WoW Targeting, Assist & Swing Timer Terms

Most of what you do in a World of Warcraft fight happens through two invisible systems: who you are targeting, and when the game lets you act next. Targeting decides where your spells and auto-attacks land; the global cooldown, the spell queue and your weapon's swing timer decide how quickly you can follow one action with the next. Players who understand both waste fewer button presses and lose less damage to small delays.

This glossary covers the targeting commands, macro terms and timing terms you will meet in guides and group chat, with the differences between Classic (Classic Era, Hardcore, the Anniversary realms, MoP Classic) and retail Midnight. Quick reference first:

Term	In one line	Where it matters most
/assist	Take another player's target as your own	Groups with a kill order, raids, PvP
Focus	A second saved target you can act on without switching	Interrupts, crowd control
Attack target	The enemy your auto-attack and spells are aimed at	Everyone
Auto-target switching	Picking a new target automatically when yours dies	Retail Action Targeting, macros
Action delay	Time between pressing a key and the action happening	High-ping play, fast rotations
Global cooldown	The short lockout after most abilities	Rotations
Attack delay	Seconds between two auto-attacks (weapon speed)	Classic melee and hunters
Attack (swing) timer	The countdown to your next auto-attack	Classic warriors and hunters
/castsequence	A macro that casts a list of spells one press at a time	Leveling, simple rotations
Auto-interrupt	Tools that help you interrupt; true automation is not allowed	Mythic+, PvP

Assist (/assist command)

Assist means taking another player's target as your own. The slash command is /assist PlayerName (short form /a): your target becomes whatever that player is targeting. Typed with no name, /assist uses your current target, so targeting the tank and assisting them lands you on the tank's enemy. If the player you assist has no target, your target doesn't change.

Assist is most useful as a macro so it takes one key press. Two common forms:

• /assist [@focus] on a key: set the tank as your focus once, then one key always puts you on the tank's target.
• /assist PlayerName followed by /cast of your opener: assist and attack in one press.

Main assist. In raids one player can be named main assist (MA), the person whose target everyone else follows. A raid leader or assistant sets it with /mainassist PlayerName (/ma); /maintank does the same for tanks. Raid addons and assist macros can then use that role, and damage dealers assist that player instead of choosing targets themselves.

Assist is how groups keep a kill order without voice chat: in dungeons the tank's marked target dies first, in PvP the whole team switches to one healer at the same time.

Auto-assist

Auto-assist has two meanings:

1. Attacking automatically after an assist. The game has a setting for this, stored in the console variable assistAttack (off by default): when it is on, assisting someone also starts your auto-attack. Most players get the same result with a macro that ends with /startattack.
2. Following a leader's target automatically, usually in multiboxing or accessibility setups: every character's main button includes /assist on the leader, so pressing it always targets the leader's enemy first.

Neither form plays for you. Each assist still needs a key press, and software that presses keys or plays the game for you breaks Blizzard's rules. See also multiboxing in the general gaming terms.

Focus target

The focus is a second target the game remembers for you. Type /focus with an enemy targeted, and a separate focus frame shows its health and cast bar. Macros can then act on it without changing your main target:

• /cast [@focus] Kick interrupts the focus while you keep attacking something else;
• /cast [@focus] Polymorph re-applies crowd control to the same enemy every time.

Focus is the standard setup for interrupt assignments and for keeping a crowd-controlled enemy under control during a long pull.

Attack target

Your attack target is the enemy your auto-attack and your targeted abilities hit. You pick it by clicking, with Tab (the Target Nearest Enemy keybind; see tab targeting), through assist, or with the retail Action Targeting option.

Auto-attack is separate from targeting. /startattack turns it on and /stopattack turns it off. By default, changing target keeps auto-attack running on the new target; the console variable stopAutoAttackOnTargetChange (off by default) makes it stop instead, which some players turn on so a target switch can't break crowd control by accident.

Two mistakes cost groups the most: attacking a crowd-controlled enemy (breaking a sheep or trap) and attacking a different enemy from the tank, which spreads threat over several aggro tables.

