Posts with tag control

A guildie of mine discovered this last night, and reader Theronis sent us a note today about it -- after patch 3.0.2, defensive pets act a little differently. Before the patch, they would only attack an enemy automatically if they attacked you first, which made things a little tough with casters -- pets in defensive mode wouldn't actually move to attack until the first spell actually hit you. But after the patch, pets are a little bit quicker: now, they'll move to attack as soon as you attack something, so you won't have to wait around until you get hit before your pet springs into action.

However, this can be a drawback as well -- while Theronis says it's a good change and that his pets are smarter, my guildie had a problem: whenever he wanted to pull one mob out of a group, the pet would run in and pull them all. Anything you attack will get pounced on by your pet in defensive, and that might bring some unintended adds along for the ride.

Personally, I always keep my pets in passive -- it only takes a split second to hit CTRL-1 to send them attacking, and I can much better control, both soloing and in instances, what my pet is up to at any given moment. It can hurt my DPS a bit if I'm not careful (since I'm a BM Hunter, my pet is a big part of my DPS, so if I forget to send him, that's a bigger loss), but the tradeoff is that I can be careful about pulling adds and I have control of my pet all the time. If the "smarter" defensive works great for you, good, but if you find your pet springing in a little too early, you might try switching back to passive and just staying there most of the time.

When I first started the arena, I thought "Hey, me and my friends can just get together and play." And we can, but there are limits to success based on composition. Some of the most successful teams are based on archetypal compositions such as Rogue, Mage, and Priest (RMP). These typical compositions are based on synergy among classes. Focused mana draining is another fairly successful team structure.

The key to successful arena play is usually to control the playing field. Drain teams deny their opponents the ability to attack or heal. Drain teams focus on characters that have mana depleting abilities, plus have a few other tricks up their sleeve to pull out when necessary. Your main contenders are Hunter, Priest, and Warlock.

Running 5 man instances is the bread and butter of gearing up any PvE character. There are some short instances, and some longer ones. There are some bosses that are ready for fun, and others that like to die fast. Many people consider it a universal truth that all you need to do these instances is solid crowd control. When you're faced with a pack of six or seven level 70 elite mobs, the last thing you want is one or two of them running loose.

But what can you do if you don't have any CC available? Are you just out of luck? Nope! There are a few tricks to running instances without CC, and if you pay close attention, you won't miss the lack of sheeps at all.

In fact, you might just start preferring to run without crowd control entirely.

Draele over at Rantings of the Afflicted asks if WoW could ever have what he calls a "meta" class. He lists the examples of Mesmer in Guild Wars or a Psionicist in Vanguard, and I'll add to that the Sorcerer class in Dark Age of Camelot-- classes that depend on manipulation and mind control rather than direct damage or healing.

I'd say that it's possible, but extremely unlikely. Why? Because WoW is based on an RTS game, and in RTS, there's not a lot of complicated manipulation going on-- either you're attacking or defending, or some mix of the two. There hasn't really been any precedent (that I can think of or stretch to) in the Warcraft universe for a Bard or "Mesmer" class, and that's why it's pretty unlikely that Blizzard will try to break out past the trinity of usual MMO archetypes. Not to mention that, as Draele says, a meta class is a complex thing to create and play, and WoW tends to be more casual than complex.

Of course, never say never. There's a lot in this universe that hasn't even been hinted at in the game yet, and as was mentioned in last week's podcast, Death Knights will likely only be the beginning of hero classes, so who knows what Blizzard could come up with.