As much as it can be confusing and vexing to see constant changes in these beta builds, I am ludicrously, obscenely thrilled to see them doing this much tinkering this time out with rage normalization and iconic warrior abilities. This is work that needs to be done before release. It's much better that these ideas are tried out now in testing, rather than have the constant up-and-down adjustments in game that make playing a class so frustrating.

Speaking as a long time warrior, that visceral feel is extremely important, and having HS as a watered-down copy of Execute just doesn't feel at all fun or interesting. I really hope all this tinkering results in an ability worthy of the appellation "heroic."

The changing face of threat and tanking

If you read

Well, sure, we all want to feel like what we do is important. If they do this, however, then they'd better damn sure not make any mistakes like they did with tank scaling in this expansion: letting tank DPS/threat double while letting DPS players scale by more than a factor of four. If not for DPS with threat handouts like Tricks/Misdirect, tank threat in the early portions of fights would never be good enough and we'd always lose aggro.

I'm not against this on paper; I just want to be clear that for a tank, if you're going to make threat generation an ongoing issue, you can't be screwing up on scaling. This idea makes tank scaling more important than ever. You'll need to bake in more passive threat or more DPS from active moves, stuff tanks can choose to do that will have a beneficial effect on threat and constant threat generation. Something as simple as threat's only decaying when it's not being actively generated would be enough; it would keep tanks working without penalizing them for a miss streak, if it were done right.

Basically, it goes back to the old story about rested XP: Make threat decay feel like a reward for doing your job as a tank rather than a penalty. If threat only decays when you aren't working to generate it, give people a generous amount of time for this (say, at least 15 seconds before decay starts) and couch it as "threat fixation" or something similar. As long as the tank is working to generate threat, he benefits from fixation and mobs won't just decay off of the aggro table. It's ultimately the same idea, but it feels like a reward for working rather than a punishment for not working.

I also have to admit I find this idea that threat and threat management need to be made more difficult a bit of a puzzler. Last I checked, when I sign up for a five man through LFD as a DPS player, I face a ten minute or longer queue. When I queue as a tank I get in instantly, even faster than when I heal. If tanking is so easy that threat is never an issue and tanks need a mechanic to keep them tanking, you'd expect LFD to be flooded with tanks looking to do the easy job. This feels to me like a situation where some tanks in high end raiding guilds (and to some degree I'm guilty of this myself) are having an easy time with threat, and the poor guy starting to tank next week is going to get hit in the face by threat decay because of it.

The first part interests me in conjunction with threat decay as an idea. It's true that particularly in Wrath, bad scaling issues were plastered over by MD/Tricks. One way to keep tank scaling in the forefront is to make it less easy or even impossible for raids to use these abilities to wallpaper over threat discrepancies. It could be said that this is punishing the players for bad design choices, of course.

More interesting is the rollback on parry. I was never a huge fan of the "parry is 50% damage reduction for two swings" idea because it made parry the new block, an ability that hovered somewhere in between avoidance and mitigation. While it's not terribly imaginative to make parry effectively dodge's twin brother, at least it avoids kludgy mechanics. And if you're making parry into Dodge v2.0, at least having some talents and abilities trigger off of parry instead of dodge is a good way to make them feel different in experience, even if they're mechanically identical.

Frankly, a parried attack should in my opinion trigger talents and abilities like Revenge. You've pushed the enemy attack away in an unbalancing manner, and now you have an opening to counterattack. Dodges should be more purely defensive feeling, as you move and shift to get out of the way of an attack. Making dodge triggered talents/abilities grant small defensive bonuses would be one way to help differentiate them in terms of flavor.

The player base deep breathes more

Let's repeat what we said before: Absolutely nothing is set in stone yet. Any change could get reverted or even changed again into something else entirely. Yes, they're announcing a change to Intimidating Shout to make it more like Repentance, but that doesn't mean it will make it to live. It doesn't mean it won't, either. Some things are far more likely to stay in place ... It's pretty much a done deal that rage will be normalized, and I'd expect some form of threat decay to be implemented ... But take nothing as an excuse to panic. Take a deep breath. Belch fire on a group of crazed, loot-mongering midgets who fortuitously came to your lair so you wouldn't have to go out to feed.