group strategy

[Ulmo 1997-2011]

As last night showed us we need to all agree to play by some kind of agrred up strategies

I want to start with some definitions, many of them you may already know, but to assure we are all on the same page.

Group Leader/ Raid leader aka GL/RL is an agreed upon leader for any given quest or adventure. This person makes the decisions. Suggestions can always be given, but in the end this person decides. Many situations need a decision made quickly. Right, wrong or otherwise this guy decides and all live or die together .

MT aka Main Tank is the meat shield of the group or raid. This is the guy we all want taking the beating .

MA aka Main Assist is the guy we all use our assist macros for to assure we are all attacking the same mob. It is often the same person as the MT but not always. The macro "/assist name" will target you on the same mob as name. You need to reword the macro for any person playing the role as MA. The macro "/assist %t" will target you on the mob of whoever you are targetting at the time you hit the macro button. This is not nearly as practical though in many situations as it takes longer to do and mistargetting gets you in trouble sometimes. .

CC aka Crowd Control is the act of dealing with a bunch of mobs, often that you wished you didn't have all at once. Polymorphing one of them per mage is an important part of this. Kiting or luring a mob away from the group and rooting it is another. If you have a lasting root spell, this can be very usefull. But you need to know which way to lure it to avoid aggro on more mobs. Using assist to kill one mob at a time quickly gets the group to a safer situation faster than several people each killing their own mob slowly. This is especially true when the group has only one tank class. Off-tanking is where a second or more tank class toons take a mob on them selves while the rest of the raid or group concentrates on assisting the MA with another mob. Which of these strategies you should use depend on the make-up of your group. But what-ever you decide stick with it to avoid confusion and wipes. Decide as a group what will be done if 2 mobs are pulled, if 3, if 4, and who will do what as part of this strategy. Having the mage polymorph and the hunter break it isn't a good choice

Rooting is the use of some immobilizing spell to keep a mob away from the group

Kiting is the use of some aggro method and maybe a snare spell to get a mob to follow you somewhere while taking little or no damage from it.

Snare is a spell that slows the mob's movement.

Puller is the agreed up person to initiate each battle by bringing the mobs to you. There are several classes that can do this. Any class with a ranged attack can. Different strategies will be developed as your class and playstyle dictates. Especially indoors it is important to keep some room between the group and the mobs being pulled. This allows the puller more room to sort out his/her methoids, and if a bad pull is made he/she can choose to just die instead of completing the pull. In EQ the monk and shadow knight can "feign death" and break aggro if a bad pull is initiated. Maybe some such evasive skills are available to a WoW toon we don/t know about or have yet?

Bad pull is a pull too large for the group to handle.

Gonna stop here for now. I will add more as I think of it and I invite everyone to add their thoughts and/or ask questions. As we become more skilled and experienced in our play we can also discuss ideas here. It is the planned use of group skills that make mmorgs fun for me. Soloing can be fun, but this is why games like EQ and WoW have me coming back for more. Add playing like this with friends from long ago and new ones and it gets really special.

[Elatan]

Even though I am not yet in the "right realm" ( still on Euro Beta awaiting the option to come US and join ) I fully agree with Ulmo here. The issues and idears that is brought up applies to all the mmorpg I know and are basic tactic with little or no difference. They are needed to learn for effective gaming and reaching beyond what 5 independent chars can achive.
But it takes time to establish a well funktioning group where all know exactly what to do in a given situation.

One thing I would like to add is focus. Achieving the highest outcome for the group in any fight relies on peoples focus on what they are doing. If just one char in the group is having his focus on PM`s, generel chat or other things not within the group even the most well-trained wellplayed group may easily die.
It is needed every char is having focus on group, GL/RL`s messages, stick/follow up when said etc etc.

[Gwaihir]

I would like to further add that pulling is not always done by a ranged attack. In many a groups its the rogue who does the pulling(via a technique known as 'sap pulling')


And the hunter can feign death... but if you're fighting many mobs, it often doesn't work unless you can get them to stop attacking you for a second(has a high resist chance)...

Also the rogue can 'vanish' which activates a very high level stealth...


I would, however, like to partially disagree... I don't like the idea of having a 'leader' in a party UNLESS there is someone who knows clearly what to do in this instance more than nobody else... I think it ends up causing problems in most groups to have a designated leader unless there is that clear distinction...


