Hunters can help tanks manage aggro without losing dps

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If you’re like me, your using the LFG Dungeon Finder as a way to play the game and get into dungeons or heroics.  And you’ve probably noticed some of the same things I have, players come in all different skills and abilities.

Which means, as you head out of the comfort zone of your guild or friends, you’ll notice that it’s not as important to be using the top DPS spec.  It’s more about really understanding how to play your class.

Earlier this week we discussed Misdirection and how hunters really need to start using it more.  Now, I’ve seen some Official forum conversations that have hunters growling that if a hunter has to MD more than once in a fight they need to boot the tank. Yeah, that’s a good way to make people want to bring us along. We’ll just yell out, “HEY! You suck! Get a live noob!” Something tells me that won’t endear us to all the tanks and healers out there.  It’s not like we’re already competing against all the hybrids out there that are doing comparable DPS.

Instead of pointing the finger and blaming the other guy, might it not be better to learn how to compensate and help the group be successful?  Maybe the group you’re in does have an inexperienced tank.  Or maybe you’ve been spending all your time focusing on topping the meters that you’ve eclipsed what other leveling players are doing.  Remember, not everyone out there focuses on Theorycrafting the game to death.

Now, as a hunter you are in a pretty unique situation.  I know it’s difficult to understand.  We’ve pretty much brainwashed to concentrate on topping the meters.  Basically, no matter what our job is to pour on the DPS nonstop, right? Wrong.

Yes, our role is to help kill the mobs as fast as possible.  However, we tend to forget that we’re part of a team, and sometimes crushing meters isn’t really as efficient.  Put it this way, you can’t top meters if you’re spending all your time Feigning Death, begging for Battle Res or doing corpse runs.

One way to help ensure that your runs go smoother and are successful is by understand how you can actually help manage Threat.  I’m not just talking about using Misdirect to the tank or Feigning Death as we approach that 90-95% threat mark.  But actually, understand how we and our generate threat.  Why we’re outpacing the tank on threat generation.  And how we can not only help the Tank consistently maintains threat, but also help our healers from pulling threat and getting pulled to shreds.

So, let’s get a better idea of Threat is.  Threat and Aggro are often used interchangeably.  But really, they’re not.  Aggro really is the person that has earned the dubious honor of being the sole target of the mobs lust for destruction.  Yep, you’ve ticked off Bubba and he’s out to get his 45!

Threat on the other hand is actually the amount of anger.  Think of Threat and Aggro as a boiling tea kettle.  As the temperature rises (Threat) the water molecules become more aggravated until finally the boil (Aggro). (And they say you can’t make wow educational! HA!)   So threat is a measurable. It’s has a value and when that value reaches max (100%) you’ve achieved Aggro.  Make sense? Good.

You can generate threat many different ways:

• Causing damage or debuffs to a target. (Ever /assist to pull up the next target and accidently fire off Autoshot? Yeah, not good right?)
• Damaging a member in a linked mob. (You know those times soloing where you tried to pull just 1 but 3, 4 or even more come pouring out. Yeah, thank goodness for Thunderstomp right?)
• Healing or applying a buff to someone or your pet that’s already on the threat list. (Ever thought, hmm I’ll just /cast mend pet  or bandaged someone only to get pwned? That’s getting Aggro through helping. So much or being a good Samaritan right?)
• Being in the proximity of the bosses or mobs combat range, aka body pulls.  (Yeah, these are the ones that get every hunter in trouble with their pets. Pet runs behind the mob only to aggro everything nearby and behind the target. Yeah, I know, but we still luv ya Elvis!)

So that’s the main ways to generate threat.  And you get Aggro when your threat reaches 100%.  For sake of this post though, we’re going to talk about how we can help manage this.  Ways we can compensate for any of these actions that we might do, and help ensure that the Tank maintains Aggro.

Since it seems basically everything we do causes threat, we probably should know just how much threat we generate with each action and at what point we’ve crossed the Aggro threshold. (Don’t shake your head and say that’s why we use Omen.)   For the record, the Aggro threshold is 130%.

