As a DPS, what the hell should I be doing? Normally, I just go into my Demonology spec and go for AoE, stopping when I see that I’ve started to pick up aggro, and starting again. This gives me pretty good DPS without usually getting me splatted (though, I’ll be honest–if my favorite guild healer is healing, I’ll just power through the aggro; keeps him awake!). Going Destro and going target to target doesn’t seem to work as well for me in that situation. If I do happen to die, I don’t bitch at the tank about it.
So, I guess my question is. . .doing that, how badly am I pissing off the tank, and is there a better way to do it?
H:HoR is one instance where looking for AoE is good way to spot a bad player, treating it like just another aoe fest will get you and your party killed.
The mobs hit hard, have some rather annoying abilities and spawn all over the place which makes just getting them under control a lot of work for the tank, so make sure you give the tank a chance to get the mobs under control before you go all out on the dps.
While the precise kill order is something that can be argued the one I prefer is:
The priest, they heal and have an AoE knockback.
Shadowy Mercenary, they stun and have a stacking poison dot.
Mage, their Flame Strike has been the cause of more than one wipe(don’t stand in it!).
4,5) The Tortured Riflemen are annoying but are non-caster ranged so it’s difficult to get them where you want them, when I tank I usually just generate enough aggro to keep them off the healer and save them for last. The main danger about the Spectral Footmen are their Shield Bash but since they’re melee they’re easy to tank and not that big a threat.
Totally correct. Please note that you should always kill the Spectral Mage (the fake enemies the real mages summon) before you end that wave. Normally each wave is trigegred by the last going down, but the spectral mages don’t count for that, and they’ll keep blasting you and distract people, who won’t repare for the incoming adds…
Hey guys, back with some questions, pertaining to Hunters. Newb questions, because it’s been a long time since I played this toon.
My time playing a Rogue has made me a better Hunter, I think, because I never would have thought of using Shadowmeld before. But there’s one thing I still can’t quite figure out. My pet won’t hold aggro on a whole mob very often. What happens is I target something, take first shot, pet runs to mob and grabs attention of the one target while the rest of the mob runs to me. My hunch is that I need to get my pet into the mob before I take a shot. Correct? But then I’ll use Shadowmeld to get the mob to go back to my pet, then start attacking again, and the mob comes back. It isn’t totally an aggro issue - Omen still says pet has aggro - but it’s like he can only hold the attention of one thing at a time.
I read that strip regularly, and this is the first time I’ve seen Marigold’s toon’s name. Seriously, Jeph? MariGoldfarm? :rolleyes:
:smack: Had to read that a couple times
(Quasi, if this is what you were talking about when you asked for “more detail”, Swift and Armour are meat companies - which is why you shouldn’t mention them around the livestock )
Frankly, I’m not seeing any benefit to hiding in the corner - I see the mobs all the time running right past the tank and straight into the corner where everybody is. I certainly don’t stay in the corner when I’m on my ret pally. Because I have to physically hit things, I ain’t doing no good over there.
The other problem with that corner is that the Mage likes to stand outside the little room, just around the corner, out of LOS of the healer, and no amount of taunting (or whatever) by the tank is going to make a ranged caster pack up and move, so I have to run out there to attack her, and then I’m out of the healer’s LOS. I’ve been in there with DK tanks and simply don’t understand why they don’t deathgrip (?) that damned mage into the room.
Also, the number of people who simply don’t understand, “The priest first! Kill the damned priest first! PRIEST!!”
Like Mogle said, AoE is contraindicated. Single-target focused fire is preferred, with the kill order Mogle spelled out. (Though I go for the mage before the rogue, simply because the tank is usually able to keep the rogue’s attention, while the mage can sit over there targeting anybody she wants.)
Once you’re through the waves and it’s time to fight the boss, AoE to your heart’s content (my pally will drop a Consecrate under those bosses), though since you’re down to a single target, you’re probably still better off with your direct damage, single-target spells.
(Oh, and Mogle - you’ll be happy to know that I got rid of that iLvl 245 trinket with all the HR on it and got me a Mirror of Truth.)
