How to fight in high-level instances

The stakes are higher at level 60. For one thing, you just can't level up a bit and come back to these instances when they're easier. If you're having trouble, there's only one cure: you have to become a better player. This essay will help you get better.

If you're new to the World of Warcraft and to instances in general, you might try reading this introduction to instances posted on the official forums, by Orophino of Windrunner. Or read the companion essay on tanking, WoW: Fighting the Good Fight.

Damage

All combat is about two things: damage you deal, and damage dealt to you. Your aim is to control both aspects. Deal damage efficiently, and reduce the damage you take. Aggro control is the tool you'll use most.

Most players already know how to deal damage. They spend the first 50 or 60 levels learning how to pump out the damage fast. At the high level, they have to learn a new lesson. They have to learn how to reduce damage. Usually that means routing the damage to a member of a class that can absorb a lot of damage. Traditionally these classes are called tank classes. Think for a moment about that metaphor. Tanks in MMORPGs have that heavy armor.

Why is plate better armor than cloth in World of Warcraft? What does the huge difference in armor class mean? It's about damage absorption. A blow aimed at a plate-wearer does less damage than the same blow aimed at a cloth-wearer. Why? Because the cloth absorbs very little damage. The plate might absorb as much as half of it. Therefore, a mob hitting a warrior does less damage than the same mob would hitting a caster. Or a leather-wearer.

Why does damage reduction matter? Ask any healer. Do your healers have infinite mana? Mine don't.

So the first lesson is, to reduce the damage your group takes, aim that damage at a tank. How do you get a mob to aim its damage at a specific target? The answer is aggro management.

Aggro

Aggro. Hate. Threat. How annoyed is that mob with you?

Mobs turn to fight the player they're most annoyed with. This is usually the player who's done the most damage to them. Healing also generates aggro. Ask a priest what happens when she casts Power Word: Shield on a groupmate moments after combat has begun. All the mobs turn and run after her. And she didn't even cast Pain on them!

Many classes have extra tools for managing aggro. Warriors have a selection of taunts and the ever-handy Sunder Armor. Paladins have Seal of Fury. Rogues have Feint, which reduces aggro. Mages and Priests have talents that can reduce the aggro generated by their offensive spells. Learn to use the tools you have to manage aggro.

Is your job to collect aggro? Practice building it. Learn what Sunder Armor can do. What taunts are available in which warrior stances?

Is your job to avoid aggro? Practice reducing it. For example, rogues should practice using Feint every time it's up. Hunters should put Distracting Shot on a handy key and know how to use Feign Death to dump all aggro. (Distracting Shot is also useful for reducing aggro on other players, because it distracts the mob from whoever its current target is. Remember that next time you see a Dark Iron pounding on your priest.) Priests should know where Fade is.

Crowd control

Crowd control is about managing the pace of combat so that your group can handle it. Blizzard's sadistic instance designers love to create groups of linked mobs. Linked means that the mobs are connected; if you aggro one, you aggro the whole group. These linked groups are often larger than a full group can comfortably handle. Wouldn't it be nice if you could split that mob group in some way? Blizzard has given you tools to do exactly that.

Here are some crowd control abilities:

• mages: sheep on living targets, freezes
• warlocks: banish, fear, seduce on humanoids
• rogues: sap on humanoids, blind
• hunters: freeze traps, frighten beast
• priests: shackle undead
• warriors: intimidating shout

Some of these abilities are subject to diminishing returns. After a mob has been stunned 3 times, it's immune to stun for the rest of the fight.

The hunter freeze trap is short-lived, but incredibly useful because it works with any kind of mob.

If you're going to use fear, use it carefully. You don't want frightened mobs running into other groups and aggroing them.

Once a mob is tucked out of the way with crowd control, your group needs to be careful not to break it. If you have an Area of Effect ability, like Consecrate or Arcane Explosion, move away from any CCed mobs before you use it. Good communication can help avoid CC mixups. Discuss with the group which mobs you're going to CC and which mobs you'll be facing. For instance, a mage and a rogue might agree that they "sap right, sheep left", or some general tactic like that.

There are some additional techniques for breaking up groups beyond straight CC. See the advanced techniques section below.

Roles

Everybody in the group has a main role:

• tank: warriors, paladins
• DPS: mages, rogues, hunters, warlocks
• healer: priests, druids, shamen, paladins

There are three more specific roles that a group has to fill for any single fight:

• puller
• main tank
• main assist

Tanks hold aggro and take damage. Their job is to occupy the mob's attention. If the healers are getting pounded on, it's a tank's job to peel the mobs off. Signs that your class might be a tank class: you wear plate, and you have ways to generate extra aggro. Signs that your class is NOT a tank class: you do not wear plate, and you have ways to dump aggro.

