I was reading the latest Penny Arcade story accompaniments when something Gabe said really struck a chord with me on game design, and why I like some games over others.
Gabe was talking about an upcoming game he is playing called Kingdoms of Amalur, and said;
A big part of the reason I play games is for “new art”. That is the thing more often than not that keeps me progressing. What will the next level or zone look like?
As soon as he said it, I knew it was true for me.
Before I go on about what that sparked in my brain housing group though, I want to say, I never heard of Kingdoms of Amalur before. I HAVE heard of a game that Gabe compared it to… Skyrim. Gabe seemed to think Kingdoms of Amalur had all the lore and exploring depth of Skyrim, but with much more entertaining combat gameplay, and with more beautiful worlds to experience.
Huh.
All I heard talk about a few months ago, at least before SWTOR came out, was “Oh, Skyrim, Skyrim is so awesome, all I want to do is play Skyrim, oh I just want to have Skyrim’s giant-destroying shouty babies.”
To hear Gabe, who I respect, say that he thought Kingdoms of Amalur was more enjoyable than Skyrim made me sit up and take notice.
I saw the trailer for it on Youtube, okay, nice trailer, but I’m not playing a movie, I’m playing a game. Much like cover art, a movie trailer can show you awesomesauce , but reflect nothing of the final gameplay experience. Show me the gameplay.
SHOW ME the gameplay!
Then I found this;
Okay. Huh.
I haven’t said this in years. Actually, I think I haven’t said this in a decade. Maybe I said it for Starcraft II.
I HAVE TO BUY THAT GAME.
Curt Schilling, who I am actually aware of and also respect, is the design studio head behind this? Oh shit, is THIS the game his studio is coming out with?
And wait a minute, WHO is behind the lore? R.A. Salvatore?
Hmmm… I dunno, that could be a plus or a minus. He is the man responsible for giving us Drizzt, after all… and giving everyone that wanted to play an angst-ridden vampire in D&D and wasn’t allowed to the Dark Elf race for a replacement.
What he did by introducing scimitars alone into a medieval setting!
But on the other hand, I did love his writing. At a time when books based in D&D were mostly crap, his brought actual character and personality and placed them above stats, an incredible concept at the time.
As far as Todd McFarlane being behind the art design…
I know this is out of style these days, the cool kids mock Todd McFarlane, but I was a fan of the Spawn art style back in the first 50 issues. The characters I loved were the Medieval Spawn and Angela characters that Neil Gaiman created for Todd McFarlane for the Spawn comics, but the art was all Todd.
Something to remember. Neil Gaiman was responsible for my favorite character designs in Spawn, but the art style was all Todd’s, and as long as he is doing the art style of this game without the lore, that excites me.
Not interests, not intrigues, excites.
I really like what I see in that video.
A game world originally designed to be as huge as an MMO, made into a single player game? Character classes that are organic, growing and changing direction as you place points in different ways in skills that sound cool to you as you level?
Oh, hell yes. Sign my ass RIGHT up.
Everything I love about WoW, but without people.
On second thought, maybe it’s not THAT solid a must have after all.
Topic of the day; Looking For Raid and new game opportunities.
The one area where I think LFR has succeeded the most is in opening up the world of large group raiding to those of us that could never be part of an organized raid group before.
It goes beyond taking raids and making them accessible to people.
I see a lot of discussion, mostly from people who were already raiders, about how the existence of LFR has affected their gameplay, dumbed it down, cheapened it, how it’s not really raiding.
Well, I say “get over yourself” to that, but let’s not forget the effect the LFR has on the rest of us.
How many people out there aren’t in raiding guilds? How many are in guilds with raid teams, but have never been part of the raid groups?
There are still a lot of friends and family guilds in this game, guilds that may not even have ten or more players. Guilds that would like to raid but suffer with too few numbers and too high standards, groups of people that insist on playing with friends and if they don’t have enough to form a raid without inviting strangers or potential asshats into their social atmosphere, just don’t?
How many people out there playing World of Warcraft have never had the opportunity to see what a big raid is like live?
