AddonGurus present WoW Addons

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When in groups players have different roles. Usually you have someone tanking, healing and DPSing. Omen is an addon for World of Warcraft that displays how much threat a player has against a single opponent. In raids this is a must have addon as tanks are the ones who are supposed to be hit and no one else because they are the only ones that can handle the kind of damage instance mobs can hand out.

Omen will show a realtime updated window of the aggro gain for as many group or raid members as you want and it can be configured with a wide range of information as well as visual aspects. Omen will also keep tabs on all mobs in a fight and what aggro players have on each of them. The only problem known is that it can’t handle mobs with the exact same name, so that’s a minor problem. The addon can display players threat per second, absolute threat and the rate of threatgain one currently has.

When someone who is not the tank starts to get too close to the tanks threat there will be a flashing red warning that helps the player stop whatever threat generation he or she is doing until it’s safe again. The addon obviously synchronizes with other users of Omen, and in a raid it is crucial that everyone uses it. In some bossfights it’s guaranteed that you will wipe if someone other than the tanks gets aggo, like the Prince fight in Karazhan, so you can see why this addon is a winner. Omen handles boss fights that involve threat wiping automatically, which helps a lot.

There have been addons like this in the past that were very popular, like KLH but Omen has been the number one threatmeter for most players in the last months due to being memory efficient and being able to hand more than one mob in a fight. There are many configuration options for those who don’t like the addon out of the box and you can change the visuals with different colors, textures and sizes as well as being able to filter out information. You can filter out specific classes you don’t want or need to see in the window for instance. If you want to just see the tank and yourself in the window, that’s entirely possible.

Not everyone knows what threat is all about and I’ll try to give some detailed info on it. In a fight whenever you damage a mob or heal someone while in a group fight, you add points in that mobs memory that we call threat. If you hit it for 1000 hitpoints you gain 1000 threat. There are several things that can affect how much threat you gain though, but I’ll get back to that later. The mob keeps a list of everyone fighting it and how much threat everyone has gained on it. The player with the highest threat will be the focus of the mob’s aggression. This should normally be the tank, usually a warrior, bear druid and paladin tank. What Omen does is give you a fairly accurate list of your group members threat against the mobs in a fight. Damage isn’t the only thing to build threat though, as healing someone fighting a mob will increase your threat against that mob.

There are a number of talents, and some items, that reduce the threat gain you get from damage or healing. I’ll mention a few things that can affect it. A warrior in defensive stance will get a 1.3x multiplier on his gain. A healer will in general have a 0.5x multiplier on his gain, and it’s worth mentioning that overhealing does not give any threat. Shamans have a talent called Healing Grace that gives up to 15% reduced threat gain, and priests have a talent called Silent Resolve that gives up to 20% reduction to threat gain. You can read a lot more about modifiers at http://www.wowwiki.com/Threat

You can grab Omen from http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/9101/

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