Having read the posts about clickers and keybindings, I'm going to make a few changes to the way I play. I'm a reformed clicker by the way. Useful as they were, none of the posts I read address one of my most fundamental and irritating problems: Efficiently and quickly acquiring the right target.

Some examples: How do you target a sprinting rogue between a lod of fat taurens? How do you find the right mob to peel off when there are several warriors and you haven't bothered to spend time on assigning targets? Is there some magic way to identify untanked mobs? Why do I sometimes inexplicably lose my target in the middle of attacking? What's the most efficient way to switch between 2 or 3 mobs to try and hold aggro on all of them. I find that tab is utterly useless. It will never select the target right in front of my nose. When there are two mobs and I have one targetted, tab often irritatingly won't switch me to the other one. I have a macro to /target Blackwing Mage that only seems to work at fairly close range. When I see a mage at say 30 yards it will still target Legionnaires instead.

Am I just slow and cack handed and should have played more 'whack the mole' when I was little? I play a rogue, occasional priest and noob tank in case anyone is wondering about the mix of examples.

Hitting 'v' and click on the bars works sometimes.

Tab Tab Tab Tab

Oops, tabbed past my target

Shift+Tab

--

I *think* it was Wodin who posted (a long, long time ago) that Tab targetting seemed to work in quadrants in regards to your field of view with the nearest, left quadrant having the highest priority when Tabbing through targets. He mentioned that if you wanted to Tab-target something, it's best to readjust your camera so that target is in the bottom left quadrant of your field of view.

Edit - Correction: Furthest left quadrant, at around 9 o'clock.

Playing lots of Starcraft/Warcraft 3 will help you with your micro, I mean, targeting ability. Also, editing the config file to allow your tab targeting to select targets 41 (or more) yards ahead of you (best tweak ever) is also really handy for picking out people in crowds.

If your raid is taking the time to mark all the mobs with lucky charm symbols then I would suggest you use bananabar its a pretty useful mod. For instance lets say you want to attack the moon, it tells you the name of the moon mob, it also tells you how many people are targeting the moon, It has a similar function for hunters mark. You do not have to use ctraid to use this mod it works stand alone, it adds to the main tank window if you do use ctraid.



http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...s-ct_raid.html

Do share.

Much appreciated.

After playing for 2 years, targeting can still be tricky. I find the on board <target previous enemy> functionality especially unreliable, particularly where there are several identically named mobs.

When I need to quickly obtain a fresh target I will try to capture it with my cursor at the same that I'm spamming the Tab key. Occasionally I get lucky and tab to the target before I could have successfully mouse clicked. Also, I've gotten quite good at quickly adjusting my facing in order to increase the likelihood of tabbing to the correct target.

I use an add-on called AutoTarget (http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/a...utotarget.html) that will lock on to a target just mousing over them, without clicking, if it matches certain configurable criteria. I really only use it in pvp, have it set to only lock on when the target is pvp flagged, hostile, and over lvl 56. Allows me to just swing my mouse over that sprinting noggenfogger'd gnome rogue and have it targeted, without timing a mouse click on those 4 pixels.

I have long given up on tab targeting, especially in pvp, as it will never target the healer in the back of the group.

There are actually two settings that control tab targetting behavior:

SET TargetNearestDistance "X"
SET TargetNearestDistanceRadius "X"

TargetNearestDistance controls the maximum distance from which targets are acquired in a 45 degree frontal cone.
TargetNearestDistanceRadius controls the maximum distance from which targets are acquired in a full 360 degree arc.

It seems to me that targets are picked from nearest to farthest first from those in the frontal cone and then from the full circle.

Keep in mind that the units for these settings do not correspond to yards. From a rough test it seems to me that 1.1 units ~= 1 yard. So 30 yards would be 33 units.

is it possible to make tab targeting target mobs behind you?

or some equivlency?

edit: i'm slow, nevermind

There needs to be a config.wtf setting to increase the viewable range of the geography in WoW like there is in Grand Theft Auto. My PC can take seeing more than just faded colors more than a 100m away.

Trying play with the "farclip" setting. That'll do what you want.

I'll type /tar name sometimes :)

Most times I just click, however.

I haven't really gotten into Tab for some reason, even though I used a similar mechanic in guild wars... I think my problem with Tab-targetting is you never know what you're going to get next, especially if the enemy is moving around.

Maybe I'll try expanding my tab target range as suggested above and give it another try.

The issue is the max range is set to be the width of one ADT tile and WoW only shows adt's up to one tile away. Prolly has at least a 16 tile cache though.

Top left, but yeah. If you impose a clock face on your screen, just imagine sweeping clockwise from 9PM.

Just use tab for the most part, or a combination of V bars + switching when the monster is at 5%. Raid symbols have made me pretty obselete though.

I use my mouse wheel to scroll through targets. Up = TAB analog, down = previous target.

A few other useful things:
http://wowinterface.com/downloads/fileinfo.php?id=5403 - for friendly NPC targeting
TargetByName accepts an optional [exactMatch] parameter, so currently /script TargetByName("Blackwing Mage",1) won't target a legionairre. I think in TBC it will be /target Blackwing Mage,1 if I understand Cogwheel correctly.

http://wowace.com/files/oTweaks/oTweaks-r15658.zip

For easy configuration of the tab targeting range.

Another usefull tip, although maybe not EXACTLY what the OP is looking for:

For DAB users, I bind my middle mouse button to a hidden floater. On the floater is a macro that checks a DAB variable if you are autoattacking. If you aren't, turn on autoattack.

This has the nice ability of targeting the nearest mob, if you have no target, and attacking it. Turns on your autoattack if you have a target, too. I find it usefull in situations like clearing the suppression room. My FPS goes to shit in that place, clicking those little whelps can be very unreliable, even the big dragonkin can be a pain.

/tar a : bind to shift+a
/tar b
/tar c

etc :p

I like that idea, is it possible to bind things like "shift + scroll up" ?

My druid uses the mouse scroll for cheetah and human forms, so was wondering if i could use the shift modifier + scroll as my tab.