So you’ve learned to Speed Up MC by Looting Faster… and that’s great. But wow, look how much time gets wasted elsewhere. How many times have you heard this stuff? “Buff up, guys” “Can we get buffs?” “Alright, everyone stop and buff” “the healers need mana” “AFK, I need to shave my ferret” “BRB phone” “I need to take my sister to my mom’s house, BRB”
And so on… and so on… and so on. Time it sometime. It’s ridiculous. Or better yet… fix it!
Follow some simple rules to Move Faster:
- Start Immediately
- Buff as you go
- Don’t wait for mana
- Pull Faster, AKA “Screw ‘Comfortable’”
- No Flippin’ AFKs
Make it a point that the guild should be in the zone on time and ready to go. If you set your start time to 7 and you never start til 7:15, change the start time to 7:15. If it becomes 7:30 instead, kick some asses. Have clearly published times when you begin invites and when you expect people to be sitting there in MC making funny faces at the Molten Giants.
As soon as you have enough people zoned into MC to do the trash (say, 18-20 people including 2 tanks), pull the giants, and keep going as people trickle in. Certainly, you move faster with 40 people, but you don’t move at all sitting around not killing anything while you wait for 40. Start fast and let your speed ramp up.
Do not omit buffs while trying to shave time off. Buffs make you go faster. But don’t stop the flow of the instance to buff. Buff on trash. The buffers do not need their entire mana pools for any trash fights. (Some of them will probably bitch about this. Ignore them. They need to readjust their comfort levels.) They can buff while you fight trash. Mana-expensive buffs can be done over the course of multiple trash pulls. Always keep everyone buffed with the best buffs for their role. When someone dies and is ressed, they should be fully buffed before their health reaches 100%.
Molten Core is not a five man instance with a single healer. You do not need to wait for your healers to get their mana back. They will probably throw a fit when you start this, but they’ll get over it. The most important thing is this: casters tend to plop down immediately after a mob dies and start drinking wherever they were standing. This must stop. They cannot do this. When the mob dies, the casters must move to the next kill zone before drinking. Then they can sit down and drink at their leisure. They can continue to drink as the mob is being killed. Should a heal be needed, one or more of them can jump up and heal while the rest continue drinking.
Never stand around waiting. If you’re standing around waiting at any time during the MC run, something is wrong. Your tanks should almost never be out of combat for the entire course of the run (before bosses, maybe before double molten destroyer pulls and lava packs depending on mana levels and so on).
You need to have a hyperactive hunter chain pulling everything as fast as your raid can handle it. In the early parts of the instance, the next mob should be pulled when the first one is at approximately 40-50%, so it will be there just as the first mob dies. Your hunter should be pulling with Distracting Shot. It generates 600 threat, slightly more than two uses of the warrior’s Sunder Armor ability. A tank can taunt the mob, transferring two sunders worth of threat to the tank, and allowing your DPS to immediately begin attacking the mob without waiting for your tank to build up a threat buffer.
Note: It has been suggested by some hunters on the WoW Hunter Forums that Aimed Shot + Autoshot + Distracting Shot is the best combo to pull — Aimed Shot is a 3 second cast, and can be immediately followed by autoshot and distracting shot. While this would undoubtedly generate even more threat and probably won’t increase the time to pull, I’m not really sure its’ necessary. I’d only suggest it if you really want to do it, or if you’ve been having problems with people stealing aggro early after trying with Distracting Shot only.
This is an incredibly important position. Your MC performance rests very heavily on your hunter’s judgement on when to pull and what to pull. Your puller must understand that he has a much more important job than showing up high on the damage meter. He should consider wearing additional +hit gear in order to avoid any missed Distracting Shots. It may be best to have two hunters share this task and switch between it at 15-20 minute intervals. This is also a very high stress task for your warriors. I suggest having a pool of 3-4 tanks and letting them switch out at similar intervals to the hunters. It’s not necessary, of course, but it may help keep things moving faster and reduce the occasional boneheaded wipes when a tired tank or hunter hits the wrong button.
Finally, you may have an issue with AFK people. A few here and there are fine, but make sure they do three things:
- Flag AFK
- Tell an officer and make sure the officer acknowledges. Include estimated time away.
- /follow a caster and tell them (so they know not to accidently lose their new companion)
If someone is going to be AFK an extended period, they should exit the instance and make room for someone else. If someone is AFK frequently, they should not be in the raid group. How you handle it is your decision. AFK people do not contribute to DPS or to healing, and do not help you Speed Up MC… so they have no place on this website. 
So now you’re moving faster between mobs… but you need to make the mobs die more quickly. Kill Faster!
Why do hunters pull with distracting shot when arcane shot (rank 1) takes less mana and still pulls the mob?
Comment by Tenskatawa — June 1, 2006 @ 12:48 pm
It’s because of how threat works.