If you know how you’re generating threat, you can control how fast or how slow you gain it.  Let’s head back into the kitchen.  One of my favorite types of cookies happens to be the No Bake Chocolate-Peanut Butter Oatmeal cookies.  They have a trick though.  If you rush it, you’ll end up with more of a candy.  Go too slow, and you’ll have some awesome Chocolate-Peanut Butter fudge.  However, if you time it right.  Bringing the whole concoction to a boil at just the right pace, you’ll end up with the best melt in your mouth confection around. (Man! Now I’m hungry!)

Okay, so now for the math part of the post.  I promise, I won’t get too sticky.

Threat is pretty simple to figure out.  Threat starts out at a base level of 100.  Then as you do damage it’s multiplied against the base threat on a 1:1 bases.  Do 100 points of damage then your threat would be 100×100=10,000 points of threat.  Now if we’ve generated 10,000 points of threat and our Tank has only generated 7,000 threat, we’ve pulled Aggro when we went over 9,100 Threat or 130%.  In other words, we generated too much threat too fast.  Time to /feign and hope it doesn’t fail.

But what could we do? Well, maybe we could’ve added all of that threat to the Tank by casting Misdrection.  Now, beside the Tank generating 7,000 threat, it’ll be 17,000 Threat.  That’s a +7,000 threat buffer we have going into the next round.

Here let’s put in some numbers that are closer to LFG type numbers.

Our group has a Tank doing 1,000 DPS, 2 hunters each averaging around 2,000 DPS. (Okay, that’s only 3 players. Go ahead and  throw in a Druid and a Mage if it makes you feel better, but we’re talking hunters here.)

That means that our Tank is generating 100,000 Threat per second.  However, each hunter is doing 200,000 Threat per second (TPS)!  (Was that a “Whoa!” I heard?) Bet your loving Feign Death now aintcha? Don’t worry, we have a way to deal with that.

We need to help our Tank get a buffer without sitting around pondering how we can tame that Druid.  Since Patch 3.3 the Misdirection stacks.  Not only does ALL of the damage the hunter causes stack. But each MD stacks as well.

Using the same basic scenario, we can give the Tank a pretty nice 4 second head start w/o losing any DPS.  How? Glad you asked.

Each hunter casts MD onto the Tank.  Now all the threat caused by the both hunters is transferred to the Tank. That means our Tank will have 1,600,000 threat at the end of MD.

[(2,000 DPS *2) + 1,000 DPS)100]* 4 = 1,600,000

That’s a trade off of a 1.5 second cooldown for about 20 seconds of continous DPS!

Now, instead of immediately pulling of Aggro, we’ve gotten 4 seconds of free DPS.  On top of that, we now have about and additional 16 seconds until we catch back up to the Tank! (Why do I feel like I’m back in Mrs. Thomas’ Algebra class?)

Using this scenario, we can plan on Feigning about 20-25 seconds into the fight. (At around 20 seconds we’ll be at 100% threat, the typical comfort zone for most Tanks.) Feining will reset our threat back to 0, giving us even more breathing room.

I know this was simplified scenario.  Yes, an experienced Tank is doing everything they can to generate as much threat as fast as possible.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t help them right? And at the same time we’re able to march our way up those DPS meters.  I don’t know about you, but the little bit of mana I’m losing from MD is well worth the trade off of having to blow a Feign within a few seconds of the fight or even worse, having to stop firing just because I’m outstripping the Tank.

Eddie “Brigwyn” Carrington has played a hunter almost exclusively for the almost 5 years. During that time he created The Hunting Lodge. The Hunting Lodge has grown from a blog to now a hunter community with a blog, forums, and podcast. The Hunting Lodge Forums are a safe spot for hunters of all skills and abilities to talk about their class. Recently Eddie has started The Hunting Lodge Podcast that you can find broadcasting live on Ustreameach Sunday at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. You can always contact Brigwyn at brigwyn@brigwyn.com.