How to Pull

How to pull
Wednesday, December 15, 2010

http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/

I was in several instances (mostly normals during leveling) and was shocked to notice that several DPS and even tanks have no idea how to make a CC-pull. I don't mean they did not pull that particular group right, they did not even know the concept of CC-pulling. In Vanilla and BC lot of people never raided or did heroics. In WotLK everything was gogogogogog. So let me outline the basic concept of CC-pulling.

CC means to turn a monster into a harmless form. It's still alive and on full HP but causes no harm. If they would be in their normal form, they would simply cause too much damage to the tank, and the healer would go out of mana. Some pulls are simply impossible without CC, even with 2 healers, like 2 whirlwinding ogres in a melee heavy group or healer add doing 50K HPS.

All pulls start with marking. It is usually done by the tank, but can be done by anyone who is familiar with the instance and knows how to CC. Always tell the group which mark means what. It's especially important if there are 2 of the same class present. One convention: skull means kill target. The tanks should keybind it and place it on the target they want dead.

The peel-off-pull:
This is the easier, but still more rarely used, simply because it takes more time. Remember: 10 peel-offs are shorter than 10 inplace-pulls + 1 corpserun.

The steps are the following:
targets are marked
tank pulls with ranged ability that leaves no dot up on any CC target or AoE on the ground.
tank runs back
CC-people cast their CCs
tank turns back when the active targets are away from CC and tanks them
they die
tank breaks one of the CC and the group kills them
tank breaks next CC, and so on

Notes:
rogue can sap without pulling (if there is no stealth detecting pet around). Distract ability allows the rogue to turn the enemies away. Sap does not work in combat.
in peel-off pull, hunters don't use trap launcher, they place the trap front of themselves and shoot the target with distractive shot
healers can CC, but they may miss, so don't tell them to CC something that must be CC-ed

The CC-ed mobs will hate the DD for being CC-ed, so if they break early, they jump on them. DD must always be ready to re-CC them, or if it's impossible, they must move behind the tank (so the monster runs to the tank)
Not CC-ed mobs will follow the tank as no DPS put aggro in him. Healers should not heal until the tank turned back and established aggro on not CC-ed enemies as the skull have one gunshot aggro, X has none. If you heal that 3% damage that the tank got from a ranged enemy, you get aggro.

It is very helpful to keybind "focus target", and make your CC-target focus. Then use a macro "/cast [target=focus,harm,nodead] whateverspell". This way you always see if they break CC and can re-CC them
If one of the CC is close to the tank, the tank should pull the active enemies away. Even if he doesn't break the CC with a cleave ability, one of the DDs surely will.

Ranged and caster enemies will not run after the tank but cast spells on them. Beware that roots don't stop them shooting, and hunters must use launcher. If skull or X are ranged, the tank must run behind the corner, breaking their line of sight. They still want to attack the tank, running after him, into his melee range (since he is waiting behind the corner).

The in-place pull:
it needs less space, need less movement, so it's much faster to do. However any mistake can mean a nasty situation:
The CC-people start casting their CC
As soon as the first CC hits, the whole pack aggros on the CC-er whose spell landed first
The active enemies run to the first CC-er
The tank picks them up using some AoE or cleave

Note the importance of perfect timing. The 3 CC must hit at the same time. In the peel-off pull, if someone is a bit late, the target will be CC-ed a bit back. So what? If someone is late here, the target will be CC-ed where the skull stands and the tank will break the CC with his cleave. If he does not cleave/DnD/consecrate the skull and X, they will keep running for the first CC-guy who has good chances to be a clothie. If the skull reaches his target in a peel-off, he'll hit the tank in the back. Bad, but not terrible. In an in-place pull the first CC-er will know what Deathwing felt when he met Theldurin! If hunter is present, it's even worse as the trap has 2 sec activation time after the launcher placed it. If the other CC-ers cast before this time is up, the trap target will run out of the trap range.