I've been leveling up a horde druid in World of Warcraft over the holidays and tanking has been a bit rough. Doable, but really uneven and messy now that Swipe has been nerfed into the ground in the 4.0.3a patch. Swipe used to be spammable, but now it's on a 6-second cooldown and does a lot less threat then prior to the 4.0.1 patch. I've been having a lot of trouble in the lower level instances with trying to keep everything glued to my bear's snout and not running off to smack the healer or DPS around.

So, since I now have to be a smarter bear then the average bear, I looked around and installed a threat plate add-on. Name plates are an optional Blizzard UI mechanic where names, health bars and mob level will appear above each one in the game world. (Pressing the [V] key, [Alt-V] or [Ctrl-V] will turn them on/off for everything or just enemies.) A threat plate add-on, takes that feature and changes the size / color / opacity (alpha) of the name plates based on how much threat/aggro you currently have.

By default with Tidy Plates: Threat Plates, bars will get smaller and turn green if you have aggro. They will turn orange/yellow when you get close to losing aggro, and will be large and red if you have lost aggro. However, there are also tons of options with which you can customize your Tidy Plates. In Tidy Plates, the threat add-on variant is a "theme" of the basic Tidy Plates. So you don't need to install the Grey/Neon themes unless you want to use them for your non-tank characters.

Note: This add-on is going to rock your world if you do a lot of tanking. No more tabbing around in mob packs looking for loose aggro, no more having to check on mobs one-by-one by selecting them. No worrying about whether you have the entire pack locked down, because now you can just look for red bars.

This is one of those add-ons I wish I had known about years ago.



Here's an example from Stratholme's live-side with the big packs of skeletons. I'm running in "tank" mode where "red = no aggro" and "green = aggro". For normal DPS situations, you'll probably want to run in "dps" mode where it swaps that around. But on my kitty, where I constantly need to be ready to switch to bear form and tank, I've gotten used to just running around in "tank" mode. Unfortunately, while the threat plate add-on will detect when I switch specs and switch me between tank/dps view, it doesn't (yet?) let me switch threat views when I change stance.



Here's a slightly better, fully-annotated example of bear tanking with Threat Plates:



Adding two more bear-tanking videos using Tidy Plates: Threat Plates. These are from Lower Blackrock Spire (LBRS) and are annotated.





Level 77 druid bear tanking in Violet Hold (post 4.0.3a patch):



Some other videos on Tidy Plates:







There's also an add-on called "Aloft" which is similar: