| abstract
| - A vital part of team play is being able to work together as a team to accomplish a goal. Well in AO that goal generally involves blasting some poor thingumy senseless, and luckily the game has a system aspect to help people do this better. This system aspect is the /assist command. The syntax for the command is ‘/assist ’ and typing that into your command bar with a name in will make you target the person that is attacking. Keep in mind though that this will only make you target what they are attacking, not actually attack it yourself. Now this command is fairly useful in itself but, it gets to be a pain to type it over and over again every time somebody in your team has a nice juicy target. The solution to this is to make a macro out of this command so you can drop it in your quick bar to use at will! The syntax to make assist macro is /macro /assist . Typing this will produce a box on your cursor that you can drop in the quick bar. The argument is what will show up in the little box as the name, generally this name is something like ‘Assist’ or the name of your caller (‘Leetpwnerteh3rd’). The argument is the same as the above and reflects the person who you want to assist. Instead of typing out that macro over and over every time you get a new team, you can make a macro to do it for you; Then you target your caller, hit the macro, and drop the resulting macro onto your hotbar. Now, on occasion, I get somebody who talks crazy talk to me that goes something like: “You shouldn’t worry about assisting because generally the target is obvious.�? Well this is crazy talk. In mass battles and raids, the target is not always obvious amidst 20-50 people and possibly an equal amount of mobs. The next argument is related to this type of scenario and sounds like: “Well in mass battles you need people to balance and occupy all the attackers, if you don’t they will kill people.�? To this I will pose the point: this is why we have enforcers. On a more serious note there is a very good, scientific, reason why you should concentrate on killing one mob at a time in a mass battle. The reason for this is that over all, if you kill one mob at a time, the mobs will do less damage over all to you and your team. How? Well thing of it like this: We have a team of 6 players and a group of 6 mobs. Each mob is attacking a different player, while all the players are attacking the same mob. Each damage cycle the players are acting as one mob and will deal six times the damage to one mob to give an increased chance of killing it. Once one of the mobs is dead it no longer deals its damage (duh). Now if we say that each mobs and each player deal 100 damage on every hit, and they all have 600 health we can model with as such… Players deal 600 damage to Mob1 Mob1 Dies Mob2 Deals 100 damage to Player2 (500/600) Mob3 Deals 100 damage to Player3 (500/600) Mob4 Deals 100 damage to Player4 (500/600) Mob5 Deals 100 damage to Player5 (500/600) Mob6 Deals 100 damage to Player6 (500/600) Players deal 600 damage to Mob2 Mob2 dies Mob3 Deals 100 damage to Player3 (400/600) Mob4 Deals 100 damage to Player4 (400/600) Mob5 Deals 100 damage to Player5 (400/600) Mob6 Deals 100 damage to Player6 (400/600) Players deal 600 damage to Mob3 Mob3 dies Mob4 Deals 100 damage to Player4 (300/600) Mob5 Deals 100 damage to Player5 (300/600) Mob6 Deals 100 damage to Player6 (300/600) Players deal 600 damage to Mob4 Mob4 dies Mob5 Deals 100 damage to Player5 (200/600) Mob6 Deals 100 damage to Player6 (200/600) Players deal 600 damage to Mob5 Mob5 dies Mob6 Deals 100 damage to Player6 (100/600) Players deal 600 damage to Mob6 Mob6 dies In this example, everybody stays alive. If you can imagine each player attacking the corresponding mob, then it would come down to luck on who takes the last strike first for the killing blow, and also each player winds up more hurt over all then if they all assisted. Which means that the team is more in danger of dying from surprise adds, traps, or other fun problems. A couple final notes. In a situation where you have a caller in team, when your target dies you should just spam your assist macro till you get a new target instead of trying to pick one out on your own. If you attack a mob that nobody else in the team knows about you could draw unwanted aggro onto you and the team. Its always really useful to have a script to make assist macros for you and your team, so try and dig one up. Ihnnaw posted his versions here:
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