Flux

Selecting a target is not easy.

Tanks, it is not the bosses, it’s the mobs. This is what frustrates or drives you crazy.  You have to change targets quickly, don’t break crowd control, and do enough threat so that everything else doesn’t go kill someone.  Separating and positioning your targets during the pull can be tricky.  Even during boss fights it’s hard when mobs add, another tank dies, something aggro wipes, or the fight requires some combination.  Use tab, nameplate, and focus targeting as well as target monitors.

As a healer the most difficult thing is changing between friendly targets.  You usually can’t afford to heal a single target.  You may also have to debuff or shackle while healing.  And you deal with more targets than any other role especially in 25 player raids.  This leads to ‘playing tetris‘.  Most of your time is staring at health bars guessing who is about to die and target hopping.  And often this is trouble because you lose track of other peoples position, line of sight, mob special abilities, or range.  Use hover and focus targeting as well as target monitors.

DPS targeting requires you to keep track of two or maybe three targets at most.  Count yourself lucky.  You only have to worry about your primary, crowd control, and next target.  But several bosses or mobs with special abilities will also require that you quickly change between your primary target and a temporary target like a totem or object.  For example, Halazzi’s corrupted totems, Selin’s Fel Crystals, or Illhoof’s Demon Chains.  Overall you have fewer targets to keep track of, but targeting them quickly is essential to increasing your dps.  Spending time picking out targets results in defeat on the damage meters and for the group.  Use assist, nameplate, macro, and focus targeting.

Nameplate Targeting

tank, dps

There is a mass of creatures and you want to select just one!  It might be behind something or moving around quickly.  With name plates a bar appears over their heads that you can click on.  What makes it so useful is that the name plates will never overlap each other. But this also makes it cluttered when there are a lot of targets. They can also shuffle around unexpectedly to make room for each other, oh no Snake Trap! The default key to make them appear is V or Shift-V.  The default nameplates are not attractive but there are several mods like Aloft which let you change them with more display options.  You can also reduce some of the clutter and go to Interface Options - Combat and deselecting Cast Bars On Nameplates.

Assist Targetting

dps

Assist targeting is done by picking a target, usually the tank, and then pressing the default F key.  This changes your target to theirs.  This is also useful for when you do not have line of sight but someone else does.  You can select them, then assist to get their target.  The problem with assist targeting is that it is not always the target you want.  For example, tanks routinely change targets especially when tanking several targets at the same time to build up aggro.  But dps usually wants to stay focused on a single target.  Assist targeting is useful when the tank stops changing targets, targeting around corners, or when you assign a primary dps person to select a single dps target until it is dead.

Macro Targeting

dps

Macro targeting is a way to target something that you know is going to appear. For example, the Corrupted Lightning Totem that Halazzi in Zul’Aman uses must be targeted destroyed quickly and destroyed or it can wipe your raid. If you spend more than a couple seconds looking for it and click ingon it, it can make the difference.

What you do is create a macro like below and put it on your hotbar. This targets anything in range with a name that starts with Corrupted.

/target Corrupted
This targets only names that are exactly Corrupted Lightning Totem.
/targetexact Corrupted Lightning Totem

Macros like this are easy to make and you usually have time to do them just before the fights where you need them. They greatly increase your reaction time and can easily make the difference between winning and another visit to the spirit healer.

Hover Targeting

heal

Hover targeting lets you use an ability without having target first. You can do this either using a mod like Click2Cast or macro commands. If you are uncomfortable with macros and you are a healer I recommend at least getting a mod to do this. They both let you mouse over anyone in the raid and press a key or mouse button to heal them. This saves two time consuming steps. You don’t have to select them and then you don’t have to move your mouse back to the spell you want to cast. You can do it in a single step. Depending on how fast you can mouse, this is like having all your spells cast a second faster.

As an example, you could make a macro called Hover Flash below. Then move it to your one of the numbered buttons on your button bar. Now all you do is move your mouse around the screen and mash the button.

/cast [target=mouseover,help,nodead][help][target=player]Flash Heal

Focus Targeting

tank,heal,dps

The game let’s you ’save’ one target.  It’s called your focus.  You can do this by selecting a target and typing in the chat window /focus.  A new frame will appear showing this target and will stay there until you type /clearfocus or /focus on another target.  Focus targeting is best for remembering a target you need to keep coming back to.  Often this is a boss when there are adds you have to deal with or a tank you need heal when there are also others in the party to heal.  One of the most useful things for focus targeting is crowd control.  You set your focus to the creature you need to keep controlled and you either use a macro to automatically recontrol it or you just occasionally recontrol it to be sure it stays that way.  This removes the need to keep track of exactly where it is.  For example, when fighting Moroes in Karazhan if you are a priest you will generally need to shackle the undead for most of the fight.  But since you are also healing the group it’s hard to keep track of both.  Just set your undead target as your focus and use a macro like the following.

#showtooltip Shackle Undead
/clearfocus [modifier:alt][target=focus,dead][target=focus,help][target=focus,noexists]
/focus [target=focus,noexists]
/cast [target=focus]Shackle Undead


Tab Targeting

tank,dps

Tab targeting is using the four keys for targeting an enemy or a friend.  It’s useful especially for tanks but there are several problems.  By default if you press your tab key you select the next enemy target in front of you within range.  The problem is sometimes you want to select a enemy behind you and sometimes that range is not what you want.  For example, you will often accidentally select targets in the next group or want to select a target further away.  It also selects the next target semi-randomly, there is an order to it but you don’t know what it is ahead of time.  So it’s easy to start tabbing through targets and accidentally select one that’s crowd controlled and break it.  And finally, the tab key is easy to reach but using Shift-Tab which selects the previous enemy target is not.  Often you will tab too far and want to go back one.

Even with all these problems tab targeting is still useful.  A couple things you can do to make things easier is to turn off auto-attack, which is under System - Combat - Stop Auto Attack.  This stops you from accidentally breaking crowd control but you will have to hit the attack key on each new target  Alternately make sure you are not in melee range when you tab.  And finally you can bind the Next Enemy Target and Previous Enemy Target to two different keys.  For example, the Q and E key or Shift-Q and Shift-E if you like to use strafe.  This makes it easier to select the next or previous enemy.

Target Monitors

tank,heal,dps

By default, you only see your target.  A target monitor show you what other group members are targeting.  Many of the unit frame mods have frames for showing the your party members are targeting, who the main tanks are targeting like oRA2, or even what your focus target is targeting.  This is useful for dps so they can choose the target a tank is targeting, for healers so they can make better guesses about who is going to take damage, and for tanks so you can either see if your dps is targeting the correct target or easily pick out another tanks target.

Summary

Having the best dps, heal, or threat is useless if your can’t pick your target quickly. Stay on target!

Tags: dps, heal, skill, tank, tip
Author: aos

This entry was posted by aos on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Games, WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.