From the Mailbag: Many mobs, handling them
Something I’ve never really done–post an email–but this was a really good question I received a little while ago, and I thought it be worth sharing (especially on such a slow news day!) for any other prospective tanks that might be lurking.
I have been reading your blog for awhile now and it pushed me into making my first tank, thank you by the way! I’ve played the last 4 years as a healer and dps, but I’m really starting to enjoy paladin tanking. I was hoping you could tell me how I know what mob to select if i see someone grabbed aggro. One target is easy enough, but what happens if you are all grouped up on 10 different things, and suddenly someone is taking damage, how do go about selecting the correct mob to start whacking/taunting. My char is only 43 at the moment, but i really want to start hammering in the correct concepts sooner rather than later. Are there certain mods I must have, i.e. if you saw someone without them you would laugh at them?
Respectfully,
The Eager Student
Hi TES,
Do you play with Name Plates turned on? If not, I definitely recommend doing that (it’s in the interface options). Then get two addons:
- Tidy Plates
- Tidy Plates: Threat Plates
With both installed and name plates on, the names above each mob’s head will turn green and small when you have control over them, and then red and large when you’re losing aggro. Easiest way to keep tabs on all the mobs for sure!
Happy tanking!
- Rhidach
Armory Feed
Proper raid/party frames should have aggro highlights enabled, which allows you to quickly see who has mobs attention. Mouseover Righteous Defense (using either a mouseover macro or an addon like Clique) can help make your taunts very quick. Mouseover Hand of Reckoning is also very useful to “point and taunt”.
Between proper nameplates and proper raidframes and proper macros, you can regain control very quickly and very easily.
For other tanks who don’t have an R.D. like ability I’d say Tidy Plates is an ideal tool to help with that though.
Perhaps I should have specified “in addition”. I thought it was clear.
@thorianar
29 September 2010 at 11:54 am #
Dude!
http://www.wowhead.com/spell=31789/righteous-defense
Yes, “RIGHTEOUS DEFENSE!”
(Ok, RD is kinda messy ’cause you have to select your friend and cast on him [not the mob]. But if you use any healing addon or the combination of Grid+Clique, you can easily assign that to a single click. Usually, with the small number of adds, you consecration or Hammer of the Righteousness will pick it up.)
@hazmacewillraid
29 September 2010 at 12:59 pm #
They changed RD to be castable on the mob you actually want to taunt (back in 2.4, I believe), so not only does it taunt your targetted mob, the mechanic travels back to that mob’s original target and gets up to two more mobs off that target.
Pretty neat spell, in my opinion.
I’m famous! Update-level 74 at the moment :)
Going well so far, looking forward to Sotr at 75. Took your advice and i use tidy plates, its worked well and is actually fairly useful from a dps perspective. They start out super super tiny and if you grab aggro they blow up.. nice for when you are doing aoe damage. not sure what ill do at 80 though, seems pointless to gear anything up at this point.
@Rhidach
29 September 2010 at 1:09 pm #
Glad to hear it’s going well!
And definitely at least run heroics for emblems. Those will swap over to Justice Points in Cata, so you can at least get a nice head start.
And on top of the Justice Points you get more experience in tanking which is pretty valuable as well ;-)
You might even want to raid a little bit to experience the differences between group and raidtanking.
@Orthien
29 September 2010 at 2:31 pm #
I absolutly love this addon and recomend it to all new tanks. My only problem is that I am so used to it that the moment something turns red its now a reaction to taunt it, often in raids its just another tank picking it up which makes me a rude Co-Tank. That can be solved by watching grid or whatever your raid frames are to see who it is that took agro though.
Orthien’s last blog ..The Other Grass- Final Fantasy XIV
I always found it easier on my raidframes to have tanks marked so that this situation is easily resolved. I know for certain healbot and grid can track those people you mark in the raid tab as “main tank” and then have your frames change their color to something vivid (I use a bright green) so that you know never to taunt off them (unless you really mean to).
Just a thought.
@Orthien
30 September 2010 at 3:52 am #
Yea I know I just often taunt as a reaction to Threat Plates before I see the frame in grid.
Saves DPS and frustrates Tanks, most of my co-tanks don’t often try on trash anyway because even without taunts their Tank offset can’t keep up with SoCleave and Reckoning.
Orthien’s last blog ..The Other Grass- Final Fantasy XIV
I read this and immediately wanted to offer for paladin tanking that a clique+grid or some sort of raidframes which indicate aggro with mouseover macros tend to work very well for getting those loose adds back. Combine this with tidyplates as Rhidach suggests and you will know preemptively when you are about to lose a mob too!
@PinkRaidFrames
29 September 2010 at 3:10 pm #
^ what I use (both, that is)
As Meloree pointed out, I use TidyPlates/ThreatPlates, but I also have a healing addon that I use since I often heal as well. The one I prefer is HealBot (I’ve tried them all, this is the best fit for me, personally.), which keeps its settings based on the spec that you’re in if you have a dual spec.
So in my healing spec all of my various clicks just heal the targets, but in my tanking spec I have no heals tied into it at all, instead I have my taunts on normal left/right clicks and then other abilities such as cooldowns or things like Hand of Sacrifice or Hand of Protection tied into shift/alt/ctrl clicks and so on.
Healbot also shows me who has agro and who doesn’t, so the ThreatPlates tells me which mobs (more importantly, how many) I don’t have agro on, and HealBot shows me who it is that they have targeted.
As a Druid, I don’t give a crap if I change targets, because I need to spread my Maul around for AoE threat anyway, but as a Paladin I don’t want to use my Judgement on one mob and then lose him in the herd when I click on the one that strayed. By using HealBot to trigger my taunts I don’t have to lose my current target. I can if I want to (by clicking their nameplate or by using the other version of my taunt macros that do change my target), but I don’t have to.
Psynister’s last blog ..Welcome to the Hollowed Core
in addition to tanking, I find tidy/threatplates to be incredible for pvp as well, especially in large battlegrounds, since it colors nameplates by classcolor and has the class icon on the plate. Awesome for knowing what’s what at a glance, and picking out a certain one in a group of players
I use Tidy Plates and the Threat Plates addon but I also use Tauntmaster (link below)
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/tauntmaster.aspx
This addon is easily configurable and allows for single click taunts. I have it set up as L-Click= HoR and R-Click=RD. With this I find that taunting is a breeze.
I would highly suggest Taunt Master also.
LOVE tidy plates btw…
@gameldar
29 September 2010 at 8:54 pm #
Just wanted to point out that you don’t really need the threat plates part of tidy plates. I’ve switched over to using neon theme (although I change the colours to the same as threat plates). It has the same threat colour changes, and more importantly a tug of threat bar that gets added above the mobs bar that shows your threat lead/loss. The added bonus here is there is also another colour setting in the tug-of-threat that marks the mob as being looked after by the other tank (if you set up the main tanks via the raid frames).
This is the author’s blog post about it:
http://tidyplates.blogspot.com/2010/04/threat-widget.html
Gameldar’s last blog ..Consequences of Drinking