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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.
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.
Addon Spotlight: Healbot Continued part I
For many, the role of the Healer is something to be avoided all together. For the few, however, healing is a meaningful, rewarding and challenging job, albeit an often-thankless one. Being a healer also tends to make one a popular player. This popularity can wane at higher levels if you don't pick up on a crucial principle: your job is more than just healing. Depending on your class, you will have other duties that include keeping buffs on your companions, de-cursing them, stepping in front of the mage if he or she draws aggro and the list goes on. Addons are one way that the aspiring healer can shift some focus towards his or her other duties. By taking some of the busy work out of casting healing spells, buffs and keeping the party free of curses, poisons and/or diseases, programs like Healbot Continued can take you from being a good healer to being a stellar and indispensable member of any group. Healbot Continued uses the embedded Lua scripting language to reconfigure information vital to healers. This retrofitting presents an easily manageable interface that helps you maintain a greater degree of situational awareness. For many of you wondering how this works, it's simply a matter of our program, Healbot Continued in this case, listening to the World of Warcraft client for events. In combat, information is literally flying back and forth between the player (client side) and the game server (server side). Healbot Continued simply listens in and picks out information it wants. This is true of almost all addons, which sift through event information for a variety of purposes. Healbot Continued is easily one of the more powerful addons around, as it goes above and beyond what is normally expected of healing addons.
Crit happens
ces_1 over on WoW Ladies posted bragging about her 9.7k Healing Touch crit, and it reminded me that I do exactly the same thing. For some reason, seeing those big numbers pop up in the middle of battle is an indescribable thrill. Crits are strange entities-- they aren't even always helpful (there are many situations, mostly when aggro is tight, in which big crits are actually bad to get). But big numbers inspire something primal in us. And even if we aren't world-record critting (even in the LJ comments, people are showing off bigger Healing Touch crits), there's something super inspiring about seeing a huge number and then realizing it's your personal best. A 3k Lighting Bolt crit isn't that much, but darned if it wasn't a terrific feeling when I finally hit it on my Shaman.Loot is fun, but at the highest levels, it's a group thing-- you need to go into somewhere as a group or a raid, and then even if you do down the boss, you have to make sure you win a random roll or however else loot is distributed. But crits are far more personal-- even though they come from that loot, they're a result of all the gear choices you've made and the talents you've chosen for your character. Sure, a big dragon to fly around on is fun, but crits, out of the many rewards we've all earned in Azeroth, are maybe the most personal achievements you can find-- a real, numerical symbol that you've learned how to combine gear, class, and talents to do big things.
Shadowstep: Do rogues need more threat reduction?
Celene has an interesting point: "Who in their right mind thought that the Subtlety tree needed additional threat reduction? Even the rogue class as a whole?" Indeed, she points out multiple ways that rogues already have to get rid of all the threat they can possibly build up: Feint, improved Fein (via the Sleight of Hand talent), Anesthetic Poison -- not to mention Vanish! And now, in patch 2.3, the Shadowstep talent is set to give an extra 50% threat reduction on the next attack the rogue makes after using it. (This is on top of the change to make Shadowstep useable regardless of whether you are in stealth or not.)But the 5000-gold question is: Why? As you can see, rogues are buffed up with threat-reduction options already. Is Blizzard blind to the actual needs of the rogue class? Bornakk shadowsteps into the thread to point out, basically, that we ought not to look a gift horse in the mouth: "Rogues with Shadowstep will probably be attacking mobs at some point and this will help them use the ability and not pull aggro." The problem here, as I see it, is that players sometimes assume that devs are handing out some abilities and buffs at the expense of others. A player sees a reduction in threat gained after using Shadowstep, for example, and thinks that the devs are opting to put that in rather than look at the class's real problems and get around to fixing them. In reality, I believe, the devs take their time with the small changes, and wait and wait for the big ones; they do a lot of internal testing to make sure that they don't mess up the class even more by trying to apply a "fix" to whatever problem is presented to them. If there are going to be sweeping changes that revolutionize the class, they'll either come bit-by-bit, or else they'll coincide with the release of an expansion, which is really the only time when huge changes make sense.Personally, I'm all for more threat reduction, but it's really not that big an issue for me. I'm more excited about being able to teleport about out of stealth as well as in. This and other changes coming up for rogues might actually make me go back to playing my rogue alt again.
