Flux

So you are dishing out damage like a cluster bomb and still not getting aggro. But your raid is wiping. People are dying and the healers are out of mana. What more can you do?

Bad dps is easy but good dps is hard. What makes for good dps? The obvious and typical answer is to top the damage meters and not get aggro. But less well know and just as important is helping your healers keep you alive.  Dead people can’t dps.

The typical mistakes bad dpsers make are getting out of range or line of sight of their healer, running away from their healer when trying to avoid damage, and not putting on stamina when it’s needed. Let’s look at some ways for dps to stay alive.

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Which stat is the best? What should you be stacking?  There is a bewildering mass of over thirty five of them. And if that isn’t confusing enough their value depends on talent spec, unseen milestones/caps, and even each other. Without a degree from Gnomeregan your mechanical chicken mount has a better chance to scratch out an answer.

We have compiled a monolithic table of cliffnotes so you can skip Gnomer.

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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.

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Describing where things are can be difficult. This is partly because you can’t reach your hand through the screen and point. Everything from where something is on the map, where you are when your friends aren’t in the same area, or just describing where to stand during a boss fight can all be deceptively difficult. Fortunately with mods, macros, or even some special items you can make things easier.

Let’s take a look at some.

Flare Marking

There are four different color smoke flares that you can buy or create. What makes these useful is that you can throw them on the ground up to 50 yards away. This is can be helpful for various fights where you need to point out exact placement positions before starting but you can’t get too close. They can all be made by engineers. The red, white, and green ones can be bought in limited quantities from vendors. For the purple one, you’ll have to find an engineer. They can’t be used in the cities but they can be used in battlegrounds where people have been known to make walls of smoke to hide behind.

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With the right talents there are three tanking classes; druid, paladin, and warrior. There is a fourth one eventually which we will see in the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion, The Death Knight.

For those of you who don’t tank, what’s the difference? Do you even care what kind of tank you have? Is there a better tank for healers or for damage dealers?

In long single target fights they all create comparable threat. The differences lie with initial aggro, healing, offtanking, multiple targets, and special abilities. Let’s take a look at each of them and what you should keep in mind when you are healing or dps’ing damage.

Druids

• best hitpoints and armor
• average initial aggro and multiple target
• worst avoidance

Druids are the easiest tanks to heal with their large hit point pools and high armor. With the right talents and gear they take damage light and consistently. Healers assigned to the druid often have extra time to take care of others. However over long fights as a healer you may find that the consistent damage may take more total healing than for a Warrior and drain your mana.

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Why can you stand far back from some bosses and still hit them? Why do people bunny hop in PvP? Why do druids in cat form have trouble with specials? Why can a Tauren tank not get Stomped by Brutallus in the Sunwell raid but every other tank can? It’s all because of hitboxes. Actually, it’s not the only reason people bunny hop in PvP but it does change your hitbox.

What is a hitbox? Hitboxes are an easy way for a game to decide if you can hit a target. For example, in a first person shooter the game doesn’t calculate the trajectory of a bullet though the air and if it would hit the pixels of your target’s leg. It simply determines if you pointed your gun at an imaginary box around the target. Did you aim and hit the box. This is much easier and faster for a game to calculate. Of course there might be a couple different boxes for each target. For example, there might be one for the head, chest, legs, and arms. But they are still boxes or some other shape. WoW has just one.

Let’s take a look at how WoW’s hitbox works and then we’ll offer up some specific tips at the end.

WoW’s Hitbox

How big is a creatures hitbox if you can’t see it? Slowly walk towards the creature and keep melee attacking. When you can hit it, the edge of your hitbox just touched theirs. To make the game feel realistic large creatures have large hitboxes and small creatures have small ones.

If you are melee you have to overlap hitboxes to hit. And if you are ranged then the distance from your hitbox center to the edge of your target’s hitbox must be in range of your ability.

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When you raid the group number you are in becomes important. Many of the buffs that you get from other players only work within your group number. If you are the raid leader or assistant picking and choosing which players are in which groups, it often makes the difference between success and failure.

As a player it’s helpful to know which buffs are best for you and as a raid leader it’s helpful to understand all the classes so you can decide how to organize the grouping. Let’s take a look at the player group only buffs. These are buffs that only work on your own group. This doesn’t include buffs you can cast across groups and ones that work individually. For example, a priest can cast Prayer of Fortitude which will buff the target and the target’s party. So they can cast it on the entire raid. But Vampiric Touch only gives mana to members in their own own group.

