Chain trapping

Chain Trapping and You

Posted on Tuesday, 06.12.2007 by Lassirra
This article contains outdated information.

Lassirra’s Guide to Keeping Mobs out of Your Grill
In a previous entry regarding my advice to aspiring young hunters, I briefly mentioned the art of chain trapping. Here, I’d like to go into more detail about how exactly chain trapping is done with style and grace.
Lay the Trap
Before you begin the pull, you should lay your trap. Because traps have a 30 second cooldown and only 20 seconds of control capability, you need to accommodate the gap by preparing your trap early. However, it’s not just important to know when to lay your trap, it’s also important to know where to lay your trap. There are a few different viable and desirable locations, and I’ll illustrate each below.
The most desirable location for your trap will be away from where the main fight will take place. This will reduce the chances that your trap may be inadvertently broken by you or your party members. Also, this will help keep the field of view clear so that you and your party members can more easily see what’s going on around you. Take a look at the diagrams below to get a better idea of what I mean.

In an ideal world, you’d have plenty of room to spread out and use the space available to you to create a buffer between your trapped mob and the rest of your party. The diagram above would demonstrate trap placement under ideal circumstances. As you can see, the hunter would place his or her trap between themselves and the mobs in a location that is away from the rest of the party and the place where most of the fighting will take place.
However, it cannot be ignored that most instances do not provide what we would consider ideal circumstances, and so some adjustments must be made. Things to consider when making adjustments to the location of your trap would include (but may not be limited to): physical barriers such as walls and hallways, and other nearby groups of mobs. When you encounter these problems, you’ll need to know how to adjust the placement of your trap accordingly, while still allowing yourself and other party members the necessary buffer room. The diagrams below will offer a couple suggestions.

This diagram illustrates potential trap placement when space is impeded by physical barriers such as walls, particularly in narrow hallways. As you can see, your trap placement will be closer to your other party members than before, but still a ways away from where the actual fighting will take place during the encounter.

