The Glade 4.0

1.) What is the easiest way to assist the tank? Is there something I can do once and have it automatically pick up his/her target every time?

2.) When in RDF, if a person leaves it pops up this window that seems to want to re-queue me for another dungeon, but it says re-confirm my role, or something. Do I need to click yes or no? Will clicking either boot me from current group or will I stay until finished?

3.) Is there any way to not be stuck into a group already in progress and only get into ones just starting the instance? Once I did a RDF it put me in a group on the last mob of the dungeon heh.

4.) As a warrior, is there any way to maintain rage between pulls? I only really have 2-3 abilities that generate rage -- Berserk Rage, Battle Shout, & Arcane Torrent.

1. I always had a macro (tied to a key) that would assist my focus, that way I just had to set my focus once at the beginning of an instance and forget it.

2. Just click yes and reconfirm your role

3. Nope

Pull faster? That's just the way they are designed. You aren't supposed to have max rage at the start of every fight. There used to be some talents that would slow it down, but I have no idea if they are still there.

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Note that you don't necessarily really want to assist the tank. It depends on how they're tanking, I suppose, but if they're tabbing around to spread the threat of single target abilities, or in some cases even with limited number cleave things, assisting them might be a bad thing.

If they aren't marking a target to be the first one killed, you'll just have to play it by ear. Assisting might be best in that case, might be not. You'll probably figure it out after a few pulls though.

edit: and as to question 3, it wouldn't really make sense to allow players to opt out of dungeons already in progress. Maybe if they made it faster to get into those, but I don't think they're separate from normal dungeons as far as the queue goes yet. But if you could opt out and no other changes were made, no one would join those groups, and any time you're in a dungeon and a player leaves or disconnects or whatever, you'd be screwed.

Ok cool.

Oh BTW, BRD = longest MF'in dungeon ever

What the RDF is trying to do is find a replacement group member for your group. So it's asking what role you want to perform, so it knows what role is needed.

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It's been a while since I've played (about 8 months ago), so some things may have changed, but you could attack nearby critters for rage, or charge for even more rage. If you just want to conserve maximum rage, you can taunt one and you'll stay in combat until it resets, or even charge and turn away from the mob just before you get there so that you get the rage from charging but don't kill the critter, keeping you in combat so rage doesn't decline. Keep in mind however that when you're in combat anyone healing or buffing you will be put into combat as well and so won't be able to eat/drink to regain health/mana.

Yeah, charging and then stance-dancing into Defensive Stance is probably the best bet to generate rage at the beginning of most fights. I haven't played a warrior since the 4.0 (hell, 3.3) changes though, so maybe you can charge in defensive stance now. *shrug*

No way to ensure you start a dungeon without any bosses cleared unless you join a preformed group and then hit the RDF. Back when people were doing daily heroics for their frost badges, starting a dungeon already in progress was actually preferred and a nice bonus.

When the "confirm your role" pops up, it's usually due to someone dropping out of the dungeon and the entire party needing to requeue. No way around it. But it's also there in case someone wants to change roles (a warrior dps changing to a tank, for instance, to make the queue go faster).

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Make this macro for whatever your primary spam attack is (eventually it will be devastate):

#showtooltip devastate
/startattack
/cast devastate

That will automatically target the nearest mob if you don't have something targeted. Also tab target is your friend, you can use that to quickly target the nearest mob as well, or cycle through near mobs until you get to the right one. Learn it, Love it (Hate it's quirky behavior sometimes)



As has been noted, it's just trying to backfill the slot that was just vacated. Starting out you'll generally want to fill that back in, especially if it's the healer. As you start to out-gear content, or if you have a really solid group and the last slot is a dps position, you can alternately close it and ignore it and finish the instance with 4.



Kinda. When you port in you'll get the confirmation box saying that it's already in progress and you can hit decline and get booted back out. I don't recall if that screws you for the instance cooldown where you have to wait 15 or 30 minutes before you can requeue or not. If you're doing randoms tho, I'd just go ahead and stay in and finish up the run because you'll get the extra exp/cash/loot for completing the random with a fraction of the work, so it's actually more efficient for you.



If you haven't already, be sure you take the Warbringer talent. Then you can charge without changing stances. And has been suggested, pull faster. But honestly, between charge and having 3 points in Shield Specialization you shouldn't have too many rage issues even if you're completely out at the start of an encounter.

