Threat Info

[Gutka]

I find this very useful.

6 Class Abilities and Talents in Detail

(A) Warrior

Most warrior abilities add a fixed amount of threat when they land successfully. The following table gives the raw values, i.e. before the modifiers from battle stance or defensive stance, and ignores the damage done by the abilities.

Sunder Armor............260
Heroic Strike 8.........145
Heroic Strike 9 (AQ)....175
Revenge 5...............315
Revenge 6 (AQ)..........355
Shield Bash.............180
Shield Slam (1.11)......250
Thunder Clap............130
Demoralizing Shout.......43
Battle Shout.............55

Battle Shout generates 55 threat for each player that is buffed; up to 5 people in your party and their pets, as long as they are on the relevant mob's threat list. For example if you buff a player that is out of combat, no threat is generated. Therefore in a tightly packed group, Battle Shout can rival Sunder Armor for threat, but as a buff the threat is split amongst all the mobs that are aware of you. On the other hand, Demoralizing Shout gives 43 threat to each affected mob. As long as there are 6 or more mobs affected, it will hold aggro as well or better than Sunder Armor.

The behaviour of Taunt is more complicated. It has three effects. Firstly, it applies the taunt debuff to the mob, which forces it to attack you for three seconds. Secondly, it gives you as much threat as the mobs current aggro target, permanently. If you were the target, there is no change, and if you had more threat than the target (that is, if you had more than 100% but less than 110% of their threat), you wont actually lose threat from it. However, this effect can give you arbitrarily high amounts of threat. Lastly, if you came on the threat list before the mobs old target, you will also get aggro on the mob.

The last effect is significant and needs explaining. For a normal taunt you will get threat but not aggro, so if you do nothing else, after three seconds the mob will return to the old target. But if you came onto the mobs threat list before the current target, e.g. you pulled the mob, or attacked it first, then you will gain aggro with just that taunt.

This can be used to your advantage on tauntable bosses that require a tank rotation. If the tanks taunt the boss in the reverse order that they came onto his threat list, then all but one of the taunts will be easy, giving aggro to the new tank, while only the last warrior in the cycle will need to get the additional 10% threat to gain aggro.

While Challenging Shout and Mocking Blow have a similar forced attack debuff to Taunt, they do not give the caster threat in the same way as Taunt, just fixed amounts.

(B) Druid (credit to Chibi of Shadow Moon)

The threat modifiers for Bear tanks are the same as Warriors: 130% for Bear Form and Defensive Stance, or 145% if you have 5/5 Defiance or Feral Instinct. However, the primary bear tanking abilities dont add threat, they multiply. Each point of damage done by Maul and Swipe does an additional 0.75 threat, before the bear stance modifier. E.g. Maul does 200 damage, so it does 200 * 1.75 = 350 threat raw, or 350 * 1.45 = 507.5 threat counting the bear stance + feral instinct modifiers.

In Cat Form, there is no -20% passive threat modifier that Rogues or Warriors in Battle or Defensive Stance have.
The Subtlety Talent is multiplicative, for 0.8 at max rank.
Growl has exactly the same behaviour as Taunt for Warriors.

(C) Rogue

Rogues have a passive -20% additive threat modifier. This means that with blessing of Salvation you are at 50% normal threat, so this buff allows you to do 60% more damage than without it (0.8 / 0.5 = 1.6).

Feint does -600 threat, or -800 threat with rank 5, from the AQ book. Note that it is affected by your threat modifiers, so that the rank 5 ability reduces only 800 * 0.8 = 640 threat by default, or 800 * 0.5 = 400 threat with blessing of salvation. However, in every case it reduces the threat of 800 points of damage. Note that you cant feint below 0 threat.

Vanish removes you from all mobs threat lists, but if you are fighting a boss you will get back on due to the in-combat pulse every tick. However, if you are the last person alive, a vanish will cause the boss to go out of combat, so youll survive if you can achieve that feat.

(D) Paladin

Paladins receive 50% threat from healing compared to other healers. This is designed to stop them tanking instances by healing everything in sight. As a side affect, this gives them a decent advantage over other healers where healing threat is an issue.

When the Righteous Fury buff is active, Holy damage causes 1.6 threat, or 1.9 threat if you have 3/3 Improved Righteous Fury.
Holy Shield damage gives another 1.2 multiplier, for 1.9 * 1.2 = 2.28 threat per damage with talented Righteous Fury.

(E) Priest

The Silent Resolve talent gives -20% threat to spells, additively. Shadow Affinity multiplies threat from shadow spells by 0.75. For example, with Silent Resolve and Shadow Affinity and Blessing of Wisdom, your threat from shadow spells is (100% - 20% - 30%) * 0.75 = 37.5% of normal.

Mind Blast generates 2 threat per damage, all ranks.

Fade reduces your threat temporarily by a fixed amount - 820 at max rank, and is not affected by threat modifiers, such as Silent Resolve. This is a good thing since a priest would only have negative threat modifiers on. When the buff ends, you get the same threat back, so there is no net gain from spamming Fade you should leave it as a panic button instead. Note that you cant fade to below 0 threat.

(F) Warlock

The healing from Life Tap, Siphon Life, and Drain Life doesnt cause threat, but the application of the Siphon Life debuff causes a small amount of threat, and the damage from Drain Life counts. Most curses cause non-zero threat.

