Question on targeting

[Caspian]

EDIT: I ninja changed the subject please see my last post for a detailed description of the problem I am looking to solve

Hi I have been lurking around here on and off for well over a year (since seeing my first Zin video). I finally got myself going and I am having a blast, it has really made WoW new and fun again. I have 4 70 toons already, Warrior and a Lock on alliance and a rogue and a pally on horde. I already have 5 accounts in my family 2 for me, 2 each for kids and my wife's (which is technically mine) to play on.

I am running up to 4 instances of wow on a dual 2.5 GHz G5 Power Mac with 2.5 gigs of ram running Clone Keys.

I started my first MB group of 3 with a Priest and two Warlocks and they are doing quite well and, like I said I am having a blast. I will probably pick up another priest that my other daughter has that is 15 and stick with the 4 for leveling. I had some macro issues at first but have them mostly sorted out thanks to the posts, guides and wikki here and Cohwheel's post on the US WoW macro forum.

Now my question.

Right now my priest is my "brain" and the locks (and 2nd priest will too) do all their targeting by assisting him. I have gotten into a couple of situations where I got adds, I would have liked to either fear them or stick a pet on them while everyone else continues to burn down the current target. I haven't seen, or figured out a way to handle secondary targeting. If I go into a situation where I know I will face multiple mobs I could modify the standard mage sheep macro or just put pets where I want them before the fight.

There has to be a good way to do this, I would think you would have to do it for PvP. Any suggestions or tips are greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.

-Casp

[Moxy]

The big question is: do you use focus to set up your main, follow, and assisting?
If you do, then alternative targeting can come from [mouseover] macros or a manual target selection. i.e. i hit mouse 4, and all my toons target the mob i'm going to kill. Then, while fighting, i target somethign else, and hit another key that has a lock /assist my target and send their pet after it. This would be pretty cumbersome.

If you do not use focus for setting up which toon to follow and assist, you can target something before your fight, set it up as one of your alt's focus, and evertime it needs CC, i.e. secubus seduction, you hit a macro that says '/target focus /seduce /targetlastarget

You can probably search these threads for 'focus' and find alot more on this topic. :)

[ElectronDF]

I might be thinking about this in my 5 lock group that I would make in the VERY far future. It won't be a offensive DOT everything you can, cause that would probably just be wasteful on mana. I would be send pets to tank for me and then use offense. My idea might use focus for my main, so that is out. But, I might try to be creative on macros and targeting.

Logic. Same macro for everyone

target the focus' mob if you don't have one

send pet and only attack if in combat (makes sure pet gets their first)

if in combat, then attack focus' target, but leave pet on previous target if you have a void, other pets get sent to focus' target.



How that might look:

/target [target=target, noexists] focus-target (not sure if this works, if not, can play around more to find one that does)

/petattack

/castsequence [target=focus-target, combat, nopet:void] Spells from Hell1, Super Spells2

/castsequence [combat, pet:void] Spells from Hell1, Super Spells2

Again, it might take some tweaking, but the effect is you get tanks to tank and you can still DPS your focus' target.

[Drizzit]

I will probably pick up another priest that my other daughter has that is 15 and stick with the 4 for levelingIs this account in your name? If it isn't you will probably get that account band for account sharing.

When I was buying the wows for boxing. I only picked up 3 for 5 boxing (had one copy already and was going to use the wife's copy for the 5th). Boxing brings a huge amount of attention to your account, and the biggest thing they look at is account sharing. So i didn't want that lvl 70 toon that took me forever to lvl to get band because the account wasn't mine even though it is my wife's account.

[Caspian]

Actually all 5 accounts are in my name. But, even if they were not, by the ToS I can use my daughters accounts because they are still minors and you can share an account with one (1) minor child. The only one I couldn't use would be my wife's, which I wasn't planning on using anyways.

Thanks for the tips, I will investigate some more and come back with any questions.

Thanks!




Is this account in your name? If it isn't you will probably get that account band for account sharing.

When I was buying the wows for boxing. I only picked up 3 for 5 boxing (had one copy already and was going to use the wife's copy for the 5th). Boxing brings a huge amount of attention to your account, and the biggest thing they look at is account sharing. So i didn't want that lvl 70 toon that took me forever to lvl to get band because the account wasn't mine even though it is my wife's account.

[Drizzit]

But, even if they were not, by the ToS I can use my daughters accounts because they are still minors and you can share an account with one (1) minor child
Good to know. I was thinking about this too. If i was going to have my kids play how would i set it up? My account and then ask blizzard to transfer when they are 18 to there account (don't know if they will do because they are not the same account)? Or set it up as them and when they are 18 do some transferring.... I might send a email to blizzard to get a legal answer.

