The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
Anatomy of a Trash Pull
by Vonya
I love five man instances best out of all the different “ways” that this game can be played. I’ve also got the great fortune to have a steady group of friends who also love it, and are incredibly good at it. As such, we bring you the anatomy of a trash pull - our style.
This is how WE, as a group, handle trash pulls. Based on comments I’ve gotten on previous entries, there’s a lot of people who feel very strongly that assisting is old-school. That it’s dead, buried, and long cold.
With all due respect, that’s a load of bullhonkey.
You HAVE to assist in a group. I have talked about assisting and the anatomy of an instance run group before.
I’m going to do it again. This time more specifically concerning trash pulls. Why am I harping on this? Why do I have my mallet lifted to give another swift blow into this particular dead horse?
Because instance runs are SO. MUCH. FUN. when they’re done correctly. Imagine me as Julie Andrews, singing a song to all of you during a scary thunderstorm. “Raindrops on roses and assisting on trash mobs. Killing the bosses with ease and no deaths. These are a few of my favorite things! When the trash cleaves, when the runners pull, when I’m feeling sad. I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don’t feeeeeeel soooooo baaaaaaad!”
Seriously.
Assisting is not dead, it’s just got a new suit of clothes. It looks exactly like the OLD suit of clothes, only it’s got polka dots instead of stripes. The idea behind assisting isn’t the /assist macro. That’s a TOOL, used to assist effectively. Using raid icons to mark mobs is another TOOL. In my personal and highly biased opinion, both can be expertly used to ensure that the group is assisting, but I still prefer the old-fashioned /assist macro because it’s more flexible to changes in the party kill order.
I will not, however, argue against raid icons, especially if you can get them macro’d so it’s easy to apply.
Assisting, no matter which outfit it’s wearing, is the process of making sure that everyone is on the same mob. This makes everyone happy. It makes tanks and healers happy. And if you are a dpser and don’t realize that your own happiness hinges upon that of your tanks and healers, you are sadly misinformed.
I win.
Right. This entry actually had a point. Trash pulls. Let’s construct an imaginary trash pull, shall we? (Ya’ll can probably thank your lucky stars that I can’t whip out Photoshop and doodle you up a trash pull. I’d probably make them all kittens or puppies, bristling with weapons but sparkling cutely at you. Who could attack that, it’s an impenetrable defense?! You die, an axe in your gullet, smiling stupidly at the kitten purring and mewling at you. +15 Adorability FTW.)
The pull.
4 mobs are in the pull, 3 are elite and those elites include a caster, a brawny fellow with a 2h axe and a scrawny woman with dual daggers, all humaniod. Since this is a generic basis, we will say that none of them have a super-badass move that raises their kill priority. What should happen?
1) The non-elite is targeted by both the tank and the MA on the pull. This means BEFORE the mobs are actually engaged, you already know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what the first kill target is. There’s no scrambling shuffle to target the right mob as they charge at you with murder in their eyes. You know. (this, by the way, is my favorite usage of raid icons. Skull the first mob, give that visual cue to the rest of the group that the pull is coming)
The tank targets this first mob because he needs to hold agro over the group, the MA because thats how the group chooses what mob to attack.
Think about that. The tank knows which mob needs the most “forceful aggro massage”, and the group has faith that because the tank knows that, they will be better able to hold aggro over the dps. The healer can be reasonably certain that the tank will be taking most of the damage, since the dpsers aren’t getting hit by a mob that the tank doesn’t know to concentrate aggro on, and everyone’s happy.
2) Placement for melee. I only recently learned this, so I’ll share it with you. (Hey, I’ve been a priest and a hunter - it’s only me goofing around on my pally that taught me the lesson. I forgive myself for my ignorance.)
Stand behind the mobs.
No, really. Even if you’re not a rogue, there are multiple reasons to stand BEHIND the mobs. If the mob cleaves, you aren’t getting hit. The benefit to this should be pretty obvious. Secondly, a mob only parries attack made from in front, and so if the mob parries your attack, it RESETS their attack timer, allowing them to attack more often. Translation into human speak? The tank will take less damage if you’re behind the mob. The benefits to the tank taking less damage should be equally obvious.
Stand behind the mobs. Do it for the children.
