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Aggro management and you - Lissa - 03-01-2006
One of the biggest problems I've seen lately is aggro management. In BWL, aggro management is the biggest reason that causes fights to go south, but it can also cause other fights to go south as well as we've seen numerous times in Onyxia and occasionally in MC and to lesser extents UBRS and other "end game" instances.
A number of you are probably going, "WTF, Taha lecturing us about aggro management when Taha's been one of the worst offenders in the past?" Well, I've learned and I've seen a lot of things from others that mean people need to learn them as well.
Pulling aggro in some fights just doesn't affect you, it affects everyone. Ask yourself this, how many time have you seen Onyxia yank to one side off the main tank and flame said side and 5 to 6 people go down because someone pulled aggro? How many times have you seen a mob rip off a tank and head straight into the main part of a raid? It happens way too often and it shouldn't happen at all.
I can talk from authority for Warlocks which conversely does lead to a lesser extent to Mages due to similarity in how the two classes function during Raids. I have also played a Hunter in several raids and have also seen things from the prospective of a Warrior Tank on MC runs. While I have never actually played a Priest in 20/40 man raiding instances, I did play a Priest up to level 60 during beta and did play in the end game instances as both a healer and as a DPSer (being shadow speced). I will leave talking about Druid aggro management, Pally aggro management, and to a lesser extent, Rogue aggro management to others.
From the perspective of the Warlock, the only way you have of managing your agro is through turning DPS on and off. While the Warlock does have some bonuses from certain builds and items sets (threat reduction by being a Master Demonologist with Imp out or having 8/8 Nemesis which none of us in the alliance are near yet), the only thing that can be done is to just stop DPSing. Because we have no way of shedding aggro like other classes, we have to be mindful of just how much we can do. What I've found that really helps is to wait every so often and not cast. Case in point, during Broodlord fights, I will wait a couple seconds after the DPS call before I start casting and during the fight itself, I will stop casting every 10 seconds or so for about 5 seconds to allow my aggro to lessen. The only time that I go full tilt out on trying to do as much damage as I possibly can is the one fight where aggro doesn't matter for range, Ragnaros. This is the one fight were not paying attention to aggro you can get away with, but all other fights, you have to watch just what you can do.
A lot of what I just said above also fits for Mages, but at least Mages do have a couple options available to them, one being the talent Ice Block which sheds the Mage's agro. The second is the Arcane Talent Arcane Subtlety, but this does not mean you should be going full out if you have these skills. These skills should only be coming into effect as a last resort, not as a crutch to be able to garner more aggro than the Tanks. Stop every so often and let your damage cool off a little so that you don't pull aggro because pulling aggro can get the raid maimed or even destroyed with particular bosses.
Hunters have the most amazing form of aggro reduction afforded to any class in Feign Death. This skill totally and completely wipes you from the aggro table of all mobs you're engaged with. This skill also refreshes every 30 seconds. Because of how useful this skill is, it allows a hunter to go full out during the entire fight. Hunters should be using this skill every time it refreshes so that they don't pull aggro at all. Although if the Feign Death gets resisted, turning off auto-attack and waiting for a bit for the cool down on Feign Death to get closer to a new use it highly recommended.
For Priests, especially shadow priests, the mind blast spell should be used very sparingly. This spell will cause huge amounts of aggro with the target mob in question. This is a spell that can easily cause catastrophic problems in a raid if used improperly or without fore thought. While you have talents that lessen aggro and have spells to temporarily lower your aggro, you must be extremely careful when using this spell.
For Rogues, Feint is a godsend. The one problem that arises with Feint, like the Hunter's Feign Death, is that it can miss and this allows you to fall back on to your other skill for shedding aggro, Vanish. These two skills combined should allow a Rogue to never take aggro or get rid of it quickly.