Also:

Ping-pong CC: Where two classes capable of doing roughly equal damage 'bounce' aggro on a mob that the tank can't hold between them to prevent either from taking full brunt while it dies... best done usually with combinations of hunter and mage(as, in both cases, most damage is ranged direct)



Hey! Hunters rarely break poly... we KNOW how to deal with that... we have to know what we're doing or we can never find a group *rolls eyes* Its usually, honestly, mage/warlock/warrior who breaks poly... or an overconfident(as this forum replaces a certain word with 'thingy' even when the four letters are present within another word) rogue. (Mage/warlock/warrior try to control one of their AoE or multi-target abilities... and they can't quite manage the range)

[Ulmo 1997-2011]

Its usually, honestly, mage/warlock/warrior who breaks poly..

Ummm, the mage is the one who casts polymorph, and from experience we rarely break it early.

I would, however, like to partially disagree... I don't like the idea of having a 'leader' in a party UNLESS there is someone who knows clearly what to do in this instance more than nobody else... I think it ends up causing problems in most groups to have a designated leader unless there is that clear distinction...

In pick up groups it rarely works to have a leader. That one person often excercises greed instead of taking the group's best interest. In guild groups it speeds things up significantly and greed shouldn't be an issue. Way too often getting a group quest going and executed takes way, way too long if it is run by comittee.

[Eonwë]

Gwaihir said:

I would, however, like to partially disagree... I don't like the idea of having a 'leader' in a party UNLESS there is someone who knows clearly what to do in this instance more than nobody else... I think it ends up causing problems in most groups to have a designated leader unless there is that clear distinction...

I would tend to agree with Ulmo here.
First I would say every group has a "leader" of some form, it's just not always prominent or obvious in all situations, and it's not always the guy Blizzard marks as the group leader. If one guy is constantly running off stirring up mobs and the others run right after him, aren't they "following" his "lead?" Not a good lead, but one nonetheless. The guy who ninja loots and causes everyone else to get paranoid about getting items, causing them to start looting as fast as they possibly can, is also leading.

That being said, my experience with groups has shown me "not" having a group leader can be at least as bad as having one that isn't good. Without making this a long and boring post, I've been in groups where there hasn't been a declared "leader" and it isn't pretty.

On the other hand, I've also been in groups where there's a plan laid out in the beginning and everything's gone smoothly from there.

I don't necessarily think there needs to be a designated leader in regular quest situations, but it would speed things up in instances and raids (40 people all doing their own thing would be especially ugly).

It's better to have one person known at the beginning of the instance to make decisions that need to be made should disagreements or whatever come up, whether or not they know anything about the instance.
To have only leaders when they know something about the instance would mean either they are looking everything up on the net, or they've already been through a couple of times. I'd like to think we'll get to a point where we'll have groups that are going together into instances each person for the first time.

As an example, I've been in a group where it took 5 minutes to decide who was pulling (not because they were jerks or trying to push it off on the other but because they were being too polite, going back and forth on who could pull if the other wanted), and even after that was decided another group person decided to run off and do it his/herself. A simple "(Player X) is pulling" a bit sooner from the group leader might've stopped it. Might not have stopped the third person, but would've settled who was pulling alot quicker.

Taking this long might not be a big deal on regular quests, but instances take much too long to be standing around for 5 minutes discussing who will pull. That's only one example, but I'm sure others can think of good examples as well.

Take care.
Eonwë

[Gwaihir]

I've personally noticed that having a group leader can be counterproductive... at least, as far as I've seen... I remember the times I've gone into Maraudon and Zul'Farrak with my hunter and we usually didn't have one... and there weren't any problems(except in the occasions of 'bad groups'... but even having a leader can't prevent those. The times there was a leader usually he was out for his own aims and nobody else's so everyone but him had quests left over that they wanted to do at the end....


Fyi... most of those times WERE in guild groups(on Shattered Hand I was a member of a small, friendly guild for a while) and we just found having a leader redundant... we spent a little bit beforehand explaining what we were going to see and do in the instance and, well, after that we all knew what we were doing.... if nobody knew the instance(as it was the first time in Uldaman) we just all stuck together and played it by ear, taking our time and letting everyone have their say...(and, uldaman is a long instance, but we didn't take that long even being underleveled to do the entire thing EXCEPT the boss... who we just weren't strong enough to handle our first run through)