3) Back to our trash pull. The group wipes the non-elite from the face of existence while the tank generates threat on all the mobs. The non-elite was chosen first because your main assist is smart and knows that it will go down the fastest, and thus stop contribute to incoming damage very early in the fight.
4) Just as the non-elite dies or just before he is about to, the main assist (MA) swaps his target to the caster. ALL other dps stays on their target until it dies! This is done to a) minimize runners and b) let the tank know which mob the group will be building threat on next. The caster is chosen because it has the least natural armor, its attacks can be interrupted, and the tank has less mitigation on its damage. Fireballs ignore all that shiny plate he’s wearing (or thick fur, for you beartanks out there).
5) Follow your rules! Did that last mob take off and start running for mommy? DON’T LET HIM GET THERE. Just because your MA swapped to prepare for the next mob, that doesn’t mean you get to stop too. You stick on your target till you hear its dying gurgle and watch its soul slip into the heavens. If it runs, you do whatever you can to make sure it doesn’t get far.
Stun, dps, whatever you can. If possible, it’s best to have someone who is watching for mobs that you know run (that’ll be almost all humanoids, for those new to the game). If you have a rogue, use a slowing poison. Hunter? Concussive shot. Mage? Frost bolt, yes even if you are fire spec, it slows runners, use rank 1. Paladin? Judgement of…judgement of…judgement-of-don’t-run-away-now. (hey, my paladin’s young, I haven’t memorized the seal/judgement names yet. I never did memorize all the hunter aspects. Aspect-of-the-run-fast is still my old standby) Shaman? Earthbind totem. Warlock, use your Curse-of-don’t-run. Runners are bad news, they cannot reach their friends or you might be looking at a wipe.
6) As before, just as this mob dies or is about to the MA swaps to the next mob, in this case the dual dagger mob.
Why this mob? Because while the 2h axe wielder might cleave, group placement means cleaves will matter less (because you’re standing behind the mobs if you’re melee, right? Of course you are, have a cookie.) Also, the dual dagger mob is eating through shield block or holy shield and causing the healer to use more mana. They are the more dangerous mob of the two.
7) Congratulations, dual dagger mob is down, the group killed him when he turned to run. The MA swapped to the only mob left, 2h axe. The group assists on the MA to get their target, and you keep trucking.
What’s this, you say? Why assist if there’s only one mob left? That’s preposterous! That’s overly tyrannical! Ego’s obviously a Nazi freedom-hater!
Slow down there, bucko. Everyone in the audience, please raise your hand if you’ve ever had someone with a ranged dps talent pull an extra mob because WHUPS! they accidentally targeted the wrong mob, either through mouse clicking or tab-targeting. One arrow, one fireball, one wand bolt, and you’ve got at least one angry mob headed your way that your group is unprepared for. If the group assists on the MA, EVEN WHEN THERE IS ONLY A SINGLE MOB LEFT, then you cannot have this problem.
Am I going to scream and yell at you if you pick that last target? No. I won’t even notice. But I will ream your backside from here to Timbuktu if you pull another group down on us, you bet your sweet bippy I will. And honestly, what are you losing by assisting? If you have a good main assist, nothing at all. They’ve already got your target, and you should be in the habit of assisting anyway. It costs you nothing to assist.
…if you have a sluggish Main Assist, that’s not necessarily true. That doesn’t mean the METHOD is wrong, just that your MA needs to pull their head out from twixt their nethers and get in the game.
8 ) Tank follows suit on the axe-fellow and Bob’s your uncle. Gratz on a very clean trash kill.
NOW ALWAYS DO THIS!
Sure, there are sometimes (often) targeting issues with picking the next mob on the kill order, but thats why people are encouraged to hit that assist macro a couple times to make sure they’ve got the right mob. MA’s are human too, and especially new MA’s will need a bit of time to get used to picking the right mob. And sure, there are times when the tank or the main assist will forget that a certain mob has a reason to be moved higher on the kill order, those pulls you just have to deal with. And sure, people in the group are expected to have off-days where they maybe aren’t hitting assist when they think they are or maybe the macro got changed. But for the VAST majority of the time, this is the way trash should be dealt with.