Let’s take a step further back.
How many people out there have never taken part in a large group raid before, because they were afraid of screwing up in front of 9 or 24 other people while trying to get their UI adjusted, addons lined up, and marks/focus/assist/roles/assignments all figured out on the fly while everyone else in the raid is popping green for the ready check on the screen?
It’s not about being able to play your class, understanding your abilities or having addons enabled. You can know how to play your character extremely well in five person groups, and you can have Deadly Boss Mods and Omen and other raiding addons, but there is a lot to setting up a raid UI, or at least understanding what components go into a raid UI and which you need, what they do, and whether you can safely ignore them.
How often in the normal course of the game do you have to know what an assist is? Do you even know what the interface menu options for turning on “attack on assist” mean? What about role settings, and assignments, and knowing who is supposed to heal what, and how to organize it right?
What are all those extra tank and off-tank blocks in VuhDo for, and when should I use them? Who is my assist target, and what the hell does that really mean? Who do I focus on, or do I even focus on anyone for what we’re about to do? Am I shackling anything? Will I need tranq shot on my bar, and how will I know when to use it, or will I be told?
If you are invited to a real raid for the very first time, especially with people whose opinions you value, what do you do if you are afraid you’ll end up screwing up, wiping the raid, and disappointing everyone when you’re trying to figure all this crap out?
Looking For Raid has done more than just open things up. It’s allowed people who could never get their schedule lined up to join a raid team before an opportunity to go in and do a raid, a real 25 person raid, and experience what it is like.
You can say whatever you want about EZ modes, getting carried, streamlined content, and how LFR isn’t a ‘real’ raid.
LFR has adds, bosses, various mechanics, 25 people, all the traditional roles, and lots of flashing lights and raid warnings and DBM updates and threat indicators and all that stuff going on. It is a raid in everything except the crushing likelihood of failure if you screw up just once with your timing on one thing.
Or, as Shadowson likes to say when someone starts a “This LFR group sucks so bad on this boss” story;
“But did the boss get killed?”
Why, yes, yes it did. No matter how sucky the group was, yes, eventually we get the boss down anyway.
In LFR you will not get guidance in how to play your class, you will not get kindly advice unless something really strange happens, and you WILL see players at their worst. But you will also get a chance to test your abilities, become a part of a raid team and see what works and what doesn’t in a live test bed without screwing over your friends.
If nothing else is remembered about LFR in the months to come, I hope this one thing is.
LFR has given everyone an opportunity to gain experience in raiding 25 person content. Everyone. People who never were able to raid before can now do so, and gain valuable experience and confidence that will serve them very well.
In the future, if these people are invited to step into a raid that needs one more person, they can do so knowing that yes, the mechanics will be different, and yes things will require tighter timing and coordination. But they will also know that they have learned to cope and excel in an environment where people don’t communicate shit, do weird ass things, try to fail intentionally, and went on to win anyhow.
LFR. If you can learn to raid without getting pissed at stupid asshats here, if you can keep your head, buckle down and be the person that carries the morons here, then you can raid with an actual GOOD team anywhere.
What I hope to see are people who used to hold raiders in awe stepping into LFR themselves, getting their raid on and seeing what it’s like, finding out how good they really are once they have the opportunity to try and apply themselves, gaining confidence and coming out with their own blogs to share how much fun they’re having and how they made it work.
When Mists of Pandaria does come out, we are going to see the largest community of seasoned and experienced 25 person raiders WoW has ever witnessed come together, all having had their taste of raiding and wanting more. Here’s hoping Blizzard understands what they’ve set in motion, and bring the raiding goodness.
If they’re smart, they’re getting ready to make good on their promise to bring smaller content updates on a more frequent basis to feed the LFR beast. Clearly, there is a HUGE market for it.
Blizzard had recently held a holiday sale of World of Warcraft. For $35 total you could get the entire game of WoW, vanilla through Cataclysm direct through their store.
Sadly, that sale is no longer in effect, but I took advantage of it while I could.
