Omen is a threat meter. Basically, enemies in WoW decide who to attack by deciding who is the most threatening based on the abilities you use. What Omen attempts to do is provide reasonably accurate estimates of your group's relative threat level on individual enemies, so that you can see when you're in danger of pulling aggro (or, if you're next on the snack list if your tank bites it). This info is usually only critical in raids, where only tanks can survive aggro, but it's useful for any multi-player situation.
Omen is an interface for the Threat-1.0 library, and comed bundled with it.
The latest updates are always available at files.wowace.com, or through the WowAceUpdater.
FAQ Help! People say my threat stops sending after a while and I "get stuck". What do I do?
This is caused by some other excessively spammy addon you have installed, which is eating up all of your addon traffic bandwidth. Threat-1.0 uses ChatThrottleLib to ensure that you don't send too much addon traffic and get disconnected, so Threat data gets "stopped up" when another addon is sending too much data. It will usually end up sending after the fight is finished, but of course, it's useless then.
The most common culprit is DoTimer - if you run it, type /comm and turn off all the communications features. They are very rarely needed, and turning them off should help improve your performance and prevent DoTimer from choking off all other addons using ChatThrottleLib.
If you are experiencing this and are not running DoTimer, I recommend FuBar_AddonSpamFu (from files.wowace.com) for finding your spammy addons.
Unfortunately, there's no good solution to this other than disabling spammy addons, since sending too much traffic at once will cause you to disconnect, which is even worse than having no threat data! Do other people need Omen installed for it to work?
Short answer: yes
Long answer: kinda
To get fully accurate data, your groupmates must have Threat-1.0 (or an addon that uses it) installed and running. Any addon that uses Threat-1.0 will satisfy this requirement and will provide full and accurate threat data to Omen. Currently, addons that use Threat-1.0 include: * Omen (naturally) * Aloft * Assessment * PitBull * Recount * Violation
If you or your groupmates have any of these addons installed, or have Threat-1.0 installed as a standalone, then they are capable of sending and receiving threat data.
Additionally, Omen is capable of displaying data from KLH Threat Meter, so if your groupmates are using it rather than Omen, you will get threat data from them. Please be aware that as KTM is an aggregate meter and not aware of multiple targets, any values from it will be incorrect in any multi-mob encounter beyond the first mob. Do I need to install Threat-1.0 to use Omen?
No. Threat-1.0 comes bundled with Omen as an embedded library. You only need to install Threat-1.0 if you want to provide your group with threat information without a GUI. As a user, you can think of Threat-1.0 as a stripped down tank version of Omen. Can I use Omen with KTM?
Sure! Omen gets along well with KTM. You will receive threat data from groupmates running KTM, and any group mates running KTM will receive KTM-compatible partial data from Omen.
Omen is intended to be a KTM replacement, but there are obviously transitory periods for any raiding group. How does Omen handle multiple targets with the same name?
Unfortunately, this is a major weak point in any threat library. Multiple targets with the same name are indistinguishable in the combat log, so you can't really tell which one to apply threat to. Therefore, all targets with the same name share a threat pool, and will show the same threat value. This is regrettable, but Blizzard has intentionally not provided enough information to distinguish same-named mobs in the combat log. Fortunately, there really aren't any threat-sensitive encounters where there are a lot of mobs of the same name that you need to dance the threat line on. Can I re-color my bar/my tank's bar/my dog's bar?
Sure. Just right-click on any bar in the main display to pull up a menu that will let you set color, size, texture, and font settings for it. I saw these cool single bars in a screenshot somewhere. How do I get those?
Just drag a bar out of the main display. This won't work for your bar, but will work for your pet and other players. This creates a bar that compares your threat percentage and TPS against theirs, and gives you an estimated-time-till-aggro-gain, allowing you to easily pace yourself to stay under your chosen tank's threat level.
If you want a bar that dynamically follows the tank, pull out the Aggro Gain bar. DoTimer manages to tell the difference between multiple mobs with the same name, why can't Omen?
DoTimer makes some assumptions about what you're casting on - namely, that you're looking at it in some form. It's possible to hit enemies (and incur threat on them) without ever targeting, mousing over, or focusing them, so the same assumption can't apply to Threat-1.0 or Omen. Sorry. Where do a report a bug?
(todo, for now, use the message board here, the wowace forums or #wowace on irc.freenode.net) Where do I make a feature request?
(todo, for now, use the message board here, the wowace forums or #wowace on irc.freenode.net)
