Ghostcrawler posted a ‘Dev Watercooler’ this morning regarding what should be a relief to tanks new and old alike. While they feel that aggro is a major factor in game design, threat is just not what tanks need to be putting their focus on.

“Back in December, I wrote a blog post about our vision for how threat should work. Since then, the game and the community have continued to progress and the designers have found ourselves changing our minds about the role of threat. Enough that we’re planning to apply a hotfix this week to change how threat works.”

This change increases tank threat generation “from three times damage done to five times damage done” in a hotfix this week with an upcoming patch pushing the vengeance ramping to getting to max levels within just a few seconds.

That doesn’t mean tanks are going to get it easy now. Focus will merely be shifted from making mobs angry to keeping them from killing you.

“…we want to shift more tank mitigation to require active management. We’ll still give all the tanks emergency cooldowns like Shield Wall and Survival Instincts. However, we want to move the shorter cooldowns like Shield Block, Holy Shield and Savage Defense so that they work more like Death Strike. Blood DKs have a lot of control over the survivability they get from Death Strike, but as part of that gameplay, they have to actually hit their target. The other three tanks will get similar active defense mechanics. This doesn’t mean everyone needs to use the DK model of self-healing, but they can use the DK model of managing resources to maximize survivability.”

Hopefully this system is more helpful than hurtful, but knowing Blizzard and the bulk of its vocal fan base we’re probably going to end up with a lot of dead tanks and a very active official forum.

To read the unabridged Dev Watercooler, go to http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3300854