As a Warrior that is tanking, nothing angers me more than when I have to taunt or go chasing off after a mob that I thought I had locked down between using skills like Sunder Armor, Revenge, Shield Bash, and Heroic Strike because someone was careless or wasn't using skills to get rid of their aggro. The only other character that should take aggro from a mob off a tank is another tank. Every time a Warrior is not the main target for a mob, the more the healers have to work and there's the chance that someone may end up dead. A dead character brings nothing to the raid.
One of the worst offenses I've found to cause lack of aggro management is use of add ons like Recap and Damage Meters. Add ons like these make people ignore good game play in an attempt to be "first" in damage. While it's fun to see what kind of damage you're doing, it leads to sloppy aggro management because you keep thinking you can push for more damage and more damage, but you're not thinking about the raid. If you do something dangerous, you risk not only yourself dying, and a repair bill, but others in the raid dying. Repair bills are not fun, so it's better to either turn off those add ons, remove them, or keep them minimized so you don't see how you're doing and check at the end.
In the end, aggro mismanagement leads to one thing, a repair bill for someone, and no one likes that. So managing you aggro better leads to you paying less of a repair (they're still going to happen), but at least it won't be as big if you ignored your aggro management responsibilities.
Aggro management and you - castille - 03-01-2006
I'll copy this over here, as well.
The real killer for shadow priests is not mind blast. It's Vampiric Embrace. If you have the Silent Resolve/Shadow Affinity Build, you could mind blast at the first sunder, get a crit, and not pull aggro. But that same setup, with VE, and there's a chance the healing aggro would be enough. It especially adds up over time.
Edit: I should add, this is one of the huge reasons I'm really looking forward to 1.10, Silent Resolve will be for healing and damage.
Aggro management and you - Rinnhart - 03-01-2006
Quote: one being the talent Ice Block which sheds the Mage's agro.
It's absolutely necessary to note that the aggro reduction of Ice Block lasts only the duration of the spell. If a mage cubes and someone else doesn't surpass their original aggro value, the mob will be back on them one the effect ends.
Aggro management and you - Arnath - 03-01-2006
Rinnhart,Mar 1 2006, 12:11 PM Wrote:It's absolutely necessary to note that the aggro reduction of Ice Block lasts only the duration of the spell. If a mage cubes and someone else doesn't surpass their original aggro value, the mob will be back on them one the effect ends.Out of curiosity, does Fade work similarly to this or is it an aggro wipe in the vein of Feint? I've never really been sure of the mechanics of Fade.
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Arnath
Aggro management and you - Skandranon - 03-01-2006
Arnath,Mar 1 2006, 03:41 PM Wrote:Out of curiosity, does Fade work similarly to this or is it an aggro wipe in the vein of Feint? I've never really been sure of the mechanics of Fade.
Arnath
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Fade removes a static value of threat (750 or so) and restores it when the spell ends. In that sense, it does work like Ice Block, except that Ice Block guarantees that the mage will be ignored and Fade may not.
Aggro management and you - Jarulf - 03-06-2006
It is my understanding that the game uses a quite simple system for determining mob behaviour (that is the aggro) in that "whoever has the most us attacked". In addition, for most attack types (and healing), the ammount of aggro is directly proportional to the damage done. In addition, there are some specific aggro aquiring skills. Also, as far as I have seen, the game tend to tell you all the damage done by anyone (even poeople outside your party) in the combat dialog windows. Right? Or have I missunderstood or missed something so far?
No0w, would it then not be a very simple thing to write a mod that keep track of what damage/healing everyone has done? Add in aggro from special skills which I believe I have read guides were people have made experience trying to figure out the equivalent aggro they generate. It would then be simple to have the add on warn you when you are close in aggro to the tank. Is there any problems I am not realising to this?
I understand the problem when one fight generic monsters since I believe the game only tell you the "name" of the monster someone do damage to, not nessecarilly the specific one, but for bosses qith unique names it should be possible, no?
For normal monsters, I guess it might be hard, but can't one coordinate the damage with the information on the damage specific monsters has taken. After all, if someone did 200 damage to "a bear", and one bear at the same time dropped 200 in life, one should be able to attribute the attack to that specific bear, no? Or is such detailed information not available to the mod?
