Originally Posted by Njial
I'm not sure how significant the missing is to my threat generation, and that's what I'm not finding.
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Long story short - in general warrior threat is not scaling, the reason for this is that warriors are the backbone of the game pve design - its much easier to design other classes scaling based on a nonscaling class. Most of our skills have fixed threat and the ones that at first glimpse scale are not scaling at all (Devastate, Shield Slam, Heroic Strike, White Hits). The latter are based on stats like attack power or shield block value which sadly is not scaling simply because Strength gained from gear is not increasing as we gain superior Tiers (i.e. Tier6 has much less Str than Tier5 and about the same shield block value). At the same time raid buffs are also not scaling - Windfury or Strentgh totems remain the same, so are the minor threat buffs from GotW and the like. Pots are also static buff and for good or bad soon (in 2.10) they will be out of the equasion.
The above leaves you with only a few options to increase your threat.
1. Main hand weapon - its base dps actually increases your threat as white damage is a substantial part of a warrior tank threat (if you bother to do a small research you will see that each dungeon preTBC or in TBC has 1 tank itemised main hand that offers ~5-10 mroe dps). Upgrading your MH wep upgrades your threat generation.
2. Hit rating - since you can not affect the capabilities of bosses to parry/dodge your attacks (unless with +weapon skill rating which is rarely seen on tank gear or at least not in sufficient quantities) or the speed at which you deploy white hits/specials (due to cooldowns and swing timer, unless you are using haste proc items) your only option is to affect the miss rate. Less Miss = more rage and more specials landed = more threat. Blizzard's way of itemising tank gear so far has been to introduce +hit tank items when the raid dps reaches the tank's threat limits (at least based on their own internal testing bla bla). With gems you can turn the tide in your favour.
3. Swapping tank gear with "dps" gear that provides +hit/ap/str.
To conclude - if you have access to tank items with + hit then use them. Socketing +hit gems also helps however you yourself will have to determine where is the line between +hit/stamina/avoidance since thats more of a personal choice based on your style.