It’s no secret World of Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery phase two has its fair share of problems—leveling, burst damage in PvP, and clunky spell rotations. Even though Blizzard Entertainment is regularly balancing Season of Discovery, the devs are choosing not to address one of the game’s biggest problems.
According to a post on X (formerly Twitter) from senior game producer Josh “Aggrend” Greenfield, the Season of Discovery team doesn’t have any plans to fix the AoE threat problem in dungeons. “To manage expectations here; we’d prefer that any version of vanilla not be a ‘gather everything up and AoE it down’ fiesta at all times. There are other versions of WoW for that,” the post from Feb. 15 reads.
Besides that, Aggrend believes certain classes can effortlessly hold AoE aggro, which might be another problem the developer needs to address further down the road. In Aggrend’s opinion, the sweet spot for tanks is keeping two to three mobs busy while DPS classes chip away at their HP. Naturally, Mages and other classes packed with AoE abilities should think twice before they start dishing out huge amounts of damage.
What bothers me most is that, in reality, only a couple of classes can reliably hold AoE threat—namely tank Shamans, Warlocks, and Paladins. Warriors, Druids, and Rogues struggle to keep aggro even with two to three mobs on them, and classes that easily climb threat meters end up tanking more than the tanks. So, it’s not rare to see DPS Warlocks and Mages stealing aggro before running around panicked, begging the healer to keep them alive.
I’m a healer in SoD, and in my opinion, holding threat as a tank is imperative for smooth run. I really don’t want to treat my Mage or DPS Warlock like a tank while healing the tank on top of that. It creates utter chaos and is completely unfun for all classes—tanks can’t tank, DPS have to kite to try and survive, and healers go OOM quickly. Even though I agree threat is an important mechanic in WoW Classic, you should bear in mind that this is Season of Discovery, and classes have a ton of new abilities that put them on the threat table.
On top of all of this, Blizzard allows spellcleave groups (consisting of Mages, Warlocks, and healers) to pull entire rooms in dungeons like Scarlet Monastery without any repercussions. In Blizzard’s eyes, it’s fine for Mages and Warlocks to cheese dungeons like this, but not for tanks to hold threat—the classes that were clearly designed to soak up damage. These double standards aren’t in line with what the community truly wants.
