Aggro-Management
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Arcane Brilliance: The mage survival guide, part 1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week and next, we look at the time-honored tradition of mages dying whenever something looks at them funny and discuss a few ways to break that tradition. Way #1: Stand next to the warlock, pull aggro, cast Frost Nova, then Blink away. I'm just kidding; that's a terrible idea. Funny, but terrible. Only do it once, purely for the humor value, then concentrate on downing the boss. Okay, maybe twice. If you've run a heroic in Cataclysm, you may have noticed something: Nobody's healing you. In Wrath, when I'd take my holy pally out for a spin, everybody got heals. I was healing the tank, the off tank, the off-off tank, the DPS, the other healers, the hunter's pet, the death knight's ghoul, the guy standing in the fire ... they all got heals. Now? Not so much. These days, healers spend 75% of their time healing the tank and the other 25% praying that their mana bars will go back up. That leaves exactly 0% of their time to spend on keeping your mage alive. We're on our own, guys. When you see your health bar start to drop in a Cataclysm heroic or raid, just know that it won't be going back up any time soon. Our survival as DPSers is squarely our own responsibility. And what's the first rule of magehood? That's right: Dead mages do terrible DPS. We need to stay alive, our raid needs us to stay alive, and the only way that's going to happen is if we do it ourselves. "But Christian," you might be saying, "I'm a mage! I wear a dress into combat! A particularly vigorous sneeze could kill me." Those things are all true. But you do have a few tricks up your sleeve that can help stave off death, if not forever, then at least long enough to pump out a few thousand more points of damage before you port up to that last great mage table in the sky.
WoW Rookie: Tanking for beginners
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.You've always wanted to be the eye of the storm: a World of Warcraft tank. You're working your way up toward level 80, quest by quest and zone by zone. Maybe you've consulted a leveling guide and done some research around the internet, and you're sporting a shiny, efficient leveling spec. Or maybe you're taking things more casually, experimenting with different specs and abilities on your own and devoting most of your energy to soaking up the sights and the lore, meeting new friends and settling into your first guild. Either way, you're beginning to feel the first tendrils of apprehension curling around your ankles. You haven't been able to get many instance groups to knock the shine off that new armor. Heck, maybe you're not even tanking-specced yet at all. What's going to happen when you hit 80? Everyone's going to expect you to know the pointy end of the sword from what's under that fluffy tail you feel inclined to tuck beneath you ... What can you bring to the table with absolutely (gulp) zero experience?
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.
Breakfast Topic: Wipeout Poll
It's amazing to me exactly how hard instances can be. Not the mobs, but the group. We've all been in ugh-PUGs before. Some players don't understand how to use their class or play nicely in an instance. That's only on regular dungeons; heroics have their own set of potential disasters. Sometimes you just have to give up. Putting a group together for instance can be extremely difficult, and sometimes you have to take what you can get. While there are many excellent tanks out there, the shortage on my server makes for slim pickings. Folks who think that pulling aggro off the tank is an honor make up another problem. I am occasionally guilty of trying to heal and DPS at the same time. I'll admit to causing a wipe or two because of it.
