It’s not mentioned anywhere in this guide, but since heals don’t target a single mob, they don’t aggro a single mob. It wouldn’t be fair(or safe) if 1000 healing did 5000 aggro(500 x 10 mobs in range). Instead you’re looking at 1000 healing doing 50 aggro per mob across 10 mobs, for the same total of 500 aggro.

During Razorgore stage 1, when your paladins heal someone, it’s being divided evenly among the 10+ mobs currently on the stage – with that number increasing as the fight progresses. Not to mention, the majority of that threat evaporates as orcs die. In order for a healer to pull aggro over your 600 base threat, he would have to do 600×1.3 = 780 threat. Given a clean fight, and that your dragon has been out the entire time with, on average, 10 other mobs alive during a heal – a priest with no threat reduction would still have to do 15,600 points of healing to pull aggro off you.

Most likely you are running into the change in mathematics that 1.12 brought about. We no longer generate 145% threat in bear with defiance equiv; it’s more like 150% now.

“A Druid in cat form can Cower, whch reduces threat on a single target by 600, equivalent to 600 damage from the druid.”

This should actually be “…equivalent to 750 damage from the druid.”, due to the recent changes in cat-form aggro.

Regarding crits and threat, while I have not done rigorous testing, I have done some minimal ad hoc testing, and it appears (can’t swear to it, but it appears to be so) that crit Mauls do in fact generate double the expected threat. There was a comment to this effect on the old Druid forums, although I have been unable to find it since the forum reworking.

To be specific: I crit-Mauled a 7000hp mob for 600 damage, which was then melee’d down by a single rogue. 600 damage should have been 1524 threat, which would require 1676 threat to pull aggro at melee range, or 2096 damage from a rogue. However, the rogue did not pull aggro until he had done all but about 1000 of the mob’s health, or 5400 damage. He would have had to feint 3 times to accomplish that, which is highly unlikely (judging both from the speed with which he beat it down, and the fact that my aggro is normally good enough to make Feint unnecessary–it’s just that in this situation I was holding aggro on 4 mobs, so I deliberately ignored the one that I critted on the first hit). However, if crits do double threat, my actual threat on the mob would have been 3048 threat, requiring 3353 threat to pull aggro at melee range, or 4191 damage–which is just about where the rogue pulled aggro.

As I said, I haven’t done exhaustive and repeatable tests (which are, certainly, long overdue). But I watch my fights quite closely, especially with an eye to aggro generation, and it does appear to me that crit Mauls (although not regular crits, certainly, as has been well-documented on the Warrior forums) generate double the expected threat.

I’ll do the official, repeatable testing as soon as I have the time and someone to help me with it, but I’d appreciate it if you’d at least add a note that the question remains open.

*hugs*,

Qina.

P.S. Thanks for an *excellent* site!

Veon, I was aware of that, but didn’t think it was particularly worth mentioning here, since this was intended to be just a basic outline of how threat works for people tanking and people trying to avoid becoming the tank. There used to be a great post on it on the R&D forums, but that’s gone now… people can read wowwiki for the in-depth details on warlock and shadow priest and paladin tanking and so on.

warriors taunt is also on 10s cooldown (and can be reduced via talents, and cost no rage.

what taunt does – it completely overwrites threat with a value of a person on top of hate list, and makes enemy attack you for a short amount of time. having the same threat as previous person won’t make a mob stay on tank after taunt buff expires – tank needs to generate additional threat to make mob change targets.

1.12 promises to make all these things much clearer… though the tooltips might be a little uglier.

So while it may work on grinding, on Core mobs I would usually be dead before Disengage got one off of me, therefore – Feign Death, which works better from a distance and – if not resisted -immediatly, also wipes all aggro so I can start damaging all over again.