Will you ever see this exact scenario? Probably not. If you have CC, things change. If you have a different group makeup, things change. If you accidentally pull too many, things change.
Flexibility is the key, but you can’t be flexible for incoming changes if you don’t have a baseline, a standard playbook.
Some people may prefer chaotic instance runs, but not me. My goal on instance runs is to make them wipe-free, and as death-free as I possibly can. The day we got heroic slave pens down on a zero death run, we went out and celebrated with ice cream. Death-free instances don’t start at heroics, obviously. Getting those non-heroic instances death free is the first step, and you’d be amazed at how smoothly things go when everyone knows their job and is comfortable with it.
This, my friends, is the anatomy of a trash pull, Ego-style.
November 29th, 2007
MA (Main assisting) has disapeared in all but the good good players. blizz bringing in raid icons has lead to that….but now if your in a pug and you get a second group or pull before the raid icons are up, everyone seems to be retarded and go on thier own target.
X-perl…shows targets of each person in the group. I love it.
So good players know how to and will main assist…but most dont. Heck i cant even get all the damage classes on the guy with the big skull above his head. How are they supposed to follow target of target on the MA.
Calandris - priest
November 29th, 2007
@Cal
You shoot them. Or rather let them shoot themselves in the foot. Say it once, nicely as a suggestion. Then when they grab agro on a mob, and really grab agro, not “woops I critted” but were simply on the wrong mob and so it went stumpling too said pug person, let them tank it, sans heals.
Sure, you’ll get an ear full after, but perhaps they will learn from their mistakes. Nothing is so frustrating to me as a group member seeming to do their darnedest to make each pull utter chaos.
“Look rogue, do you see the hunter using misdirect onto the poor priest? No, know why, because that would give the wrong person agro, just like you are doing by starting the fight with a cold-blood ambush. Stop it! Just because you CAN vanish and dump agro, doesnt mean its right.”
The same can be said for a ret paladin using a paly-bubble at the wrong time, a mage thinking she doest have to follow the rules because of the trusty Frost Nova->Blink combo or a hunter that has FD on cooldown. All of those things you use while soloing or questing, leave them there. They may get you by outside the instance, but dont bring them with you. We arent here to see you do the most damage, or use your cool tricks. We are here to clear the instance by god, and doing that as smoothly as possible IS the coolest trick in the game.
/rant off…for now.
November 29th, 2007
*cuddles her assist macro*
November 29th, 2007
ok rogue perspective..
on runners.
Blind and or deadly throw if you have cp on it.
on aggro.
#1 get a threat meter omen is great for this
#2 stay behind the tank on the threat meter don’t overdo the feint/vanish you want to be
on the mob’s hate list higher than the healer so they will come after you (dodge tank)
if your tank is having problems holding aggro
#1 get aggro reducing things blessing of salvation(paladin), anesthetic poison(rogue), threat reducing trinket(quest)
#2 if after this you are still giving your tank aggro problems watch the threat meter and vanish before passing the tank wait a sec for your aggro to clear and start over again.
on assist.
make a macro and put it on a button to assist the tank.
on starting moves.
#1 pickpocket while the tank gets aggro.
#2 in order of desirability Garrote, ambush, cheapshot, hemo, sinister strike
November 29th, 2007
Whenever my parties used raid icons, it was purely for CCs and order of operations. The rest of the time, we still use MA’s.
Now this leads me to pose a question for you.
The MA is the guy who calls for all damage on a particular target, yes? Would you say there is a class that is the most suited for this kind of role? We alternate between Hunters, Rogues, and Enh. Shamans.
November 29th, 2007
@gus
Only one thing that I’d disagree with (not being a rogue).
on assist.
make a macro and put it on a button to assist the tank.
The tank is the worst person to have as your main assist. A good tank will constantly be cycling through the mobs, building aggro on all of them. If you have a multi-mob pull and your tank never touches the other mobs, then your healer is toast.
The main assist has to be someone who will stay on that one mob the entire time. It can’t be a mage that’s assigned to keeping a sheep up, a priest assigned to either healing or shackling, anything like that.
That, of course, is pending the style of the tank. Not being one myself, some tanks may be able to hold multiple aggro without swapping - pally consecrate, bear swipe, that sort of thing.