For months now, my son Alex has had a free account to play in WoW, and by watching over his shoulder I’ve seen just how miserable it really is to play on one. My son was initially excited to play WoW on a free account, but one of the biggest draws was the idea of playing with mom and dad, grouping and chatting and questing.
His enthusiasm waned pretty quickly, and as I want him to do what he wants without being pressured into playing with what I think he should (or with what we spent a lot of money on and damn well want to see played with, that shit is expensive yo), I let it go for a while.
Recently, I asked him why he wasn’t really playing WoW anymore.
He said it was because his WoW is different than ours, and because it was so difficult to do the stuff we take for granted. On a free account, he can’t participate in trades, he can’t be in a guild, he can’t just log in and say hi to us (initiating a conversation), get or send mail, buy things on the auction house, make a Worgen or Goblin, etc.
All the things that prevent free accounts from being useful to a thief. Er, by thief I mean gold seller, a title which is semantically equivalent to thief, but should have the added emotional qualifier of ‘unwashed scrotum sack’.
This made me a sad bear. We do spend time with Alex of course, but he sees both Cassie and myself play WoW as our only real ‘adult’ hobby thing. Being able to play WoW would become yet one more thing we did together as a family.
So I caved. Last weekend, I used the fresh WoW boxes to upgrade him to a full WoW player.
Queue the doom bell.
Alex was very excited, and I found I was in the perfect position to see the game through fresh eyes. What would he run to do first? What excited him most that he hadn’t been able to do?
What would be his impressions?
The first thing he did was make a dwarf shaman. Then a dwarf rogue. And now he’s got a dwarf hunter. WTF?
I found out why he makes so many dwarves… Dwarves are SHORT, like Alex is! He can relate to the short little buggers. Doesn’t answer why they all have beards, though. Or why he doesn’t like gnomes.
Well, I guess the ‘doesn’t like gnomes’ thing is self-explanatory. And he’s too short to punt them himself. (Sorry Gnomer, love ya man.)
He also explained that when he makes his new dwarves, he looks for faces that appear kind and gentle, he doesn’t like the fierce or angry faces. Surprisingly, there are some peaceful, kindly dwarf faces to choose from when making a character, and he selects those.
He got going on his shaman, so I made a dwarf mage to travel and quest with him, and we had a lot of fun cruising to level 10 before we quit for the night. I let him do all the leading. I nudged him a bit to keep us on track with going from quest to quest, but otherwise he had made so many dwarves in the starter set that he was well familiar with the area.
First impressions;
He may go from quest to quest, but there is ALWAYS time to stop and kill the wabbits.
He prefers killing the fat wabbits to the skinny wabbits. I didn’t even know there WERE fat rabbits. Lrn2rabbitrecognition.
He doesn’t want to get overwhelmed with things to remember, so he has been taking one quest, doing it, then turning it in before taking a second quest from the same place. I explained that the game was mostly designed so all the quests available from one place at one time could all be completed in one trip. This came as quite the surprise.
Shamans are cool because they can drop colorful totems with neat flames and stuff, and because they can cast spells that make their weapons glow with fire. Also, they can shoot things with lightning. Shooting things with lightning is great. It’s also great to be able to beat things up with two weapons. But since he doesn’t like to get hurt and wants to be invincible, why can’t he do Enhancement combat with a mace and shield? Why does his special ability require an offhand weapon? He likes his shield.
Funny how unsatisfying it can be to answer, “Because the game is designed that way.”
The next day, he decided to create a Worgen. A Worgen Druid.
I created a Worgen Warrior just to help out, because Gilneas ain’t easy mode. All that instancing and scripting makes for buggy play. Fun and interactive, but buggy.
In an eyeblink we were both level 6, and he was having fun playing with me, but very, VERY frustrated at playing as a caster. He was ready to toss the character and try something else.
Why?
Because his shaman can cast neat spells like lightning, but when it came time to fight there was a mace and shield to beat up the bad guys! This druid worgen is all lame, smacking things with a stick.
I encouraged him to hang on until level 8, when he could get kitty form.