Auto-target switching

Auto-target switching means picking a new target automatically when the current one dies or becomes invalid. How it works depends on the version:

Version	What happens when your target dies
Classic Era, Anniversary, MoP Classic	You keep a dead target or none; you press Tab or a /targetenemy macro for the next one
Retail (since Dragonflight, patch 10.0)	With Enable Action Targeting on (Options > Gameplay > Combat), an ability used with no target goes to the enemy you are facing; Tab still works normally

Many players add a line such as /targetenemy [noexists][dead] to their main attack macro so one key both picks a new enemy and attacks it. The trade-off is control: in packs with crowd-controlled enemies, automatic selection can choose the one you shouldn't touch. The full article on these settings is Auto-targeting system.

Action delay and the spell queue window

Action delay is the time between pressing a key and the action happening. Some of it is your connection (see ping and latency); some is game rules that make you wait.

The spell queue window exists to hide that delay. If you press your next ability shortly before the current cast or global cooldown ends, the game queues it and fires it the moment it can, instead of rejecting the key press. The window is set by the console variable SpellQueueWindow: 400 ms by default, which is also the maximum. It replaced the older "Custom Lag Tolerance" setting in patch 7.2.0. Players with very low latency sometimes lower it so queued spells feel more immediate; very high values don't help because the cap is 400.

Classic had one more source of delay. The 2019 WoW Classic client grouped server actions into batches of about 400 ms to mimic the original game, which made reactions feel slow. Patch 1.13.7 (2021) cut the batch window to 10 ms, so current Classic Era play no longer has that delay.

Global cooldown (GCD)

The global cooldown is the short lockout most abilities trigger, during which you can't use another ability on the GCD. Its rules decide how fast a rotation can go:

	Classic Era rules	TBC Anniversary	Retail (Midnight)
Base GCD	1.5 s	1.5 s	1.5 s
Haste shortens it?	No	Yes, spell haste down to 1.0 s (added in patch 2.4.0)	Yes, down to 0.75 s
Rogues, Cat Form	1.0 s	1.0 s	1.0 s, not reduced by haste (most Monk abilities too)

Abilities marked "off the GCD" (some defensives and interrupts, and Heroic Strike in Classic) can be used during it, which is why players weave them between other casts.

Attack delay (weapon speed)

Attack delay is the time between two automatic attacks with your weapon. It starts from the speed number on the weapon tooltip, for example 2.6 or 3.6, which is really a delay in seconds. Haste divides it:

Attack delay = weapon speed ÷ (1 + haste %)

Different haste effects multiply together: a 1.8-speed weapon with 40%, 20% and 3% haste effects swings about every 1.04 seconds. Your current values are on the character sheet under Melee and Ranged.

Weapon speed	With 0% haste	With 20% haste
1.8 (fast dagger)	1.8 s	1.5 s
2.6 (one-hander)	2.6 s	~2.17 s
3.6 (two-hander)	3.6 s	3.0 s

Slow weapons hit harder per swing and fast weapons more often, so damage per second can be similar while the feel is very different. Slow weapons matter most where abilities scale with one hit's damage, which is common in Classic. In retail, auto-attacks are a smaller share of total damage, so attack delay matters mainly for specs with many on-hit effects.

Attack timer (swing timer)

The attack timer, or swing timer, is the countdown to your next auto-attack. It restarts after every swing or Auto Shot, and in Classic versions several abilities interact with it:

• Heroic Strike and Cleave (Classic Era) are "on next swing": they don't fire immediately but replace your next auto-attack, costing rage instead of the rage that white hit would have given.
• Slam resets the swing timer in Classic Era and The Burning Crusade (from Wrath of the Lich King onwards it only pauses it), so warriors start Slam right after a white hit.
• Hunter Auto Shot has a short aiming window before each shot. Casting or moving during it delays ("clips") the shot, so hunters time Steady Shot or Aimed Shot to finish between Auto Shots.
• Parry haste: before patch 4.0.1, and so in Classic Era and TBC Anniversary, a parried attack speeds up the defender's next swing, cutting up to 40% of its weapon speed off the remaining timer. Bosses benefit too, which is why melee attack from behind, where they can't be parried.

