I am wondering how useful healers (or raid leaders) find talented threat reduction (silent resolve for priests for example) when healing in TBC. This is more of a big picture question rather than hard theorycraft so I will keep the numbers low.

In a fight were tanks pump out 800 tps this means that healers w/salvation (with only 1 target around) can pump out 2+k hps each. 2k hps for 2 healers on the MT means they can heal the tank up to a boss that hits for 4k damage per second which seems like a rather hard hitting boss. Given this premise it seems that threat reducing talents for healers are more useful for initial conditions when tanks didn't start their max threat cycles yet. To counter starting conditions, hunters can misdirect and problem is solved. So is talented healing threat reduction no longer something useful for endgame healing roles?

(I haven't been to fights after Gruul and through some rough arithmetic it seems that it is not really needed. Not sure what happens beyond that though)

p.s: ofc for priests one could argue that there is nothing better to get in discipline at that tier anyway. Or at least 3 points of it.

I'm going to disagree, and say it's probably VERY useful for tree druids. Those HoTs add up on the threat meters.

Threat can still be an issue, especially during trash pulls. It doesn't help that as a druid I usually end up with blessing of might instead of salvation during trash

There is trash and also a number of encounters with adds, where healing threat is an issue if you can't control it well through strategy, or having tanks knowing to "guard" that healer.

Morogrim Tidewalker is a good example of an encounter where someone getting aggro from healing in the raid-camp can mess up your attempt depending on the strategy you use.
However we often find it useful to make a Paladin heal with Righteous Fury up - pretty much impossible for them to get killed by trash/boss adds and you can guarantee to pick up the mobs with tanks by moving to them.

A more compelling question for me would be - which talents do you see as being so vital that you would like to pick them up in lieu of -threat talents?

If they are better than Silent Resolve, then great (I doubt they are).
As far as Druids and Shaman go, from my somewhat robust knowledge I'm going to say that if you spec Restoration you might as well go the whole hog than get some of the rather poor choices of low tier talents in the other trees.

Yes the healing threat is split between all the targets you are in combat with, but I don't see how you conclude that makes it easier.

If the tank is dealing with one mob then he can use a plethora of skills to keep aggro and I don't see healing threat as an issue. For every additional mob the tank is going divide his threat skills between more targets, and so on, until you reach a point where even the best tank has relatively little threat accumulated on the extra mobs.

The trash packs before Moroes, or Alar, or Tidewalker Murlocs are a great example of this - in fact you will be accumulating threat on them before they even meet the tank in a number of cases.

Now, if you want to put the merits of different classes aoe aggro to the side for now, this means that while your threat is divided among more targers, so is the tanks. Once you factor in player skill it means that in the case of a warrior at least, you are increasing your chance to have aggro rather than decreasing your chance, as the number of mobs increases.

More importantly - I would be amazed if a competent tank lost aggro to your healing even on a multi-mob pull. However, you are not healing the mobs to death, and therefore some focus will be made on one or two mobs which are being DPS'ed down, reducing the tanks attention on the extra mobs in comparison.

Now that this is clarified, to get back to your question:

If you can guarantee having BoS all the time, do you need to max out Silent Resolve? No.
Is getting it more useful that some of the other talents you have to choose between? Yes, in my opinion.

Try this. Don't put any points in -threat and get everyone else to max it out in your raid.
Who gets aggro all the time and dies the most as the healer, is it you?

I guess it's a moot point to say that a living healer outputs more HPS than a dead one.

On zerg adds, a tank should be able to outpace healing threat from demo shout/thunderclap/rage gain threat. Hell, this should be apparent from as far back as Nef or Fankriss (and there wasn't even def-stance thunderclap then). And if they can't, the person who gets it in the face is probably the mage or warlock AOEing the zerg, not the healer.

There are some very limited situations I can think of where healer threat reduction can be handy (for healers besides the paladin "tanking" smoking blasts on nightbane, for example), but otherwise it's mostly fluff. Especially for shaman, who for some reason didn't get the courtesy of having some other ability combined with the -threat talent like everyone else (memo to Blizzard, there is another 3 point talent in that part of the tree just waiting to be combined with the -threat...).