Spiritual Guidance: Threat and you
There's a lot of content in World of Warcraft that you can do all by yourself -- you can easily get to level 70 without ever joining a party. But there's plenty of content along the way that can only be accomplished in groups, and group play is, well, a bit different from solo play. To succeed solo, all you really have to do is kill your target before it kills you -- but in a group, every player has a specific role to fufill to make the group as a whole function. You've got someone to absorb damage (your tank, decked out in gear to help him or her mitigate damage), several someones to do damage (your DPS, which can come from nearly any class), and someone to prevent everyone from dying in the meantime (your healer). And regardless of whether you're healing or flaying minds, you're cloth-wearer who can't take a lot of hits. What does this mean? Well, my friends, it means you need to know a little something about keeping monsters on your tank and off you. And you're in the right place, because today we're going to talk about threat.
Cutting down on grind time for lowbie pets
Mania's Arcania, which is the new home of the Petopia blog, has a really interesting look at a frustrating problem for hunters-- leveling a lowbie pet with a high level character. Say you're 70 and you want a Ghost Saber. Because the Ghost Saber spawns at only 19 or 20, the only way to currently level it is to basically let the hunter tank (or kite, more likely), and simply bring the pet along for the ride.So how could we fix this? One of Mania's commenters has an interesting idea-- whenever a pet is tamed, it is automatically brought within a few levels of the hunter taming it. If you're 70 and taming a level 20, then when the little green ding flare rises up after taming, the pet suddenly becomes level 65, which is good enough to make the pet not so useless. It doesn't quite make sense (why would a pet be so much more powerful just because you tame it?), but it does take out the unnecessary pet grinding. Mania has other ideas that work well, too-- either make the pet experience relative to the pet (not the hunter, as it is now), or reduce the amount of experience needed anyway. Another idea mentioned is to make the latest rank of Growl open to any tamed pet of any level, but I don't see that working-- even if a level 20 could hold aggro against a level 60+ mob, it's not going to last very long.The only other suggestion I'd have is just to implement a different way to level pets-- maybe a turnin or a special quest at pet trainers that cuts down on the grinding time and method. But no matter how you do it, there's no reason hunters should be forced to go through all this just to get the pet that has the look they want.
Spiritual Guidance: Grouping with Priests
Every Saturday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!Priests always seems to be in demand. Exploring or questing in any area of the game, at any level, whether Horde or Alliance, a Priest player can expect to be pestered with whispers for instance runs. Some polite, some demanding, some who need to be put on our ignore lists, and some who don't make any sense at all, but seem to be asking for something. What's a Priest to do when being asked to go here, there, or elsewhere? And what's a player to do when they need a Priest's help? Well, I'm going to try to explain here, in something of a how-to guide for grouping, for the Priests and non-Priests among us. So whether this is your first time partying with a Priest or your hundredth -- keep reading. There's plenty to know about how to act in a group, and we're only going to scratch the surface.
AFK a sec guys -- wife aggro
When Ryan wrote in suggesting we write about the concept of "wife aggro," a collective roar erupted over here at WoW Insider. The resulting conversation was both stimulating and more than a little silly, and in the end I decided if we can discuss this topic so profusely amongst ourselves, our readers certainly would benefit from us writing on the topic. A couple of weeks ago several people in our guild started using the phrase "wife aggro" or "girlfriend aggro" as explanations why they had to AFK or log out of the game entirely. Now, being of that oh-so-rare female gamer demographic, I really took exception to this phrase, but it wasn't until four days ago when I actually spoke up to my guildies about how I felt.
Warlock Spells: Soulshatter
Soulshatter is another new skill that warlocks receive, this one at level 66. As a variation on the usual "Spells cost mana" theme, this spell costs you 8% of your base health. Base health is your health before any bonuses from items, so it's probably between 3 and 4 percent of your hit points. It also costs one Soul Shard. For the warlocks this spell is great because we didn't have a practical way to dump aggro before, and now we can easily reduce our produced threat to stay below the threat of our tank. The 5 minute cooldown means it's only usable once or maybe twice per fight, but that's usually enough to keep you far enough down the aggro list to not be a threat.Sorry, no action shot for this one. Trying to capture an instant-cast spell with the screenshot tool would run me out of shards fast.
