Just a quick one here, on a topic thats concerned me for some time.

Im currently Lead Officer (GM) of a guild thats just downed Gruul (pre-nerf), working on Mag and heading into SSC this reset. We're having some debate at the moment over the usefulness of KTM with regards to raiding vs the amount of player skill it takes away.

Personally, I feel that part of my class is knowing how far I can push the agro boundary with a particular tank, and adjusting accordingly. I think that if i were to use KTM, although I may do a slight amount more DPS, I'd probably not be as good a player as I am atm. Others in the guild share this view. However, recently there have been a few people suggesting that as literally EVERY other guild out there uses KTM, we should give it a go.

Im interested to find out from the guys and girls on here;

1. Do you use KTM? If not, why not?
2. What are your views on it with regards to taking away an element of player skill and encouraging lazy gaming?
3. Has using it made your gameplay noticably easier?

If this is too specific a topic, or has been covered already, feel free to heap it, and point me in the right direction, cheers

We've had the exact same discussion in my guild, no final conclusion reached yet, then again, it's only been discussed since around when the first version surfaced at Vaelestraz.

Uhm, it doesn't take any skill away. It reduces the need for a certain skill, but it doesn't make you worse in any way. And even the most skilled DPS'er in the world, playing with the same very stable tank for years, will be able to see an improvement with KTM.

1. Yes. We have used it on and off since we started reclearing AQ with rerolls after our 6 month break last summer. Had people install it to stabilize Huhu, then didn't care if people used it until Patch, where we got it back in. We've had people install it again for certain TBC encounters.

2. It doesn't. It may even help build player skill, since you get a better idea of what kind of tps typical tanks put out on typical encounters, giving you a mark to shoot for even when not using KTM.

3. On encounters where aggro order is absolutely essential (low geared Huhu) or you're otherwise in danger of drawing aggro (a ton), it helps you in two ways. Your DPS can push to their potential with greater efficiency, and you avoid aggro pulls, which will cause deaths, threat/dps loss and whipes.

And yes, it's been covered before. KTM is a great tool. It's not essential in any way, but it does help you do more dps and have less accidents.

And to add: I was initially very skeptic towards threatmeters, since I viewed them as inaccurate. If they are inaccurate, they can do more harm than good. Once they were refined and tested enough that they could be considered 99% accurate, I've been of the opinion that they are definitely a good thing.

1. Yes, why intentionally make the game harder?
2. How is it skillful that you don't know if the tank missed a bunch of attacks in a row and therefore has lower than expected aggro? I would even go as far as to say it is more skillful as you can push your dps limit all the way up to the 10% threshold and stay there for max dps.
3. I've raided with KTM since the beginning of BWL, to several bosses down in SSC, and quite frankly, there is no point to not raid without it.

I don't really think trying to be psychic and using your spider sense to notice when the tank gets 4 parried shieldslams in a row qualifies as "player skill".
It's a great tool that displays the information about a certain aspect of the fight in an easy to read manner and allows every dps class to operate at their maximum potential. I don't really see why you wouldn't use it.

Yes, why not?

Bullshit. This game has little to do with skill anyway. Tell people who think like that to use default UI only since everything else make things easier.

It was so long ago... probably yes and I saw people that started to dps way much better after KTM.

However I might add... KTM can be dangerous for brainless people who will trust that it is 100% accurate which is not true. It still require "skill" to use KTM correctly.

Personally, I feel there's more skill involved in knowing how to ride the line then there is in guessing what your agro is.

Additionally, as a healer, KTM allows me to be pissed off when a mage or rogue or hunter pulls agro on a fight. The excuse, "I didn't know I was that close to pulling agro!!" just doesn't fly with KTM. In my book anything that increases personal accontability is a good thing.

1) Guild was never religious enough about it to make the whole thing reliable- especially with one of the main MT's not modding up due to crappy PC. Also, at the height of my DPS adventures- Shadow Priests were mana limited not threat limited. Going full out it was pretty much impossible to pull aggro unless all the VE was pure heal. I plan on using it once I get back into raiding though, especially after some near disasters in KZ at 70.

2) Dot timers take away no more of an element of skill- I don't see how this is any different. Yes, a skilled individual can function without them. With them, even a skilled individual can improve timing and precision slightly- and an unskilled player can function leaps ahead of where they would without help. It's a tool, like a crowbar. You can use it to be lazy or to excel, the use of the tool doesn't change the fact that it allows greater ability than without.

3) I certainly hope it does- riding the aggro line with a merri-go-round of tanks and constantly changing gear was like trying to tightrope walk in a hailstorm. Visualizing it objectively is good. This is why it's used fairly often.

It depends on who it is and what boss fight you're doing. Hydross and pre-nerf gruul are pretty ridiculous fights DPS wise, and everyone needs to be getting every bit of DPS they can. Having a melee DPSer on Gruul get smacked by a hurtful strike because he wasn't using KTM and so didn't realise he was above the offtank is just stupid when you need that dps to kill him before he oneshots the tank.

