Bad Tactical Memes

[Kevin]

Example:  In BRD there are 5 elite humanoid pulls, which as a 4 man group at appropriate level, are really quite dangerous pulls.  We used multiple priest Mind Control casts for CC/healing with the medics.  We would kill the entire pull except for the mind controlled mob.  After 2-4 Mind Controls, that one mob HATED the priest with a furious passion.  That is a tremendous amount of hate to overcome.  It is much easier to kill that mob than to reclaim aggro.  Even without ANY rage, though, a warrior could keep his priest alive by spamming taunt as soon as it came off of cooldown (improved taunt helps a lot) if the priest moved away from the mob when it was taunted, and the warrior chased well.  In practice what we did was taunt, conc blow, taunt, which gives 17 seconds of complete priest safety (should be enough time to kill one of those mobs) without the warrior ever truly reclaiming the top of the hate list.
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This is where tactical mastery and angermanagement help you. I actually try to save rage or wait till I can bloodrage again before an MC'd mob is released. There a few things you can to do them to keep it on you for 15 seconds. Bloodrage if you can, taunt hit battle stance then Mocking blow it that will get you 2+6 seconds. Anger management gets you 3 rage in that time, staying in battle stance gets you more rage from damage or you can flop back into def stance. Blood rage will get you an additional 8 in that time (assuming you only had the initial 10 from it). When mock wears off taunt it for 2 more seconds that should be one more rage from AM so you have at least 14 (2 more from bloodrage) just from the skill build up. If you blocked you got another rage, you hit for more rage. You can not conc blow for 5 more seconds of stun there shouldn't be any diminishing returns on it. That is if it lives that long.

I can't get rid of tactical mastery just because of the uses of mocking blow if nothing else. I even use it in Motlen Core at times (when an elemental comes out of banish it's great if you can, plenty of time for the lock to rebanish then or to help you establish aggro). But you have to be quick on the stance changes. :)

Even without that taunt/conc blow/taunt is generally enough to keep the mob off the squishy. I will open with conc blow sometimes since it will hit a little better than taunt will when the mob movs. Taunt is very unforgiving about distance, conc blow seems to not give you too far away messages as frequently.


And yeah I don't go into detail because there is no need to. With both you can Concillian if there isn't any CC close I throw multishots out all the time because I figure the other mobs aren't going anywhere either.

The other thing about Bloodrage to consider and a reason that I don't use it until after I engage in most cases is that bloodrage generates AoE aggro too. Sure it is small aggro but it's still aggro that you waste if you hit before you pull. Actually it's twice as much aggro as dem shout is. This is also why imp sunder is so huge. You can shoot, bloodrage and only need 2 seconds (which is generally about how long it takes them to run to you) before a sunder, not 5. 10 immediate rage is generally all you need. It's another reason I like to charge/thunder clap/def stance/bloodrage/sunder/dem shout, you've bought yourself a fair bit of time to hit the other mobs with sunder, you've got anything that gets CC'd after you clap still locked on you if it breaks, you've lowered incoming damage even more, which isn't an issue for rage generation with 3 things beating on you (or it shouldn't be) and you have enough aggro on the charged mob to not lose it to the focus fire right away. But Bloodrage should be used liberally. One tick of a renew will make back all the health in most cases, even without the improved talent.

I like the CC applied after I pull for the same reason. If they CC before I pull, then I generally don't get the aggro from bloodrage and or dem shout or the clap (if I'm charging) applied to that CC'd mob. I'd have to dem shout before I bloodraged to get the CC'd mob to put me on it's hate table. It's great to watch a sheep or seduce go down early or a trap go down early and see that mob still run to me. I try to maximize the chances for that. I suppose I should do more with with a hunter pulling with rank 1 arcane then charge and do my routine instead of me pulling, that would probably maximize the rage I have available. But I don't like aggro being on anything else. I blame it on growing up with a priest and 2 mages in the group most of the time. The 5th slot would be a lock or hunter most of the time and the hunter will admit they were still learning the game and weren't very good. So there was no one else I could ever really trust to live long if they had any aggro at all. So the more that I could keep it centered on me, the better. :)