How to assistFollow

I have seen more mobs use the shield command than I have MA's. More's the pity.

It seems to be one very much underestimated tool.

Regarding assist.

Iluien has only one assist button, plain and simple /assist [who ever is MA] As he is always DPS only these days he has no need of anything else.

Both Celeni and Aesten have three, plain /assist - for checking mob targets, and used rarely. /assist [who ever is MA] and used for nukes, stuns, snares etc very frequently. And /assist [who ever is Puller] for assist targeting the mobs to be Pacified.

Babastina has been exiled to the Abysmal Sea and no longer remembers anything about hot buttons.

Turn down the graphics you are using. Turn off spell effects. Lower the resolution rate. Reduce the graphics detail level. Turn off the sky. Turn off particle effects. Turn down your clip plane.

Do some or all of these until you reduce your lag to a reasonable rate. If you are getting "cursor float", then you've got too much stuff turned on. This can be disasterous.

Um... Filtering chat messages (with /serverfilter on if that still even exists) will often fix some targeting slowness. All the stuff that involves updates of info from the server to you client use the same "pipe" that your chat channels do. If you're getting hordes of chat, this can cause a delay in things like mob position, health updates, and targetting. This goes double obviously if you're on a slow network connection. Note that in this case, filtering to another chat box doesn't matter. It's the very fact that the data is traveling to your computer that causes the slowness. You have to actually go into your filters and turn them off for you to see a benefit.


You'll have to fiddle with your own settings, and the specifics of each computer and network connection will have different "ideal" settings. You just need to find yours. You should always have crisp mouse movement, and reasonably fast targetting and health update speeds. If you're getting noticable delays in any of that, you need to look at changing something on your client to speed things up.

As Singdal said switching to overhead camera can be an excellent quick fix to video overload.

The other method that I use more often when healing (as opposed to CC) is simply punch PageDown untill I'm looking at my feet.

As healer I do not need the cursor to target, (even in multigroup situations), but staring at my feet instantly frees the cursor so that I can use my favourite "left hand punching key board" "right hand fumbling mouse" technique.

However in reality when healing or nuking there is no need to use the mouse cursor at all.

With properly set up hot buttons to assist and target you can heal anyone in your group and nuke anything that someone in your group is attacking.

When called upon to patch heal people in another raid group I make up targeting buttons with their names on them, then all you have to do is cycle through them to monitor health.

WARNING.

The only problem with habitualy staring at your feet, is getting left behind when the group moves. There are some group leaders who seem to be very forgetful about calling when to move up.

I once had a MA die because of this. After using a large amount of mana to deal with some adds one time, I was sitting medding and still happened to be looking at the ground. Next thing I see is the MA health falling at a fast rate. I jump up to heal to find I'm all alone.

I then ran madly around in circles trying to find everyone while watching the MA's health bar drain and turn purple. Eventually someone got my message that I wasn't there to heal, but it was too late.

Couple comments to add to the thread, and answer a few things brought up.

Someone mentioned that hitting attack will not target anything. A while back, though, in a patch, sony made the default attack key also default to targetting the nearest mob. Lot of people found out the hard way, when trying to attack changed their targets. I changed that in my set-up as soon as I found out about it.

/shield Can be very useful when used right. However, since it's rarely needed, hitting /shield hasn't become reflex like hitting taunt. It can save the cleric or chanter's life (if they are close enough...which unfortunately, they're usually not. Most of the time I've had need of this skill is when we've had an add) And yes, /shield <name> does work. In my mid-30's to mid-40's there was a cleric I grouped with a lot, who liked to melee and pretend he was a paladin. I hotkeyed a shield with his name on it. :lol: I've also seen it used when there were two warriors in the group (rare) and cleric was oom, and second warrior couldn't get aggro fast enough...second warrior /shields MT, which saves him enough damage to finish out the fight.

I've seen a couple UI's that have a more noticeable cursor. Maybe eqinterface.com has a way to change out JUST the cursor of your current UI?

Except for the 'chanter and possibly the tank, most targetting can be done without the mouse (via /assist, or the F-keys for casting on group members), which saves a ton of time and aggravation. I personally can't figure out how a chanter manages to individually target all the mobs that need to be mezzed, and bow to the reflexes of all the good chanters out there who can do it.