Situational Awareness: The most important skill in your arsenal

 Hey you.  Yes you, the guy watching TV while pressing the buttons.  Yes, we know you're not paying attention, you stood in (fire) and expected to be healed through it.  Actually, you probably didn't expect to be healed through it. You didn't expect anything, you weren't paying attention. Oh, now you're bitching about fail-tanks and shitty healers, how nice.

Everyone's run into this person at some point.  Hell, some of us may have been that person.  As much as I like to be on top of things, even I've zoned at times in my umpteen millionth run through H. UK, didn't get to spawns fast enough in VH, and so forth.  It happens. We all screw up sometimes, or zone out, and the biggest culprit is simply not paying attention.  Don't do this to your fellow raiders.  Be there for the fight.

You might be the best healer on your server, the top DPS in your group, or uber-tank extreme, but if you're not paying attention, you're not healing.  If you're eating the floor you're not DPSing.  If you zone out and miss that taunt your raid is gonna be zoning in again in a few moments.  It's important to be there for the fight.

Paying attention can save your (virtual) life.  That stuff on the floor?  It's bad. Anything on the floor is bad.  Even if it's not bad, stay out of it to be safe anyway.  Don't make your healers cry. If they have to spam heals on you, guess who's not getting healed?  That guy over there keeping all the big bads pissed, that's who. When it comes down to decision time, the healers know what to do, they'll heal whoever they think will get it done, and if they let you die...well, they had their reasons (double check before bitching; raid tank survival may have been critical, tank was taking a beating, the healer was dotted and saving themselves.  Run the checklist before deciding they were just being a dick).

This goes for tanks too.  Tanks pretty much have to be there and on their game.  But sometimes tunnel vision kicks in.  You're nailing your rotation.  The boss's health is dropping like a rock.  You're doing it, you're badass, you're that tank, oh yeah!  But wait, why'd the healer oom?  WTF, DPS are dying?  What the hell guys, what's...oh.  Oh no.  You were tanking in the sludge.  Standing in the DnD.  Not watching your range and all the DPS around you got Chain-lightning'd. Oh noes, everyone died and you're next!  You went from being OMGTank! to WTFTank! with incredible haste.

Situational awareness includes DPS, threat, healing, and so forth, but that is only a small part of the equation.  You have to know where you're standing, what you're standing in.  Everyone has a specific role in the raid, and while you should know what your fellow raider's role is, trust that they'll do it.  If you're worrying about "That Idiot over There (tm)" you're probably not performing your own role, you're distracted. A proper raid is a well oiled machine, and everyone should know their role.  Once the action starts and the proverbial brown stuff hits the metaphorical spinning thing you need to do your best to:

1. Stay alive
2. Keep a tank alive (see #1 if this is you)
3. Save a healer's life
4. Do your best output (threat, DPS, healing)
5. Don't stand in bad stuff?
6. Don't stand in bad stuff.
7. Don't stand in bad stuff!

That pretty much sums it up.  These things are important, and knowing your role, your position, and your current situation will greatly increase your chances of survival and a successful raid. It seems like common sense, but that stuff is sometimes more like Common Sense.

Keybinding: The end of the keybinding posts

Jeez, once again it's been way too long since I've posted an update.  Unfortunately, time doesn't wait for me, and I've yet to perfect my method for unaided temporal distortion.  Maybe it'd work better if my house moved faster relative to the speed of light.  It's kind of just stuck in place for now...

In any case, you were promised my personal keybindings, strategies, and a resolution to the mystery of Q and E! Firstly, as for Q and E, if you've mastered the mouse turn and side step: put whatever the hell you want on them, they're now free keys.  Yay!

