Ol' Grumpy's guide to Cataclysm instance protocols
by Matthew Rossi 
Oct 7th 2010 at 9:00PM
- After a few weeks, those jerks who constantly say "go go go" in runs will have died a lot and will either have stopped playing or learned to stop doing that.
- Same for people who feel the need to pull while the tank/rest of the group is regaining mana and so on.
- Abilities that haven't seen much use in Wrath of the Lich King will probably make a comeback. You're going to need to learn to Polymorph, Sap, Trap, Hex and use other forms of CC.
- For the first few months of Cataclysm, at least, there will have to be more of a focus on skill and execution than numbers. Switching targets properly, not breaking CC before it's called for, and using your abilities at the right time will be rewarded.
- You're going to get whole new dungeons you haven't seen hundreds of times already, with all-new mechanics. Glory in once again having no idea what this pull does.
- The return of CC also means the return of marking pulls. As I said literally hundreds of times back in The Burning Crusade, I did not put all those shapes above mobs' heads because Lucky the Leprechaun promised me a balanced breakfast.
- Tanks and healers are going to be expected to carry more of the weight in individual instance runs. Frankly, if DPS pulls aggro, breaks CC or otherwise gets attention, it's likely they're going to die. When that happens, don't blame your healer for not healing you and don't blame the tank.
- Tanks are going to have to relearn asking for CC. No, you can't just tank six mobs. No, you can't. Even if you could somehow hold aggro on them, you'd die. You simply can't play it the way you have been, trying to zerg down every trash pull.
- DPS players, get ready to wait in the LFD tool. Get ready to wait a really long time. Expect to see queues go way, way up as a result of tanking and healing becoming more demanding. Many people who are tanking now are not going to have the patience to mark every pull and explain every fight. Many people who are healing now will not be able to adjust to the new triage system. You are going to see extended wait times; learn to cope with them.
The new old basics
First up, if you're a tank, get used to being expected to mark pulls, explain how you intend them to go and lead the instance. Other players can do this, to be sure, but it almost always devolves upon the tank. So step up to it. And please, try and familiarize yourself with your group and its capacities. If you have a priest healer, a shadow priest DPSer, a fury warrior DPSer and a ret paladin DPSer in addition to yourself as a bear druid, don't ask the shadow priest to sheep. Don't ask the fury warrior for Chains of Ice. The ret paladin and shadow priest have CC options; learn what they are.
Second, learn to ignore that "go go go" guy. He's an idiot. Don't pull until your healer is ready. You can ask, or you can look at his mana bar; I personally prefer to ask, if there's any doubt. Don't rush your groups and don't let anyone else rush them, either. Do not try to be a tyrant. I can't stress this enough. Many tanks, when faced with a situation that is stressful, find themselves treating the group like the enemy. They're not. Control your prima donna instincts.
DPS players, by all means offer to pull if you have a longer range than the tank. But don't pull without asking first; even if the tank can get the mob back, it's just rude and makes chaos more likely. Use your CC intelligently if asked, and please learn to reapply it. Follow the markings, please. Taunts aren't magical bullets that fix all aggro problems. If you're more experienced and a better choice to lead a run than a tank, by all means speak up. As long as you do so without being a jerk, a lot of tanks might welcome someone else's doing the labor of marking and explaining. Just be cool about it; it's often easier for a DPS player to see the whole fight, and good tanks will know that. Don't be overly pushy with this, however.
Healers, make sure groups let you get your mana back if you feel like they're not. In many ways, the healer is the most important person in the group, and in Cataclysm dungeons, the new triage system of healing is going to put a lot of pressure on you until you learn it. No, it's not your fault if a DPS player dies because he broke CC or pulled aggro, or if a tank died because he tried to tank way too much. Don't let these things discourage you. If you have a valid, working form of CC that you can use without taking away from healing, please do.
For everyone, I must tell you, learn to accept a wipe. Wipes are going to happen. In the first few months wipes are going to happen frequently. Instances will be new to players, some players will be new to their class or role, and the mechanics of play are a lot less forgiving. If you're in the habit of dropping group as soon as a wipe happens, don't waste your time queuing up. You'll just end up annoyed.