When you fire the shot, you not only trigger the target into attacking you, but you also trigger his friends. Your pet rushes the target immediately and strikes it, building threat quickly, which ensures the target stays on your pet. But the friends aren’t getting damaged by the pet; they’ve already got aggro on you, and your pet’s not doing anything to make them focus on it. When you Shadowmeld, you dump all threat (and dump yourself out of combat entirely), so the friends, bereft of a target, turn to the nearest one, your pet.
This does work, but only once every 3 minutes, and it’s pretty clumsy, to be honest. What you need to do is send your pet in first; when the pet attacks the target, the friends will trigger on the pet, not you. As long as you don’t damage them, they’ll stay on the pet. I highly recommend making a macro with the following two lines:
/cast Hunter's Mark
/petattack
Then put that somewhere you can easily access it. (I have mine on my mouse’s side button.) That way, you can target something, and with one button press you mark it and send your pet in. After the pet’s first strike, you can start attacking safely.
What I recommend, for more comfortable leveling, is to get a Tenacity pet. These are built for tanking, and have a special attack called Thunderstomp (which, unfortunately, you don’t get until level 44). Specifically, if you get a bear or crocolisk, these are able to attack more than one enemy around it every so often. When you get Thunderstomp, it damages all enemies around the pet. These generate a lot of threat and make sure the enemy doesn’t attack you instead of your pet, even when you start using multi-target attacks like Multishot or Volley.
I hope that makes sense. It’s pretty late for me right now, so I might be more incoherent than I think I am.
I’d argue if you get a bear as a tank, you need to switch the order slightly and kill the mage over the merc. We don’t have any long range interrupts unlike DK’s (DG ftw) or Paladins (racial silence for Blood Elves at the very least) to get casters to come to us. If I want to stop a caster, I have to either feral charge into them (and out of healer LoS) or just regular run over to them and bash or stomp (tauren racial). But otherwise, the priest is the biggest nuisance and must die first. I really need to find a good simple macro that easily marks a target with a single click (rather than my current method of target, right-click mob frame, raid-icon, skull/cross/circle/whatever) just for HoR alone.
I just bound my F1-F6 keys to the raid target icons. That way, even in the middle of a big trash fight if I want to make sure the DPS is focusing on the same target that I am I just hit F1 and my current target gets a skull over it.
Oh, and I had the worst session last night. First, my sister-in-law came over, so I didn’t get to play until 10:00, so I missed my ICC25 raid :(. WG was just starting, so I jumped in hoping to win and get in a VoA run. That worked out and I got to do both VoA25 and 10, and picked up the T10 priest gloves. Except I already have the 264 off-tier gloves; but I’ll hold on to these new ones in case I get a token or the fourth piece for the bonus.
Then I needed to do a random. First I get into a PoS in progress which I thought was a lucky break - it would be quick. They were on Ick: a pally tank and three (!) DKs, all from the same server. Oh, man. I don’t know how many times they had already wiped but there were two dead player bodies on the ground who were not in the party anymore. Anyway, first attempt, no one (except me) runs out of the poison cloud; no one runs away (except me) when they get chased by Ick. So two of the DKs go down right away to the poison cloud, and we wipe.
We reassembe, rebuff, and I say “Make sure you run away from poison cloud.” 2nd attempt: two DKs go down to the first poison cloud. we wipe again (because none of them, I forgot to mention, are doing more than 2k dps). We reassemble and rebuff again. “Run away from poison cloud or you will die” I say. We attack – first poison cloud, DK #1 goes down. He actually says “wtf healer do you hate me?” and I say “RUN OUT OF POISON CLOUD OR U DIE.” But we manage to take down Ick that time, with only the tank and 1 dps left alive.
DK#1 then, as we’re zoning back in, tries to mount up and ride up the ramp to the cave. He’s killed of course as we’re down getting ready for the wirst group of trash at the bottom. Instead of rezzing, he’s like “I’ll just wait for you to get her.” Like hell – I dropped group at that point.
