Tank like a girl

Last week I had my birthday, and my friends were kick-ass enough to fulfill my greatest wish: a G13 Logitech gaming keyboard. I have long been unhappy with my keybindings. As warrior I have more abilities and bars than any other of my characters. I use the number keys for my main action bar, and then Shift and Alt modifiers for the other bars. Not efficient. It means some awkward finger positions while tanking, and always two hands on the keyboard, which makes me a keyboard turner.

First impressions:
the thing is heavy. Quite heavy. I had to clear some stuff off my desk to make it fit. Hand position was pretty comfortable. Also, 22 keys still don’t seem enough, and I will have to prune stuff off. The display is nice, and will be great for seeing who talks on Vent, but the character information is kinda pointless. I can see all that via my UI. Moving with the thumb stick will take some time getting used to, but it really makes you turn using the mouse.

Setup is extremely easy. Click on key you want to configure in the Profiler, assign a key from your regular keyboard, done. There are a lot of pre-configured macro actions, like Auto-Run, Follow, Jump, Attack, etc. which also provide nice examples on how to use the macro abilities of the keyboard.

I redid my action bars, using 3 bars with 7 buttons. The middle G-row is numbers 1-7, the top row is Shift 1-7. The row with five buttons has various stuff like mounting up, /startattack, etc. The lower row I have assigned to Shift, Ctrl and Alt, so I will be able to use Clique for healing easily.

Sounds nice in theory, but how does it play? After doing my Brunhildar daily, I set off to Stratholme, to get some Runecloth and Argent Dawn rep while learning the keyboard. And it is a learning process. I remapped most of my keybindings so that the abilities I use non-stop are more easily reachable. This is mostly Charge, Thunderclap, Devastate, Revenge, Concussion Blow, Shield Slam. Buttons 3-5 are the core tanking abilities Revenge/HS, Concussion Blow, Shield Slam. Charge, TC, Shockwave and Cleave are in the row above, and they’re a bit trickier to hit. It’s all about my finger memory at the moment.

I completed Stratholme using the G13 exclusively and was pretty happy for the most part. Some keys aren’t mapped perfectly yet, and I have to shuffle things around still. It was very comfortable and I felt very mobile. Targetting was a bit iffy, but I can work around that.

As I still need two dungeon Elders for my title and Azjol-Nerub was the heroic daily, a guildie came along and we pugged the rest. My first real test of the G13!

As you can imagine, it went awfully. Targetting was a problem. Hitting my auto-run thumb button was a problem. Suddenly not remembering the new bindings in the heat of the moment was a disaster. We wiped on the three-pull before the first boss. Back to the regular keyboard I went, but as I mentioned, everything was rebound, so that did jackall. Yet another wipe. I have to give it to the guys from the PUG, they didn’t seem to care about my keyboard moments. Then my Pitbull 4 alpha failed me and Target of Target didn’t work anymore, so I quickly had to ditch Pitbull for my ouf setup. After re-binding all keys back to what they were before, I finally got a handle on things.

It was one of the messiest heroics I have done, DPS stole aggro left and right, and even though we one-shot all bosses when we did them, at least one DPSer usually died. But then, standing in Anub’arak’s Pounce is not so smart. As major bonus of the day, Hadronox dropped Essence of Gossamer, and of course I am now only one Elder away from my title. 28.2k health unbuffed, rawr!

I have to continue to fine-tune my G13. I predict a lot of time spent in Stratholme while I try to figure it all out. I think my shaman and all other characters will be fine, because I just use a lot less abilities on the rest of them. My next scheduled guild heroic is Halls of Lightning on Wednesday, we’ll see if I can make that happen with the G13. I hope so! We’re doing OS-10 again on the weekend, but I will be healing again, which should be a breeze.

So, who of you are using a gaming pad to tank? n52te, G13, the Saitek Command Unit, what have you. Share your experiences.