Friday, January 28, 2011

How to use Leap of Faith

Ever since Cata was first announced and the betas first opened, the spell on every priests lips, and many other classes lips too, was Life Grip, aka Leap of Faith. Everyone wanted to see how it looked, how it worked and ponder what uses it could have in the new instances and raids, and now we have the answer. In this post I thought I'd take you through a couple of areas of usage for this great spell, so that you can get the most out of your Life Grip!

Saving the forgetful
As I have been saying many times before, no one is perfect. There will be times when a great try on a boss is ruined by someone being absent minded for a split second. One great example is the tank (or anyone actually) being caught by tornadoes on Al'Akir. Just use Life Grip is to simply drag these people out of harms way and be the hero of the day, you might very well have saved a wipe with one single spell! To help you help them you can have them tell you if they happen to get caught in shit, it happens to everyone. Just make it perfectly clear that this isn't going to be a standard way of moving out of fire!

Kiting
There are a couple of bosses in which things need to be kited. One example is Atramedes where, during the airphase, the one who is targetted by his beam should try to kite it for as long as possible to avoid using gongs. In normal you can use many gongs, but trying to work towards lowering the usage is an important step to managing this fight on heroic eventually. Being able to work together with the kiter to drag him out of the beam in a critical moment will make wonders. Just let him burn all his speed cooldowns and tell you when he needs that final pull, and you can give it to him. Another example is when Chimaeron shifts into phase 2. Drag the tank out of harms way asap to allow him to kite the boss as long as possible while everyone else burns him down.

Positioning the slow
Some bosses do knockbacks, throwing people all over the place. One example is Feludius on Ascendant Council who will knock the tank back with his frost aoe. If you have a tank that can't charge, it could be nice to try to help him get back to his target by pulling him there. Or if someone is having trouble getting to a Sink hole/Tornado to get their Grounded/Airborne buff.
Another example, which is similar to the first point, is when someone needs to get out of a group asap, but runs too slow. If you happen to be in the right position, and don't mind taking a blow (which in any case could be a better idea than having many people take the blow) you could pull him out of the group to you. An example is yet again on Ascendant Council when people get the Lightning Rod Debuff, or on Valiona & Theralion when someone has Blackout (although in that case you actually want to pull them into the group).

Winning corpse runs
I don't know if many guilds do this, but in my guild it is common that people compete to get to the boss chamber as fast as possible after a wipe. Any means necessary to achieve this (except pulling mobs and killing people) is allowed, and one great way to win over your fellow comrades in this kind of run is to pull them back to your position with Life Grip and then use B&S to run past them on the finish line.

Killing people by deception
There are a couple of things the Life Grip won't do. It won't clean your house or do your dishes, and it won't save people from falling off cliffs either. It is important to note that. So another fun way to use Life Grip would be to tell people that you'll pull them back when they jump off a cliff and see them fall to their demise while you cackle above their heads. Just don't do this during a fight or you might have an angry raid leader on you.

2 comments:

  1. Some very useful tips on where to use LoF in raids - I've been starting to look for opportunities myself lately. So far, I've only used it at Atramedes to help the kiter out (usually we use a druid in catform) and it sure is great for that.

    And LoF was basically created to grip back cheeky mages blinking ahead of us during corpseruns!! ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. In deadmines on the bridges where they shoot cannonballs at you, there will always, with almost no exception, be someone that gets knocked into the water and will have to swim back to the beginning to start over. I have used lifegrip here to pull them back onto the bridge several times the past weeks alone.

    ReplyDelete