Then got into FoS with some undergeared players, but they were pretty decent and we did ok.
Also, I dropped my Disc off-spec (never enjoyed it) and re-specced Shadow, since the BDL has a glut of healers anyway this makes me more flexible.
I use that macro on my hunters. Mine is on my “8” key, mainly because that’s the key I assigned to Hunter’s Mark on my first hunter, and I was used to hitting that key first. So when somebody showed me that macro I just stuck it on the 8. (And that led to my using the 8 key for my “pull” ability on every class toon I have that possesses a “pull”, like my paladin’s Hand of Reckoning.
I would also add: When targeting an enemy with a hunter, always do so with your left mouse button. If you right-click the mob you’re gonna start shooting.
I really love the turtle my troll hunter has. Specifically, I like the “force field” he puts up when his HPs drop below a certain point. Is that unique to turtles, or do all tenacity pets get something like that at a certain level?
That’s unique to turtles…for now. Blizzard’s been streamlining pets to reduce the differences step by step for a few years now. It used to be that Thunderstomp, which all Tenacity pets can get, was a Gorilla-only ability, but it was considered so mandatory that it was given to all. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard decided to do away with species-specific abilities.
Very productive weekend on my Holy Pally. I hit something of a wall on my Druid, because at the time the ICC 5-mans were difficult enough that I didn’t want to attempt them, and it kind of killed my interest in playing. However, they’ve turned out to be extremely completable with the Pally, and I’ve been gathering up good drops left and right. Seethe and Protector of Frigid Souls are the two I’m happiest about, and I managed to score a 264 belt on the AH for 2200g, which is bloody cheap. And this time around I’m working to keep my gear enchanted and gemmed.
Because of that success, I’ve been feeling more comfortable entering raid PUGs and completing the weekly raid quests. I even entered Ulduar for the first time on Saturday to down Ignis the Furnace Master. Unfortunately a relatively simple fight caused us to wipe 3 times, and I think it was at least partly my fault. I was on raid healing duty and positioned well to keep people from dying to the Flame Pots (or whatever they’re called). Except…I had Grid set to replace a player’s name with their health deficit after taking a certain percentage of damage, so although DBM would tell me who had the pot, I wouldn’t be able to find their name in Grid. By the time I realized whose health was dropping fast, it was too late for me to heal them. We did eventually complete it once we brought in a true raid healer (all we had were 3 Pallies and 1 Priest, not great options) and one of the Pally healers switched to tanking. I went to off-tank duty, and although half the group wiped we still managed to bring him down. 35 gold for 10 badges, not too bad of a trade.
I’m now only 13 badges away from getting my very first Frost piece; I’m still using a Reanimator’s Cloak and I intend to replace that ASAP. I’m on the way to getting my T9 helm, and after that the only 200 pieces I’ll have left are my rings and a trinket (and a libram, but I want to keep that). Even as I am, WoW-Heroes says I’m ready for ICC 10, so I’m starting to keep an eye on Trade for ICC rep runs or runs that don’t require a 5500 gearscore (I’m still only at 4684 GS right now). Even the Friendly Ashen Verdict ring would be a huge up for me. I didn’t expect I’d be that close to being geared for ICC this quickly, particularly after my little bout of indecision a couple of weeks ago.
I highly, highly doubt it. I think they’ve gotten things to a place they’re comfortable with. In fact, they’re planning to add more pet families.
Start in the corner anyway, specifically because mobs go after you there. Paladin and DK tanks have nice AoE death fields they lay down. If everyone starts off standing in one corner, you won’t die.
Let me explain: what happens is that they mobs here immediately aggro the nearest target, even through walls. DK and Paladin tankscan drop AoE which will touch both DPS/Healer and the tank. Thus, we tanks can ignore anything which comes to attack you for the moment and try to grab a ranged add or start the rotations on the melee.
