How to deal with weaving melee as a caster

[BobGnarly]

So, we all know as a caster how annoying those weaving, jumping melee toons are as you sit there trying to manually turn and whatnot. I have figured out a pretty good way to deal with it, and I thought I'd share it with you all.

The crux of this idea is one of those formations that we all love to play with. Before I go into that though, let's say that we've got our main (which will be represented by an "O" in these diagrams) and 4 slaves (represented by "X"s). For the purposes of these diagrams, please ignore the "."s. I'm only using them to preserve the spacing so the diagrams line up. Anyway, as you know, most of the time your formation will be something like:

...O
.
...^
...|
...X

Where in this case all the Xs (the slaves) all are overlapping each other. In other words, all the slaves are following right behind us. I've also attempted to draw an "arrow" on the slaves to show you which way they are facing, hopefully that is clear.

Now, the nifty formation macro/keybind that we're going to use is the "plus" one that I'm sure we're all well acquainted with, since it's easy to do (see elsewhere on this forum for the details on how to do this formation if you aren't already aware). Basically, we stop moving, back up so we are standing on top of all our slaves, and use the keybind to spread out into a "plus" like formation. After doing so, we probably look something like:

....^
....|
....X
.^.....^
.|.....|
.X..O..X
....^
....|
....X

Basically, we in the plus formation, all looking "forward".

Now, we hit our "follow" macro, which will turn each slave from looking "forward" to look at our main, like so:

.....X
.....|
.....v
.
.X->.O.<-X
.
.....^
.....|
.....X

Once we are in the position, any melee attacking can, at most, get "behind" one of our slaves at a time. No matter which of the slaves he goes after, all 3 of the others will have unrestricted access to nuking him down. Our main will have to turn to face, but this is easy since we can control the main with our mouse - it is just like we're used to when playing a single character.

Using this approach has helped me tons lately as people become more acquainted with our weaknesses. I can basically park my characters in this configuration and nuke away without any further micro, which is huge in these situations, as you know. I've even gotten pretty good at executing this while being attacked by said jumping/weaving melee(s).

Anyway, hope it helps some others out, and sorry for the crude ascii art.

Let me know if any of it's not clear.

[Mac]

I was thinking this might also be helpful for jumping aoe mages and limiting CL from another shammy group, the downside is you don't get to take advantage of stacked fire totems when they are all spread out, assuming a shammy group.