Hate generated number indicator

Now this is an idea I am simultaneously interested in and at the same time disconcerned by.

Context: Coming from a healer in vanilla wow 20 years ago, and Thunderfury main tank + healer in a top 10 speedrun guild in classic wow (Read: I spend a ton of time in raids and preparing for speed run raids).

In MMO's raiding scenes there is always the tension between:
- DPS doing enough damage to keep the fights short enough for the healers mana pool.
- Healers being able to keep up healing numbers on the tanks (and the rest of the team).
- Tanks being able to keep threat while also avoiding/mitigating damage.

This is a nice triangle love relationship, and depending on the boss/game mechanics some parts of the group have to give and take. Sometimes the DPS has to keep low to give time for the tanks to build up threat (again), sometimes the tanks have to speed up threat generation to keep the fight short, sometimes the healers have to do massive healing during damage spikes, etc.

In my opinion its one of the nice parts of MMO groups as there is a real group dynamic going on, with one person capable of both saving and fucking up a fight. But usually it gives a sort of "ripple" effect or "waterbed" effect:
- A healer not paying attention and has to spike inefficient heals to keep up again -> 30 seconds later you have no mana anymore and you end up in the next dillemma.
- DPS not paying attention and getting aggro -> 30 seconds later you are dead, or the healer has no more mana, or just a chaos in in the fight.
- Tanks not paying attention to game mechanics -> 30 seconds later its chaos all over the place, etc.

Now, this is a nice story and all, but what does it have to do with your question of showing Hate numbers?

This triangle balance of dps/tank/heals is usually happening in a "black box" environment. You dont really know how far you can push it, and usually you figure it out by "fuck around and find out". That knowledge comes with experience and knowing your group members. This is (IMO) one of the core concepts of heroics: you have to build trust with your teammates and feel how far you can push it.

Adding an absolute number to that love triangle CAN cause the following things (among other things):
- The dps look at the numbers and hold off, tanks keep up threat, healers have a nice day, everyone happy.
- The dps will look at the numbers and try to stay just below that number, in theory. In practice a skill miss hit by the tank causes the tank to lose threat and you're back at square 1.

Adding an absolute number to that love triangle CAN also cause:
- you make an exciting, often random, heroic into a color-within-the-lines to do list. Just look at the number and stay below, dont veer off to far please.
- you add an incentive to "speedrunning" and "parsing": it adds an extra layer of challenge to become better than last time.


I dont really know what what will happen, but I do know one thing: adding an absolute number will cause the beauty of a "black box" to be less "black box". Is that something you'd want?

I think part of the tanking frustration is that nobody knew exactly how aggro was working behind the scenes , Ornj wrote a pretty good explanation
tanks should definitely read that and hopefully they get a better understanding of how it works , so im inclined to down vote this

Downvoting not because it's a bad idea, but because we don't need to turn the game into a spreadsheet, coming from a spreadsheet warrior.

I kinda agree with stroop, however if this IS added I highly suggest staying away from a numerical solution. Do what FF14 does, and add a little bar on the party frames, for each group member. It shows aggro relative to whoever actually HAS aggro. Attaching a picture example. Looking at the picture, you see the class icon, health and mp to the right, buffs to the right of that. But there is a small bar underneath your class icon, and when its fully filled up and red, it means that person has aggro. Whoever has 2nd aggro, the bar turns yellow, and each one fills up towards wherever they have aggro compared to the tank(or whoever has aggro). It is based on what you are targeting. So you're targeting the boss, tank has aggro, that meter is red and filled with dps and healers somewhere inbetween full and empty. If you swap targets, it will show the aggro for that enemy specifically.



The reason for this is to discourage parsing and epeen measuring contests. You will always get that in games to some extent but if we want to avoid the toxicity associated with that, don't assign numbers to this. Keep it vague. I know that its possible to have dps parsers in this game already but making it so accessible and visible to entire groups is welcoming in some nasty behaviors.