I got around to re-doing my prot spec, here's a link to my armory so you can check out my talent spec.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/y ... f/advanced

As I've started back into tanking on my newly made death knight, I can give you something that will greatly help you out when it comes to tanking several mobs at once. Get these two mods:

Tidy Plates
Threat Plates (a sub-mod of Tidy Plates)

When enemy name plates are enabled in the GUI, all mobs that you have aggro with will have small, green bars above their heads (also displaying their health, level, and if they are casting). You can click on the plate to target a mob as well. When you lose aggro, the plates grow bigger and shift from green, to yellow, to red. So if a mob has a big red bar above it's head, it means you lost aggro. Makes it so much nicer to "corral" everything you're trying to lock down.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

+1 for tidy plates/threat plates

Hands down the best tanking addon out there, bar none.

I may have read it wrong, but I don't think Rodahn is a tank. He's looking for ways to /assist the tank for target acquisition.

I will say though that Tidy/threat plates = awesome. Even for DPS specs.

Ah...

Then yeah, I would make these two macros:

#showtooltip Focus Target
/clearfocus
/focus

Basically, when you have someone (or something) targeted and you hit his macro it will set it as your focus. If you don't have a target set, and you hit this button, it will get rid of anything you have as a focus. This is more handy for classes like mages or rogues, who used to (and now again) keep track of sapped/sheeped targets often.

You can create another macro of:

#showtooltip Target of Focus
/target focustarget

And hitting that button will always set your current target to be whatever your focus was targeting at the time you pressed the button. I used a similar (but not exactly the same) macro for my rogue so that I was always putting Tricks of the Trade on the tank my target was currently fighting. Useful for when tank-aggro changes happen often for certain boss fights.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Battle Shout has a 30 sec CD for 30 rage if you grabbed both Fury (I remember you being primarily Fury at the moment) talents for it - that should leave it up sufficiently for you to have Rage, plus all the flailing with your weapons.

Just for the record, you'll still get the dungeon finishing bonus if you only do the last mob of the dungeon. You -can- decline the queue if it says Dungeon Is In Progress, but that'll kick you back to the back of the line.

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I remember my first trip through there. Got All the quests we could and did the WHOLE thing. This included trips back and forth to complete the Alliance Onyxia quest line. Eight hours.... *whimpers*

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Are there many little critters you can kill in dungeons, tho? I haven't really seen anything that I can dribble some rage off of.

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I never thought about stance swapping, but there's also the matter of swapping specs, too once in a new stance, and that sounds like it could get tiring.


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Aizle:

Thanks for the spec. Looks like I will need to modify some of your other advice, tho, to when I am in a DPS stance/spec.

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I'll check em out, but considering I cannot even get Carbonite to work, I'm not too optimistic.


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Yeah, right now I'm grouping as DPS. Still too scared to tank, at least until I know the WoW dungeons better.

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Not sure I 100% follow you there, but I'll toy around with it.

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Maybe Zerker stance causes you to use more Rage or lose it faster when not in combat, because even after boosting Battle Shout and attacking, I still have Rage level problems. Should I be in a different stance when DPSing?

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Thanks for the help, all!


Oh, I did have another question, actually:

Any way to turn in quests once a group ends other than waiting to group there again or hoofing it back to the dungeon entrance? In other words, is there a quick return to entrance ability/feature?

Stance dancing is no longer genuinely viable in PvE, especially pre-58 and Tactical Mastery; your Rage drops to 0 when you change stances. The best tactic is to stick to your present stance and build rage with the tools you have.

In Protection, Warbringer will give you access to Charge for free opener Rage. Shield Spec will give you most of the rest of the Rage you need, then you have damage intake.

You should always be in Berserker Stance when DPSing as Fury. The best way to increase your Rage generation is to get Haste and Hit, in my experience. In my experience, at 61, I usually can use the initial boost from Battle Shout to get enough Rage to start the rotation. My weapon hits then usually give me enough that I'm never Rage-starved. Make sure that you're dual wielding; what level are you at the moment?

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

On your mini-map there should be a green eye icon while your in the dungeon. YOu can click on that to teleport out of the dungeon and then back in, when you come back you'll be at the entrance. Just need to be sure the group stays together long enough that you get ported back in. If it completely disbands you can't port back in.

Sorry, I thought you had mentioned loving prot, so I assumed you were looking at tanking.

I'm assuming that you're going Fury for dps? Really there isn't much you can do outside of combat beyond using battle shout. As has been noted, stance dancing is basically dead, tho charging in might be useful for closing the distance, but probably not worth the rage loss. Usually what I'll do is just battle shout before the fight and then intercept in and start swinging. Rage comes up fairly quickly.

