Know your duties

There's some things people assume you know already when you hit 80 and do heroics. Like when and what to need when those blues purples drop, for example. Or what food and potions to bring. Or what is your d@rn role in the group.

In a 5-men group there are usually 3 types of roles: tank, healing and DPS (damage per second). You're usually doing one of these 3 roles, you usually don't switch roles (although you can if your call can tank and dps and you have the proper gear, for example - even if not very advisable) and you usually don't mess with what your group buddies are doing.

Of course, there's always the dumb guy that wants to play Leeroy Jenkins and wipes the whole party. Again and again.

Our huntering wipe award today goes to a hunter we have played a few nights ago (no names). He did his need/greed moves right, he had a nice pet, he played well. Except he HAD to try and hit every single mob in the instance BEFORE the tank did. Did we wipe? You bet we did. Did we boot him? No. We teached him. We told him NOT to do it. We told him to wait for the tank to get aggro and THEN hit the mobs.

And now he uses Omen too. Finally...

Tank Guide to Traps

Woah! Wait a minute... TANK guide to traps?

Indeed!

Although traps are the hunter's domains, tanks should be able to understand how they work, what's the cooldown and what's the amount or time they stay active. A bad hunter does bad trapping but a tank that doesn't understand how things work will make a master-trapper seem like a kindergarten kid sticking his hand into a bear trap. So, fellow hunters, show this post to your tank friends from your guild!

First of all, a couple of facts about traps:

1) Only 1 trap can be active at a time. If a hunter drops a trap, any other trap active will vanish.

2) Traps will exist for 60 seconds.

3) The cooldown for traps is 30 seconds.

So, whenever a hunter drops a trap, he can not lay another one for 30 seconds. This means that if a mob runs over the trap and the trap doesn't hold him, the hunter can not try to trap it again for a while. Also, even if the mob is trapped, the amount of time he's held may not be enough for the hunter to get another trap ready to catch it once it sets free. Therefore, timing - as with pretty much anything in World of Warcraft - is important.

When doing a trap-pull (a pull of mobs in which you require a hunter to lay a trap - usually a freeze trap), wait for the hunter to tell you he/she is ready. The hunter will lay the trap, wait a few seconds (usually around 25 seconds) and then tell you to go.

Now, something worth noting: remember traps only last for 60 seconds? Well if the hunter has to wait 25-30 seconds to give you the "go" call, that trap will only hold for another 30-35 seconds. So you now have 30 seconds to do that pull. If you know you are going to lose this window of opportunity for some reason (because a patrol is coming your way, for example), let your party know and ask your hunter to re-deploy the trap on your call.

After this, let the hunter do his job. Don't touch the mob unless the hunter asks for help. If done properly, the hunter will keep that mob under control for a couple of minutes, more than enough time for your party to get rid of 2 or 3 other mobs and then go frenzy on the poor frozen bastard.

So, in a nutshell:

1) Wait for your hunter to give you the go (usually 25-30 seconds after he/she lays the trap)

2) Do the pull within the next 30 seconds or abort the pull and let everyone know you're aborting. Ask the hunter to lay another trap when you think it's ok to retry.

3) LEAVE THAT MOB ALONE. Don't touch it, don't talk to it, don't even look at it unless the hunter cries for help. Your hunter has it. Let it be. Shoo. Go get spanked by the other mobs.

Tanks love Wasps!

I did my first 2 instances from Northrend a couple of days ago (yeah I know, 76 and didn't had entered a single instance until now - shame on me and my tight schedule). I wanted to try something new so I went to Sholazar Basin and grabbed a nice Sapphire Hive Wasp. I wasn't a huge fan of wasps since the ones in Zangarmarsh were a bit weird. But now you can find some REALLY cool ones at Nothrend (like the one I caught).

The wasps' special is the sting and the ones from Sholazar come with rank 5 which is quite nice. Now the damage is not that much of a biggie (only 30-40 nature damage) but the cool thing about it is that it reduces the target's armor by 610 for 20 seconds. With a cooldown of 6 seconds (or less with the proper talents - mine's cooldown is 4 seconds since I'm the cool type of hunter (BeastMaster). But even with a 6 seconds cooldown, you can have the armor reduction on your mob the whole time. How cool is that?

Now the OTHER cool thing about the wasp is its size. That thing is HUGE. BIG. ENORMOUS. It's... BIG and HUGE and.... Well you got the picture. You can see on the screenie above how big that thing is compared to yours truly. And that's why tanks love it!

They are HUGE, they are hovering above the ground and they get on top of mobs like crazy! Your tank won't see anything else BUT your pet! Annoying? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. They LOVE IT! Or not... But they do. Trust me!

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.