AIE Instance School/Glossary

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Glossary

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Terminology

• Aggro: The attraction of an enemy's attention or focus. This can happen a number of ways, a couple of common ones are:

1 - When an unengaged hostile enemy enters within a certain range of a player, that enemy will attack a player. This range varies based on the target's level.

2 - When a player performs an offensive action (such as an attack or spellcast) on an unengaged target, that target will normally attack that player.

• Battle Rez: Battle Rez is slang for the Druid Spell 'Rebirth', which allows a Druid to resurrect a fallen party or raid member during battle. It is the only spell that a player can cast on another player that allows resurrection during battle, and has a two second base cast time.
• Buff: A buff is a beneficial spell cast upon a target (yourselves, your allies, your enemies) which benefits its recipient. Buffs can include long time (30 min +) buffs such as blessing from Paladins, to 20-30 second buffs such as Bloodlust (aka Heroism for Allies). Buffs on enemies are considered bad because they can make that enemy more difficult to defeat.
• Crowd Control: (Abbreviated CC) refers to spells and abilities which limit an opponent's ability to fight. CC abilities are used to reduce the number of mobs that the group fight at once. Due to the fact that most groups cannot tank more than a certain number of elite mobs at a time, crowd control is often essential to prevent a group from being overwhelmed.
• Debuff: A debuff is a detrimental spell cast upon a target. These can range from purely cosmetic (Eck Residue from Heroic Drak'Tharon Keep) to exceedingly detrimental (Mark of the Fallen Champion from Deathbringer Saurfang in ICC). Some debuffs can be removed by certain classes (Paladins, for example, have a Cleanse spell which can remove all types of debuffs except for Curses).

Debuffs usually fall under certain categories: Poison (Green Border), Magic (Blue Border), Physical (Red Border) - these are usually bleed effects, Diseases (Brown border), Curses (Purple border)

• Kill Order: The order in which targets are to be attacked and consequently killed.
• Marking: Marking is the practice of placing Raid Target Icons on enemies so that a kill order can be established and easily communicated.
• mob: A mob (short for mobile or mobile object) is a generic term for any non-player entity whose primary purpose is to be killed for experience, quest objective, or loot.
• NPC: Non-Player Character; these can be friendly (Green text name), neutral (Yellow text name, in different shades) or hostile (Red text name). Common NPCs include innkeepers, auctioneers, bankers, quest givers, etc.
• pat: Short for 'patrol'; a wandering hostile NPC enemy. Any party member may announce 'pat' to alert the other party members that an enemy or enemies are approaching so the tank can prepare to grab its aggro before anyone else does
• Raid Target Icons: Raid target icons (sometimes referred to as lucky charms) are icons that raid leaders/assistants and party members can place over players and mobs.

• Rez: Short for Resurrection, This is the act of reviving a fallen player. Normally (except for the aforementioned 'Battle Rez', this is cast only out of combat. Certain players have resurrection spells: Shamans, Paladins, Priests, Druids (Druids also have an out of combat resurrection spell, Revive, which has no cooldown and does not require a raegent). Certain classes can cast spells or use abilities to resurrect themselves - Shamans can use Reincarnation to resurrect themselves once every 30 minutes, and Warlocks can utilize Soul Stones to preserve their own lives or the lives of other party or raid members for a period of 20 minutes. Also, engineers can make items (referred to as Jumper Cables) that can attempt to revive fallen players as well. This is not 100% effective, but it can be nice to have in the case where all other classes can resurrect may have died, but an engineer remains alive.
• threat: Threat is basically a measure of how much attention an NPC enemy is paying to you. This can be manipulated in various ways including the following:

Directly attacking an enemy in melee range. This generates the most threat outside of spells and abilities.

Directly attacking an enemy at a distance (ranged attacks and spells) - this causes the second most threat outside of spells and abilities.

Healing a target that has threat on an enemy. This will earn the healer some threat as well. In almost all scenarios, healing does not cause enough threat to pull aggro from a tank that has control of an enemy, but it should be noted that healing and casting helpful spells does in fact generate threat.

• Wipe: Wipe can have two meanings in World of Warcraft. A wipe is when an attack/encounter against enemies results in the encounter ending with the enemy returning to full health and usually entails the death of all members of the raid/party (except those that have certain abilities to avoid death, such as 'Feign Death' or 'Vanish'.

• Soulstone
• Bubble
• Misdirect
• Sap
• Trap
• Divine Intervention

Needs simplification

• Line of Sight (LoS): Line of Sight is a tactic occasionally used to engage enemies. At times, the opportunity can arise that there are more than one enemy to be encountered at a time, or a situation presents itself where engaging a group of enemies can put the group at risk of bringing additional, unwanted enemies. It can also be the case that groups of enemies can contain caster type enemies, which are tougher to gain threat on as a tank (unless that tank uses special abilities).

LoS is when a tank utilizes terrain to engage an enemy and try to control the path by which the enemy travels to the party/raid. This can be very useful for a couple of reasons because it can create a situation where caster mobs follow the tank to the group because they do not have a line of sight' on their target and need to move to position to cast. This can position groups of enemies together as well, creating a situation where a tank style class can work more easily to generate threat on multiple enemies at once (such as the use of a Paladin's Consecrate ability, or a Warrior's Thunderclap/Shockwave ability, or a Druid's Swipe).