I guess there must be something making such an add on hard or impossible to do since I am not yet aware of such an addon. Or?
Aggro management and you - Hannibal777 - 03-06-2006
There has been talks of using damage meter for exactly this purpose. To track how much damage you are doing and tone down if you over damage, which is proportional to hate.
Damage meter has its dark side as well as good side, too. :)
Aggro management and you - NotSoDarklord - 03-06-2006
The problems with this that I am aware of are as follows:
First off is the performance issue. Mods that parse the combat log are a pretty ridiculous resource drain. For this mod to work it would have to look through every heal every dot every direct damage skill every white damage attack and so on and so forth... a lot of data. With my own combat log on during 40 man raids set to just show my own damage out the spam can get hefty... that X40 seems very problematic.
The other part of this is the added "quirk" that most bosses seem to have. In BWL the drakes shed aggro with wing buffet, broodlord reduces aggro (temporarily?) with his blastwave and so on and so forth. Bosses tend to have some variable that gets thrown into the mix that would mess up the simpler aggro trackers (and it does, such mods have been created before, but were mostly abandoned as useless since they did not track aggro reduction due to knockbacks and such.)
Hate values have been figured out for the most part, though this was the biggest problem early on in the raiding game "How are you getting those values, you're just guessing! etc"
Mods such as these have been attempted before though. I remember when Elitist Jerks from Mal'ganis let their own hate tracking mod slip and the resulting uproar from the community that such a mod existed and was kept hush hush for quite some time. I don't see what would stop anyone from making a mod like EJ did, especially now that exact values for threat moves have been determined, what I do not see however is what incentive a mod creator would have to release it to the general public, especially if this person was from a premier raiding guild.
Aggro management and you - redinter - 03-06-2006
Hannibal777,Mar 6 2006, 12:02 PM Wrote:There has been talks of using damage meter for exactly this purpose. To track how much damage you are doing and tone down if you over damage, which is proportional to hate.
Damage meter has its dark side as well as good side, too. :)
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I have to agree here, I use damage meters to control my aggro on many fights. I am a warlock and know that with my imp out I have 20% threat reduction. As long as I keep myself doing less damage than some dps warriors, I tend to be safe of overaggroing. Its just a matter or clearing the damage meters before each boss fight and using common sense. why to use warriors for controling purposes? A good dps warrior tends to be pretty high on the dps charts, they do normal dps in battle or zerker stance, so its easy for a warlock to equalize damage 1 to 1.
Of course it also depends on the boss fight. For example the broodlord fight, being one critical fight for locks/mages, as we can not shed aggro. Yet I have noticed that my personal aggro ceiling for this fight is 36k damage, over this I have to be careful. So, as long as I remain sensible in the fight, I know I can get to this amount of damage done, before having to stop the damage, or be ready to die if needed.
damage meters is really handy, you just have to use it for the right purposes :)
Aggro management and you - Kevin - 03-06-2006
It exists. It's called ThreatMeter. You can find it here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...ns&T=328904&P=1
Aggro management and you - Quark - 03-06-2006
NotSoDarklord,Mar 6 2006, 05:14 AM Wrote:The other part of this is the added "quirk" that most bosses seem to have. In BWL the drakes shed aggro with wing buffet, broodlord reduces aggro (temporarily?) with his blastwave and so on and so forth. Bosses tend to have some variable that gets thrown into the mix that would mess up the simpler aggro trackers (and it does, such mods have been created before, but were mostly abandoned as useless since they did not track aggro reduction due to knockbacks and such.)
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Threatmeter, which GG linked below, had a pretty ingenious solution to this problem. Since exact numbers are known for skills/damage/healing, they have a "Knockback Discovery" method. Essentially, the mod keeps track of everyone's aggro and when the MT loses aggro to someone else, it knows how many knockbacks the MT has taken and the % difference in pure aggro (excluding knockbacks) from the MT and the new aggro target.
Run this many times over, and you get a more and more accurate result of just how much aggro is lost for each deaggro ability.