Most of us will, the ones who don’t are not good. However, DG has an just-a-little-too-long cooldown, and there are only two ways to shorten it. So don’t expect it to be constant. We can do it usually only once every 1.5 pulls (depending on how long it takes to down the mobs). And most people won’t have either of those ways to shorten the refresh because it requires a lot of Triumph gear when there’s better choices or taking subpar talents.
Well on Saturday night, I tried to run UK again on my holy pally (along with a ret pally in our guild, I think Shin Kell’s). It was terrible. Our first tank dropped just before the first boss, which was ok because I had just dinged 70 so I was able to port out and train up my new skills. We made it all the way to Ingvar without too much trouble, but we wiped on Ingvar at least 4-5 times. I just could not keep the tank up. Part of it was not stopping my casting in time to avoid getting spell locked; part of it was the tank not avoiding the Smash. But I had run UK on that pally twice before without problems and scores of times on my priest without trouble. But each wipe got more and more frustrating (and it’s a long walk back through the instance). Finally I just apologized and left the group.
It couldn’t have been all my fault, though, because the next night I got in UK again and we breezed through, including Ingvar. So I don’t know what was wrong with me and the party the night before.
Since I dinged 70 I also went out and got my epic flying skill. That plus the Cold Weather Flying tome pretty much wiped me out; I probably have <1000g on all my toons together now. But flying around the Fjord on a fast flyer with Crusader Aura on is pretty sweet.
Here’s hoping we get enough folks for a BDL 10-man tonight…
I scored Blizzcon tickets! (Or rather, my spouse and his all-hailed clicker finger did). We had four of us trying to get in, and the best queue position other than him was over 5000, which meant the other three of us didn’t have a chance. He got in at 2700 and we’re in! I’m so happy, because we all failed miserably on Wednesday night and were starting to get seriously worried we’d have to miss it this year.
Hard mode Sindragosa 25 down! Finally. So now it’s on to heroic Lich King (we took a few potshots at him last night but the best we managed was getting to the first transition with all but about 3 people dead, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.)
Lich King kill with Shadowmourne in the raid, which meant the our guild got 5 goodies to divvy up. I didn’t win one, but it was fun to see the turn-in RP and watch the happy winners trying out their new toys.
Who got her 10-man Kingslayer on Friday? Oh, yes, that’s right, that would be me.
We knocked out 9/12 bosses on Heroic, most of them one-shots (minus Putricide, Sindragosa, and LK–and we would have had PP if we’d had a little more time to spend). I picked up an embarassing amount of loot–two mainspec pieces, two offspec, and a tier token that I have to decide how to spend. (Either I can get my T10.33 chest now and bank it for potential swapping down the road if I get an awesome upgrade to one of my other tier pieces, or I can start switching my DPS set to T10.) Plus, they were happy to oblige my request to be bitten on BQL, so I picked up the 10-man Once Bitten, Twice Shy, as well.
With any luck, I’ll be finshing up the guild ICC25 run tonight, and get my 25-man Kingslayer, too.
Focus-fire targets in the order given by the tank, and watch your threat like a hawk. Even with the changes made since it went live, these gauntlet spawns are a nightmare for tanks. I am deadly serious when I say there are hardmode ICC25 fights that require less of me (and I’m not just talking lootship).
Oh, and for the love of god: INTERRUPT. If you have an interrupt or a silence, please use it as often as possible, especially on heals or the Mage’s Flamestrike. It’s also not a bad idea to do any kind of dispeling that your class is capable of (though notice that there are some effects that occur from someone standing in something, so if you try to dispel it, it’ll just come right back).
I always say Priest > Mage > Merc > Rifleman > Footman.
Priest heals, so they’re the biggest danger. The Mage has nasty AOE and is ranged, so they go down next. The Merc is my next priority, because of their shadowsteps and stuns. Rifleman comes next, because he can iceblock people. Footmen are fairly inconsequential and should be saved for when everything else is dead.
Really, the only difference I tend to see is where Mage/Merc fall in the number two and three slots. Everything else seems to stay pretty consistent.