Generally (in my experience) the people who have agro trouble are Hybrids. All of the hybrid DPS classes have little or no reduction in threat, and have no escape move (invis, soulshatter, vanish). Warlocks also need to maximise their threat before the first soulshatter to make sure they get the most out of it, same with mages for invis really, if they're pushing the threat barrier.

It's also interesting to see the difference between tanks - we have one warrior in guild that can push out a consistant 20% more than any other, and I have no idea how. Tanks knowing that they have a barrier of threat in front of DPS classes is also quite nice - they know that they can spare the time to do another demo shout if one resists, or TC.

--1. Do you use KTM? If not, why not?
Yes.
--2. What are your views on it with regards to taking away an element of player skill and encouraging lazy gaming?
It is a tool for maximising the way you play the game. Many classes can do without it, but it helps to take away an element that otherwise can be quite random, and there's enough of them in the game right now to make it worth doing regardless of if it sacrifices a small amount of player skill imo. It's also allowed people to adjust to the new skills and having BoS horde-side much quicker.
--3. Has using it made your gameplay noticably easier?
It has helped to maximise raid DPS, which has meant easier/better boss kills, if you want to look at it that way. When you have someone who is putting out the best DPS in the raid, but still holding back because they "think" they're pushing the agro limit as they're top on DPS, but don't know it, it's just stupid to not use KTM when it's there to use. It's like saying don't use Grid because it shows people's health in a clear way, maybe everyone should play with friendly nameplates on and purely heal with that instead because it requires more "skill" to heal well?

1. Personally yes, as the OT on Gruul it's fairly essential for me to know my limits. As a Bear I can pull aggro early on fairly easilly, and even later a string of 3 ability crits can bump me up almost 5k threat in an instant (mangle, maul, ilotp) and the DPS warriors are doing their job as best as they can. I've got an upper and lower limit on where I can be without potentially causing a wipe. Well, at least that's how it was before the nerf ...

A few healers in my guild don't use KTM, I don't care too much about that, I know they don't need a 12 box on their screen. DPS that don't use it and pull aggro get bitched at until they get it.

2. KTM is an addon that does quick math for you (your damage * threatmod vs tank damage + special threat * threatmod) and displays it. Much like the standard ui displays health bars. I honestly think it makes players less lazy, you see where they are and where the tank is. If there's DPS riding the Tanks ass on threat chance are he's going to try figuring out how to boost his TPS, meanwhile DPS that are far behind (much like on DMs) know they need to push more. At least that's the way I hope people think.

3. Easier? yes, if not for Blizzard's general desire to make players discover formulae I would have expected it to be in the UI when they added all those other silly things.

1) no, never used it and I never will. As a mage I had 4 things to do as a damage dealer. Watch my mana, watch my health, watch my aggro and max my damage. If I use KTM I might aswell let a bot play for me.
2) aggro management is one of the essential and only "skills" a damagedealer needs, taking it away makes the game even easier imo.
3) never used it :p

To the people who have never used KTM and never pulled aggro, how do you know you are doing as much as you can? How can you be sure that you aren't pushing your play as far as it can go? There are so many variables in threat (mob abilities, your resists/misses, the tanks resist/misses, talents) how can you possibly keep track of them all on top of having to DPS to max potential while controlling adds, avoiding AoE, and everything else that needs to be done on encounters? Some people make it seem that they have a 6th or 7th sense for threat, when it seems to me that they are more likely putting out less than optimal DPS.

On Aran, I know that if all the spell schools get locked out he is going to come running to me, and everyone who has KTM can see that. On a few encounters we've had to call people out on KTM when they are closing in on pulling aggro, and when they don't listen they usually get splattered. If there is a mod that can improve raid DPS and prevent death, why not use it?

As a tank, anyone who doesn't use KTM can go fuck themselves. It's the best tool you can have for raiding, and playing without it is tantamount to clicking on abilities and turning with your keyboard while on the phone.

I've never used KTM cause I thought that it shouldn't be needed and part of the game is to learn how to manage aggro. This was my reasoning a year+ or so ago and it never came up since then. But the first line quoted kind of sold it for me. The amounts of misses, parries, dodges I get while tanking is absurd. In an ideal situation I can output tons of threat, but it rarely happens. I can get 2 shield slams avoided in a row, 4 seconds of constant heroic strike parrying, revenge and sunders dodged like no tomorrow. And I don't think any dps'er takes this into account, not because they don't want to, but because they can't see that their tanks threat is crippled due to bad luck (and boy was this scenario fun on Vael).
Time to get KTM to accompany my 2 dps meters somewhere on my screen x)

Basically. You could analogize it to playing a healer without visible health bars and estimating how much damage people have taken.

As people have said, unless you have the ability to monitor exactly how many of the tank's attacks have been landing, and how many have been parried/dodged, and so forth, you will keep pulling aggro at bad times until you throttle your DPS to some safe threshold that will work even if the tank gets unlucky. When we started using KTM, it didn't function to stop people from pulling aggro -- people learned that running 5-mans long ago. What it did do was increase our raid DPS because on fights where people had previously been really cautious about pulling aggro, they could suddenly see, "Oh hell, I'm only at 70% of the MT's threat, why am I holding back?"