Distracting shot generates a large amount of threat. A warrior can then taunt the mob as it runs towards the raid. The taunt ability has two functions: it increases the warrior’s threat value so that it is equivalent to the highest threat in the raid; and it forces the mob to attack the warrior only for a few seconds. In that time period, the warrior must generate enough threat over and above the highest threat individual that the mob will remain on him and not go after the other person.
Typically a warrior might ask the raid to wait for him to apply Sunder Armor two or three times. During that time, the raid is standing around doing nothing. Having a hunter pull with Distracting Shot saves all that time, the raid can immediately begin DPS (except the hunter, who’ll need to feign to wipe his aggro)
Comment by Lauran — June 1, 2006 @ 3:29 pm
Still if the tank taunts the mob after the arcane shot he still has more aggro than the hunter thus pulling him off the mob and having more aggro than the rest of the raid.
Comment by hugi — June 8, 2006 @ 4:17 am
Sorry, apparently you don’t understand how threat works.
Arcane shot does 183 damage, which creates 183 threat minus whatever modifiers a hunter has to reduce threat generation. It doesn’t generate enough hate for the raid to begin attacking as soon as the warrior taunts. A single melee hit for 203 or more damage or ranged hit for 340 or more damage could pull the mob off the warrior at that point.
http://thottbot.com/?sp=14287
Distracting Shot is a high threat move, generating 600 threat value. A melee would have to produce 661 threat worth of damage to pull threat off the tank (827 damage from a rogue or dps warrior, for example), which is much less likely to happen before the tank can get a sunder or heroic strike off and start the hate building process.
http://thottbot.com/?sp=15632
Comment by Lauran — June 8, 2006 @ 6:48 am
Yes, the point is to have the most aggro possible, not simply to have more aggro than the raid.
Comment by Sabin — June 19, 2006 @ 11:00 am
Just so you know, Distracting shot does no where near the same amount of threat as 2 sunders. 1 sunder armor does around 1000 threat.
Comment by Syz — June 19, 2006 @ 11:16 am
Sorry Syz — you’re wrong.
Sunder generates 261 threat (340 threat after the defensive stance modifier; and 379 threat with the defiance bonus) per application. That’s all. Not 1000. Distracting Shot does 600 threat.
My “slightly more than two sunders” is inaccurate because I was looking at the raw threat value of 261 and a tank would be in defensive stance; but it still generates sufficient threat to enable the dps to start immediately.
If you don’t think this is the case, all you have to do is test it yourself. Just keep in mind the various modifiers regarding ranged vs melee and so on, and what threat threshold must be passed to pull aggro.
Comment by Lauran — June 19, 2006 @ 1:22 pm
Screw hunter pulls…have your MT or OT or your backup tank pull. They grab the mob since they need to hold the mob anyway.
We use a hunter as our MA and he targets the mob and announces to the raid when to kill.
Our hunter makes like 4 non-boss pulls now and we are speeding up all the time.
Comment by Jayfoot — August 4, 2006 @ 5:24 am
Wow, you really don’t get it… yes, a warrior can pull, but that is a regular threat ability. Yes, the warrior will have initial aggro of the mob, but it’s also possible for a heal from the previous mob (that you are still fighting btw, the whole idea is to chain pull) to pull aggro with a lot of threat meaning a dead healer. The reason you use a hunter with distracting shot isn’t for the speed of the cast, it’s the high amount of threat build up from range. That will then be transferred to the warrior with a taunt and then sunders, etc. in which time dps can then begin fighting the mob immediately.
Comment by Alifana — August 28, 2006 @ 11:40 am
Ok, as the hunter pulling do I then just sit there and pray that warrior takes agro and builds it fast enough to keep it from me?
If I feign death then all my agro from the distracting shot disappears. Which leads back to the same worry that someone pulls agro from tank…..
That being the case, I better have healing or else I am going down, and constantly rezzing hunters will be a slow down I think.
Comment by Drasconis — September 26, 2006 @ 7:01 am
Taunt will give the warrior all the threat you just built, drasconis. It has something like a 4% chance to be resisted, in which case you feign death and the warrior has to build up aggro from scratch; or you die. People dying only slows down if you have 39 people waiting around for you to get ressed before the next pull. Don’t do that on trash. It’s silly. You can kill trash with 20 people, you don’t need to have the whole raid wait for one dead hunter to get ressed. And yeah, occasionally a hunter will die on a pull after a taunt and a resisted feign death. Consider it payback for all the times you feign death.
And don’t run so far past the tank that he has to chase after you if the mob resists his taunt.
Comment by Lauran — October 9, 2006 @ 12:20 pm
Dudes, we just started using this pulling system, and I can honestly say as main puller on the night and Hunter leader, that IT WORKS BRILLIANTLY !!
It did increase our speed, and aggro was not an issue for the rest of the raid
Cheers for a great site, it is helpuing us a great deal !
Comment by Rodimus — November 8, 2006 @ 7:40 am