Once level 8 came around, he started having a lot more fun. He likes hopping around, killing rats he passes by (because cats kill rats, don’t you know), going into stealth and moving around that way, and using Rake.
I may have made a mistake explaining the relationship between Mangle, Rake and Ferocious Bite.
He gets the idea of combo points, he explained to me (quite patiently) that he didn’t HAVE to wait until 5 combo points to use Ferocious Bite, he could use it at one or two, and it does lots of damage.
What he does as his main attack, though, is use Rake.
I explained to him that Rake was a damage over time attack, just like a snake biting and poisoning the bad guy.
He seems to like the idea of poisoning the bad guys and making them suffer, so he uses Rake as his main attack, so he can poison them. He does also use Mangle, I’ve been watching, and I’m impressed with the way he mixes his attacks up with Mangle, Rake and Ferocious Bite if something lasts long enough to get it in there.
What I really find interesting is my response to how he fights.
I haven’t said anything, but as I watch him, I see him flip into Kitty, use his Mangle and Rake, flip out to caster and Moonfire Spam the SHIT out of something, flip into Bear and smack it, go back into Kitty for a Mangle when it’s dead, and then on the next mob just stand as a caster, sneak up and blast the crap out of it with Starfall, then Moonfire Spam again, and then a Wrath.
My gut reaction was to want to coach him to stay in one form to maximize his damage output with combo points and finishing moves. Just for a second, but watching him switch out of kitty in melee range to cast Wrath hurt.
I had to ask myself… why? Why feel even a moments twinge? That’s the way it’s supposed to be played. Even now, casting something like Wrath as a pull before shifting in is legitimate to get some starting aggro, although with the changes to aggro all that precast stuff is mostly redundant as long as your group holds their horses.
I used to pride myself on taking the time to have fun swift shifting in combat, just for the hell of it. Here my son is doing just that, and it feels like I’m watching someone doing it wrong, just because he cast the kitty stuff first before switching to caster for the long cast times when already in melee range.
He’s trying stuff out, and he’s migrating naturally to fast reaction time stuff. Early days.
I still haven’t decided whether to laugh or cry that my 8 year old instantly discovered and fell in love with Moonfire Spam.
Getting Kitty form was just the beginning, and once he got Bear it’s been shift city.
“I like bear, it’s great being an Invincible Bear!” (bounce bounce bounce)
We wrapped all the questing and leveling up the other night at level 17 (one more night ’til he gets his first mount!), and I watched to see if he’d log out, or what he wanted to do.
He logged into his dwarf, and found that I’d mailed him a pet cat (the calico) that looks just like one of ours. He saw that, I showed him how to learn the pet and display it, and then he asked where I got it. I told him the auction house, and he insisted I show him where the AH was, and how to use it.
Once I got him started, boy did he take off.
What did he want to do?
Browse pets he could buy.
He even bought a pet himself, a cockatiel he thought would be very pretty. He pointed out one rather odd feature of the pet section of the auction house.
Why can’t you get a picture of what the pet looks like when you’re browsing pets? How do you know if you want it, if you can’t see what it looks like until after you bought it?
I have to admit, that’s a good question. It makes me think the feature was intended for collectors who want to buy every pet they don’t already have, regardless of what it looks like. Adding picture preview for pets would be awesome.
One last observation.
We’re in the Gilneas starting zone, and we’ve just watched Lord Walden jump off a cliff. As we head up the trail between the hills, the path is covered with a flock of sheep.
A lot of sheep in a very small area.
It turns out kitties like killing sheep.
As the slaughter of the lambs began, Alex made the comment, “I hope none of them are mechanical sheep”.
It took me a minute before I remembered what he was talking about.
A while back, I flew down on my druid to group with one of his old free starter edition dwarves, and fly it around on my dragonform.
As we flew over the mountains from Stormwind to Burning Steppes (I think), we flew over a point of interest that included sheep.
I landed, and he killed sheep.
I noticed something, and mentioned it to him. One of the sheep had that engineering robot look to it. Nobody around, no dwarves or NPCs, just a flock of sheep with one mechanical sheep hanging out. Clandestine Robot Sheep.
