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One of Blizzard’s main objectives in Battle For Azeroth seems to be to slow the game down. First, they put almost every ability back on the global cooldown (before rolling back a few cases, such as some defensives), paralyzing specs like Frost Death Knights and Fury Warriors. Now, it appears they want dungeon and raid groups to slow down as they wait for the tank to grab aggro: in the latest Battle For Azeroth beta build, threat generation has been reduced by a whopping 80%.
For comparison, the skittish affix in Mythic+ dungeons reduces threat generation by 75%. So in essence, a worse version of the skittish affix is now baseline, much to the chagrin of tanks and bursty DPS everywhere.
This harkens back to the days of vanilla, when DPS had to do “white damage only” — that is, autoattacking or wanding — until the warrior tank (the only viable tanking class at the time) got five stacks of sunder armor on the boss, indicating that he had generated enough threat for the DPS to pop their cooldowns. It’s a far cry from the current state of the game, where a tick of Consecration is usually enough to keep enemies fixated on a tank, and will certainly slow down dungeon and raid groups significantly.
Fourteen years into this game’s development, it appears that the current development team has forgotten some of the lessons that have already been learned. Time will tell if this change will stick, but one thing’s for sure: I certainly won’t be tanking in Battle For Azeroth.
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