If there’s a pack, you should always send the pet in first, so it can body-pull everything. However, that doesn’t establish any actual threat, so unless the pet is in some way actively creating threat on all of the targets, you’ll peel off it if you do anything that creates aggro (AOE attacks, healing the pet, targeting a mob the pet hasn’t hit yet).
There are two ways to deal with this:
1.) Have your pet use AOE abilities. Generally, you will need a Tenacity pet for this. (E.g., I seem to recall that bears have a Swipe that hits more than one target.)
2.) Have your pet switch between targets. This is equivalent of a tank tab-targetting a group of mobs.
Note that Shadowmeld is an odd mechanic: As long as you are still in combat, it’s an aggro hide, not an aggro dump. None of my Nelfs are Hunters, so I’m not 100% sure how it works, but note that if you get aggro, Shadowmeld, and don’t break combat because your pet is still fighting, if you break out of Shadowmeld too early, whatever had you targeted will flip right back to you again.
He freely admits that he doesn’t play WoW at all. I really wish he’d find a friend who does and run any WoW-related strips by them. 'Cause, seriously, if you’re going to have a character actually play WoW instead of some generic-made-up-WoW-parody, you should probably make sure you’re doing it right.
All the mobs running into the corner is EXACTLY THE POINT. It’s called an LOS (line of sight) pull. It is the ***only ***way to get a caster to come into melee range without silencing them. You’re not supposed to stay in the corner the whole time–just long enough to get all the mobs in one place so the tank can pick up aggro on everything. **THEN **you can step out of the corner and start DPSing.
If the Mage is hanging out in the open, that’s because *someone *wasn’t all the way in the corner and/or moved out of it too soon.
Ooh, she was in The Lion in Winter! I love that film.
This is always the hardest part for me when I go play my Hunter after neglecting her for a while. :o
Belt of the Forgotten Noble, or something like that, right? There’s always about a billion of them up on the AH. That’s what happens when you make gear that’s only useful for a single spec of a single class. Sucks for the rest of us Plate wearers, but it’s gotta be great when you’re gearing up a Holy Pally.
Yeah, the rep rings are awesome. I’m really glad they went back to that paradigm. I still see rep runs advertised in Trade chat all the time–and don’t forget, you could even start one yourself, if you’d feel comfortable leading it!
On preview:
Skammer: If the tank isn’t moving out of Dark Smash, that’s a fail on their part. And they should have CDs they can use to keep themself alive when you have to stop casting to avoid the lockout mechanism.
winterhawk11: You lucky so-and-so! Amazingly awesome on all counts. Although IMO they really need to move to some kind of lottery system for tickets, where people register ahead of time. These clusterfuck queues are too much of an RNG mess.
Yep, Belt of the Lonely Noble. It was arguably the piece I needed upgrading least, since I had a 219 Cable of the Metrognome already, but all other 264 pieces are running way too rich for my blood. But it added so much Int! I’m sitting at 31k mana with only Blessing of Kings running.
Eheheh. Given that I’ve never even set foot inside ICC yet? Probably not.
On this: remember that the tank might get stunned early and you might only have the threat generated by their aoe thingy to overcome. I’ve lost dps’s to this when I got a merc in the pack. (And one dead dps usually means eventual failure, unless the other 2 dps are of the Ashen Verdict or something.)
I have had a tank ask for merc -> priest -> mage etc. Also, if the tank doesn’t immediately specify an order, ask before the waves start coming. I usually just say something like “priest->merc->mage ok?” and let the tank correct me if he doesn’t think so. (This is also for the benefit of the other dps if they’re paying attention - I do this even when I’m healing.)
I kind of dread getting an in-progress dungeon. Usually they’re okay (and sometimes much faster) but you’re also much more likely to end up in a failgroup.
Also, Ick is pretty hard on melee DPS since you have to start running away from everything so much sooner. (BTW I assume they were dying to poison nova and not to the toxic goo on the floor, right?)
)
So now it’s on to heroic Lich King (we took a few potshots at him last night but the best we managed was getting to the first transition with all but about 3 people dead, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.)
I’m sitting at 31k mana with only Blessing of Kings running.