Alex, attacked it, and it blew up, blasting him in the process.
He remembers that, and it made him pause months later to do an Exploding Robot Sheep check.
How cool is it that I live in a world where I can write that last sentence? That right there is reason enough for the internet.
I hope that the new year greets you warmly and provides you with opportunity, excitement and adventure.
Whatever else may occur in your life, may you hold true to yourself and greet all that comes your way on your own terms, in your own unique style.
God bless!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This will seem a little unusual, I know, but I’d like to spend a little time chatting with you about tanking.
Since the moment the new patch was released, I’ve been running the new 5 person instances and Looking For Raid like a fiend. Just like everyone else, I’ll wager. :)
I know that the new content is exciting to me, and in my gushing I’ve talked to quite a few people that maybe haven’t played WoW in a while, or who haven’t tanked in quite some time (or ever), people who are now interested in getting into the tank thang.
There are quite a few issues I’ve seen in the new content, things that just could have gone better when I was playing as DPS, that were smooth as silk when I did them myself as a tank. Now that I’ve had a chance to test and verify a few things, I wanted to take this time to bring ‘em up, and make a few suggestions, things to keep in mind.
This is written for tanks, but honestly, I think it’s always good for everyone in a group to understand what is happening around them, what people are doing, and why. You never know when the chance might pop up for you to use your special class abilities to make everything better.
Tank Positioning
This is going to seem silly, but unless you’re used to being a tank or melee, the importance of your physical position in relation to the mobs isn’t immediately obvious. Especially if your view of tanks is being all go go go.
As a tank, you know you’re supposed to wear gear that makes you hard to damage, and gives you a healthy cushion to absorb the damage that does get through. You also know that you’re supposed to grab aggro on mobs and keep them focused on you, not the healer.
Positioning is almost as important as being equipped with the right gear and stats, but it’s not nearly as obvious. There is a lot more to it than “run in looking all cute and cuddly, then swipe.”
The first part of positioning is protecting your party. Some enemies have Cleave or Cone attacks, attacks that affect a cone or area directly in front of them in the direction they are facing. If you run straight in and start fighting, then the enemy is facing you… and the rest of the party behind you. If you charged, the rest of the party may be running in a straight line after you to catch up, and take a cone-effect breath weapon in the face.
You handle cleave/cone situations by knowing what the enemy will do, and when you charge in (or pull them to you), immediately run off to one side so they are forced to pivot to face you, turning 90° away from the rest of the party behind you. This actually helps the group in two ways. You get the cone/cleave away from the group, and you present the side/back of the target to the group, making it easier for melee to get to their kill zone faster. Especially with Dragons (and their tail swipes), opening the side of the enemy to your group is handy and helpful. If you were to move the supposed Dragon completely around, then the tail is on your party, and really, we can’t be having with that. Sloppy.
One codicil to this… tanks, for the love of Elune, don’t move if you don’t have to. If you don’t have to kite, DON’T. Moving all over the place just screws with the melee, places your healer at risk of having to interrupt casts to get back in range of you, and generally pisses everyone off. Tank kiting Nozdormu in End Time, I’m looking at you. If you have to kite, kite in a clear, consistent pattern. Straight lines or gentle curves around the group are your friend. Trust me, you’re not a fighter jet, they ain’t enemy migs, and you won’t lose them by jinking all over the place.
The second part to positioning is protecting yourself. Enemies make the least amount of effort they can to attack you. If they have ranged attacks, they move forward just far enough to get you in range and line-of-sight, then stand in place to shoot you. If they can disengage like Hunters can (Azure Dragonflight in End Time, Thrall Gauntlet in Hour of Twilight), they will leap backward and shoot you from range that way. If they have melee attacks only, they will run directly to you in a straight line, then attack.
This is significant for a lot of reasons. The first is, and I am stunned how often I see this, if you run into the middle of a group of enemies, they will ALL turn to attack you. If you run forward until you are solidly in the middle of them, (probably to make sure your AoE hits them all), some of them will be in front of you, but others will be behind you.