But as a general rule, we don’t make our tank main assist, because he’s got other things to worry about.
November 29th, 2007
@Matticus
I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a class thing so much as a role and a player thing.
As a hunter, I found it difficult to be MA because the ‘v’ thing (where you hit v and it makes the healthbars show up? SUPER handy for MA) doesn’t work well at range. I had to be closer than I liked in order to see the health bars. But I’ve seen another hunter do it very well.
Rogues tend to be good for it - but only if they don’t have to CC, or are playing with people smart enough not to keep the first target and break the sap.
Enhancement shaman make great MA…Ret pallies, mages, shadow priests…
Anybody who has no reason to change their target in the middle of the fight. Warlocks who cycle dots are no good, for example.
Beyond that, you have to have someone who is a quick thinker, able to prioritize mobs and reevaluate based on changes in the fight makeup. Someone who can remember mob names/looks and be able to do kill priorities quickly when doing chain pulls. (It took me two runs before I got all of SM Cathedral down as an MA, and that’s just one wing of one instance).
If you’ve got a sharp player behind the keyboard, almost any class can be MA. It’s best if you can combine the great player with the class that doesn’t have to swap - that right there is perfection.
November 29th, 2007
well its not a class thing but we use two methods and the methods never involve the tank as MA. watch the tanks targets one day, a good tank will be all over the place….(warrior and even bear…i dont know much about pally tanks)
method 1. use the noob with you as the MA. hes not smart enough to follow a MA so he’ll be it without knowing…lol this really works i swear unless he swtiches targets.
method 2. everyone knows whats going on. we pick a damage class….preferable one that will not switch target mid fight to sheep or whatnot so rogues are great at this.
Calandris
November 30th, 2007
“It can’t be a mage that’s assigned to keeping a sheep up, a priest assigned to either healing or shackling, anything like that.”
Of course, if the CC guy is only handling one mob to CC and is smart enough to use Focus and some macros, we won’t be changing targets during the fight and will still be able to re-apply the CC. But this probably falls under your “If you’ve got a sharp player behind the keyboard, almost any class can be MA.”…
November 30th, 2007
I’ve just started tanking for a 36-42 group in SM; we made our first run last night.
On standing behind the mobs, I love this! As a tank, it’s really nice to see the mob that I’ve lost aggro on, turn around. My current group has 4 melee and one priest, so the visual cue is very helpful!
Currently, we use the raid icons for kill/sap orders. As we progress as a group, we may change to a MA format; only time will tell. But, what I really want to bring up in this context is that the tank CAN be a viable MA. I have a nifty little macro that I cobbed off of Big Bear Butt that allows me to place Sunder Armor on mobs by mousing over them and hitting “c”. I can do this without changing targets, so cycling through the mobs is a piece of cake!
The main issue that I can see with this is if I have to chase down a mob or taunt a mob, then I do have to switch targets, but the DPSers should be already focused on the die now mob. Now, that said, it really isn’t a big deal to designate one of the DPSers as the MA; I’m not THAT much of a control freak!
Dax….erm….Dwarfvader!
November 30th, 2007
I got a little distracted when I began to picture Vonya singing that Julie Andrews bit. Um, is she free at all this weekend? I know a nice nelfie rogue who would like to show her a good time…
November 30th, 2007
So… I don’t necessarily assist, depending on the strat that works for us. Also have had split DPS in a heroic instance (Crypts, Shadow Labs, etc). We didn’t wipe, nobody died (possibly because everything was dying too quickly for anybody else to actually die, even when we randomly buttpulled that one pat AND the other group). I don’t use an assist macro either. I sometimes use raid icons. When I am tanking for a pug, I always use raid icons. When I am in a pug, I usually ask that targets be marked, so when the tank assigns me to mind control Random Mob A (and I know that RMA is immune to MC), I can tell them before the pull starts. Sometimes I assist off the tank. Sometimes I assist off the rogue/enhancement shaman/mage/warlock etc. The person I assist off in an instance can change in a single run. It doesn’t, usually, but sometimes it does. I don’t use a macro for assisting.
