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Unread 06-26-2012, 01:47 PM
moebius92 moebius92 is offline
The Undying
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Join Date: Sep 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bogumil
Well, so it is possible to track the amount of threat you generate on a mob by parsing the combat log. WoW threat meters used to work like this a long time ago, before the necessary APIs were made available. However, there are several issues here:

- you need accurate and ideally always up-to-date data how much threat a skill generates, could be accomplished by lots of testing and frequent addon updates
- this does not work very well in situations when there are several enemy NPCs with identical names - they show up under the same name in the combat log (or is there some hidden meta data available via APIs that allows you to differentiate between NPCs?)
- probably most important: the biggest benefit of a threat meter is not there; you only have your own combat log, but not the combat log of other fellowship/raid members - and no way of knowing whether their generated threat on an NPC is bigger or smaller than yours
- even if you were able to somehow accomplish this, you would need accurate data for generated threat for every skill of every class, so you can track threat for all fellowship/raid members
- parsing the combat log of 12 or even 24 raid members and managing a threat table for them would very probably become a huge resource hog

So while some data can be gathered and an addon can be created, there is no Omen equivalent, i.e. the feature to track the threat generated by others is not there/data cannot be gathered so far.
I'll agree, it's a lot of work. It's doable though.

You don't actually need to track other people's threat. Let me explain how I handled threat in Mirkwood. Back then, I'd rather messily estimated that precise blow generated 1700 threat. So what I would do when I was tanking would be to say... alright, I know there are three DPSers - and I expect them all to do roughly the same amount of damage. Thus, for any mob (assuming focus fire), I expect no one will do more than 33% of the damage done to the mob. So for each mob, I'd divide it's morale by 3, divide that by 1700, round up, and that was the number of precise blows I'd have to hit it with to get an aggro lock. And then I'd hit each mob with the number of precise blows needed, and then go read a book for the rest of the fight. (Well, okay, technically what I did was multiple 1700 by 3, say that was roughly 5000, and then divide the mobs' morale by 5000 - same math, but easier to do in your head.)

So for the addon side, you'd need to say, alright the mob has n morale, I expect the most damage someone will do to a mob is x% of its morale. Therefore, I need to generate enough threat to hold aggro against n * x% damage. And you just keep track of how close to an aggro lock you are.

You can even be clever and do it somewhat dynamically. What you do is you set the x%, based on your group composition, and then n_name based on unique mob names (bosses, really). Then what you do is you make a bar that sits directly above the morale bar:

|---threat---|
|---morale---|

...and then you track the amount of threat you've generated on mobs named whatever (call that t_name), and then you compare t_name / x% versus n_name - which tells you alright I've generated enough threat to hold the mob through p% of its morale. (Let me put some actual numbers so there's an example - say the boss Qwz has 1000000 morale, I expect at most anyone will do 20% of the total damage, and my threat counter says I've generated at least 100000 threat. So that's enough threat to hold against 500000 total damage done to the mob, which means my threat bar should be 50% filled in.) And then you by just comparing the boss's morale versus the threat bar, you can see if you're falling behind or ahead on threat, or whatever.

And yeah, this only works on bosses - but I would assume that would be the main concern, really. Regular mobs die too quickly to worry too much about.
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