The main tank is the person whose job it is to tank the biggest mob in the fight, such as a boss, or to collect as many mobs as possible. The main tank is usually a warrior. Often there's a second tank in the group, like a paladin or a hunter's pet, who can off-tank mobs and occupy them until the group is ready to deal with them.

DPS: The classes that do the damage. Kill the mob. This comes in two variants: ranged and melee. In all cases, the job of the DPS-dealer is to not take aggro from the tank. This sometimes means holding back. Not doing damage. Waiting to engage a mob until the main tank has established aggro. This can be a very hard lesson to learn. If you're a DPS class, you know the fight is going well if you're not getting hit at all. If you're routinely pulling mobs off the main tank, maybe you need to hold off more than you have been. Repeat, sometimes you need to not do damage in order to do your job. What's your DPS when you're dead, anyway?

The main assist is the damage-dealer whom the other damage-dealers should be following. This player chooses a target and kills it. Everybody else should be working on the same mob. This is the most efficient way to fight groups of mobs. It reduces the overall dps done against your group, which gives your healers a break. Concentrate your fire! Pay attention to who your main assist is. Make a macro, "/assist Fred", for assisting this player. Put this macro on an easy-access key. Spam the macro until the target settles down. Rogues can be a good choice for main assist.

The puller is the person who kicks off the fight by annoying a well-chosen mob. Hunters and warriors make good pullers. Rogues can sap-pull when you're fighting humanoids. In some circumstances, a priest might shackle-pull. Generally you don't want initial aggro taken by a flimsy cloth-wearing class, though.

Healers: you know who they are. They keep you alive. Take care of them in return. Don't make their jobs harder by taking aggro if it doesn't belong to you.

How fights are supposed to go

Phases of the combat:

• plan
• pull
• establish aggro
• kill
• mop up

Plan

Make a plan. Pick your initial target. Discuss crowd control options.

Don't rush. There's usually plenty of time. If the fight is unusual, or a boss fight, take a moment to discuss what's going to happen. This phase won't take long for experienced groups. If the group is in a groove in a familiar place, it might take no time at all. But make sure you have a plan. But when in doubt, say something.

A plan might look like this:
Rogue saps the Zorkmid Footman.
Warrior tanks Dimwit Flathead.
Everybody else on the Zorkmid Evoker.
When the Evoker is down, everybody on Flathead.

Pull

The puller identifies a target. If you have a hunter, the hunter sets any traps you might want. The crowd-control classes get ready to act. The priest casts shield on the puller, and maybe the druid casts a HoT. The puller then initiates combat. Fire! The crowd-controllers do their thing immediately afterward.

Establish aggro

This is the phase many groups skip, to their eternal regret. Well, they probably regret it all the way back from the graveyard. As they make those slow runs back to their corpses, do they ever stop to wonder what went wrong?

Let the tank build aggro. All the pressure is on your main tank here. He or she has to get everybody's attention and hold it. Often the tank concentrates on the first kill target and builds aggro from that mob.

During this phase, healers will be keeping an eye on the main tank but not blowing any big heals. Everybody else will be hanging back for a few moments. For some big mobs, like Onyxia, this phase might last 2 minutes. For smaller fights, it might last 5 seconds.

Kill

The main assist picks a mob (often the one the main tank is on intially), and attacks. The other damage-dealers key off the MA and also start beating on that mob. When that mob is at low health, the main tank will probably change targets and begin establishing aggro on the next mob. Do not follow the main tank. Stay with the main assist. Bring down your target.

The main assist then looks around for the next target. The next target should be the most dangerous mob left. Healers and casters are usually considered dangerous. Failing an obvious most dangerous choice, the main assist usually picks the most-damaged mob left. It's easier to do this if the main assist has "show name plates" enabled. (You can also select mobs by clicking on the name plate. Handy!) Continue to assist this player, by hitting your assist macro until the target settles.

The tank should keep an eye on the healers. If they get aggro, the tank should run over and get aggro back.

If things go pear-shaped, they usually go bad here. What can go wrong?

#1 reason: the main tank died, and nobody else could step up and establish aggro. Perhaps the healers ran out of mana, or were busy casting Mind Flay instead of healing. Whatever the reason, your mages and rogues are now taking damage, and needing tons of healing, and then the healers are getting healing aggro, and the group is running out of mana resources fast.

#2 reason: somebody pulls aggro off the tank, and the tank can't get it back. The healers suddenly have to start healing somebody who needs a lot more than the MT does. They get low on mana. Then an add appears...

#3 reason: runners. Ranged classes should keep an eye out for runners. Don't let a nearly-dead mob get away and call some friends over!