Basically, there is no one right way to run an instance. Assisting is a tool, but it is not the only tool, and I disagree with you there, Ego, about instance runs only with assists. There are other ways of doing it, and they are equally effective. I find that raid icons are better than having an MA, especially in pugs, when people don’t actually know how to MA. When I tank (especially in an inexperienced pug group), I know what the kill order should be and why, so I set up a kill order at the beginning of the run (skull, x, square… etc.) mark targets, and off we go. Sometimes, the rogue mistargets and grabs the CC. That’s okay. Everybody else knows the star’s not to be touched, so all the dots are on the X instead of the star, so our mage isn’t happily gnawing on dirt.
As a shadow priest, I may not be a good MA, either, because I might be shackling targets, dispelling buffs off mobs (even the ones we’re not focus firing down) so the tank doesn’t take 5k hits, or heck, even MCing a mob, in which case, the mob I’m targetting is possibly the mob my MC target is tanking so our healer isn’t eating dirt.
=) And I can say this confidently as a tank, DPSer and a healer. Assisting is good if you have a good assist and a somewhat knowledgeable group. Raid icons are better, even if somebody’s buttpulled a group. If you’ve got a good marker, that group will be marked up in 3 seconds flat; yes, I have and do mark groups that we end up butt pulling.
For the record, I don’t have a regular instancing group, nor do I do all guild runs all the time. I rarely assist in a pug, but I do follow pre-established kill order in a multi-target pull. I will pick up the sapped target and MC it if sap breaks and we’ve still got targets or somebody buttpulled another group.
Instancing is about being flexible, and while having an MA is great, it’s just better overall to think about what you’re doing in an instance and to be aware of everything that’s going on. Sometimes, the MA is WRONG. E.g. Breaking the sheep when the sapped target is about to break. Don’t blindly follow the MA if there is one. Most of the time, they are correct, some of the time, they are wrong. Know when they are. I’m always aware of what is being CCed and who is doing it, and how long that CC lasts and if it can be reapplied. Some of it is knowing the instance. If you’re with an intelligent, aware group of people, assisting is unnecessary.
;P You know you’re doing good when your healer is begging the tank to remove some armour while throwing out holy fires because nobody’s taking any damage and they’re bored.
Also, side note on the getting behind the mob as a melee class to DPS… If you are attacking the mob from behind, they can’t dodge your attacks. So… you do more DPS (because they can’t dodge what they could if you were attacking from the front), you take less damage (because you’re not getting cleaved and stressing out your healer), and your tank takes less damage (because of the parry mechanic). It’s a win-win situation.
November 30th, 2007
Ego, this is exactly the article I was looking for right now: Are you clairvoyant? We do okay in 5-mans, because each player is individually good (well, better than good). But our group dynamics can use some tweaking.
To be honest, I’d forgotten all about the Main Assist idea, and the why’s & wherefore’s–but it all came crashing back as I read your article. We’ve been using raid icons, but generally to mark first kill target and CCs (Skull, sheep the Moon, trap the Square, Sap the Diamond, Shackle the Circle, what-have-you).
But after the first target went down, there wasn’t always a lot of reasoned progression on what we killed next: Usually, it’s the first broken CC (and that usually means a hunter’s trapped target…just before it hits the retrap, and just after, say, the sheep, sap, or shackle breaks. So now we have two mobs to tackle, and two people are one; one on the second; the tank’s trying to get aggro on both…and now mobs four and five just broke CC and the pull just went to hell.
NOW I know how to keep us out of those depths…all because of the simple concept known as Assisting.
November 30th, 2007
usually we mark our target and our order of priority after the main target is down is (in regards to cc)
#1 sapped guy (when sap breaks there’s no re-sapping)
#2 Trapped gal (can be retrapped if hunter is prepared)
#3 Mind controled guy
#4 Sheep (can be re-sheeped)
#5 Banished thing
of course if anything breaks early that becomes the de-facto target
As for who is it better to assist the tank or someone else.
you shouldn’t for starters be switching targets until the target is down (cc exceptions)
so usually the first target of the tank should be and remain the first target of everyone
tank:
pros: if you hit the same mobs as the tank there’s less risk you’ll pull aggro from the tank
cons: tunnel vision on runaway mobs.
