(This article was written by our second-place winner in the writing contest. A young man who plays under the toon name Lithanial. He’s got tons of great information, especially about druids. Lithanial is the fellow who tanked Grull in moonkin form, a style he calls the Panzerkin. He’s creative and a great writer, you’re going to love his info.)

Have you ever wished you could keep your eye on two targets at once with no hassle whatsoever? The good news is that you can! The bad news however, is that to be able to do so can be rather complex if you don’t know how to set it up.

Within the basic functions of WoW is a feature called focus targeting which allows you to assign yourself a second target separate from your normal one; this second target will be locked and unable to change until you specifically tell it to.

On its own this feature would not be too useful. But with the use of a few simple macros you can set up custom spell buttons that will affect your focus target, rather than your normal target; this is where focus targeting starts to shine.

So why would you go through the effort of setting up focus targeting for yourself? Here is a short list of what can be achieved with a little careful configuration :-

> Be able to heal a friend without having to target them.
> Be able to quickly crowd control an opponent without switching targets.
> Be able to keep an eye on enemy healers in PvP for well timed spell interrupts.
> Be able to attack two mobs in melee with little effort for much better multi-mob aggro generation.
> And many more uses besides.

Hopefully that will have grabbed your attention, so how do you go about configuring focus targeting? The first thing you need to do is create a macro button to assign your current target as your focus target.

Log into the game and then go into the options menu. There is a button labeled macros on the main menu, press that to open up your macro window. From here create a new macro; select whichever icon you desire and name it “Focus.”

In the bottom window of the macro frame you can add the macro program, in this case it is just a simple case of typing in:

/focus

that’s it, nothing more, nothing less. And it should look something like this.

Now drag your new button from the macro window in to a free slot on your UI, when you press your new button it will assign your current target as your focus target.

The next step is to create a spell macro that will cast your ability at your focus target rather than your current target. Again, go into the macro window and create a new macro with a name and icon of your choice.

When adding the macro program this time type:

/cast [target=focus] spellname

now this can be tricky depending on the spell as the spell rank data needs to be entered as well, luckily there is an easy way to get it right. When entering the spell name, rather than typing it in, shift-click on the icon within your spell book that you wish to cast.

By shift-clicking the icon, its spell name and its rank is automatically placed into your macro for you, assuming both windows are open.

Now drag this new icon into a usable interface position and get ready to try it out. First off target anything, then press your first macro to assign it as your focus; next, target something else and then press your second macro.

The spell should now cast at your focus target despite you having something completely different as your main target!

Feel free to experiment with creating new macros for whichever spells you would find most useful and in part 2 I shall show you how you can expand upon the focus targeting feature with some custom UI mods to take full advantage of it.

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