Now for my personal keybindings:

1 -  Shield Slam
2 -  Devastate
3 - Revenge + HS (macro, does just HS if R is on cooldown)
4 - Thunderclap
5 - Cleave
6 - Taunt
7 - Mocking Blow
Q - Shockwave
E - Shield Bash
R - Conc Blow
T - Charge/Intercept/Intervene macro

Y - Heroic Throw
F - Challenging Shout
G - Grenade (engineering)
~`(tilde) - Shield Wall
alt+1 - Shield Block
alt+2 - Bloodrage
alt+3 - (don't remember, not sure if this is mapped)
alt+4 - Rend
alt+5 - Spell Reflect
alt+~` - Last Stand
Shift+1 and 2 - on use defensive trinkets
Shift+4 - Disarm
Shift+G - Enraged Regen
Shift+~` - Comm shout 

Shift+F - Intimidating Shout
mouse button 4 - autorun
mouse button 5 - Battle Shout
alt+mouse 5 - Demo shout 

shift+mouse 4 - Berserker Rage

Okay, I think that covers all the binds.  For the life of me, there's probably something on Alt+3, but I can't remember it, it may have been skipped due to awkward hand positioning. Aside from the above, I've also remapped my arrow keys for quick marking.  I know there are addons out there like QuikMark and maybe others, but the default interface works fine and doesn't require a bar on my screen:

Left arrow - Skull

Up Arrow - Moon

Down Arrow - X (cross)

Right Arrow - Circle

As tank you'll be leading the charge, and need a means to mark efficiently.  I've tried many methods in the past, but using the arrow keys for my main marks seems to have been the easiest solution 90% of the time, and the times you'd need other marks (such as marking tanks on a fight, or marking more than 4 targets, such as Faction Champs in ToC) you can use the right click option, it's not a big deal.

Lastly, as I've mentioned in the past, I use Bartender4, and have a single bar floating above my main bars for random stuff, most of which isn't keybound.  This includes my auto-attack (to disable on the last boss of FoS on Mirrored Soul), mage Strudel, alternate trinkets (quick click to switch when out of combat if I need to change them on the fly), and other items that may be useful, like for the Oculus Drake, or macros that I only need for specific fights, 'lock Healthstones, et cetera.

Everyone's taste is different, and not everyone likes to configure their bars the same way. There are plenty of threads on the WoW official UI Forums with links to peoples' UIs and bars to check out.  Maybe at some point I'll post a screen of my configuration, but at the moment don't have access to my WoW client.

More posts incoming, and hopefully I'll get a bit more consistent around here going forward. :P

Feel free to comment if you have any keybinding or UI questions.

Upcoming posts: Situational awareness, and as a complement, situational skills and when to ideally use them!

Also, I'm due to post an update on warrior tanking attack priority, some things have changed in the most recent patch to warrant revisiting the subject.

Advanced Training (ala "holy shit I CAN'T keyturn!")

If you somehow linked directly to this post, check out part one.


WOW!  It's been a while.

...yeah, the work of a guild master is never done it seems, but more on that another time.  Now, for more on Keybinding and mouse turning.  Welcome to the advanced course.

First, if you haven't done so, I highly recommend downloading and configuring Bartender4.  You can download it here. BT4 makes keybinding much easier, allowing you to add and remove keybinds on the fly, as well as configuring your actionbars to your liking. Much better than the default interface in my opinion, and frees up screen real estate as well.

Ok, now, I know I said this is advanced training, but really, you just need to do something simple.  Pull up your options/escape menu in WoW, go to the key binding section, and for your turning options, by default you'll have the following:

Q - Strafe Left
E - Strafe Right
A - Turn Left
D - Turn Right

What I want you to do is change it to the following:

A - Strafe Left
D - Strafe right

Just leave Q and E unassigned for now, we'll get back to those later.  That said, this will be one of the hardest things you do in your journey to improve your reaction time and learning to mouse turn.  You WILL likely freak out at first when you try to turn.  I did.  What you've done here is forced yourself to mouse turn by removing the ability to key turn.  It's weird at first, but works, and once you're used to it, a mob will never hit you in the back again. When I first made this change, my brain locked whenever I had to turn, sadly.  I was used to Q and E strafing, and losing those two keys frustrated me more than actually losing the A and D keys.  I ended up double mapping the keys at first until I made the mental shift, so A and Q left strafed, and E and D right strafed.

