 35% value. Assuming you push it a bit later now due to wanting more of a threat ceiling by the end, it has a higher value.)

If you didn't give the mage those buffs, they'd still be at 0.90:1 -- if you give them to the warlock, that's on top of a 0.57:1 ratio.

If threat is really bad?

Now, if the shit starts really hitting the fan? Mages stop getting HoS and Vigilence, pop back up to a 0.90:1 ratio, and they use invis -- which brings them down to a 0.30:1 ratio at the cost of 5 seconds (which is pretty expensive in many fights.)

But at that point all your hybrids are in trouble, because they're operating at a higher effective threat ratio than a warlock is -- most around 0.70:1.