In general, we're about to see a paradigm shift in how instances work, and being a good group player means being at least cool and somewhat considerate of the other players. Try it and see. It makes runs much easier for everyone.
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 12)
Chump Oct 7th 2010 9:11PM
sounds depressing
Zerrissen Oct 7th 2010 9:18PM
On the contrary, sounds awesome. I'm so sick of the go-go-go guy.
Chump Oct 7th 2010 9:27PM
@Zerrissen
I know this sounds exciting and new but after a few months its not going to be fun anymore. Having to mark targets and CC was pretty boring during BC. I mean even now without all the CC people still manage to screw simple things up. Its only going to get worse. I hope im wrong.
dpoyesac Oct 7th 2010 9:31PM
Seconded: this sounds fantastic. I enjoy this game when I need to hit more than 2 buttons.
dpoyesac Oct 7th 2010 9:34PM
And back again to add:
Marking targets in BC was way more interesting than just spamming AoE. Some of us actually enjoy running instances and would prefer them to be fun and challenging instead of just 15 minutes of grunt-work with some purple shining at the end.
As Totalbiscuit says, why even play a game that you can't lose?
elstor Oct 7th 2010 9:44PM
Only go-go-go guy allowed in my raids is Wowcrendor. He is totally welcomed.
Balgus Oct 7th 2010 9:50PM
people still wipe in Wrath. just ask all the tanks that drop group as soon as they see that theyre in HoR
Drob10 Oct 7th 2010 10:32PM
I agree this really isn't making the new/old style of dungeons sound much fun.
I'm torn, I tired of the gogogo mentality, but also don't look forward to the added pressure to tanking and added wait times for dps.
C'est la vie.
Revrant Oct 7th 2010 10:42PM
To be fair, those tanks drop group because the DPS and/or healer just will not listen, get in the corner, stay in the corner, let me break LoS with the mobs and get the aggro to drag those ranged in.
What do they do? They stand there in the open, get aggro, and when the Merc stabs their face and the healer rescues them, what happens? The mage, who aggroed them instead of the tank as it should have been, has one-shotted your healer, causing a wipe.
Thankfully I can deal with this as a tank, and thankfully Cata means these people will be vote kicked rather than tolerated.
Overall it's just a shift to a form of BC that isn't frustrating grinding attunement-oriented fringe stuff, harder Wrath content with better gear scaling(where in Wrath the dungeons were at one time hard, we just out-geared them so easily).
devilsei Oct 7th 2010 10:45PM
Yeah...
People didn't bother to wait EVEN when you had to mark mobs, so returning to "the oldskool" isn't going to fix the ADHD-riddled dps'ers nurtured during Lich King.
And, whats more depressing, to me at least, is someone instantly jumping at DPS if a mob does go after them. Frankly, some tanks suck, and as such they lose mobs, so how could it be the the fault of the dps then?
txnicole Oct 7th 2010 10:48PM
Sounds frickin' awesome! I loved BC and the fact that you had to actually use your brain to -earn- gear. Wipe till we get it right :)
But you know, I have to admit there's a voice in the back of my head that is laughing hysterically at how angry all these people who have been just blasting their way through stuff and laughing at old school techniques.
So all you younguns... get ready to eat some old school dirt ;)
Microtonal Oct 7th 2010 10:49PM
@Balgus:
It's still possible to wipe in HoR because Wrath has spent the last two years training players that the DPS meter alone is king and things like kill priority, minimizing unnecessary damage, and aggro management are almost completely unimportant. I can't tell you how many times I've seen the relatively harmless soldiers die first, while the mages and hunters stand out in the open happily nuking the healer to death.
On the other hand, I've successfully completed HoR (i.e., with no wipes) in all three roles on multiple toons with widely varying group compositions and skill levels. I've successfully completed it with bad healers, with inexperienced tanks, and with no DPSer doing better than 2k. It's not THAT hard.