Let’s take a look at the player group only enhancements.

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Generally in WoW one person pulls a creature mob over to where everyone fights it. But who does the pull? The puller is usually the tank, crowd controllers, or a hunter. But which is the best?

The Tank

There are currently three tanks in the game, each with their own way of pulling. Druids will usually start a pull with damage spell or Faerie Fire. Paladin’s usually pull with Avenger’s Shield. And Warriors use their ranged weapon, either a bow or a gun. Crowd controllers control their targets after the pull starts, except with Sap. The tank builds up aggro on the loose creatures. And the party proceeds to blast the creatures in the kill order. The tank is the simplest puller to have, and it’s the most often used.

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	Class	Ability	Icons	Time	Breaks	Resist	Targets	Creature	Cooldown
Primary	Mage	Polymorph		50	yes	arcane	one	humanoid, beast	0
	Hunter	Freezing Trap		20-26	yes	yes	one	any	24-30
	Rogue	Sap		25-45	yes	no	one	humanoid	special
	Priest	Mind Control		60	caster	yes	one	humanoid	0
	Warlock	Seduction		15	yes	shadow	one	humanoid	0
Limited	Druid	Hibernate		40	yes	yes	one	beast, dragonkin	0
	Druid	Entangling Roots		27	no	yes	one	any outdoors	0
	Priest	Shackle Undead		50	yes	yes	one	undead	0
	Warlock	Enslave Demon		300	no	shadow	one	demon	0
	Warlock	Banish		30	no	shadow	one	demon,elemental	0
Emergency	Druid	Cyclone		6	no	no	one	any	0
	Hunter	Wyvern Sting		12	yes	yes	one	any	120
	Mage	Frost Nova		8	partial	frost	all ranged	any	21-25
	Paladin	Turn Undead		20	no	yes	one	undead	30
	Paladin	Hammer of Justice		6	no	no	one	any	45-60
	Priest	Psychic Scream		8	no	no	5	any	30
	Rogue	Blind		10	yes	yes	one	any	90-120
	Warlock	Fear		20	no	yes	one	any	0
	Warlock	Howl of Terror		8	no	no	5	any	40
	Warrior	Intimidating Shout		8	no	no	6	any	180

For most instance creatures you have to use some sort of crowd control or your group makes a quick visit to the graveyard. Who decides crowd control usually falls on the puller, often the tank, though anyone familiar with it can do it. That person usually has rough idea of what’s what and uses the raid target icons, , to mark the creatures before the pull and fighting starts.

We talked before about easy ways to mark mobs with hot keys and mods.

What gets crowd controlled (cc) and what doesn’t is mostly about knowing the mob and your group’s cc. It’s also a part art depending on how strong you feel your party is and how safe you need to play it.

Ask yourself what is your group’s cc, the target creature type, the creature’s abilities, and what is the kill order going to be. In practice this is pretty easy once you know the mob and know about cc abilities.

Crowd Control Abilities

Crowd control abilities come in many different flavors. Officially these are Charm, Daze, Disorient, Fear, Incapacitate, Root, Sleep, Slow, Snare, and Stun. But this isn’t very useful for deciding when to use them. So we have listed the crowd control abilities in three different groups assuming maximum level and rank .

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Marking with the game UI can be a monumental pain. For those who aren’t into hotkeys or want some extra features let’s go over the various mods out there for marking creatures with raid targets. Consider one of these mods essential if you are regularly marking in raids or instances.

Previously we talked about marking with hotkeys.

The Ace mods listed below can be installed by getting WoWAceUpdater.

Button Bars

There are several flavors of mods to help you mark. But by far the most popular ones are the button bar types. You click on a creature and then click on a button bar to mark it. This is infinitely better than the default Blizzard interface. It saves you from having to click through two menus for every mark, making it quite simple. Two of the more popular ones are LuckyCharms2 and Krom, but they are essentially the same. If you are a FuBar fan you can combine LuckyCharms2 and FuBar using FuBar-LuckyCharms2. Let’s take a look at a couple other button bar mods with some interesting or unique features.

RaidMobMarker has the ability to raid warn and whisper people their targets. To assign a symbol to a mob, select a creature and then a symbol button. To assign a player to symbol, select the player and then right click the symbol button. The abiliy to automatically tell the group their targets is especially useful for those groups that keep forgetting what their target is supposed to be.

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