A swing timer addon shows the countdown as a bar. In Classic it is one of the first addons warriors and hunters install; in retail Midnight most specs don't need one.

Cast sequence (/castsequence)

/castsequence is a macro command that casts a list of spells in order, one per key press:

/castsequence reset=target Immolate, Corruption, Curse of Agony

Each press casts the next spell in the list. The sequence starts over after the last spell, or earlier when a reset condition is met:

Reset option	Starts over when…
reset=12	12 seconds pass without pressing the macro
reset=target	you change target
reset=combat	you leave combat
reset=shift / alt / ctrl	you press the macro while holding that modifier

Combine several with a slash: reset=combat/target. The important limit: the sequence only moves on when the spell was actually cast. A press that fails because you are on the global cooldown, out of range or out of mana doesn't advance it. That makes cast sequences fine for fixed openers and leveling (a set of damage-over-time spells on each new target), and unreliable for rotations that depend on cooldowns or procs.

Retail also has an official one-button option: the Single-Button Assistant (added in patch 11.1.7), a spell you drag from the spellbook to your bars. It casts the next damage ability the game recommends, but it doesn't use defensives, interrupts or major cooldowns, and Blizzard adds a small extra delay to its global cooldown, so it trails a well-played rotation. The Assisted Highlight option only highlights the recommended button instead of pressing it. For the idea behind it, see rotation.

Auto-interrupt

Auto-interrupt refers to tools that help you interrupt enemy casts (Kick, Pummel, Counterspell, Wind Shear, Rebuke and the like). Truly automatic interrupts are not allowed: Blizzard's rules ban software that presses keys or plays for you, and addons can't use abilities without a key press.

What players actually use:

• Focus interrupt macros, such as /cast [@focus,exists][] Kick, so the assigned caster is interrupted without a target switch.
• Cast bars and nameplates that show which enemy is casting and whether the cast can be interrupted.
• Interrupt rotations, where each player is assigned a caster or a slot in a rotation on one enemy.

Retail Midnight changed what addons can do. Since patch 12.0 Blizzard has restricted addons from reading detailed combat information, and some data, such as whether a cast can be interrupted, is no longer fully available to them. In return the default interface does more: boss warnings can show especially dangerous casts as a larger, highlighted cast bar. Classic clients are not affected by these restrictions, and addons there work as before.

Related articles

Auto-targeting system. Retail's soft targeting (Action Targeting and the Interact key, both added in patch 10.0) and the console variables behind them; how to turn automatic target selection on or off. Read the full article.

Auto-cast toggle. Pet abilities can be set to fire on their own: right-click the ability on the pet bar, or use /petautocasttoggle, /petautocaston and /petautocastoff in macros. Taunts on auto-cast are a classic way for a pet to steal aggro from your tank. Read the full article.

Arrow. In Classic Era and TBC Anniversary, hunters still need arrows or bullets in their ammo slot, and a quiver or ammo pouch speeds up ranged attacks; ammunition was removed in Cataclysm. Read the full article.

Tips

1. Set a focus on every pull where you have an interrupt job. A focus macro is faster than switching targets and back.
2. Bind assist. One key for /assist [@focus] or the main assist saves a target switch in every fight.
3. Leave the spell queue window alone unless you know your ping. The 400 ms default suits most players.
4. In Classic, learn your swing timer before your rotation. Warrior and hunter damage depends on what you do between swings.
5. Don't build rotations from /castsequence. Use it for openers and leveling; rotations depend on cooldowns and procs the macro can't see.

Related WoW terms

• Threat & aggro glossary · Aggro table
• Auto-loot, auto-mount & interface automation · Abilities, racials & combat stats
• Keybinds · Skill cooldowns in the general gaming terms