Auto-targeting for AOE

The WHU has a pretty good post today about something that had been bothering me in my last 5 man: that targeting bug fix in 4.1 made it so that pressing a button wouldn’t select a target. While this sounds good for actual raid DPS (nobody likes accidentally pulling), it’s pretty bad for AOE packs. The problem with AOE is that while you are mashing multi-shot and your focus regen, some mobs are dying faster than others. If one that you’re selecting dies in the middle of, say, a steady shot, that shot is wasted.

I had developed a particular set of habits based on the old system of targeting.

• Every time we had stopped pulling, I would target myself, and if any mobs were in range, face away from them. The only time I pulled, it wasn’t an “accident”. Also, completely unrelated pro tip: if the hunter misdirected to the rogue, it’s never an accident.
• When my AOE target died, I’d hit multishot to select a new target. It had the same function as tab targeting, and this feature saw a lot of use in heroics.

As Frost pointed out in his WHU post, you can macro “/startattack” before anything you want and it will tab-target for you, just like it used to. Instead of aimed shot, however, I’d probably use multi-shot.