Instance Run Tips and Tricks

[D-Bone]

Ok guys, I thought I would start this thread to help us all out. Even though we do pretty well on these runs, I think there is room for improvement. This started out by me thinking about things I can do better and then changed into seeing if there are things we can all do better. Things I would like us to discuss...

1. Main Assisting aka Off-Tanking Duties
This is mostly for me but can also be for anyone else who will MA when I can't. The reason I say its for me is that I know Kelian isnt a big fan of being the MA and I dont think a hunter should anyway. So, I would like to take up that role. I'm also going to respec to help with that. Things for this topic are, (a) give me all the rules that a MA needs to follow citing example for different types of pulls, (b) what kind of gear should I be looking for and (c) any other little tidbits that might help.

2. Looting
Ok, so my run with you guys the first time through scholo I got more than I should. This was due to my own misunderstanding about the unspoken loot rules in instance runs. Lets clarify exactly where we all stand on this so myself and possibly others are not confused anymore.

3. Managing Aggro vs. Damage
This is a delicate balance in instance runs and I think we all need to be on the same page. Its important for the tanks to hold aggro and then letting the damage dealers bring the mob down. How can we best achive this safely and effeciently?

4. The Anatomy of a Good Pull
Give me all the ins and outs of what makes a good pull. Tell me about the differences between small group mobs vs large group mobs vs boss pulls.

That's it for now. If you guys have anything else that is good info, please post. The more informed we are, the better we all will be.

[Rehn]

#1 Being protection specked with some points in holy will make a great Paly MA. Shield wielding would be nice?.Light Forge is your best bet on MA/Healing. There are some good drops in DM for this as well. Most groups would like a Tank, or a rogue to be the Ma. I like Palys? Just my experience.



#2 Standard Raid loot rules are. Role On all BoE if it is an upgrade for someone in the group hand it over, with multiple players that need the item they will then random for it. Pass on all BoP (Unless it?s an immediate upgrade). Pass on all recipes, schematics, plans, unless its your Trade skill. Scourge stones always roll on, and Chests always random for. However if you are using a pick up group I would suggest you have a master looter so there will be no ninja looting.



#3 Having a great MT is key to success. The MT must be fully Protection specked wield a shield, and have an AC count of 7000+ This can be a much higher count, An MC MT needs to have close to 9k, Their armor should also have a + defense bonus as well with a 400+ defense all around.



#4 There are so many different kinds of pulls, Hunter pulls, Sheep pulls, Shackle Pulls, MT pulls. It is all situational. Hunters are great pullers they can take a beating, and are easy to pull agro from. Sheep pulls are great, but this requires an experienced group, and MT.

Shackle pulls work great, however you will want to do this carefully, and at the same time the MT attacks another mob.



I hope this helps D-bone

[{OOE}Death]

uhhhh yeah what he said. :confused:

[Rehn]

uhhhh yeah what he said. :confused:


Do you play WoW? If not this would be hard to follow. :scratch:

[Dante]

For those of you out there that might have that twinkle in your eye to try this outstanding game out, go here to brush up on your acronym speak.

http://www.worldofwar.net/guides/glossary.php

[{OOE}Death]

uhhhh yeah what he said. :confused:


Do you play WoW? If not this would be hard to follow. :scratch:

Nope I don't play ANY of those types of games. Can't get into them at all. I stick with FPS and racing games.

On a side note about acronyms. I passed my CCNA today. :headbang:

[Kyraath]

Awesome, congratulation death.

Just a quick note before i go to bed, I don't have much time to post a good one but reading Rehn's post prompted a few things about pulls. Concerning sheep pulls and shackle pulls. I feel that the mage or priest who pulls with these methods need to back off and not try dishing out any damage right after the pull. I've seen many mages in the pickup groups i've been in sheep then immediately lay into the first mob that heads towards them. This caused the tank to have a really difficult time getting the agro and caused me to have to spam-heal. If you pull this way, try to wait to cast the sheep till right after you hear the BWAAA of the priest or paly shield dropping on you and priests/paly's should always drop a shield on the mage before they cast. This allows the priest/paly to stay out of combat for a few more seconds which gives the higher regen rate on mana and does not generate the agro usually associated with shielding. Plus the mage still gets the benefit of the shield for when everything else comes at them. Once the tank has all the agro, you can then assist the MA and start pounding away at the current target.

I'll post some more tomorrow when I have a few free minutes at work.

