Every tavern has its own slang, and raid groups are worse than most. Half my readers learned these words mid-wipe, shouted at full volume, with zero explanation attached. So here is the house dictionary: the terms my guides use, translated the way I would explain them across the table.
Words you hear before you understand them
These are the ones encounter designers build entire fights around. Know them cold and half of every boss guide starts making sense.
Active mitigation
The buttons a tank presses to stay alive on purpose, not by accident. Shield walls you time yourself, buffs you keep rolling through the scary parts. If your tank treats these as optional, your healers will tell you. Loudly.
AoE and cleave
Damage that hits more than one thing. AoE is the general word, cleave means your main target eats the full hit while the neighbors catch the splash. Groups live or die on knowing which fights want which.
Best in slot
Shortened to BiS. The mathematically best item for a given slot and spec, according to people with more patience for spreadsheets than I will ever have. Worth chasing, not worth crying over — the difference between BiS and second-best is usually smaller than one avoided mechanic.
Crowd control and hard stops
Anything that tells an enemy to sit down: slows, roots, stuns, fears, knockbacks. Soft control annoys them, hard stops end casts outright. My routes mark exactly which casts deserve a hard stop and which you can let fly.
Letters your group screams at you
The acronyms. Learn these and voice chat stops sounding like a foreign language.
- GCD, the global cooldown. The short lockout after every ability. All pacing, all reaction speed, lives inside these seconds.
- Soak. Sharing a lethal hit across several players on purpose. Somebody has to stand in the glowing ring. Volunteers welcome.
- Lust or hero. Bloodlust or Heroism, the big party-wide haste party. Saved for burn phases and enrage races, wasted anywhere else.
- Frontal. The cone of death pointing at the tank. If you are standing in it and you are not the tank, that is on you.
- MDT. Mythic Dungeon Tools, the addon my routes are drawn in. Percentages, pulls, skips — the whole plan on one map.
- LoS, line of sight. Breaking enemy casting with walls and corners. My favorite trick in the game: bunch casters up behind a pillar and let the AoE do the talking.
Ideas hiding behind the math
The concepts that separate groups who time keys from groups who argue about them.
DPS, HPS and what actually matters
Damage and healing per second. Useful scoreboards, misleading gods. In progression the only number I care about is damage to the right target at the right second. Meters are for after the kill.
Diminishing returns
Stun the same mob over and over and each stun lands shorter, until the game hands it immunity out of pity. Spread your control across categories or watch your chain fall apart at the worst pull of the night.
Enrage, hard and soft
Hard enrage is a clock: when it hits zero the boss one-shots the room, full stop. Soft enrage is slower murder, mechanics piling up until healers run dry. Both mean the same thing in my calls: hurry, but hurry cleanly.
Threat and aggro
The invisible list deciding who the boss wants dead. Tanks cheat this list with multipliers and taunts. If a caster rips aggro mid-pull, somebody skipped the fundamentals — usually me, once per tier, like clockwork.
Four calls worth memorizing
- Baiting. Standing somewhere deliberate so the nasty ability goes there instead of the group. Brave. Occasionally fatal. Always appreciated.
- Kiting. Running away professionally while things die behind you. Tanks do it, hunters do it, mages pretend they invented it.
- Staggering. Spacing control and burst so nothing overlaps and nothing wastes. The difference between a plan and a pile of cooldowns.
- Soothe and purge. Ripping enrages and shields off enemies before they rip you. Deeply satisfying, criminally underused in pugs.
Three more words worth knowing
Newer additions to the house dictionary. If you only learn three things this tier, make it these.
The Great Vault
The big chest waiting every Tuesday. It pays out loot for the hardest content you cleared that week: tougher keys and bosses, better picks. Most of my midweek planning starts here, working backwards from what the Vault wants to see.
Affixes
A word with a past life. It used to mean the weekly modifiers bolted onto Mythic+ keys: same dungeon, different poison every reset. That system is retired history now, so if an old guide tells you to check this so-called affix week, smile and move on. In current patches the word lives on in the Prey hunts out on the Coiled Isle, where modifiers reshape open-world targets instead. When somebody says affix in 12.x, ask which game they are talking about.
Raider.IO score
A public number summarizing your key history. Groups use it as a resume because inspecting logs takes time nobody has. High score opens doors, low score starts conversations you do not want.
Keep this page open
Progression has its own dialect and it changes a little every tier, so this page grows whenever the game teaches me a new word. If a call in one of my guides confused you, tell me at info@tendemerveilles.com and it earns an entry here.