MA:
pros:faster reaction time on loose mobs
cons: chance to steal tank aggro is higher
November 30th, 2007
@Kestral
Instead of only marking CC targets and first targets, if you are using raid icons, why not mark up the whole group and set up a consistent kill order. For instance, a 4 mob pull can be skull, X, square, star. Sheep the star and if the whole group knows that kill order is skull, X, square, star, then there is no confusion. So that once skull dies, everybody moves to X, and then square, and then star. =) MA is also another good way to do it. IMO, there’s really no One Right Way to run an instance, but there are also a ton of really bad ways to do so.
@gus
The way I’ve usually assigned kill order of CC is reliability of the CCer and not the CC itself. I’ve been in groups where the sheep was the second target and the trap after the sheep, because the hunter was a more reliable CCer than the mage for whatever reason (inexperience, lag, etc.). I’ve been in groups where the sapped mob was the last killed (trap and sheep taken down first) because when the sap ran out, I MCed the target and used it to assist on kills.
I think once you get to a certain point in instancing, there really is no One Right Way to run an instance. There are good rules of thumb to follow. Generally speaking, the sheeped mob is last to die, because it tends to be the most reliable and common CC (mages can resheep while the mob is sheeped, etc.), and the sapped mobs are the first to die, because it can’t be resapped. But at the hands of an experienced rogue, a sapped target can still be the very last target taken down. I’ve been in instance runs with a rogue whose control over the sapped target is absolute. The minute the sapped target breaks, it is stunned or blinded.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, while Ego makes a lot of good points about having a MA around (and I agree that if you have a good MA, it can make a run go smoother), it is not necessarily the best way for everybody. I personally have not actually gone on many instance runs with one. There are other ways to do things.
The most important thing is making sure that your group is in control of the entire situation. Most of the time in general, the tanks and CCers are the ones in control of the mobs (positioning, where they are, what they are doing etc.) but if you are a DPSer, you can help to control how a mob pull goes, and an MA is one way of doing it. =)
November 30th, 2007
@Doom - Get Vonya to do the “Le Jazz Hot” number from Victor Victoria too. That’ll curdle yer toes.
@Ego - Is another damn fine post. Nice job.
On using the tank as a MA, I tries as much as possible to generate threat on multiples without changing targets, either through AoE’s like Thunderclap or mouseover sundering. But I makes no promises, so be carefuls. Better to use someone else for MA, if possible.
December 1st, 2007
Yeah, as a tank, I shuddered a bit at a DPS going onto the next target before the first is down. Any DPS that knows me tends to go bugfuckynuts on the mob at the earliest possible time (approximately 0.0000785s after I hit it). And damn it, I need that lead time to stay ahead of the insanity. So I swap MY main target (depending on my aggro lead) at around 10-15% health left on the first target so I can get a hold greater than my normal >healing aggro on the next thing to die.
Last night in H SP, I had a hunter and two rogues. I tend to use one rogue that I run with ALL the time for a sap, because we understand each other well. He does a sap (usually on a caster), and then the first target is usually a caster which I let the DPS go insane on - stuns and all - because I have another 2 or so mobs beating on me to give me rage. (Make sure there are no stuns on the pull, that the rogues/BM hunter knows to wait till they’ve arrived at the tank before the stun) We can usually get the first three mobs down before the sap, or at least the last one is dead enough I can swap targets immediately without worrying about losing aggro. Tip for bear tanks - if you FF the sapped target when you get a second, it will run to you instead of the rogue when it finally breaks.
I have been known to assign a “rogue” target. The rogue(s) stunlock and I ignore it completely.
December 3rd, 2007
I personally find raid markers the most accurate when you have time to plan them out. For very difficult trash pulls they can be the difference in a wipe. You don’t have to worry about the MA going to the wrong target on accident, or misclicking the mob he meant to click and having the other dps assist at this point.
If we’re dealing with spawned adds, a gauntlet, or anything in pvp, an assist train is hard to beat. In my experience, the best people to be MA are melee. They are up there in the faces of the mobs and can actually see what is going on. In addition to the bars not showing up because of range, ranged dpsers don’t exactly have an easy job of clicking targets. If we try to click on one particular mob in a big group, we have a fair chance of accidentally clicking some other mob, or possibly a friendly target. You also need a competent person to MA - someone who can make quick decisions and stick to them. On my 3v3 and 5v5 teams, our MA rogue is invaluable at calling the targets and selecting who we should kill first. I assist him, and as soon as that target is down, he goes after something else and I assist him again. And he does it quickly and without changing his mind. Hard to imagine staying so coordinated without assisting, and when I do arenas with someone else trying to MA, it really shows.