Birong Oct 7th 2010 11:00PM
While I do agree that there are some tanks that do suck, dps "always" has the option of slowing down so as not to generate as much threat.
tulipblossom Oct 7th 2010 11:07PM
I'm a little torn --
Because I can't really raid (time issues, poor comp, etc), dungeons are my raids. I truly enjoy them and I'm definitely fed up with the "GO-GO-GO!" jerks. I don't want to race through a dungeon and certainly not through a Heroic. So, the thought of instances becoming more interesting, being a greater challenge, and requiring more CC sounds fantastic.
At the same time, I don't want it to feel like work. While I welcome more challenge, more use of CC, and the simple requirement of more awareness from each player, I don't want running heroics to be something I grow weary of doing, over time.
So, in the end, I just hope they've found a great balance between the two.
Teron Oct 8th 2010 12:22AM
@tulipblossom Meh, I doubt you'll grow tired of them if you could tolerate wrath ones. I've played wow for a long time, but it's only during wrath that I've felt like taking breaks, and I've had three vacations from wow so far, as well as short little breaks that I didn't cancel my accounts for.
@Birong Actually, sometimes not even that works. Had a guildmate who was just getting used to wrath tanking after a long time in BC lose aggro to me before the fight started because after he tagged the first mob I realized battle shout had worn off and cast it, and pulled two mobs onto me before I even did damage.... Generally though, I will agree with your statement:D
Mirantha Oct 8th 2010 12:49AM
@devilsei "Frankly, some tanks suck, and as such they lose mobs, so how could it be the the fault of the dps then?"
Very simply - the DPS has to learn to cater to what the tank can handle. It's not hard, you don't need to be mashing buttons constantly just so you can top the meters. DPS needs to work within the abilities of the tank and healer. If you find as DPS that you are pulling agro off the tank regularly, then you need to slow it down. The mobs will still die, but will do so in a more efficient manner that will allow the group as a whole to survive.
devilsei Oct 8th 2010 1:05AM
When I say that, I don't mean in a way that dps could easily alleviate by slowing down, I mean the ones who can barely even manage one mob because of a complete lack of attention or some such.
Case in point, back when Magister's Terrace just came out, I joined a group for it (on normal). Was a few days after the patch, so some addons were a little odd, but the tank in the group couldn't even keep aggro off the healer. His reason? "My addons aren't working". Someone who is so reliant upon addons that the addons themselves might as well be tanking, isn't exactly a what I'd call even an okay tank. If the dps tried to keep under his threat, Healer got crushed, if we tried to bring down a few of them before the healers mana went dry, we got killed. Tank was pretty well geared at that, so you'd expect better.
I'm not saying all this as just some DPS, I've done my fair share of heroics during TBC as tank and dps both, and I understand exactly that some classes need a "ramp-up" time for threat, or to adjust to fit a tanks output, but there is a line between "needing adjustment" and just plain "bad".
Angrycelt Oct 8th 2010 1:12AM
As a dps'er and healer this will be fun again. Skill will once again matter, and my 5 man group that has been unbreakable since vanilla will remain awesome.
Self control will be required. Dumb players will reap what they sow.
Its gonna be great.
murabayashi.harukaze Oct 8th 2010 1:49AM
I'm really looking forward to an environment when Threat meant something. In BC, you actually had to *manage* your threat. As a DPS you *could* blow over a tanks threat if you were geared unintelligently or if you didn't watch your threat meter, and here's thing thing: it was intentionally built that way. What the point of even having a threat mechanic if it doesn't need to be managed? CC being required again will let the skillful folks shine, and the useless idiots will get vote-kicked. Having a reputation as a *good player* will really mean something.
Socialcockroach Oct 8th 2010 2:04AM
@devilsei
Your story about the bad MgT tank is anecdotal at best. First, that is only one example and is very hard to equate to the game community as a whole (although, admittedly, there ARE a lot of bads who play the game). Secondly, his excuse could have been completely legitimate. For instance, if he had an add-on that stored his key-bindings and it got all screwed up, that could have a significant effect on his play. If this sort of thing is the case, however, it would have been good of him to let you all know the moment the problem started to happen. Since you omitted weather this was the case or not, we can only guess as to what really happened. If you are going to make an argument, please make it more compelling.