A Guide to Mages comment thread

[Skandranon]

I will refrain from sarcastic retorts if you will refrain from informing me that my opinions are exceedingly worthless.  Fair enough?
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For my part, I apologize if that's the sentiment that was conveyed. I didn't intend to dismiss your opinion as worthless, merely point out that I had also seen it from the perspective of a tank, and that I wasn't taking only one viewpoint on the matter.

Responding to your original post, I am not violating my own Rule One in any way by suggesting that you might plan for mages to pick up all humanoid adds. Planning that way doesn't suddenly mean there are problems if the add is non-humanoid. Obviously, the flip side of a plan that says the mage is picking up all humanoid adds is a plan that says the tank will target and take the aggro of non-humanoid adds. No one's going to make a plan that says, "mages pick up all humanoid adds" which has no contingency if they're not humanoid. And if people do, that's not what I'm talking about when I say planning ahead.

If the mage is in the middle of a spell, it's no trouble - a quick tap on the "w" or "s" key - to interrupt casting to throw a sheep. And even if the mage's sheeping is delayed by some factor, it doesn't change the fact that the mage is going to sheep the add - the tank attacking it and then having to stop when the sheep comes, some unspecified time later, only offers greater opportunity for confusion. Yeah, the sheep may be late, but in situations like that I prefer to trust the plan and assume that it'll get sheeped sooner or later rather than try to ad-hoc a solution that may cause more trouble than it's worth. Sure, notification may help there, but every second the sheep is delayed is more time that you'll spend with one eye on the chat screen, waiting for that message to pop up, which is less concentration to be spent on aggro management.

You say that in the "real world", you often have no clue how or why you've popped the sheep. This is where my original paladin comment comes in - I, too, have "real world" experience in this, and I have never in any group, even when main-tanking, failed to notice what got sheeped, and, when it was popped, who popped it. When I popped a sheep I know I did it, because I'm always looking at my target with a portion of my attention and the puff of smoke around it is distinctive. When a sheep pops and it wasn't my target, unless I've cast Consecration I know it wasn't me. This is borne out by many of my upper-level raid and party experiences, as well - after a battle where the sheeps were popped, I have never failed to see someone apologizing for doing it. I do not question your experiences, but I submit that there is a significant portion of the playerbase that does not have trouble knowing when they popped a sheep.

Multiple adds aren't handled much better with a macro, either. If they're both humanoid, which can be seen at a glance, all a macro lets you know is that the mage is sheeping one of them (which should be determined in advance). In battle, it doesn't convey the critical information as to *which* is being sheeped more quickly than the spellcast itself would. You have two options: wait to see which one turns into a sheep or click each one, look at the nameplate, and compare them to the name indicated by the sheep macro. The first one takes 1.5 seconds. If you can do the second one in significantly less than that amount of time, go right ahead and ask your mages for macros. But I doubt a time savings of a half second or less are going to matter that much.

And, given that you're invoking Rule One, you can't forget to consider all the ways in which a macro can go wrong. Part of my objection to these is their effect upon party chat. My position, obviously, isn't that chat should be silent, but that its signal-to-noise ratio should be as high as possible. And with the number of alternative cues the polymorph cast offers, and considering how fast it is, a macro is most frequently noise. Party chat, in my view, should contain only messages that demand immediate, entire-party response - because a player's attention is already divided in so many ways.

Also, people do not hit buttons with perfect accuracy. I know this from seeing other people's macros in action - you can expect a lot of "Sheeping - <party member>" or "Sheeping - <no target>" results from a macro. You're either induced to ignore these messages or spend extra time recognizing that the message is bogus - the same info that not hearing a casting sound tells you. And what happens if an add is non-humanoid, but you aren't familiar with the critters in the area? Mage selects it and tries to sheep it, you get a "Sheeping - <target>" message, and it doesn't turn into a sheep. Now things get uncoordinated, worse than if there was no message at all, because you had some expectation that it might be a sheep and it isn't.

If you believe it helps you, request macros all you like. However, I don't believe that such macros are universally good advice and definitely not something to be done unilaterally, without consent or request from other party members.