Thursday, January 21, 2010

Vuhdo... Voodoo and Odd Thoughts About Tanking


Situational awareness is a kinda big thing in WoW. The best players seem to not only have their toons very well geared/gemme/etc, they know the fights inside and out, knowing their own role, and the roles of everyone there, but they also seem to have this innate ability to know EVERYTHING that is going on, from the tank, off tank, Main healer, raid healer, OT healer and all the weirdness happening with the DPS.

Um, that's not me.

Standing in the middle of the fight, thwacking monster crotch and trying to avoid the fire, I am usually just about overloaded, at least in the more challenging fights (ICC 5 mans and up) As I've mentioned before, trying to keep an eye on things (watch my aggro, keep a safety eye for mobs on the healer, etc) is something I like to do. And I have problems doing it.

And that's only as DPS.



Now that I'm trying to tank a bit, the workload is up a notch (mainly because you HAVE to know the fights) but also because you are now DIRECTLY responsible for the well being of the healer, as well as trying to keep the DPS as safe as reasonably possible.


With your screen filled with monster crotch (not to mentione a bunch of other stuff), this can be a challenge.


Having the healer as focus can help, but that still only puts a small green bar up top that can be tough to see. Even moving it around only helps to a degree.


The other day I was watching Kattastrophe healing in her guild's 10-man attempt on Ony, I watched her do the whack-a-mole thing to heal everyone.

"Man, something easy to use, really obvious and visible, would be really nice to help taunt/etc folks getting attacked by loose mobs, the healer especially."


Then the thought came: I wonder if the add-on Vuhdo would let me bind OTHER spells to the frames. Then it could be as easy as a quick scan over to the frames - see someone in trouble (ie, taking damage that they shouldn't) - and then left click for Righteous Defense or maybe right click for Avenger's Shield (or even Hand of Reckoning)



And so, I will have to try this out. There's no guarantee that Vuhdo will LET me put alternative spells into its guts. After all, Pally Power (an addon for Paladin Blessings) will NOT let you control anything other than pally blessings. It may be that Vuhdo is coded to only allow healy spells into its hallowed clicky boxes.

Just a thought, and a radnom bit of musing... I'll try it out and let you know.

8 comments:

  1. Yes it will :) I personally use Clique with my raid frames, but Vuhdo is another option.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What he/she said - clique will work for your needs (my preference: with grid). Or a mouseover macro if you prefer.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My tanks all use Vuhdo. Many of my DPS use it as raid frames as well, especially hybrid classes.
    Another person on the Vuhdo bandwagon! Yay! Lol.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks guys!

    I have it installed on my machine already (Katastrophe's PC is Kaput, so we are sharing my machine) and she uses it for healing.

    *giggity*

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yep, Vuhdo will do that for you. I HEART vuhdo!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I have a very neat way to deal with tanking and protect my ego: i make sure i do my part right when pulling and everything else falls into place. If it doesn't, it's because someone didn't /assist me, didn't wait for me to pull or something to that extent. Yes, yes, i'm a jerk.

    I'm tanking with my paladin at level 77 and it's a breeze in regards to aoe threat. You mentioned in another post that you tanked UK heroic and found it somewhat of a challenge. Might be because there are quite some packs that have 4 mobs or more, and the Shield only hits 3. I don't know if it helps, but what i do is i body pull to get them closer to me, to make sure the shield will hit max targets, then Hammer the 4th or 5th mob that the shield didn't hit. That ensures every mob in the pack has at least a quarrel with me and it won't run to the dps at the first shard of a blizzard. You probably know this stuff by now anyway, but i really believe you should try to tank "manually" first. It may be hard, but it's a good way to train your tank-eyes. You'll be able to spot the mob that gets hit by the big bad lava burst and you'll feel you'll lose aggro, and you will know what it is to be done.

    See, you mentioned whack-a-mole before, do you really want to turn taking into that ? It's fine to do it, but at the end of a run, when your hands will be shaking because of so many buttons spammed, and your mind will finally "let go" because of all the exhaustion of keeping aggro vs. people with 5k dps, tricky pulls, interrupts and positioning, you'll feel much, much better.

    ReplyDelete
  7. A big part of my problem was just lack of familiarity with tanking. I don't have my 969 in muscle memory, so I need to actually watch it. (also, I don't have it macroed to 2 keys either)

    I don't even have exorcism on my action bars (you brought it up in a later comment - I'm going backwards) The time to cast is just too long, and between Avenger's Shield and Hand of Reckoning, there isn't any need for it (sadly)

    I'm still looking for the enchant of "remove n00b debuff". I'll keep ya posted if I ever find it...

    ReplyDelete
  8. I use Vuhdo for tanking on my pally. It's awesome, has a well developed feature for threat monitoring within the raid and exclusion of aggro gain from caster bosses that you can't do anything about anyway.
    Keybinding is very simple too. I bind right click to righteous defense and left click on the hostile target to hand of reckoning. Then I show target of targets as tiny bars next to the players.
    So when aggro does get away from me, I see it by the aggro lines, and then right click taunt on the person or if that is down, left click on their target. Very simple, super fast and easy. If you turn on threat warnings, you can see which people are about to pull aggro before it happens and prepare. It sped up my response time to aggro loss.

    ReplyDelete