Other reasons: A patrol appears. Somebody gets feared into another group. If the fight is otherwise under control, you can survive these events. If the fight is sloppy, it's harder.

Mop up

Heal up. Cure disease and poison, remove curses. Distribute loot.

Be polite: don't start looting before combat is over. You might have nothing to do, but the people still fighting don't appreciate having those loot windows pop up on their screens while they're still busy.

Postmortems

When it all goes wrong, pause a moment to discuss what went wrong. And I don't mean "to assign blame". I mean to figure out how the fight went badly, and how you can help it to go better next time. Be constructive. Be positive. The goal is to make it work right next time, not to beat people up for what happened last time. And sometimes it's nobody's fault. You might still be learning the encounter and figuring out what tactics work. Whatever the reason, learn from it and do better on your next shot.

Advanced tactics

More to come.

Off-tanking

I mentioned off-tanking above without really defining it. Off-tanking is melee crowd control. You send a plate-wearing tank class or a tank-style pet (bear or voidwalker) to occupy a mob by fighting it until the main group is ready to deal with it. Nobody else should fight the mob while it's being off-tanked. Paladins have weaknesses as main tanks (not enough aggro generation), but they make excellent off-tanks because they can heal themselves.

Positioning

You can make some fights easier by paying attention to position: where the fight happens, and where you are relative to the mob.

Some mobs do area-of-effect damage. Some have abilities that affect people in a cone in front of them (for example, breath effects) and some have abilities that affect people behind them (Onyxia's tail lash). Back effects are less common than front effects, so often the safest place to position yourself is behind the mob, or on the side and slightly behind. Dagger rogues are already going to be placing themselves behind.

If you're a main tank, you're in front, of course. How about trying to position yourself and the mob so it's pointed away from your group? And if it has a general AoE effect, pull it away from your casters so they don't get stunned, burned, frozen, or otherwise mutilated.

AoE damage is why healers need to pay attention to everybody and not just the main tank. DPS classes might be avoiding aggro but still taking damage with certain mobs. Healers who claim they don't heal rogues or mages are doing themselves and their groups no favors. If the fight is stretching on and on because your DPS is dead, you will eventually run out of mana to keep the turtle-tank alive. And then what happens to you?

Advanced crowd control

Here are a couple of rogue techniques.

Sometimes groups that appear to be linked aren't actually linked. They only seem that way because of proximity aggro.

The rogue's Distract ability can be used to break some not-really-linked groups. For instance, if a patrol of 2 mobs is walking along, a rogue can cast Distract in a spot that affects one of the 2 mobs and leaves the other untouched. The distracted one freezes. The undistracted one keeps walking. When they're far enough apart you can pull one of them without aggroing the other.

If you have two rogues in a group, they can sometimes get sap off at the same time, so you can sap two mobs at once. They can do this with good timing even if they don't have Improved Sap. Don't try this when the game is really laggy.

Pets in instances

Never put your pet in aggressive mode. Bad idea. Most of the time you'll probably want it in passive mode, so it only goes where you tell it.

If you're pulling, and people in your group are following you forward instead of staying back where they should, try this technique. Park your pet exactly where you want the group to wait, and tell them to stay with Fluffy.

If you're going to take a shortcut by jumping down a ledge, remember that your pet isn't going to take that shortcut with you. It'll go the long way, aggroing everything it runs past. A wipe will ensue. So dismiss your pet before you jump down! (Good group leaders will know to remind their pet-using party members to do this.)

Things that don't matter

You'll notice I haven't said anything about specs. That's because I mostly don't care about your spec. Priests and Druids are probably the only classes forced into specific specs in the endgame. Priests pretty much have to abandon Shadow for some combination of Holy and Discipline. Druids have to abandon Feral for Restoration. This is unfortunate, but the consolation for speccing for healing is that you'll never, ever be without a group. Otherwise, spec the way you like and have fun. If you're a warrior who isn't Protection-specced, I won't make you my Main Tank in Molten Core, but I wouldn't worry about you tanking in Scholomance. (And probably out of the 39 people going to MC with you, there's somebody who loves tanking and has specced and equipped a warrior to do it.)

Soames of
Level 60 Rogue
Scarlet Crusade

pogo : Tue, 10 May 2005 22:37:05 PDT

ceej : Wed, 11 May 2005 07:52:10 PDT

pogo : Wed, 11 May 2005 08:52:51 PDT

ceej : Wed, 11 May 2005 10:39:46 PDT

Jacyll : Thu, 16 Jun 2005 08:02:53 PDT

Nuszika : Thu, 16 Jun 2005 10:42:12 PDT