The above diagram illustrates trap placement when one must be mindful of other nearby mobs. As you can see, there isn’t much difference between accommodating for physical barriers and adjusting for nearby mob groups. However, the big thing here is to be careful of your movement during the fight. Obviously, there’s no harm in accidentally running into a wall, however, getting too close to another group of mobs can cause party wipes, so its important to watch where you’re running. (And, of course, this is true in general, not just when laying traps for crowd control.)
Getting the Mob to Your Trap
This is, in some cases, the easiest part of chain trapping. One thing I’ve noticed that bears mentioning right off the bat, is that you should let your tank know before starting any pulls that you are capable of getting the proper mob to your trap without any aid from them. In fact, them trying to “help” you get mobs to your trap is, in my experience, a hindrance to the process. Countless times, I’ve had tanks try to “help” me, by pulling mobs to my traps, only to trap the wrong mob before my cooldown is up to lay another, and then they continue to hit the trapped mob because it wasn’t the correct mob that hit the trap to begin with, and I’m left getting hit in the face by a mob that would otherwise have been trapped and out of the fight. So, its important to let your tank know–you can get the mob to your trap without help, and that they should just continue as if you and your designated mob weren’t even there.
With that out of the way, you can get on with your designated task: trapping the mob. When the pull starts, generally the tank will hit the mob that is designated as the first DPS target to generate some threat right away. As your tank pulls that target, have your trap mob targeted, and fire off an Arcane or Distracting Shot or a similar “instant” shot to get the mob’s attention. Once you’ve seen that the mob is headed in your direction, stop firing and wait for the mob to hit the trap. Once you’re sure that the mob has hit the trap and is incapacitated, move aside and begin DPS on the designated DPS target.
Sounds pretty easy, right? Well, there is a bit more to it than that. First, you have to know what kind of mob you’ll be trapping in order to know how best to get it to your trap. The process described above generally applies to mobs that deal melee damage. They’re the easiest to trap. You just hit them to get their attention, and walk them to your trap. Done deal. But what about casters? They’re a bit trickier. If you’re a Marksman hunter with Silencing Shot, it’ll quickly become your best friend when chain trapping. If you’ve been designated a caster to trap, pop a Silencing Shot to make sure the mob is forced into melee combat and to get their attention, and the next thing you know, the caster will be in your face, and on your trap. If you don’t have Silencing Shot, though, the process is a bit more difficult. You’ll need to either back up to get out of the mob’s range in order to get them to run into your trap, or place the trap next to a wall or corner to get out of the mob’s Line of Sight to get them onto your trap, if such barriers are available to you. If neither of these options is available to you, let your party leader know this. Chances are, they’ll be able to designate a melee mob for you to trap, and either mark a caster as the DPS target, or have another party member (such as a mage) CC the caster as their methods of crowd control aren’t as location-sensitive.
The lesson here is to know your limitations. If you think you may have some difficulty trapping a specific mob, don’t try to be a hero and tough it out. Let your party leader know, so that they can find a more workable solution that won’t put the party at risk. Hunters are great for crowd control, but we’re not fool-proof.
Re-Trapping Your Mob
The term “chain trapping” denotes the fact that you have to trap a specific mob more than once to keep it out of a fight. So, following the process described above, you’ve placed your trap and gotten the mob you want to the trap. Now what?
This is where you need to pay close attention to what’s going on around you. This is the multi-tasking portion of the hunter’s job. At this point, your designated mob should be trapped, and you’re turning your attention to the DPS target and sending in your pet. This is good, but now you also need to pay attention to your cooldowns. (If you haven’t already, I suggest you pick up the AddOn “Cooldown Timers” or OmniCC, as they’re both great tools for keeping track of all your abilities that you’re waiting to be able to use again. Particularly traps.) After your mob was trapped, you should’ve stepped aside a bit to begin DPS on the main target. Keep an eye on your trap cooldown, and as soon as its up, lay another at your feet and continue DPS. Even if your mob was trapped only 5 seconds ago, if your trap cooldown is up, lay your next trap. (Remember, traps stay active for 90 seconds. Your first trap will break long before that amount of time has passed.)
Your best-case scenario for chain trapping is that your cooldown is partially, if not mostly or completely, up by the time your mob hits it for the first time. The reason for this is that it gives you more breathing room later on. The more time you have between the time you lay your next trap and the time your previous trap breaks, the easier things will be for you. You’ll have more time to watch the fight unfold, and more time to position yourself properly and plan ahead for any potential mishaps.
So at this point, you should have your second trap down and waiting for the first trap to break, while you continue providing DPS on the main target. As soon as your first trap breaks, you should be first on that mob’s hate list still, so it’ll go running straight for you–and your next trap, without your having to switch targets. If you’re positioned properly next to your new trap, the mob shouldn’t even have time to take a swing at you before triggering the second trap. Once the mob has hit your second trap, step back to the other side (where you laid the first trap) and wait for your cooldown to run out again. As soon as it does, lay your next trap. You can keep that same mob trapped in this fashion indefinitely.
If for some reason your trap breaks before your cooldown is up, rather than run around panicked that there’s something whacking at your face, call your pet back and have it off-tank temporarily until your cooldown is up and you can lay another trap. Beast Master hunters, a simple pop of Intimidation should be enough to get your pet the aggro for the time being. Marksman and Survivalist hunters, manually proc growl real quick, but do not set it to auto proc. One Growl should be enough for your pet to pick the mob off you. Once your pet has aggro, give it a Mend Pet (so your healer won’t have to waste a heal on your pet, and you won’t have to worry about it going down too soon) and wait for your trap cooldown. Once your cooldown is up, lay the trap. Wait for the mob to trigger the trap, and then send your pet back to the DPS target. (You wait for the mob to trigger the trap, so that it doesn’t follow your pet back to the main fight. If for some reason the mob does follow your pet, target it and pop a Distracting Shot real quick to bring it back to you and your trap.)
Practice Makes Perfect
Essentially, you now know all you need to in order to successfully chain trap a mob. The rest comes down to practice. Seeing how mobs move and react and determining proper trap placement and timing all comes down to having practiced chain trapping over and over again. If you don’t do instances enough to practice this, try it while you’re out soloing. Pull two or more mobs at a time, and see if you can keep one chain trapped throughout the fight. The more you practice this, and see what happens under various circumstances, the more prepared you’ll be for anything you may encounter in an instance. The big part of successful chain trapping is awareness of what’s going on around you.
I’m currently working on compiling a video of various examples of chain trapping that should also help give you a better idea of what the whole process looks like. When the video’s finished, I’ll be posting it in the “Videos” section, as well as answering any questions folks may still have about the process.