Once you make the shift though, it's a beautiful thing.  Here's some other tricks in no particular order:

• While you can still move forward with the W key, you'll find holding down the left and right mouse buttons together will also run forward.  It's situational, but helps to have the redundancy sometimes.
• Some people like to unmap the S key or assign it to a skill.  My experience has been to leave it alone, there are times when a little backpeddling is needed to position mobs.  Keep it, or reassign it to a side mouse button or something.
• The "jump through." Sometimes you just can't get the damned mobs positioned.  In a pinch, sometimes jumping through them and mouse turning 180 degrees gets it done.
• Sidestep shuffle.  Mob pathing is a bit weird.  They do some kind of latency check and end up just too far to the side or behind when they try to spread out in a semi-circle.  To fix this you can sidestep left and right a tiny bit, just tap back and forth a few times, and then backpeddle a step or two.
• The shockwave lock: If you stun can't get your mobs positioned in front of you, sidestep run so they line up and pop a shockwave.  They'll be stunned for 4 seconds or so, and if you position yourself where you want to be before the stun wears off, they won't move after they wake up from the stun.

 These are just a few tips from what I've learned in my time tanking.  It's a job and a responsibility, but it can be awfully fun, and is by far my favorite role in the game. Tanking is great, but everyone's run into that one tank who just doesn't cut it.  Maybe it's a DPS reroll for a quick Random Dungeon queue, maybe they're mouse turning and getting smashed in the back by the boss, maybe they just can't hold the adds. Don't be that guy. Learn and be the best tank you can be.  Everyone will appreciate it, and you'll gain the respect (and the raids) you deserve. :)

You'll note that I haven't actually mentioned my own key binds.  I find that everyone's style is a bit different, and what works for me won't necessarily work for you. However, in the interest of discovery (who knows, maybe someone can show ME an improvement ^_^ ) I'll list my own key bindings in my next post, as well as (if the binding list doesn't get too long in the tooth) some strategies when to use specific moves, and what emergency situations may arise as you tank and how to deal with them.  Actually, I never got back to it, so along with the keybind list, I'll also go over what to do with those pesky (not really) Q and E keys. :D

Keybinding, Mouse turning, and you - Part one

I was recently in a raid where the off tank was keyboard turning...while picking up Onyxia's whelps.  On 25 man.  Suffice to say it did not go well.

A lot of people make the argument that clicking is just as good as keybinding, keybinding is for PvP, mouse turning isn't necessary, blah blah and so on.  To this, I can only reply so: Try it.  I'm not saying you have to fall in love with keybinding and mouse turning.  I'm saying try it, and really give it a shot.  Get bartender4, set up your buttons where you need them (if you're raiding you probably already have this or another button mod anyway), and go for broke.  You'll be able to keybind on the fly just by typing "/kb" and hovering, and you'll still be able to click your buttons in a pinch.

But just try it. Trust me, in a day or two your eyes will open and you'll be a better player, and a better tank for it.

When tanking, you can't just slowly turn in a circle while mobs beat on you.  That guy behind you? CRIT.  That one to the side? CRIT.  Oh, let's get on that one. YOU MUST BE FACING THE TARGET. I know there are tricks to keyturning, because before I started binding and mouse turning, I was stubborn and learned them.  I know you can circle strafe by holding A and E or D and Q at the same time.  It's still not as good.  You cannot perform an instant 180 degree turn with the keyboard.  You can't jump-turn-attack while keyturning. Your reactions will be slow, and if you're clicking AND key turning, you'll be busier looking at your buttons than you will be looking at the fight.

Besides making your reactions faster, keybinding and mouse turning give you more opportunities to exercise situational awareness. Once muscle memory kicks in after a few days, you won't be looking at your keys, you'll instinctively find them. That means you won't be standing in that pile of goo while looking at your buttons.  You'll already be moving and attacking. Mobility and Situational Awareness are what keep you out of fires and keep you alive.  Keybinding and mouse-turning give you the mobility, and free up your eyes to help you with the situational awareness.

Try it.

Later I'll post my ideal methods for mouse turning and learning to keybind + mouse turn.  For now, if you're reading, just try it on your first 5 or 6 keys.  Next post: advanced training (ala "holy shit I CAN'T keyturn!")