DPS classes, unite!

Let's imagine, for a moment, that you are doing an instance with the perfect group. You got a tank, a healer and, as a hunter, you're one of the 3 DPS players.

You get into the instance and you start thrashing mobs around. The tank (or the party leader, whoever he is - I rather have my tank lead though) should first tell the group by which order the mobs should go down. He gets in, holds aggro and now he has 2, 3, 4, whatever amount of guys around him.

In the same perfect world, the tank keeps aggro and all the nice DPS folks control their aggro (you can use a nice addon such as Omen Threat Meter - GO GET IT), the healer does his thing - just another regular business day.

Now, what's the deal with the DPS group? Well you guys should ALL be targeting the same mob to take him down FAST. If each of you targets a different mob, or one of you targets one mob and the other 2 another mob well... That WILL work. But not just as well as if you ALL target the same mob.

Let's say each mob is hitting the tank for 100 dps (nevermind the number - I'm just using a nice, simple round number). So we got 3 guys hitting the tank for 100 dps each. That's 300 dps on top of the poor guy. If you all target a mob and bring him down, you'll reduce the damage by over 30% quickly. Then you move on, take more damage down from the tank and so on.

If you target different mobs, the poor tank will have to sustain more damage, for more time. The healer will have to heal him more often, spending more mana. This is a big no-no. You guys want to bring the mobs down, one at a time, but FAST. Nuke them. Send them to WoW-hell. Whatever. Just bring them down as fast as you can.

Now I know this is not too hard to do. You guys read/listen carefully to your party leader, you know what symbols mean what, what's the kill order and you just nuke a mob, pick another mob and so on. Nevertheless, and as I am a tactical gamer, I try to add a little more of teamwork and tactics to this action.

In the said perfect group, one of the DPS players would be the Lead DPS. This is the guy that has the responsability to quickly switch targets to the next mob. The other 2 guys only follow their lead, by assisting him.

Let's say you are confronting a group of 3 mobs - A, B and C - that are to be killed by that order. You guys target A, the tank goes in and off you go shooting them to pieces. After A is killed the Lead DPS picks mob B and the other 2 DPS players assist him. You can either select the player and hit "F" (the default key) or click the target window on the group frames. But there's another cooler way: macros.

I use a couple of macros to help me on this matter: 1 to set a player as my focus and another one to assist my focus. Don't mix this type of focus with pet focus. They're 2 different things.

When you assign a player as your focus, WoW stores the said player in memory so you can reuse it later.

So you click on the Lead DPS player and enter "/focus target" into the console. Or, better yet, do a macro and make it a button on your action bar.

Later you will be able to assist your focus player simply by using yet another macro, which will be comprised of a single line, once again: "/assist focus".

So let's say you click on your Lead DPS player and hit your "/focus target". Later on, that player will start targeting mobs. You hit your "/assist focus" macro and bang! You're targeting his mob. If you and the other DPS player do that, you will ensure that EVERYONE will be hitting the same mob, bringing him down fast and doing your job!

Your tank will surely appreciate it.