raid-icons
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WoW Rookie: Stay on target with raid icons
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide. In your group of regulars, who's the nipple and who's the thong? Raid target icons can take a new player by surprise. Baddies look that much more terrifying with a skull icon floating over their heads -- yet all in all, it seems like a logical mechanic that you didn't happen to notice whenever it kicked in. But what about that mob over there, with something that looks like an orange nipple? And why does the party leader keep saying to hit the "thong" next? Talk about a blast from the past ... With the death of crowd control, target icons don't get much of a workout any more. They were a staple of play, however, back in the days of huge pulls that needed to be controlled and taken down in a specific order. Icons are still used today on a limited basis in raiding and a few notoriously twitchy instance pulls, and they can make it easier to spot players or NPCs who must be protected or escorted in a crowd. Still, it's fairly likely that you can run all the way up to 80 and through the Dungeon Finder system without ever seeing more than the occasional skull or three -- and that's no good for building savvy players.
More options for party communication
Our buddy Rufus from the WoW LJ brings word of a sneaky change in the recent patch: raid warnings (those warnings that pop up in the middle of your screen, created by typing "/rw" while leading a raid) no longer work in parties. Apparently you have to be in a raid to actually toss off a warning. Of course, that could have happened before this patch, but at any rate, it's in the game now. No more /rw in party chat. Not only is it a bummer because some people used to use it constantly to keep party members in line, but this also means that there's one less means of communication between all of these random parties forming out there on the realms. Sure, in a perfect world, everyone would know the fights and chat would be enough to make sure everyone was on the same page (or depending of your vision of a perfect world, everyone actually uses the in-game voice chat -- a quick survey of our staff here presumes that it works in cross-realm PuGs, but given that I've never actually seen it used on the live realms by anyone, who knows?), but we're hardly running instances in a perfect world. Sometimes chat is not the best way to get a complicated boss fight organized and ready.
They're magically delicious!
Very early in patch 2.4's progressive development on the PTR, the ability to send raid icons over chat was implemented. The syntax is pretty simple, you place the name of the icon in those funny looking brackets, like so: {circle}, {star}, etc.Personally, I'm not too terribly excited, it's not something you'll be typing on the fly, probably. I can't really see a Mage or Warlock(or anybody) taking the extra time to type that out properly when something goes wrong(ie death), as simple as it seems to do so. However, this could be a good tool for raid leaders, not so much the raiders. A raid leader could include these in a tanking/crowd control assignment macro. "/ra Matthew, tank {skull}. Christian, sheep {square}." That sort of thing.Regardless of how often this will actually be used, it's a nice little feature, and I'm sure post-2.4 mods and addons will make good use of them, even if the players themselves don't.
Addon Spotlight: LuckyCharms2
Marking targets is an art form, one that requires tactical know-how of whatever instance or raid you happen to find yourself. This duty can fall to your raid leader, your tank or some other designated distributor of raid markers. Of course, the exception is often the Protection Paladin who often requires no crowd control and lets DPS go to town on whichever target they want. But, eventually, even a great multi-target tank needs to establish a kill order. Regardless of who does the job, LuckyCharms2 can provide an easy-to-use raid marking interface.During my days as a Protection Paladin, I started out using the somewhat clunky, default raid-marking interface. A druid friend eventually clued me into the concept of binding the aptly named lucky charm markers to keys, which made my marking endeavors much easier. However, being an addon junky, and a confessed clicker, I knew there had to be something better for me. Enter, LuckyCharms2, a nice little addon which allows you to assign raid icons by using a small frame displaying the different lucky charms.
The strange art of marking
I like Nikol's writeup of her experiences marking targets in instances. There really is an art to laying down those icons in a group, and it requires quite a bit of knowledge to do right. You need to keep group makeup in mind, know the abilities of all the classes involved, pay attention to what individual members want to do and even how they're specced, and have a basic knowledge of the instance and how it works. There's so much that goes into it that it's basically an art in itself -- do you sheep the caster and take out the minions, or focus on the big bad first and then move on to trash? Do you have the group to interrupt and pull a caster to a trap, or do you need to get the mobs out of the way before the patrol comes through?It's complicated and fascinating stuff, and this kind of group coordination is why some players choose to play PvE rather than PvP -- because while yes, the mobs are predictable (and players aren't; as much, anyway), the fun is in the planning. And when you get a good group to go with a good planner, then things really get interesting. There is an art to laying down marks, but once you study what a good marker does, and get the hang of it, you're that much more helpful to any groups you're in.
