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Scattered Shots: Threat management
Last week David discussed finding and training your pet. This is a great time to start practicing threat management. When you attack a target in a group, your target will be threatened to varying degrees by everyone in the group. This becomes really important later in your career, when you will more often be facing targets in instances, or larger targets which require a full group to kill. Take advantage of the early levels of Hunter to practice threat management, and bring more to those groups than they might be expecting.Most classes have to group with someone before they ever have a chance to think about, much less practice, threat management. But we have a built in tank: our pet. We can practice this as clumsily as we need to, dying as often as we have to, all without an audience to mock us. Your pet'll never mock you. He's your best friend! Just don't ask what he tells the other pets when you're not listening.I'll be discussing "threat," also known as "aggro" or "hate" depending on the group. All of these words refer to one thing: how mad the target is at you and all your allies. Lots of things can cause threat to rise, such as standing within a mob's range, smacking a mob with a gigantic slab of marble, or even healing a party member who is in the process of doing either of those things. Lots of things can also cause threat to drop, such as being feared, being polymorphed, or being killed. Understanding a little about how to manage your own threat will help you prevent that last option from happening to you or your party members.
BigRedKitty: A little deeper with hunter macros
Each week, Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the hunter class sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary. After the overwhelmingly positive critical reviews of last week's introduction to hunter macroism, and Mathew Porter's outstanding coverage of all things macro, we feel that one more week of instruction in the art of macroistics is in order. It is certainly not our goal to steal the thunder from our resident macro maven, but we have had a lesson plan in mind from the beginning of this short series of columns, as we usually do. We wanted to start with the basic one and two-line macros we showed you and follow that by expanding on those ideas to make macros that respond to specific key-clicks, macro sequences, and if-then structures. Many folks will find these simplistic but that's OK. The BRK Email Coffers have overflowed with thanks from those people for whom macros are a new idea and that's where our bread is usually buttered. The comment section from last week, and hopefully today, will continue be a great place for you macroheads to show us your particular masterpieces.