[Malice]

OK, BACK ON TOPIC! Here is my disclaimer, I do not know everything and some things I say here may be contradicted and an argument made for something else, I can accept that. However, there are some things I do have quite a bit of incite into and hopefully that will help. As always, I (we) suggest comments and criticisms on the following content.


Main Assisting
First off, I want to say that I think hunters often make a good MA, but a lot of people will argue that. Really, the MA is a tough job. IMO the major requirements of the MA job is as follows:

Recognize which mobs in the pull need to go down first and in which order. If you are not sure, ask the more experienced players. Also work with whoever is doing crowd control to see what they are going to be sheeping/freezing/shackling, etc so as to try not to target that mob. In addition to that, in pickup groups where there is no Teamspeak I tell the crowd controllers in advance that I'm going to pick a target and if it happens to be the one they were going to sheep or shackle then once it breaks they should pick a new target. My reasoning for this is it is a lot easier to get 1 guy to switch targets than it is for 10 - 15 people to do it.
Select mobs ASAP. Since everyone is assisting you, if you dilly dally too much without selecting a target then the ranged guys miss some valuable time to be dealing damage until you can get in on them for melee combat. Perhaps even going up near the MT, or whoever is pulling, and preselect a target so that everyone can start bombing on it as soon as it comes into range. Sometimes this is not feasible, especially with hunter freeze traps. In that case, it just takes experience to make a good guess at which mob is not going to make it to the freeze trap first and select that one. You won't always be right but sometimes you have to gamble. Once you and your whole group gets really advanced everyone can recognize that the selected mob is going to freeze and hold their fire. In that case, immediately select a new mob and everyone re-assist. (We need to get to this level)
Make sure when selecting the next target, do it quickly but you must be sure not to cycle to the sheeped/frozen/shackled mob. Many players will have their assist auto attack, so if you accidently have one of those targeted, there is a good chance they will attack it and break the hold. This can sometimes be really bad.
As far as who should MA, I personally think another warrior is good for the taunt ability. This is just in case the mage gets a knarly crit and pisses the mob off really bad. However, I do think Pally's are the natural second choice and like Rehn said, in many people's opinion the first choice.

What kind of build do you need to MA? I don't really think it matters much. There are two schools of though on it, one says do as much damage as you can as to try to maintain a high hate level with the mob. The other says go full on armor and protection as to absorb the most damage. It's been my experience however, that the MA usually doesn't get beat up all that bad. Usually so many people are beating on it that they will occasionally switch targets so the damage is distributed and no one besides the MT really takes much. Perhaps Kyraath can comment on that more since he's a health bar watcher.

As a side note, its not necessarily the MA's job to absorb the damage, like the MT's job, although sometimes it is. Remember your main job is to control the battle. You are the general, you choose the targets to attack. If you can keep the agro on you and off the paper towel wearers then that helps too. However, a good MT will recognize that the MA target is on a caster and go taunt it off if need be.

Important Notes for those assisting the MA
You must always attack the target the MA is targeting, no matter what. This is just like the army, if everyone doesn't do it, the whole system fails. This is especially true for casters. I've been in pickup groups where there is a mage or hunter who always decides to do their own thing. It causes undue strain on the MT and the healers. If you decide to continue to do it after being warned, expect the MT to stop coming to draw the agro off of you and the priest to stop healing you.

Use your MA macro several times during the battle especially during the initial pull. This will help in the case where the MA accidently selects a frozen mob or realizes that they selected the wrong mob in the first place. This will do two things, first help to kill the desired mob quicker and second, keep the mob original mob off of you, especially if you are a caster. And THAT helps me! =)

Looting
Rehn's looting rules are standard and we use those also. As far as the unspoken rules, I actually rescind my earlier complaints about D-Bone taking too much loot. It was unfair of me. I have a personal rule that if I get 1 or 2 good items, I stop rolling on most everything unless its set gear. Thats just MY rule for me, because I want everyone to have a good time and get some stuff if possible. If you all want to adopt such personal rules yourself, you are welcome, but I now see that it is unreasonable to expect everyone to do that. If you can really use it, then roll. However, we do not want to see anyone rolling on BoP items that they cannot use. If no one in the group can use it, when it first pops up, everyone passes. After that everyone can random for it if they want to greed loot it. This way, if someone wants it disenchanted instead of just sold for gold they can have an enchanter pick it up for them since its BoP. As an aside, we are all equals now and there is still a lot of things that those of us that have been 60 for a while can still use. While I'm not saying those that are recent to 60 or soon to be don't get to roll on set items and stuff, just remember that this isn't the level 20 noob zone anymore and we all can use this stuff too.

