Here's an exerpt from an interview that Curse Gaming did with Antiarc, the creator of Omen.

You may know Antiarc from his Armory Tools and Signature Generator that EVERYONE uses.

I started using Omen a week ago to replace KLHThreatMeter and I ain't never going back. Especially after reading this interview :)

Omen is an Ace2 addon and can be found at http://files.wowace.com/ Or by using the WowAceUpdator found on www.wowace.com. And because its Ace you can update it and all other Ace addons with the click of a button.



Curse: For players not familiar with your latest AddOn - Omen - can you explain exactly what it does?

Antiarc: 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.

Curse: What are the major differences between Omen and KLHThreatMeter?

Antiarc: Well, Omen is obviously inspired by KTM, but I've attempted to improve on the design. The primary reason that Omen (well, its backing library, Threat-1.0) was written is because KTM brute-forces its threat estimates by polling a large number of values every so often. When we gained CPU profiling in WoW, I noticed that KTM was eating significantly more amounts of CPU time than any other of my mods, even while idle. There was a bit of a flamewar going on over this issue already, but what it basically came down to is that Kenco (KTM's author) didn't have any intent to change KTM's design to be more efficient, so I decided that I could do it better. Omen is empirically, by design, more CPU-friendly, which should improve the user's framerates, though that point is contested by Kenco. :)

Once I started development, the Wowace developers convinced me that it would be well-served to make the project a library, which could be used by any number of mods. To date, Threat is used by several mods, including Assessment, Recount, Aloft, Violation, Pitbull, and Sphere. This provides each of these mods with threat data, while the actual threat calculations (which can be computationally expensive) are only done once, and also allows any mod author wanting to incorporate threat data into their addon to do so without having to do the threat calculations themselves.

In the process, I realized that I could do multi-target threat, which eliminated the need for using a master target, and which gave useful information in multi-mob pull, like Moroes, High King Maulgar, or Kael'thas. Then, we went ahead and implemented per-boss modules. Since many bosses have special threat considerations (like threat wipes, or reductions from knockbacks, etc), we developed a general module framework that allowed each boss encounter to be handled separately, and which makes it easier for future boss encounters to be adapted to easily. This modular design tends to make it easy to develop updates for new threat mechanics as they arise.

The final difference is that Omen itself is just a display for the Threat-1.0 library. What this means is that people who don't want a display don't have to pay the CPU and memory cost of a display. They can just run the Threat-1.0 library by itself and it silently synchs your threat data with your group's without ever getting in your way.

I love Omen so much it's difficult to articulate.

The fact that it calculates threat on the fly per-enemy is *so* important to me as a healer -- I don't need to know what my threat is for the combat situation as a whole, I need to know what my threat is on my target's target, because that's who I'm going to get aggro from when I slam out a giant heal. And it switches *automatically*, I love it so much.

... ... ...Also, it's really, really pretty-looking.

I switched to WOW Ace a few weeks ago and Omen was one of the first add on's I put on. It is awesome. I still suck as a tank but it is by no fault of Omen!

I switched to WOW Ace a few weeks ago and Omen was one of the first add on's I put on. It is awesome. I still suck as a tank but it is by no fault of Omen!

I will have to try it out. Also you don't suck. We rocked Shattered halls together!!

I've been using Omen for a couple of months, and it was the new standard at my old guild. It isn't perfect, but does seem to be better then KTM, and particularly with multiple mobs. I may be wrong, but I think uses the mob name to distinguish, so if you have multiples of the same type of mob it isn't so accurate on trash.

It is updated quite regularly, so if you use the wowaceupdater, that makes it a bit easier to keep up to date.

Ya, the multiple mob thing is entirely true. Right now there's no way to descern between two mobs with the same name. However, if you check out the rest of that interview on Curse, Blizzard may make it possible in 3.0.