[Caspian]

But, even if they were not, by the ToS I can use my daughters accounts because they are still minors and you can share an account with one (1) minor child
Good to know. I was thinking about this too. If i was going to have my kids play how would i set it up? My account and then ask blizzard to transfer when they are 18 to there account (don't know if they will do because they are not the same account)? Or set it up as them and when they are 18 do some transferring.... I might send a email to blizzard to get a legal answer.I did the account in my name and let them play, we have a number of years before they hit 18, if we are still playing WoW then I will cross that bridge when I get to it.

[Caspian]

So back to the main subject...

I have read even more about focus and non-focus targeting. There are a number of macros out there for setting up targets "pre-pull" to assign void walkers to individual targets to tank for example or for a mage to sheep, and keep sheeped (sheept?). But all of it involves knowing what you are going to do before hand and setting targets and/or focus appropriately before hand. I am confident, as I play more I will get better and faster at setting this up and avoiding adds. But I still haven't figured out an efficient way to deal with adds or additional targets on the fly.

The reason I am concerned with this is, the other day, I was fighting two mobs and everything was going as planned when a pat I was unaware of snuck up on me so my 3 guys were fighting four. I ran into directional issues (which thanks to the forums I can cope with now), targeting issues (not fixed) and "brain death" issues (is fixed, ty forums). The jerks ended up wiping me. Ideally I would have liked to fear at least one of the adds while the other two dps'd the "main target" and the "fearer" went back to DPSing as soon as fear was cast.

Mouse-over targeting won't work because the mouse is not active on the alt's screen (though I did find a thread about assigning a key to a mouse click not sure if it would work on mouse over, or get the correct target if it did).

Manually targeting and fearing is very cumbersome - getting to a different window clicking target and then casting and getting back.

And these are adds, I didn't know they were there, so I couldn't set a focus or target before I started.

I also don't want to assist off the Brain because I want him to continue DPSing the current target, or healing in my case. So I don't want his time wasted.

I could easily see this happening in pvp fighting one guy and a rogue pops out of stealth on the brain, I want that rogue feared fast so my brain will live and can get back to work. or in a 3v3 arena to CC the healer while killing one of their DPSer or the other way around - whatever.

The best I can come up with is to have a macro for each lock that looks like

/targetenemy #this works like hitting tab which we all love
/cast fear or /petattack #for which ever you want
/targetlasttarget

Of course there is no guarantee that we get the 'nexttarget ' that we wanted, just like hitting tab, but it is better then nothing I suppose.

You could also set this new target to your focus and use the "sheep focus macro" to handle him if he needs to be feared again. So I could flesh the macro out to make it more robust to handle different situations a little better but the actual targeting really can't be fixed. Can it?



Does anyone have another way of doing this?

[Caspian]

So am I stuck? I am really curious to hear how other people handle this issue.

It could also be used in PvE when a mob spawns more mobs, like VanCleef in Deadmines for example, or the slimes that replicate themselves. Any time you would want to change targets briefly to do something to a new mob then return to what you were doing.

[daviddoran]

Warlocks have AoE Fear at lvl 40, so if you can wait until then, that should work fine for "oh crap" moments with extra adds. With multiple locks, you can make a cast sequence on each of your locks so you can do 2x in a row if necessary.
/castsequence howl of terror,
/castsequence ,howl of terror and it should help a bunch. You could also then use focus to target any stragglers, or just fear a couple after you are ready to burn those adds down.

I want to be able to set up focus on each of my slaves separately, so I can CC them all effectively. If you have multiple versions of CC it gets tricky (sheep/fear, etc) you could also add modifiers in, so one keypress could focus one character on a particular target, then tab to another one, hold a modifier, and press same button, and another character focuses that one, etc. If you also use your main spells as /cast [target=party1target] like I do, that also frees up the regular /target. That basically gives you 2 targets, so you could have one lock fear the focus, and one fear the target.

[wowphreak]

Have one key for assist this key is what yeh use to switch all yer chars target to current target

bound to some key
/cast target=Kuolemaa greater heal
/cast target=Kuolemab greater heal
/cast target=Kuolemac greater heal

or what ever heals yeh want to use
this way yeh dont have to worry about what yeh have targeted they still get the heal

then one or both warlock have /cast [target=Kuolematarget] fear yeh might want to add a stopcasting macro in front of it
this shouldnt change yer current target of the warlock

they wont change targets unless yeh hit yer assist button yeh can still spam spells

only other thing I can think of is use one of the warlocks as a head instead of the priest