I was asked recently how I manage threat in my instance runs.  Not by an ability or rotation scheme, but rather from a informational system. Your UI and what you do within it are the major factors impacting the information you have at your fingertips. But, it’s not enough to slap a few AddOns in the mix and have information scattered all over the screen. To be effective, that information has to be organized. So, with that in mind, here’s how I organize that information.

Name Plates

Why name plates?  It’s an obvious indicator of threat. I’ve profiled Threat Plates before, and for me it’s an essential.  It is amazing to help figure out which mob in the pack is eyeballing my heals (or overzealous DPS).  Anything that I don’t have 100% threat focus will be enlarged; it makes it that much easier to click the correct target for the next icy touch. With two mobs, tab-targeting is fine.  With a larger group, it takes too long to tab through, and a big red bar is pretty easy to see and target.

Threat Plates showing Fail tank losing Aggro

Action Bars and Inline Timers

The first thing I change in my UI is the default action bars. I like Dominos for this.  However, the real meat for threat management are the OmniCC and Inline Aura AddOns.  OmniCC adds a cooldown count to the action bars for my abilities; this tells me at a glance how many seconds left until my rune cooldowns are ready to fire again. Inline Aura tells me how many seconds are left on my diseases. This second part is pretty crucial, especially considering incoming spike damage will soar if Frost Fever (and by extension Icy Talons) is allowed to fade. I’ve tried other timers like Class Timers or Power Auras, but for me it’s simplest to monitor the action bars for cooldown counts. This way, I can glance at the action bar to know when to fire and upcoming durations.

Action Bar with Inline Aura durations and OmniCC cooldown counts

The red (and yellow at times, but not shown) numbers in the center of the action bar button is OmniCC telling me how long my runes have before they refresh.  The yellow number on the very bottom is Inline Aura telling me how many seconds are left on my current target for that ability.  Another way of saying that?  OmniCC tells me when I can use my next ability.  Inline Aura tells me how much longer my disease will tick away on my current target.

There you have it, everything you ever needed to know about visual threat management.

Cheers!

The current mindset in 5m instances seems to be: tank pulls a pack of stuff and DPS AoEs like crazy till all are dead. The advantage to this is lots of stuff dies fast. The disadvantage is that it’s easy to lose threat if you as the tank are not putting out enough AoE threat to offset the DPS.

Visual Threat Indicator

The Threat Plates theme for Tidy Plates helps me manage this visually. What it does is beautifully basic: when you are in “tanking mode”, any mob that you don’t have high threat on has it’s nameplate enlarged (I’m slacking off on the Enslaved Proto-Drake). Any mob where you do have high threat is displayed in ‘normal’ view. The AddOn allows for customizations to suit your own personal tastes.

Threat Plates is a theme for the Tidy Plates addon, so you’ll need to download Tidy Plates and Threat Plates to use. The one disadvantage that I’ve run into with Threat Plates is that the settings are global (and therefore not specific to my Death Knight). The way I’ve gotten around this is to deactivate Tidy Plates & Threat Plates within the Blizzard AddOns window at the login screen for all characters, and then activate for only Artie.

Blizzard UI

With Patch 3.2, Blizzard implemented the fix to the nameplates where you can choose if overlapping nameplates are allowed… When I tank, I prefer to have the nameplates not overlap; it helps select the one that’s getting bigger with a quick mouse click for a Dark Command or Howling Blast (depending on cooldowns) and quickly refocus that straying attention on me.

Bottom line for me: I want to know what has the possibility of slipping away from me and I want that information readily available and easy to see. Kudos to Syronius, the author of Threat Plates!