My solution to this problem is what I call Dynamic Assist. I can assist any player in my party simply by pressing a hotkey. No, I don't put 5 buttons on my hotbar to do this. That would be wasteful. This is what I do instead.
Under your key mapping options under the WAR Main Menu (the WAR icon in the top middle of your screen by default), you'll see the default options for assisting your party members. By default, these are set to Shift + F2-F6. By default Shift 1-5 rotates your main hotbar. How many people actually make use of that? (My guess is about zero.) So I made Shift 2-6 assist group member.
With my Razer Naga, it's very easy for me to move, target, and fire off abilities all at the same time. Now I can also assist any party member I want easily. I don't get to use this feature as much as I'd like since I usually end up being the target caller in my parties, but when I'm not, I can assist anyone in the blink of an eye without missing a beat. If you don't have one, you should get one. For $80, it's one of the best things I've done to improve my game.
Guild Wars has a system that has people assisting in PUGs (although a lot of people still ignore it, PUGs still use it pretty often). I haven't played GW in years, so I can't remember exactly how it works, but all the person had to do was press T (or assigned button) and they would target the main assist.
ReplyDeleteI think this worked well because there would be a chat notifier letting everyone know who that person was targeting. It was built into the game from launch, so no mods were required (no mods in GW anyway). Also it was such an easily accessible button that people could easily use it.
(me above)
ReplyDeleteI should note that anyone can be the person that does the targeting, so PUGs just have to let someone choose who does the targeting. Here are some quick google results:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/call-your-target-t17177.html
Here is a WAR player talking about it:
http://rvrconfessions.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/so%e2%80%a6-what-is-up-with-main-assist/
And the money quote:
"Then I suddenly missed how in Guild Wars, anyone could call out a target, and once a target is called, the name of the target will be displayed on the chat window (you don’t have to type!) and finally the teammates will be able to push F1 to acquire the target. Its that easy! And everyone can call out the target, not just the team leader (I mean at least in PuG everyone calls targets, in a Pre-Made the tanks usually are the once that call targets).
Would it work a lot better if WAR has a system like that? The answer to that is… At least in my mind, it probably will work a lot better than the current Main Assist system."
So yeah, there are better systems out there than the way WAR does main assist. I would recommend you look a little more into this if you were that interested.
That would not be difficult to implement. It would be as simple as adding a party chat message that the main assist can trigger by hitting the main assist button.
ReplyDelete@Ted
ReplyDeleteTrue, but the system all has the other feature that was discussed, allowing for anyone to be the main assist should someone die. And this is a core feature of GW, which makes it easily accessible to everyone that plays the game, not just those that stay up to date with mods. These together make it an easy to use system that everybody does use, unlike the main assist feature that only organized groups use (which still has flaws).