hard time in deadmines - moving out of flamestrike (and other noob questions) ?

[Moorea]

Hi,

I have a new 5 team (which btw I'm leveling a lot slower than you guys; they are l19-21 now but with 12+h played; with RAF; but there is some idle time, chatting, experimenting with macros, picking profession and a lot of running around to do class specific quests)

And all was easy and fine until I entered Deadmines/VC

I did the first 2 bosses there but I wiped a lot on the mage patrols; they flamestrike and my squishy alts die pretty quick and when I try to get them out of flamestrike I sort of panic; get the wrong orientation and things go downhill to wipe

The main issue is :

I have W mapped to forward on main and follow focus (main) on alts; so when I urgently need to move the main because he is in flamestrike; it causes the alts that I had positioned before fight to join in; I could try to use mouse movement but it's a pain - and with only 2 keys mappable for movement; I'm not sure how to set things up

My group is 3 locks, 1 shadow priest (that I'm thinking of respecing holy), 1 prot pally (tank)

I think I will try to somehow change the focus to be my priest instead of tank for those combats; so they won't follow my tank; but then when they get aggro (and they did); how do I move them out (using the arrow keys maybe but it's not reliable if you have to turn or they aren't all perfectly faced)

Ideally I'd like a modal key I can hit that says :

a) everybody follow the main who moves with WSAD (I have SAD on do not pass)
b) everybody follow priest who moves with ??? (maybe numpad 8 456) but how do I bind that and still have bindings for arrows and for my spread key

Thanks for your ideas

ps: I have another problem which is my pally and priest got slightly ahead xp wise and they are increasing the gap as they get slightly more xp because of how xp is divided... I suppose it would stop if they get 3 levels ahead or something (as they would stop getting 3x raf xp) but I don't want them to get far apart - have you guys no problem keeping all the alts exactly at the same level (with different class quest lines and some mistakes sometimes (missing 1 quest)) ?

ps2: I got 1 more level (l20 on locks; l22 on pally) and geared a bit more so I hope to clear deadmines next time I try

[Naysayer]

Set up in formation before you pull. There are some formation macros in the wiki. When you move into formation, follow is broken so they won't follow your main around unless you command them.

[Vyndree]

My video tutorial has a snippet in there about spread out macros/formations.

[Moorea]

Thanks, but the issue I have isn't setting up a formation before I pull; the issue is moving 2 groups of characters (the tank and the rest) in different directions / at the same time when I get jumped by mage casting flame strike - including in deadmines where there isn't always a lot of room and you may have to turn around a corner, etc...

Say I start with:

....T
.....
.....
.....
..L.P.L
....L

And I get a flamestrike on both my tank and my other grp
and I need to move the tank, maybe foward while the grp need to go right; all while still facing the mobs...

So basically I'm looking at maybe some way to dual control 2 sets of my toons while at the same time using the normal "all follow T" for most movements (outside combat,...)

I think 2 key bindings for movement is too short... unless it's possible (I'm using keyclone) to send different keys based on some mapping ?
(like if I press num pad 8 it would in some mode send fwd to all alts and sometimes only to 1 of them and follow on the others, etc...)

Or maybe I just need to kill those mages faster :-)

[Vyndree]

What I do is I face my tank towards my group like this...

              Tank-->Mob              <--GROUP

All I have to do to move out is just press my "backwards" key. I left my arrow keys bound for this reason

By pressing my arrow keys to go backwards, my group moves like this...

Tank-->Mob                                         <--GROUP

[Moorea]

I made progress !

Thanks Vyndree for the idea of having tank facing rest of the group and using down arrow/back to spread !

I put W in do not pass and put my follow on "," instead and I was able
to go all the way to Mr Smite; which I killed but then I wiped when I
aggroed Greenskin and a bunch of guys then wiped again when drawing aggro when rez'ing from that,
then mobs had started respawning and I wiped again (I'm slow) trying to clear my way back to the ship so I gave
up and will do a full run again when I have more time and it's not as
late/I'm rested !


ps: soulstone on my pally and priest ftw

(if you're on firetree/ally pst me: Ujv(Pally/Main) Ujw Ujx Ujy Ujz)