Hotfix adjusts tank threat from Heart of Azeroth Essences

I said this was going to happen sooner or later. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since the old days, and one thing that was inevitable once Blizzard decided they wanted to make threat matter again was that DPS would outscale tanking threat. It was the bete noire of the old school tanking design that hobbled the game until Active Mitigation was brought into the paradigm. Always, sooner or later, DPS would outscale tanking threat, especially when tank DPS was kept low by design.

Now, Blizzard is hotfixing the way Essences work on the Heart of Azeroth to add threat, because — I’m going to let you sit down here so that the shock doesn’t knock you over — DPS from the Essences has outscaled threat. Truly, only someone who paid attention could have seen this coming.

This always happens.

It happened in Classic, it happened during The Burning Crusade, it happened in Wrath and only once we started seeing Vengeance in Cataclysm did we see it fade to a degree, and it wasn’t until the full rollout of higher tanking threat once Vengeance went away did it cease to be an issue. The fact that tanks also had higher base damage for a while there didn’t hurt, either. The changes to tanking made between Legion and Battle for Azeroth put us in a place where this was inevitably the result — the fact that it’s happening fairly early into the second patch of the expansion, with one more big patch to go, is a bit surprising but not shocking. Especially when a DPS increasing mechanism was put into place with Essences.

Because tanking threat never scales as well as DPS does. If you make it so threat is uncoupled from tank damage and you make threat more of a concern, eventually, tanks will lose. DPS is going to get immediate DPS increases from better gear and adding in a system like Essences just makes it more likely. It’s nice they’re hotfixing it, but mark my words — it’s going to happen again.

It would be better to simply increase all threat generation, baseline, across the board for all tanks. Making threat something tanks have to worry about is always going to lead to moments like this — it always has. Still, here’s hoping the hotfix makes it less frustrating for tanks who are wondering why they suddenly started losing their threat after 8.2 dropped.