That said, I never actually use a macro for assisting. I prefer to use XPerl to display my focus and my focus’s target. That makes it just a simple mouse click to assist my target. If I need to assist someone who is not my focus, I normally just click their name in the raid frames and then hit F.
December 3rd, 2007
Hi!
Being a long-time horde-only player, i figured i’d like to try a change of scenery and made a gnome warlock, one of the classes i didn’t already have a serious character for. It seemed frustrating at first. I thought back to how much easier it was to be a shadow priest: no pet to bother with, a single, compact tree with tasty talents, simple combat rotation of blast, dot, flay, fear, flay, possibly wand. What i didn’t realize was that i was simply frustrated with the same things every class goes through at very low levels. I had forgotten what it was like to only have a few of your class’s abilities available.
I got the little gnome up to 22 and got tired of her for multiple reasons, which are hard to describe. The one i understood at first was that i wanted to try my shadow priest again and see if it really was better. I think another was that i was tired of being away from my horde. I was so familiar with the horde side of things and i wanted my guildmates to talk to.
I get back on my shadow priest and wow, it’s not nearly as easy going as my little lock was. I was quite surprised. I had remembered it as being so easy, but there i was, getting comparatively pwnd by mobs. Wow.
Thus was born my new horde warlock, a female orc. The casting animations blow. Really. Ouch. Still, other than that, she looks fantastic and i was having a good time playing, right up until the level 10 voidwalker quest. It sends you into the cave at Skull Rock, and for some reason those mobs were just kicking my ass. I finally figured out a way to survive all the normal pulls (i couldn’t even THINK about getting past the level 14 guy or the 11 elite rate (both of which are warlocks with voidwalker pets) that spawned right next to each other in the middle of the cave, but i resurrected on the other side and kept going. By the end, i had worked out how to kill each individual encounter without dying, although my imp was a frequent casualty. I earned that VW. I don’t know why the hell it was so tough. I think it was just that the enemies hit really hard, my imp and i can only take a few hits each, and i can’t use fear in the cave or i’ll draw adds.
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What does this all have to do with a priest blog? Well, in comparing my experiences with warlock and with priest, i learned two things:
1) I should have taken the talent to reduce my chance to miss with spells, which i had apparently skipped up to this point. As a warlock, it’s not a huge deal if one of your spells is resisted once, because most if not all of the commonly-used spells have no cooldown, but as a priest, a resisted Fear means you wasted that mana and you have to cast the higher-mana Shield or face wanding the enemy to death.
2) Priests need a talent that reduces the chance of pushback on Mind Flay by 70% (or more), just like Warlocks get for Drain Life/Soul and like Druids get for Wrath.
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Why am i posting this as a comment to THIS post and not to a priest-related post? That is because this is the most recent article at this time!
December 5th, 2007
I personally prefer raid icon orders, but I certainly use the assist function when needed (either by clicking on the person and hitting F or by using the Xperl target indicator).
We generally mark up the mobs, and go after them in a standard order. Skull, X, triangle, circle, star, moon is typical, though we might shuffle it around.
We then reinforce these over vent - if we need to change on the fly, it’s easier to say “Ok, sheep broke early, everyone on circle” than “Everyone on the Orc-wrath Feldoom Casterguard.”
That’s just personal preference though - if I had to pug it w/out voice communication, a MA would definately be welcome.
January 7th, 2008
About “sometimes the MA is wrong” I always figured it was “the MA is always right even when they’re wrong” So you follow the MA even if they hit the sheep. When the sap breaks, the mage takes over sheeping the previously sapped target. That’s where the “flexibility” comes in. It’s far easier, if there IS an MA, to do it that way, than to have some people say “oh the MA is wrong” then your dps is split up.
But for most groups, raid icons works well as long as there is no accidental pull of another group, and when that happens, well I mainly use vent, and most of us are pretty fast with the raid icons now.