When Blizzard wants to make threat an issue, they are very capable of doing so by using nonstandard mechanics that don't play well with KTM.

I haven't used it mostly because I expected its functionality to be disabled. Mind you, I came from a game that specifically was against showing something like this (Everquest), and lets just say more than a few things that were done in EQ in raiding show up here. Threat management was supposed to be a player "skill" in that game, something people just knew through experimentation/practice how far they could push their agro. So I kept waiting for the ball to drop, for Blizzard to say na, we're gonna change something or other and if you make another mod like this one we're going to ban people who use it.

Of course, this day never actually came, and this has been out for like a year or so, so I guess its probably here to stay.

So I still haven't used it, neither has my guild, but I've considered it recently because of how important dps is becoming in encounters, a lot more so than in Naxx as the margins are a good bit smaller for enrage timers or points when encounters can't be won so in that regard alone its probably worth having people get the addon. I suppose even if it only results in say a 5% increase in raid dps, its probably worth having it over not.

Yes I do. So does just about anyone who wants to run a heroic or a raid with me tanking. Having to shout out on vent that a shield slam or revenge didn't land early during a pull when I'm doing 15 other things is not efficient.

Not at all. Dumb people will find a way to pull aggro regardless. There's plenty of fights where it isn't coded for the aggro-resets yet (hi mr nightbane), but the tps rating it has can help people guesstimate where they are on the threat list.

Using a damage meter to determine your threat generation when your class has a 29% modifier is idiotic (even worse, shaman have to determine what chunk of their damage is melee vs spell because one gets different modifiers).

Yes it has, but just because I can focus on the things that matter rather than trying to save willy the dps'er. With multiple targets, people can still pull aggro, they still need to pay attention. KTM just provides one more source of information.


Does using target of target constitute easy mode? How about spell alert? Deadly boss mods/CTRA? You still need to pay attention to the information presented and react accordingly.

I can pretty much guarantee you that you aren't maximizing your threat ceiling. Multiple variables will change what a tank puts out for TPS at different points in a fight and is not universal across all fights. KTM is a far cry from decursive.

Well, not really -- Blizzard's default UI obviously includes health bars for everyone so they clearly intend for that to be quantified, visible information.

Aggro is hidden and non-obvious, so there's a case to be made that Blizzard intentionally wanted it to be a fuzzy value that you have to guess at, and if you push too hard, you risk pulling aggro. I was resistant to KTM for a long time because of this -- it felt like it was quantifying something that Blizzard didn't intend to be quantified.

That said, the fact that you can't really tell what's going on the tank's RNG makes the game of "make an educated guess on how much hate the tank has and how much hate I have and how much dps/healing/etc I can do" pretty unfair, and KTM becomes invaluable for dealing with variances in tank hate that you couldn't otherwise be aware of.

Personally, I'd like for aggro to be less quantified, but to provide more in-game indicators of what's going on with the tank. In the absence of that, I'm going to keep using KTM.

In naxx I was usually mana limited as a mage. Back then when rolling ignites were a great deal of our dps I couldn't be very close to the MT on aggro anyways. If I had 4 or 5 4k+ ignite ticks I would take aggro. The only fight where KTM might have been usefull for me back then would be thaddius but even then a rolling ignite could take you from 50% threat to 130% threat in a couple of seconds.

Amen to that.

As long as people know when threat drops and resets happen in the fight, it's a great tool to improve one's DPS.

Right, I realize it's not a perfect analogy, but it's a similar case of trying to make precise decisions when you are completely lacking half of the necessary information to make those decisions.

Aggro isn't some complex and mystical process. You want to keep your aggro, X, below the tank's aggro, Y. Except you have no clue what Y is in many situations. You can estimate what X is pretty well, just by keeping track of your own damage, or by looking at DMs. Before KTM, we used DMs as a substitute effectively, and mages B, C, and D all knew that if they were behind A on DMs and A hadn't pulled aggro yet, then they could nuke more. Conversely, whoever was #1 on DMs, unless they had an aggro wipe, was going to tend to slow down a little bit just in case, since if anyone was going to pull aggro, it was going to be them. That's how we did Broodlord for months.

I don't remember what first made us use KTM -- I think a couple of the tanks installed it on their own in order to compare threat generation potential of different tanking approaches. Then I got it to spy on them. Then other people started to get it. It wasn't until Naxx that it became a standard raid tool for us, though.

The last time we tried using KTM, it caused massive amounts of UI lag for every single person in the raid, so we've generally avoided it for that reason alone. That was way back when we were learning Vael though (which was pretty brutal in terms of UI lag regardless - one of our main tanks had enough problems even with a stock UI and no addons whatsoever, so adding any more load on top of that actually made things worse, especially if it involved combat log parsing), and when it still used the CTRA channel since the addon comm channels didn't exist, so i expect it's got a lot better on that score since then.

Personally, as a rogue, i've never seen much use for it (except maybe for vael - but at the time, i couldn't even run damagemeters if i wanted double-digit framerates, so...)