I know it’s rude of them, but enemies standing there looking at your unprotected back will NOT run forward to get in front of you.
Enemies that are behind you are completely unaffected by your Parry, Block, and Dodge. You are literally standing there dropping your trousers, bending over, and asking them to shove their attacks like a red hot poker right up your unprotected ass.
That hurts. It hurts far more than you probably expect, since you are used to having damn good mitigation from frontal attacks, even as DPS.
I hope that the visual gets my point across, because I am constantly seeing tanks charge forward into the middle of a big pile of enemies, stand there in the center, and then use AoE threat-generating abilities like Swipe and Thrash or Thunderclap while standing still. Then, they get pissed at the healer because their health plummeted like a brick from the butt ramming they just got.
I have seen this cause group wipes. On trash. MANY TIMES.
Many whelps. Left side. HANDLE IT.
But I digress.
Moving back on target…
I’ve seen this (standing in the center of a group of mobs) happen to a Bear tank most recently. His health dropped so freaking fast I thought he was just starting out as a tank. I inspected his gear, and to my surprise he was dressed head to toe in 378 or better, properly enchanted and gemmed and reforged. Great gear or not, that didn’t do him any good when he ran into the middle of a group, stood there and let everything behind him have a free pass at his ass. And he was by no means the only tank I’ve seen do this.
Even if you’re sword and board and used to it, make no mistake, do not EVER intentionally give things standing behind you a free pass at your ass.
Got it? Good.
Now I’m going to tell you when to ignore all that. This again comes under the heading of ‘knowing what you’re fighting’. Some trash mobs hit like a truck, but others really are candy-coated marshmallow puffs. You can be surrounded by 15 – 40 of the damn things and safely ignore their attacks while keeping aggro and letting the DPS burn ‘em down. You have to know when it’s safe to do that, though, you can’t just assume ALL groups of trash are like that. Groups like that are usually accompanied by one really big, hard hitting enemy that you spend most of your attention on.
It is that subtle training we’ve had over the years, the ‘ignore the little adds when there is a big one in the mix’ that made me applaud Blizzard the first time I saw the trash in the Ruby Dragonshine for Echo of Sylvanus. The trash consists of a pack of Time-Twisted Geists and one big Time-Twisted Scourge Beast. If you focus on killing the big Scourge Beast, then all the little Geists will cannibalize freely, and, well, bad things happen. Bravo, well played. Moral of the story is, you gotta know when to hold ‘em. Know when to kite ‘em. Know when to pop your cooldowns, and know when to bubble-hearth. You never loot no corpses when you’re trying to interrupt ‘em, there’ll be time enough for looting when the encounters done.
Using positioning to control the pull
There are several things you can do to keep from giving enemies a free shot at your butt. The simplest way is to charge in, use AoE to get some fast aggro, then take a couple steps backwards. This makes the enemies in front of you take a couple steps forward to follow you, and the enemies behind you will stand in place (since you are staying in their range) and simply turn to maintain facing, ending up with all of them in front of you or to your sides, and your butt poking safely out of the pileup.
I find it helps to think of it as covering your ass, even though the goal is to have your butt be the only thing not actually covered by anything.
If there are casters at range, and you aren’t fortunate enough to be a Death Knight to yank them to you or a Paladin to silence a bunch of them with your shield and make them come running to you, then you pretty much have to start by getting aggro on the melee enemies first, make sure they are all focused on you, then charge the ranged enemy, run a little past him and turn around looking back the way you came. This puts the ranged right there in melee range in front of you, and all the rest of the melee enemies will trot along after you to group up conveniently in a handy pack, nowhere near your butt.
The problem with this? Mostly, if you do this and your group doesn’t know to hold up for a second while you drag the melee along, you will likely lose aggro on the melee since you’re off harassing the ranged. Then the pull gets all messy, with you darting back and forth trying to grab them all back up, and players running around screaming “get it off, get it off”, and isn’t it funny how they almost never run the mob chasing them TO the tank?
