Saturday, November 12, 2011

#02 - Target Icons

Great! Now that you know about watching all those health bars to keep tabs on all the creatures in that pull, eventually you should begin to realize that some enemies hurt more than others and things can go much more smoothly when those certain enemies die before others.

Sometimes you don't realize this until half way through the pull (Maybe you forgot, or maybe you assigned an icon to the wrong target) that things could have been done better. But if you take the time to actually type out "kill that other thing first" you could fall behind quickly and start losing threat on those mobs. Right clicking and choosing icon and then selecting an icon is cumbersome too. It is pretty easy to at least find a few unused keys on your keyboard to bind those high priority icons too.

Here is the Macro discussed in this segment (feel free to modify to suit your needs) that quickly communicates your intention to your group:
/p {skull} First kill ::: {cross} Second kill
/p -- Additional CC. Call out your own --
/p {moon} - {star} - {triangle} - {square}
If you've never made a macro before, don't worry. If you can "Copy and Paste" that blue text above, you can create macros. Here's How!
  • Type /macro in your chat window in game. this brings up the Create Macro interface. 
  • Click the New button Type a name for your macro. (I named mine Kill) 
  • Choose any icon of your liking and click OK. Now you'll have a button in your Create Macro window.
  • In the "Enter Macro Commands:" text box below, Paste the Quoted macro from above into this area. 
Now you can simply drag this spell button onto any of your action bar spaces for easy access to tell your party how you want things to go down!

Monday, November 7, 2011

#01 - Health Bars

In Tanking 101, If you've never played with enemy nameplates or health bars turned on, this is one of the easiest first things you can do that will enable you to tackle more than 1 enemy at a time and keep tabs on all those meanies trying to kill your party members!

Name plates are visible through walls & floors.  You can actively monitor each and every one of the enemies in a group to know how close they are to being dead.  It can also make targeting specific enemies at a distance a little easier, as the name plates stay the same size within their viewable range.
Even in PVP/battlegrounds nameplates can make it easier to find that darn Arcane Blast spamming mage hiding in a bush!

Addons Mentioned:  Tidy Plates + Threat Plates
This addon is functional outside of tanking though, If you're in a healer or DPS role, the addons works in the reverse as described in the segment (They're green when you do not have threat, turn yellow if you're about to pull threat, and turn big & red if you're about to get the bad stuff)

(Threat plates is not a second addon, it is an optional "theme" for use with the Tidy Plates addon)