Posts Tagged ‘pug tips and tricks’

6
Nov

The Art of the (PvE) Pick Up Group

   Posted by: WoWGrrl    in Addons I Use, Adventures In Azeroth, Adventures In Outland, Adventures in PUGs

On a game like World of Warcraft, there are many directions a player could take to advance his or her characters. From the person to whom Soloing is a daily joy through to the person who finds a partner for nearly every quest or every playing moment of the day, there’s a wide variety of “player styles” in between.

We all come together in the form of a Pick Up Group, likely wishing to tackle a dungeon instance, but occasionally to tackle particularly difficult quests outside of dungeons (which happens a lot at level 70), and now our player styles have to mesh in some cohesive fashion so we can all accomplish what we came here to do.

What Is A Pick Up Group?

A Pick Up Group, also known as a “PUG” is likened to an impromptu game of soccer out on a field busy with kids - people playing in the same area who are interested in joining the game of soccer can band together in teams (with practical strangers) to play what cannot be played alone.

Tell Me More…

In a dungeon PUG, players are around the same level and wish to find a group of people interested in entering the same dungeon they want, but unless they PUG regularly or bring a guildmate along, it’s quite likely the people in their group are going to be complete strangers.

In a soccer game, specific positions need to be filled for the game to run smoothly: You need a goalie, you need defense and you need offense.

In a dungeon PUG, there are specific positions that need to be filled as well: Tank, Healer, and DPS. As players get more advanced, and certainly by Outland instances, DPS may also double with CC (crowd control) duties.

A tank can be one of many classes, but generally the most popular are Druid, Warrior and Paladin.

Only certain classes have a healing ability that works on others - Druid, Shaman, Priest and Paladin.

Most classes have the ability to specialize in a DPS (damage per second) style to their class, depending on how they spend their talent points, but the “pure” DPS classes (those that cannot really tank nor heal) are Hunter, Mage, Rogue and Warlock.

Crowd Control/CC is handled by a few different classes and for Mage in particular, makes the class a very valuable asset to the PUG: Mage can Polymorph (sheep) humanoids and beasts, Rogue can Sap humanoids and beasts, Hunter can use an Ice Trap, Priests can Mind Control humanoids and Shackle undead, and Warlock can seduce humanoids.

Assembling The Team

How a group is assembled can, right from the start, demonstrate quite clearly how the PUG is going to do.

Will the Leader take responsibility for filling out the group with its required parts? How many DPS have been invited into the group before a Tank or Healer has been secured? How many people in the party are waiting for a summon instead of making their way towards the instance?

Tip #1 For Joining A PUG

No matter what class you are, don’t join a party of 3 DPS “just” looking for a tank and healer to complete their PUG - even if you’re a Tank or a Healer.

One thing I’ve learned is that competent players learn how to make friends of Tanks and Healers and therefore their parties assemble quickly and get going without huge delays. Watch how long a “LF2M, tank and heals” group’s requests go on - sometimes for more than an hour before they give up.

Learning From The Experience / Making Friends

If you have no friends to invite to your PUG to help make it a little smoother, you’re at the mercy of the rest of the PUG’ing community for a little while, and this cannot be avoided.

What I’d suggest in order to improve your situation is to jump into some PUGs, see how they go, and keep track of what you learn so you can make use of it to make things run more smoothly in the future.

Start with considering downloading the Karma addon, which you can use to make notes on players you have partied with, and you can assign them a numerical value that reflects your opinion on whether you enjoyed partying with them or not as well. Next time you see them around, your notes will be there to remind you!

From there, PUG and pay attention to trying to PUG again with someone you enjoyed partying with in the past. Once you have a small core of friends you can turn to for a reliable playing experience, you’ll find this core will grow more easily and your groups will form with less effort.

And always - make friends with Tanks and Healers! Bring extra mana or health potions and offer them up… bring buff food and offer it up… buff and offer water/food as a mage without having to be asked.

And if you don’t mind tanking or healing - do it! You’ll be well loved and sought after, and will need to carefully choose your friends list so you don’t overdo it!