There are lots of other fun things you can do if your group is willing. If there IS a Death Knight, hey, don’t be too proud to ask them to pull the ranged in to ya. Sure, that forces them to have aggro from that mob for a few seconds until you taunt it off, but Death Knights can take a little abuse.
Also, and I know this is a strange thought, but those ranged trash mobs are sometimes able to be Crowd Controlled. Now, before you get too upset, let me tell you that I’ve seen about half and half in the new instances between groups that did use CC and those that didn’t. Both types succeeded, but the ones that used CC took a few seconds longer. Some folks just hate that.
Don’t forget, while we’re on the subject, that Druids can do our own CC on dragonkin, Hibernate. The final boss encounter in End Time has two groups of dragonkin you pull first, each group having two ranged casters and two melee. By all means, Hibernate one of the casters yourself, wait a few seconds for the rest of the pack to walk out of Swipe range of the CCd mob, then nail them bastiches.
Make it hard to do it wrong
A lot of the new instances can get pretty chaotic. There are several gauntlet-style fights where mobs come running in at you from various angles, appear from patches of noisome darkness, or just uncloak.
When you are running from fight to fight, it is extremely common for the group to get spread out. Someone may stop to loot, someone else may have stopped for a sec for a quick mana drink, or maybe a patch of light appeared in the darkness ahead and everyone ran for it like a herd of cats, every kitty for themselves.
What happens next is quite natural. If people are running ahead of the tank, they face pull the mobs first, even if they didn’t do anything yet. When they get attacked, they start fighting back or casting heals, causing actual threat you’ll have to pull off. If the tank is running ahead to try and facepull first, other people lagging behind can get aggro from mobs still running in, or the healer may start casting heals on you and pull healer aggro on mobs that haven’t gotten near you yet.
The calm players will simply keep running to catch up to, or fall back with, the tank and trust the adds will be picked off.
Not all players are calm. They stop and panic, trying to fight the mob themselves. They run around looking for the tank. They buckle down and DPS harder, and sometimes that doesn’t always work if the mobs have some meat to ‘em.
The best way to prevent this is to get the group thinking like a team instead of five strangers. You can help this along by marknig yourself with a golden star so you stand out in the chaotic mess ahead. Then just a quick message saying that the healer should try to stay close to you through the gauntlet, and everyone should try to match your pace and bring adds to the star if they get ‘em should eliminate all the craziness.
If you want to mention that you’ll mark a Skull as a first kill on casters (like the Shadow Priests in Hour of Twilight or the healing Priests in Azure Dragonflight), who knows? You might even find people following them.
The point is, if you communicate to your group that you have some kind of clue what you’re doing, and make it EASY to do it right and bring stuff to you or stay at your pace, why, people tend to feel reassured you won’t just facepull Swipe spam and will work as a team. If you zone in and proceed to pull in silence, you end up with every person for themselves half the time.
Try to step back and keep that principle in mind. Look for ways to make it hard to do it wrong. If it’s easy to lose sight of the tank in the crowd, mark yourself. If it’s hard to tell who should die first in the crowd, mark it out for the DPS to focus on. If it’s easy to pull two groups of ooze trash in the ring around Yor’sahj the Unsleeping, then move your ass around the outside ring further to center yourself before running in towards the center to pull instead of running across at them at an angle.
Wrapping this fish up
The most important thing I recommend is to make sure you read up a bit on what to expect before you go in. If you haven’t run the new content as DPS or Healer before going in to tank it, take the time to read up on the boss fights at least, using a nice resource like Wowhead that will tell you info about the zones and what bosses do. Read the comments as well, people love to give tips there, and many are excellent. They won’t tell you much about trash mob encounters, those you’ll have to find out on your own, but knowing what is critical to interrupt and what the inevitable twist will be is just immense.
Make it hard to do it wrong… and that includes yourself. If you know what to expect, chances are a lot less likely that when Sylvanis raises ghouls in a ring around you, coming ever closer, you won’t panic and jump past ‘em.