Managing Agro/MT Responsibilities
First, just a quick recap of what the MT is supposed to do.

Get the agro of all mobs in the pull except possibly the MA's target. I.e. be a meat shield.
Yeah, thats it, sounds easy huh? I can say that it isn't too bad if, EVERYONE in the group understands how the MT maintains the agro. This is how I do it and I suspect almost all other warriors also do it this way.

Pull the mobs and bring them back to the designated kill zone. Actually this brings me to another good point that sort of belongs here. Whoever is pulling, be it the MT, MA, hunter, mage, priest or whatever, brings the mobs back to the kill zone. That means that EVERYONE stays in the kill zone and doesn't move until the fight starts. If the experienced players tell you, "We are going to fight here, I'll bring them back," I guarantee you they say that for a valid reason. Listen to them. Is it worth a full party wipe cause you wanted to see what was in the other room? Don't be foolish.
Use demoralizing shout to gain the agro of all the mobs in the group except probably the MA's target. Now you must understand, demoralizing shout does no damage, all it does is reduce the attack power of the mob. However, this is enough to bring the MT's hate level to the top of the list on all those mobs that are not under direct attack. At this point, the MT has a very loose hold on the agro. It is enough to sustain the priest and druid flash heals and renews, most of the time. It absolutely cannot sustain ANY kind of AoE attacks. This will instantly turn the mobs against whoever is doing the AoE. For this reason, its is imperative that AoE only be used in specific situations. Those situations are a large group of non-elite mobs. I can say, there are few if any situations where AoE is required against elite mobs, however, I know they do exist. They will undoubtedly be discussed prior to the pull. In emergency situations, warriors have a 10 min cooldown spell that will draw the agro from all nearby mobs for 6 seconds. After the 6 seconds are up, they will go right back to their previous target. Sometimes the MT will call out saying to begin AoE and they will pull all agro but this is also usually a special case. Do to the 10 minute cooldown, you should not count on it being up. Believe it or not, I use it quite often in our raids lately but would really prefer to save it for the "Oh shit we are going to wipe" situations.
Taunt off the stragglers. Usually there is some reason that at least one of the mobs has decided to pick another target. It's the MT's responsibility to find those guys and taunt them. The minimum cooldown on taunt is 7 seconds with 3 points in the talent tree. Another thing to note is that sometimes taunts are resisted. Your best bet is to follow the guidlines in the MA section above and this should minimize these problems. If for some reason you do get a mob on you and he is beating the crap out of you, by all means, do NOT run away from the MT, run TO the MT! In addition call out for help on teamspeak. There is nothing more annoying than chasing after a caster and a mob and watching him die because I can't get close enough to the mob to taunt it.
Switch between all targets and get a few hits in and some sunder armors. If all is going well, we've got the initial agro from demoralizing shout but its shaky at best. We've taunted the few lose mobs, now we start beating on all the other mobs a few whacks at a time and then hit with sunder armor. This generates a high amount of threat and will often times keep the agro on the MT even if a Mega Heal comes down. However, it won't hold a fireball, pyroblast, shadow bolt or whatever the mega damage stuff from a hunter is. From this point, its smooth sailing and when the MT feels he's got enough of the agro, he should assist the MA to help take his target down faster.
One last thing, casters are huge damage dealers and that is the number one way to gain agro. Casters really are designed to be finishers. It may seem boring and retarded to sit back and wait a while before attacking, but somehow you must. Perhaps initially attack with a low aggro spell or a wand in order to keep the agro down. Once the agro is firmly with the MA or some plate wearer then you may start to "unload" on them. Typically its safe to start unloading at about 3/4 health or lower.

Pulling
As an MT, I don't really like anyone else to pull. It makes more work for me to have to immediatly get the agro off of some non plate wearer. However, sheep pulls, shackle pulls and hunter pulls are a fact of life and can be dealt with.

In my opinion here is how the optimal pull goes. The MT watches the mobs movement patterns and pulls at just the right time, i.e. gets the fewest mobs. As soon as the pull begins, the crowd controller, i.e. the mage or priest disables the predesignated target. This does two things, since the MT engaged the attack all the agro is initially on him and not the cloth wearer. After the pull, its business as usual as described above. I would say it'll be unlikely for you to pull as MA unless we are in an area with undead, whereas you can pull with that cool undead spell you have. Otherwise, without ranged attacks, its aweful hard to pull successfully.