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1
Jun

Things Every Warrior Tank Thinks Every Non-Tank Should Know

   Posted by: WoWGrrl    in Adventures Leveling Up, Adventures While Tanking, Adventures in PUGs

This post is something of a cathartic exercise for myself. If someone gets something out of it great, if not that’s fine too. I feel like I got it out of my system before the next pug either way.

Things every warrior tank thinks every non-tank should know.

My ability to generate threat over an extended time frame is inversely proportional to your ability to generate threat.

Huh? Ok here is what I mean, we will use a mage for this example but the same applies to rogues hunters, or anything else not a warrior or a bear druid.

As a fight commences both of us have two bars. We both have big full green health bars. Under my health bar is a big empty bar. Under your health bar is a big full blue bar. When you do dmg, it drains your blue bar. When I give or take dmg it fills my red bar. You have all the ammo you need at the start of a fight to make all kinds of threat which will pull all kinds of aggro. I don’t have much ammo to generate threat or take aggro, it takes me a minute.

The difference is that at the beginning of the fight, your threat making resource; mana, is full. You at this moment can activate whatever ability you want and instantly create tons of threat. Mine is empty. My resource, rage, fills up as I give and take dmg. Over the course of the fight I will get a lot to spend, so the longer the fight goes on the more and more threat I make.

Problem is at the beginning of the fight I have little or no rage. It takes me time to build the threat to hold aggro off of you.

So what does this mean to you? It means that if you start every pull with your biggest most evil 10 second cast fireball, it”s gonna be real tough for me to get aggro off of you with my empty rage bar.

How to apply this advice: You need to learn to pace your dps. Whether you are a mage or a rogue or a lock whatever (except hunters who feign death whenever the cooldown is up) start off the fight with lighter lower dmg attacks.

As the fight wears on rank it up to the bigger meaner stuff. You can do the same amount of dmg, but instead of front loading all of your dps (and threat) back load it.

Seriously, this is the biggest problem I see with every single DPS class in the game. Yes, I can taunt the mob off of you, but then the taunt is on cool down. What if the mob then does an aggro wipe like a knock down and it goes after you? What if it stuns me right after I taunt so I can’t build threat? You should be trying to play in such a way that you don”t ever have to see the warrior taunt outside of extenuating circumstances like aggro wipes.

When not to stun.

Ok so you have a stun button. I”m happy for you, no really I am. Stun buttons are great. You see a mob start to cast a heal or a “Level 5 Death to Tank” stun him, that”s fabulous. You see something chewing on a healer, stun them, awesome. A mob “attempts to run away in fear” go nuts stun lock them to the floor.

So why insist on stunning a mob I just pulled? Why stun the mob I just taunted? Here is what happens when you do that. When I am tanking I don’t really do dmg to make rage. My little red bar fills up when I take dmg. If you stun early in a pull I don’t get pounded on so I don”t gain threat so I don”t hold aggro, so someone like a healer or a mage is going to get the aggro. This wont usually produce a wipe, most mobs you can stun aren’t a big deal, but seriously, why make things more difficult then they need to be?

If you absolutely need a rule of thumb, wait till there are two sunders on a target before you stun it.

What to do when you get aggro.

The tank won’t always hold aggro. That”s a fact. Maybe the tank sucks, maybe he got feared, maybe he got stunned, maybe you just unleashed a cruise missile that crits the target for umpteen gazillion points before the tank had so much as an auto-attack on the mob. Whatever the reason, eventually you are going to have the mob beat on you.

If you are wearing pajamas and the mob is elite I understand the panic that sets in. You don”t want to get two shotted. I don’t want that either. So let me explain first the two things NOT to do.

Don’t nuke the thing with another cruise missile! You just pulled aggro so why go nuts trying to dps the thing to the floor before it can kill you? This isn’t a lvl 11 Defias Pillager, most likely you wont take it down in time. What you WILL do, is generate another gajillion points of threat that the tank needs to top to get it off of you. Stop hurting it. If you have a threat mitigator (cower, feint, fade, feign death) use it, if not. Just hold still for a sec. It wont be for very long, soon enough you will be sticking it full of sharp metal things or setting the mob on fire again. Just don”t make it harder for the tank to get the thing off of you.