On a couple of our early Maulgar pulls, we had issues with the fel puppy pets running over to the MT healers. We only had one paladin in that particular raid, and the priest getting aggro most often suggested that he get salvation instead of wisdom. I pointed out that just meant that I would get hit by the puppies instead. He suggested that we all get salvation instead of wisdom. I pointed out that just meant he'd get aggro again, and suggested that the correct solution was for the warlocks to do their damn job. Which they did, and we killed Maulgar.

The moral to this story is that the solution to healers getting aggro on anything is pretty much never "make healers do less aggro", at least in this days of Misdirection and Earth Shield and Prayer of Mending. The only time I've ever really wished for less threat was those moments where the tank missed everything on Vael for the first few seconds and I got aggro from my first heal, but those were pretty rare then and due to earth shield/PoM/Misdrection never ever happen now.

Yes, but in general as a higher-threat healer, you're not pulling mobs off tanks. You're pulling mobs off other healers. After the initial sunder is laid down on a mob, you're not going to pull healing aggro from the tank. You'll pull aggro on untanked and un-dps'd mobs, who are running for the healers. A healer IS going to get whacked, by making sure it isn't you personally you might not be helping the raid as a whole.

As a paladin, I run with RF and without BoS on any trash I feel might start hungering after healers. I'm sturdier than clothies, and can bubble if worst comes to worst. And with +90% healing threat, it's unlikely that a priest is going to be higher threat than me regardless of whether they put points in threat reduction. So yes, I do get aggro all the time, and I do die more than most other healers. But I'd rather I die, than two priests die in the same time before a tank picks the mob up.

There are some fights where initial agro after threat resets are pretty problematic. Morogrim murlocks are one, wave after wave you have to find good spot for healing the earthquake, save the MT or heal watery graves without risking your life for the agro on the trash. Another example could be Hydros, where the swap between damage types what reset hatelist. Not to mention the adds that spawn (And the possible failure of actually being forced to heal from behind the line and causing wipe trough unintended swap). On Leo the Blind its also possible to cause problems with bad healing agro, not so likely as the previous 2 examples. But still possible.

So all in all, There are multiple fights where having less threat production can indeed prevent wipes when forced to heal. But in the situation where you need to make that decision its most likely because of someone elses mistake. Scenarios arent really the main headache of these bossfights. But just given as example to give you insight of whats ahead in raiding SSC.

Personally I 've been running with 4/5 Silent Resolve for quite a few months now, since it helps with 23/38/0 build. I would say it is generally safe with only 4/5, I 've only ever pulled aggro in say Morogrim if I had more than 4-5 renews running and did some greater heal too. But generally having it means I may need to be extra careful and heal less when aggro would possibly matter, so I wouldn't say you can afford having many people without it, so technically that's cheating! I 'd call 3/5 more like gambling, and wouldn't really like it because it just adds some unpredictability factor which can be easily avoided.

From my experience it will only cause a problem if you need to aoe tank something that stays alive for a long time (you will find that 4% eventually adds up). (Eg: Kept pulling aggro on Gluth zombies in 1 night of retroraiding!)

Increased Melee DPS for Omen of Clarity procs?


Rogues Feint only worked up until the first 13 sunders. After that the threat reduction in reality did not benefit as much as, let's say stop DPSing.

Healing reduction works the exakt same way. A 30% threat reduction is only useful when healing alot in the begining where the 30% is a greater amount. Remember that casters only get aggro when they get 130% of no.1s aggro (casters need to be outside of melee range). Long story short if you have above 90% with threat talents you need it, else you dont.

As a ToL druid, I only found it useful in Heroics which demanded that I used HT's for healing instead of HoT's.

For raids (cant speak of anything post gruul), enough healers do the healing so that the threat is fairly spread out. Giving priority to one lifebloom expiring early as a healing strategy is also a nice way to throw threat over to the tank (since his lifebloom heals him - its his threat). Coupled with other spells that share the mecanic of lifebloom (Earthshield, Prayer of Mending) - the initial burst of damage on the tank will give him a nice threat lead, making it safer for the healers. Raids will also generally give you salvation if threat is a problem.

On heroics - the groups I've joined often lacked Earthshield, Prayer of Mending and salvation. Coupled with going there with weaker tanks, I'm often stuck at throwing max-rank healing touches. Here, threat matters alot more - at one point I did a respec to more subtelery after the first few pulls, and really could "feel" the difference.

I'd say its one of those talents which really show off when things hit the fan - and you wont notice it at all during "regular" raiding.