Well that turned out to be a lot longer than I thought it would. I hope no one thinks I'm picking on them or thinks I'm being condescending, that's not the idea at all. For example, I may know the process of how to be a great MT but that doesn't mean that sometimes I get lazy or forget to do something, we all make mistakes and just need more practice. But I'm hoping that if everyone understands how many of the mechanics of instance running works it can make us all better players. I would love to hear from some of the other classes of suggestions or perspectives they have on some of the situations. If we all understand our own role and have a good idea of what everyone elses role is, we can become a good tight nit group. This will allow us to run instances more efficiently and perhaps even spill over into doing battlegrounds. I know I personally want to do MC sometime, obviously we will need a larger group, but we must be very good at our standard instance runs before we can be successfull in MC.

[spawnman]

On a side note about acronyms. I passed my CCNA today. :headbang:

Nice job!, on another side note, I passed my A+ exam! Must say it's not very hard, but just hadn't gotten around to doing it. Looking at a 2000 MCSA next.

[spawnman]

4. The Anatomy of a Good Pull
Give me all the ins and outs of what makes a good pull. Tell me about the differences between small group mobs vs large group mobs vs boss pulls.

Cheesus knows all about pulling it!:eek:

[D-Bone]

FYI, Dante and I are going to keep this specific thread moderated so it stays on topic. This one needs to stay clean. Thanks guys.

[D-Bone]

Thanks for the great info Rehn and Malice, looking forward to Kyraath's in depth info.

You say LF armor huh Rehn? I was reading a bit on the official forums and some people are saying you can get better tanking gear by picking and choosing. I was looking at getting all stuff with +defense on it. Is that a good idea? And, how do you feel about the MA being damage dealing vs damage absorbing? (protection vs retribution)

[Rehn]

It's Nice to pick and choose, LF is a start. there are better things out there of course. I think DPS MA is a good Idea, However if you have to off tank. this can cause some issues. protection is the best bet, and eather Holy/Retro as a secondary. Protection and holy makes for a good MA.

[lethalmind]

I think this is one of the best discussions that we have had. Just to throw my two cents in, One of the first things I want to comment on is that the MA is my key player in the game. I have learned very painfully that I have to give a few min. at the beginning of the fight before I start to blast. If I get a crit off i can do about 3000 points in less that 2secs. If whoever I hit is not steady on one person and they have firm agro im in trouble, unless they are dead. Anything that has that much hp is going to cause me a hurt.
For the most part I have the easiest of jobs, I wait a lil bit for whoever to hit and then i go to town on them. How long it takes for the MA to make the decision on where the next target is greatly affects how effective I am and that is my ? If ma is not targeting what should I do?
Do i hit at all or just wait for him to finally target or hit someone that i see someone else hitting?


I have noticed that at least in most of the groups that I have been in that we are very blessed to have good MAs.. I got in a group a few days ago that MA could never make up his mind and everyone just really picked a target on their own. Needless to say run did not last long.
The biggest key to this game is just plain and simple communication. If you have people who do not know what is going on.. it is better to school before than after we all get wiped.
sorry looks a little scattered to me.
I look forward to any sugestions.

[Malice]

How long it takes for the MA to make the decision on where the next target is greatly affects how effective I am and that is my ? If ma is not targeting what should I do?
Do i hit at all or just wait for him to finally target or hit someone that i see someone else hitting?
This is exactly why MA is a tough job. Within our group, we are lucky enough to have voice communication and at that point you should be calling out for a target from the MA. If you end up in a group where the MA can't get a target, thats not going to work out very well, as you experienced. However, a 60+ mob takes a LOT of damage, probably more than your mana pool and mana shield could sustain, so in that case, just sit there and wait for the MA. I have seen a few runs where the MA sucks so bad that everyone gets more or less of a concensus of which one to attack and they start doing it. But even then I would wait a few seconds to see which ones the plate wearers are fighting and then open with some low agro spells then when they get below half, nuke the poop out of them. But thats the whole reason we all hate pickup groups is when things like that happen. I think we all will take a lot of pride when we can walk 5 man into any instance and whoop its butt because we all do our roles pefectly, just takes time.

Thanks for posting though, its nice to hear from everyone.