TAB targetting

[Sukurachi]

Am I the only one having trouble with TAB-targetting?

It clearly says in the key bindings that TAB "targets the nearest target".

It apparently does not.
On so many occasions now I have been facing two mobs, fighting one, and used TAB to switch to the other one, also standing right in front of me and eating my face, and to my utter surprise and dismay, the game went and selected a mob that was completely out of my field of vision, off to one side, and YARDS away from me.

This is getting ridiculously dangerous. An incredibly annoying.
Is there a fix for this?

Yesterday while fighting in Broken Isles I literally had to click my targets to make sure I wasn't aggroing more than I could deal with.

An example: I have a lone mob about 10 feet in front of me. I would like to target that single mob, launch a single arrow, and kite the mob to a more secluded area to continue the fight (pets on passive, etc...)

30 feet behind that mob is a small pack of similar mobs.

I press TAB... and notice that I have one of that distant group as my target now, instead of the mob that is pacing back and forth directly in front of me.

Could this be a relic of the old "minimum useful distance" thing that Hunters suffered from back in the bad old days, where our ranged weapons were totally pointless within a certain range?

[Rawr]

Yes, I too have pulled many more mobs that needed because I used tab and it targeted something barely in range, not the mob two steps from me.

[Talihawk]

Yes tab has been broken since legion dropped. ;P I have an addon, but honestly I'm not sure it's helping much.

[zedxrgal]

Good to know I am not suffering alone on this. Tab targeting seems to be hell bent on choosing the mob the furthest distance away. It's been so bad I to have stopped using tab. Strangely part of me wonders if it may be a weapon related issue. I'll check tomorrow but I believe my sv hunter doesn't have this issue whereas my MM and BM do.
I'll let you all know if you'd like.

[Nachtwulf]

Yeah, it loves to pick the mob on the far side of the room, two packs away. It's not just you; I cuss it daily. I also like (not) how it loves to preferentially target flagged players, even if you're not flagged yourself, so you just get line after line of 'you can't do that' while not actually hitting anything useful.

[Sukurachi]

Strangely part of me wonders if it may be a weapon related issue. I'll check tomorrow but I believe my sv hunter doesn't have this issue whereas my MM and BM do.
I'll let you all know if you'd like.

which makes me wonder again if this is somehow some legacy code that's related to the days when we had a minimum useful distance with a ranged weapon. maybe something about making SV hunters melée resurrected a bit of code from that era?

[Makoes]

[Wain]

I loved that Dark Legacy comic

Tab targetting has always been a bit funky. You can be staring a mob in the face and instead it'll select a mob 20 degrees to the right and 50 metres away. I'm always cautious with it, but I still use it all the time.

I know at the start of Legion they introduced new algorithms and they mustn't have been going so well because they did post something about reverting them. I'm unsure of the details though.

[peanutbuttercup]

Tab targeting has pretty much always been broken (just like pet pathing!) but it happens to be worse in Legion than before, if that's even possible. I do still use it as I always have, but it just means that 1) you do get unwanted pulls sometimes, and sometimes that's in a raid and 2) that you just have to be that much quicker to react to try and deselect the unwanted target. If you're quick enough, you should be able to stop the auto shot from going off.

That Dark Legacy comic is the TRUTH. Anyone who has run Karazhan has seen those ridiculous pulls!

[zedxrgal]

Ok so after A LOT of play time yesterday. I am 95% certain that a hunter's weapon does have some sort of tab targeting problem. I got my BM Draenei huntress from 106 to 110 and in that time a lot of far away mobs were pulled. I mean a lot. Thankfully she actually had ok gear and survived for the most part. But it was VERY annoying to think you're attacking a withered 10 feet from you when it's really the withered 50 feet from you behind some rocks and trees.
My SV gnome hunter though. Lets just say during the quest line for Moon Guard Stronghold she did not misstarget one time. And there are way way too many mobs there that respawn like rabbits. So a wrong tab target could have been disastrous numerous times.
I didn't make it onto my MM hunter sadly.

So whatever change was made it definitely may have effected different weapons because ranged seems to be truly ranged where it's going to target a mob the furthest distance from the character at times

[Sukurachi]

thank-you zedxrgal,
this sort of reinforces the idea that it might be some legacy code related to the old minimum/maximum distance for hunters' ranged weapons from the days of "that's a hunter weapon".

[Xella]

I'm not so sure; I've had it happen just as often when playing my casters (which I've been leveling up nonstop); the big difference between my hunter and my balance druid (for example) is that I have the length of the cast time to realize my error and correct my ways before I'm stuck in the thick of it.

Tab targeting on Korgath is nearly useless nowadays because of both the "which target it picks" bug and CRZ (Korgath is an Alliance-dominated PvP server, but our CRZ averages more like 10:1 in favour of the Horde; good luck tab targetting during any world quest and not selecting an undead mage or something.)

[PrimalTazza]

I remember a post several months back mentioning that Blizzard was "reworking" tab target functionality in Legion to be "better." Yeah, it seems even worse than it was before.