Inbuilt Threat Meter coming in WotLK

[Akasha]

Yesterday, Bornakk hinted at built-in threat meter, and guess what, it's now live on beta servers. Nethaera has just confirmed that a future patch will bring a big new feature: threat meters.

Apparently some tests in game show:

1. There is no menu to configure it.
2. Your % of threat is an event displayed in your floating combat text messages.
3. The mouseover tooltips are displaying your current % of threat.

[Pernicious]

I suspected this was coming out ever since I read about the changes to Paladins. The new "Hand of Salvation" or rather the modified "Blessing of Salvation" now is a 10 second "buff" that reduces threat by 2% every second. This means that Paladins would HAVE to know what everyones threat is in order to accurately use the spell, as it wouldn't work very well after someone steals threat.

Stealing threat means you have 30% more threat than the previous threat bearer, and the spell only grants 20% threat reduction over a duration of 10 seconds. Odds are if you pull, you'll die before the Pally can do anything about it. So a threat meter would have to be implemented into the game so that a Paladin can use the spell before someone pulls agro as Blizzard doesn't want people to have to use addons to play the game.

[Carlinda]

Does this mean an end to updating Omen every other day? That would be beautiful!

[King Crab]

Originally Posted by Carlinda

Does this mean an end to updating Omen every other day? That would be beautiful!

I doubt it would unfortunatelly. Even though the game will have it's own threat meter, it'll be text based (from information so far). To me the bars makes it MUCH easier to know where you are, so omen will still be a must for me. Only thing is that know omen is going to be a hell lot more accurate.

[Akasha]

I can't see too quick a death coming to Omen (and similar). Blizzard also introduced the in game voice chat, yet Vent and other options are still the most popular choices for players.

[Lurker37]

Unless there's a lot more work coming on how the standard UI displays threat, I believe threat display add-ons will still be wanted.

Some mod authors have commented that the task of making a threat meter is now much easier because it is now a simple task to get accurate threat information directly from the client.

Furthermore, the add-ons will now be able to display threat of anyone in the group/raid, even if they have no threat meter installed. (Currently most addons cannot display threat of anyone without a compatible mod installed.)

In theory, since threat meters will no longer be calculating threat, this also means that add-ons like Omen will only need to be updated when new display features are developed, or to fix bugs.

[doogless]

People will still use threat meters just to make the display prettier, but they definitely won't be required anymore.

[snackereen]

First pictures of the threat meter available at mmo-champion / pic / another picture:

[RomaGoth]

I still prefer Omen and will use it until Blizzard can prove that a built-in meter is better. Don't see that happening anytime soon.

[Opathu]

Hmm from what I recall inside Beta, it's floating combat text, and tells you things like you've got aggro, aggro is high, etc. Not being much of a raider I failed to really look at it closely ... *sheepish