Searing pain is 2 threat per damage, all ranks.

Fel Stamina and Fel Energy do generate threat.

(G) Shaman

The talent Healing Grace is a multiplier, 0.85 at max level, which would give you 68% threat from heals with a Tranquil Air totem.

Earth Shock is 2 threat per damage, all ranks.

Each rank of Rockbiter Weapon triggers a weapon proc that is designed to give a fixed threat per second. At max rank, Rockbiter gives 72 threat per second on successful hits. If you had a 3.0 speed weapon, each successful hit (not a miss, dodge or parry) would add 3 * 72 = 216 threat.

(H) Mage

The mage talents Frost Channeling, Burning Soul and Arcane Subtlety, for 30%, 30%, 40% threat reduction to Frost, Fire and Arcane spells respectively, all stack additively with buffs such as Tranquil Air Totem, Blessing of Salvation, and the Arcanist 8/8 set bonus. This means that once you have the Frost Channeling talent, adding Blessing of Salvation allows a 75% increase in damage to reach the same threat. (70% / 40% = 1.75)

(I) Hunter

Feign Death is a complete threat wipe, as long as it isnt resisted.
Distracting shot is a flat 600 threat at max rank.

[Magdalena]

One very very useful tip I got from that, lets see if everybody else comes to the same conclusion... if a mob gets away from the tank, have enough pallies to keep up healing until the tank gets aggro back... all other healers and dps stop everything, might help get it back quicker?

Food for thought.

[Gutka]

I don't know the answer to your question Mag, I am not a good tank . But I think its best if when mob runs off the tank, just to use light dps such as wand and the target being attacked by loose mob runs back to the tank. Although healers need to be alerted to heal the player that's being attacked.

Maybe consider the threat monitor mod... eventhough it requires every1 in the raid to use it, but its good tool to monitor the threat lvl of each player.. and will help with raiding since we pretty much are beginners to end game content.

[requiemdreamer]

Right now that's what people should already be doing. If at any point you pull aggro, you should be making a bee-line for the main tank and everyone should halt ALL dps. "Light DPS" is a relative term and everyone is bound to have their own thoughts on how much DPS that actually is.

[Magdalena]

My reason for thinking that on the healers is inevitably, when the target goes loose, it goes straight for the priests every time, because they're still generating a lot of hate healing everybody it goes after... being that pallies are A) heavier armed and B) according to that generating a lot less hate, seems like a good possibility to try. Technically, if tank aggro is already lost, dps shouldn't even wand until they get it back... reason is once lost, tank not only has to get equivalent aggro for whoever is the current aggro target, they have to get 20% more aggro... if they're still hitting and generating aggro, this is very difficult, especially when the mob is running all over the place and most of the tanks time is spent chasing after it...
this is also the reason for running to the tank if you are the target, quicker it gets to them, the quicker they can start building aggro...

[JonisRahl]

Yes we could give it a try especially since blizzard gave pally's the righteous fury spell which make them generate 60% more hate from there holy spells....its worth a shot!

[Gutka]

Priest can fade, after fade should be able to put the mob back to the next person on the highest threat list. Pallies can make sure to keep priest alive if mob/boss is loose

[Bladesinger]

My personal favorite tactic when the tank loses aggro is simply to feign and lay there until our lovely metal-bound enchantress gets its attention again. I even do it when Magdelena and not Draconias is tanking.

I honestly don't think classes that have de-taunts use them enough. We've got them for a very good reason and should make them a staple part of our personal tactics.

Regularly de-taunt at random intervals. To use a permutation of what my old electronic music professor said when taking his class.

[QuantumDelta]

Gutka, you may (although I realise the focus of this post is to try to orientate the rest of the raid to the concept of threat, threat generation, threat management, and control) want to include a few calculations for your warriors;


Something along the lines of, Rage Generated Per damage point, of a fury or arms prot specced tank, along with the actual rage usage of each ability for threat generation.

It'd actually be quite interesting to see.

As aside:
To all those people not noticing, their gear is steadily improving, the longer you're playing, the longer you're in MC/etc, as well, it is obvious that your +dmg//agi/str is going up the entire time, this means your scaling abilities (sinister strike, frostbolt, shadowbolt, multishot etc) is constantly gaining damage, and, therefore threat.

The issue is that the threat a warrior puts out when played at their optimum will never improve, bar set bonii from Might and Wrath etc.

This means that although a Warrior will forever be able to put out (from day one to day end) ....perhaps 1000 DPS worth of agro, any DPS class will realise that they will eventually be able to exceed this (random example number) limit reliably, and sustainably, at that point they should stop looking at increasing their +dmg/agi/str, and start looking at increasing their stamina, intellect, spirit, and other traits that promote their survivability and durability as a character.

As Armed quite rightly put it last time I raided with the EU Crew - "Dead DPS is no DPS!" - Although you may not find this vital, imagine if everyone was alive for the last 10% of your golemagg last night.

There are examples where this become more extreme later in the game, and ragnaros is one of them, he's not far out of your reach, either.

Little food for thought

[Padishar]

Yes yes I neeeeeed to feint more, I get it......


hehe