Don’t run for the hills! I am a bit baffled as to where this gut reaction comes from. When you were lvl 40 did you outrun a bear or something? I don’t think you did. Do you think if you run far enough you will drop aggro? In an instance an elite mob will not drop aggro until you are dead or until you have left the instance. Running won’t keep the mob from chewing on your keester the whole time you run around, really it won’t. The mob runs the exact same speed you do. Guess who else runs the exact same speed you do. That’s right, me!

So if train A leaves Pheonix at 5:10 a.m. Pacific time headed east at 45 miles per hour, and Train B leaves San Diego at 5:10 a.m. Pacific time headed east at 45 miles per hour, at what point does train B catch up to Train A? That”s right! Never! So when train A dies in a monstrous fireball or twisted metal and diesel fuel, it is probably even going to blame train B for not saving it.

You need to run TOWARD the tank, at the very least hold still.

Ok Pally OT, bear OT or other Warr OT, when should you taunt off of me?

Um, really close to never. Why on earth are you taunting off of me? Are you trying to prove a point? Are you trying to demonstrate that you can tank as well as me? Great for you! You have tank buttons too. Now I have to burn my taunt to pull the mob back off of you so you don”t die, or so the healer doesn”t waste mana on you. Now my taunt is in cool down if I need it.

The only time you should taunt off the main tank is if I ask you to. When will that happen? Only if the healer dies and I need to bandage, or if it’s a fight that requires a tank rotation. That’s it.

Now of course there are times when things are confusing, something is chewing on the healer and you are trying to save the day and I taunt and then you do too. That”s fine, you did the right thing in saving the healer, don”t beat yourself up about it, you don’t need to apologize to me for it either. I saw what happened, I”m 4% smarter than I look.

When should you bubble me?

I hope this is a priest asking this, I really don’t need divine intervention thanks. If you bubble me I don’t get threat from taking damage. Don’t bubble me before a pull. Don’t bubble me early in a pull. If my bar is mostly red, sure if you think I need the extra mitigation and there isn”t time for a real heal, bubble me.

Don’t BOP me please, it’s a fantastic way to kill healers.

The pull.

Sometimes we aren’t going to fight the mob out where it is standing. Some times I will even shoot the mob and then duck behind a corner. This is not the universal “unleash your mana wielding ranged casting might” signal. What probably happened is I saw a little blue bar under the mob out there; I want him to come to me so I shot him, then broke line of sight. If you shoot him, guess what, he will stand right where he is and shoot back. Then I have to go out there and risk pulling the whole room to get him off of you unless you figure out how to duck behind corners too, that is assuming that the Moonkin and the Hunter standing next to you didn’t just take your cue and unload their blue wad all over the mob you just launched WWIII on.

The sheep

We pull 3 mobs on accident. You can sheep or seduce or scattershot or whatever. That’s a fabulous idea. Don’t sheep the thing I am beating on! You know what will happen? It will break and I will already have another move queued up behind the move that broke the sheep which will break the next sheep you are trying to do since you didn”t change targets. You might not be familiar with the “F” key. Click me, then click “F”, now you are targeted on my target, so target something else, anything else and sheep that.

Multi mob pull

Ok so we just got more than we can handle and I am tanking 3 mobs with no offtank. Attack my target would you? I only have so much rage to spread around. If you start shooting something that I am not concentrating on your going to pull aggro, then I have to decide whether I let you die, or whether I go pull it off of you and risk letting the rest of the party die while they keep attacking the thing I was attacking. The “F” key works great for this too.

The off tanks target

Just because I am the main tank does not mean that my target is the most important target to kill. In fact, often it is the opposite. I am the main tank because I take the best beating. The Hunters wind serpent that is tanking that other orc over there wont hold up as well as me. His target needs to die first. My target should be the last one to die. Those other tanks aren’t built to take the abuse I do, help them out. I will be ok, I have all kinds of squishies watching my back. Seriously, go fight the other guy’s target.

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