Pffft ... you love BRD ...

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BRD is fun with Dungeon Finder. It can actually be really quick… though like Maurodon, it is split into 3 (as I recall) sections.

BRD is more fun way above level on it.

Teiws has the remote, and mining, and is attuned to Molten Core.

I never really took advantage of that during WotLK to solo Molten Core until I saw Dungeon Diplomat.

And since I can't dispel magic anymore, I'm not sure I can solo Geddon, though with 115K HP and upgrades to look ahead to, I will try again.

Fineous has the monocle, too, so you better run your worgen through it to get a monocle for their top hat.

Quite.

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Still at a loss here -- Rage is just not staying with me. My +rage abilities have uber long refreshes and every ability I do seems to sap what Rage I have like crazy.

I cannot seem to fast-switch to tank's target (Numbuk's macros seem to just clear my target). Someone mentioned to use the "F" key, but that really only seems to work every so often, most of the time I get the "I have to target something first" message.

/shrug

I dunno what I'm missing here.

What abilities are you using?

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

If you want the most unobtrusive way of assisting the tank, it's probably best to just make a simple macro

/assist Tankname

and change 'Tankname' every time you join an instance to the new tank's name. This can be difficult if they have screwy characters in their name, but most of the time it takes no more than a few seconds to adjust the macro. I used to do this when instancing on my Hunter or Rogue for Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade respectively. I probably still would if I ran dungeons with them again.

Numbuk's macros should work though, gaining the ability to never have to change your macro at the cost of using your focus for the tank. As a dps warrior this probably isn't a functional loss 99% of the time but my UI isn't set up in such a way that my focus target fits in well. This is sort of on purpose, as I rarely use focus, and when I do I want it to kinda stand out. I know a lot of people who do it Numbuk's way though and they're happy with it, so perhaps you should work out the kinks and try it again.

...especially if you run into a tank in your random dungeon with Chinese characters for a name... I still have no idea how that happened to me once, but it happened! These are situations I would switch to focusing the tank and /target focustarget :p

He gave two macros. You use the first on only once at the start of the instance, while you have the tank targeted. This will set him or her as your focus target. Every time you hit the second macro afterwards, it will assist the tank... because your tank will be set by the first macro as your focus target.

I haven't ran a random dungeon with a PUG in a long time while leveling up, certainly not since 4.0 and Cata stuff, and even now at level 85 I haven't really run any PUGs. To that extent, I don't know how much marking of mobs is or is not going around. If tanks are marking at least one mob to be killed first, I maintain that you don't really want to use an assist macro. If your tank isn't marking though... eh. I'd probably just spread around the first hit or two (depending on class?) and then take note of whichever mob's hp is dropping considerably faster than the rest by looking at nameplates and then clicking on said nameplate and go from there.

Lastly, about that 'f' key thing... I'm pretty sure that's the default keybind for assisting your target. This has a million and one uses, but it doesn't fit so well with the concept of assisting the tank. It can work like that, and I've done it before in certain situations (the way I play my healer, I usually keep the tank targeted, so it can be handy for debuffing the boss or whatever), but it's a bit unreliable in cases where the tank doesn't have aggro on every mob. It would work fairly well in cases where they do have aggro on every mob, though... hit tab to target any mob, hit f to target tank, hit f again to target their target. The only cases where this would fail, which are becoming more and more common as WoW ages, is when a mob will -- while being aggroed on the tank -- target someone else to cast a spell. If you catch this at the wrong time, the f key plan is going to end up targeting whatever that person had targeting, which could very well be yourself!

I think all I did was target the tank, right click his name/icon.....list pops up and I choose Focus.

Make a macro called Assist..... type /assist focus

Worked for me unless they changed it. Once you have your tank focused.....hitting the Assist macro will put you on the target they are on. Only times it gets hairy, is if you have a tank that swaps targets a lot.

When in doubt, if they ***** at you, tell them to mark the mobs. Most don't take the time to bother.

Usually it's skull=1st, X=next, then whatever.....circle, triangle...whatever they want to use. If it's a CC type deal.....moon is usually sheep IIRC.

Thanks, the /assist focus macro worked.

Added /startattack in there too.

I'll post my hotbars here soon, although I think I may have identified my auto attack not starting as one of the culprits.

It also amazed me how so many people randomly drop group without a word right in the middle of an instance.