Blizzard dev 'Ghostcrawler' has penned a new blog post on the World of Warcraft community portal called "Threat Needs to Matter". He begins the post with the obvious: A tank's job is to draw bad guys to him/her and to protect the rest of the group from direct attack. The rest of the post outlines the importance of threat. It's a great read so be sure to head over.

We don’t usually want DPS classes to have to stop attacking in order to keep from generating too much threat. We do want players to pay attention. We don’t think it’s too much to ask for DPS and healers to wait a couple of GCDs for the tank to get the enemy under control -- we’re not asking for five stacks of Sunder Armor these days. What we really mean by proper threat management is knowing things like when it’s time to go all out, when it’s appropriate to use a threat-reducing cooldown, and most importantly, which is the right target to be attacking. I’m not trying to bash pugs here, but I am amazed at how often a nuker will pick a random target instead of the one being tanked, then blame the tank for not holding aggro (and then blame the healer when they die). In short, if threat is too easy, the game is boring. If threat is too difficult, the game is frustrating.

Read more here.