Is that an ice cube in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Running Slave Pens for the first time last night, I was asked to do some crowd control. Very cool. Chain Trapping is becoming one of my favorite parts of the game. Complex job of juggling trap cooldowns, aggro management of the mob you're controlling, and the team effort and discipline to allow you to control your mob. Add in that you also are trying to deliver punishment to the main mob that the team is burning down, and I'm having a real good time.

Without going through the mechanics in detail, I'll just say that I learned that one of the keys to chain trapping is not the hunter, it is the team around the hunter.

Everyone did an awesome job supporting me in my chain trapping.

Firstly, the group leader always put the blue square up as soon as he could, so I knew I had to trap and could put the trap down and get my cooldowns going. Maybe saved us 5 seconds per pull, which isnt much, but really makes the team feel like chain trapping is seamless and not interrupting the flow of the game because the idiot hunter has to wait for his stupid traps.

Next, semi-obvious one, nobody attacked my mob. During the night, not a single time did someone break a trap of a mob that was marked for freezer. In fact, the only trap that was broken was during a chaotic fight where we didn't see a patrol, so we pulled a group and had the pat show up and jump us. On the fly, I picked a mob that looked like it wasn't receiving any direct damage, so I could pull him off pretty easily. I did pull him and freeze him, but a teammate mistook the mob's movement for running at the healer, so she tried to help out. Completely good intentions, and a good move in general, so no problem with the broken trap. Plus she apologized afterwards, which won big points with the hunter.

Thirdly, they gave me space. On the initial pull, I'd place my trap off to the side where ever possible. The tank would engage and position the other mobs a little away from there so as to not interfere with my traps. And even better, they seemed to be aware of where I was placing my second trap and stayed away from there. In the Slave Pens, I was finding a bunch of open spaces so I was able to maintain good distance between my two trapping positions, allowing me a few extra seconds to deliver DPS down range while a mob was running at my waiting trap.

It was funny because at first, I don't think they were doing this on purpose. I think they just naturally were going about their jobs burning down the mobs in order. Because on the first few pulls, after the uncontrolled mobs were dead, they'd forget that there was 1 more left 25 yards behind them. On one of the early pulls, I actually ran up to them, into their line of sight and started jumping and pointing, because nobody saw my text message "ice cube behind you". Everyone got a chuckle out of that, and they learned to trust that at the end of each fight that started with a blue square going up, there would be a nice an tidy package waiting for them to beat on after all the action cooled down.

So one of the happier parts of the night was during a corpse run after a wipe. I posted the screenshot, the text conversation speaks for itself. If you click, the popup has the whole screen, not just the chat.

I tried to explain to them that they were the reason I was doing well, but they didn't want to hear it. I guess that's the sign of a good team in an of itself.