Kili Rants... on why I'm a baddie

I have a confession to make.

I am a keyboard turner.

Go ahead, call me OMGn00b - I beat you to it in my "about me" blurb there on the sidebar anyway.  I know it's not the "best" way of doing things, and sometimes it has caused more problems than I'd like it to... but hear me out here.

I was catching up on the last couple of weeks worth of posts at Tree Bark Jacket, and spotted this response to a reader question about how to learn to not be a clicker.  It got me thinking about the good old days of vanilla WoW, when I was just starting to play, and how I've evolved into the player I am today.  I left a comment about my keybinding philosophy there, and realized there was a lot more to say than I felt comfortable leaving in the comments section.  I mean, when my comment starts threatening to be longer than the post that inspired it, I know it's time to hop back over to my own space to vent my thoughts.

See, unlike many of my friends, I came to this game not as an experienced gamer.  I didn't have tons of FPS experience, or even play another MMO.  I'd played a text MUD, and a bunch of computer arcade/puzzle type games that involved lots of clicking on the pretty pictures on the screen, or with maybe a few preset keystrokes that mimicked an arcade game's joystick/button commands.  The concept of customizable keybindings was a bit new to me, and the sheer number of skills and usable items in WoW blew my mind.

I had the default UI for a while, until I learned more about different addons to change my button bars and other interface features.  I didn't even know enough to turn on the extra action bars in the default interface for a while.  Macros?  Ha.  Not a clue.  I had the basic 12 action bar buttons to shove as many useful things as possible into, and then I clicked on things in my bags, or put them on the extra action bars once I figured out how to show them, and clicked on those.

Then, after a few weeks of low-level messing around, my good friend Dave, who was much more experienced in this sort of thing than I, informed me that I needed to keybind my commonly used spells and items, or I would be considered a baddie.  "Don't be a noob clicker.  Keybind everything."  "EVERYTHING?"  "OK, well, the stuff you'll actually use very often."

Trying to go from mostly clicking to mostly keybinding was a real learning experience.  Of course, Dave didn't play a druid, which was my main by that point, so he didn't have any real advice on how to keybind effectively.  If I could go back in time and teach myself a few things, I'd have done it very differently.  Over the last 2 years, I've learned so much about how to play this game better - but unfortunately, unlearning 2 or 3 years worth of ingrained habits is... awkward at best.  And at worst, disastrous.



So I downloaded Trinity Bars because they looked oh-so-cool when my hubby was playing with them and the different button skins, and gave myself a whole buttload of action bars so I could see everything in case I forgot what keybindings I assigned, and proceeded to assign away.  I tried to use things that I would remember for various abilities - "D" was for my Decursive spam key (back when Decursive actually decided what spell to use on who, before Blizzard broke that functionality).  "I" was for Innervate.  Since "M" was assigned to open the map, and Shift-M was the miniature zone map for battlegrounds, I used Ctrl-M for my mount.  Since "B" was for opening my bags, I used Ctrl-B for Barkskin.  Oh, but I was so clever in how I assigned things that I could remember. 

I even was smart enough to keep my most commonly used abilities on the left hand side of the keyboard, on easier to reach keys.  This was, unfortunately, not because I needed my right hand free to use the mouse - it was because, coming from other types of games, it was most intuitive for me to use the arrow keys to navigate.  Because of this fact (and my Decursive keybinding), I ended up putting some very important binds on the WASD movement keys (well, not the "W").  I also didn't really "get" the usefulness of strafing, so once I hit level 70 on my druid, I bound Cyclone to the "Q" key, chuckling at the humor in this due to the massive QQ from all other classes whenever Cyclone was used.

At some point while learning to be a good healer at level 70, I came across the nugget of information that it was just way too slow to select a target then cast a heal - the real pro healers used mouseover macros or click-casting mods.  At the time, I was still a bit macro-shy, but I read about the vaunted addon combo of Grid plus Clique, and decided I could master this healing thing by click-casting.  And I got really good at it.

Since most of my heals were being cast by mouse click hovering over my Grid, I got used to moving by keyboard while healing - although my WASD movement keys were largely unavailable, so I would just keep my left hand on the arrow keys while my right hand was moving the mouse.  Somewhat awkward, but it worked for me, and it worked well.  Druids are a great class for healing on the move, and in late BC, rolling Lifeblooms on multiple tanks while tossing out a few spot-healing rejuvs would allow a druid to beat anyone on the healing meter.  Well, except for COH spamming priests on raid-damage-heavy fights.

In any event, the advent of click casting heals, while playing a raid healer full time, cemented this whole keyboard turning thing in my head.

Then, after a while at level 70, I decided to level my rogue so I could make use of her herbalism and alchemy professions, saving myself the gold of purchasing flasks and potions for raid use.  Leveling on a PVP server, I decided to forego the yawn-inducing Combat Swords spec and work with the sneakier Subtlety spec, allowing me to avoid more involuntary world PVP and come out ahead in more situations than I would have with the Combat spec tools.  

My good old friend Dave, again, took it upon himself to give me rogue advice, since his first level 60 was actually an undead rogue.  He actually liked to PVP on his rogue, and one of the first things he told me was that if I wanted to be really good, I should practice circle-strafing.

Wat.

He tried to describe how it worked, but seeing as how he'd never bothered to explain the concept of mouse-looking either, the thought of trying to strafe at the same time as turning blew my puny n00b mind.  He said he'd taken a few solid days during a vacation, playing all day long in battlegrounds, to practice and master the concept.  I finally did a little research on my own about how this mouse movement thing was supposed to happen, and did a little practicing, but it was, as I said earlier, awkward. 

It messed with my camera angles to the extent that it sometimes put me in dangerous situations where I didn't realize just how close I was to things that I didn't mean to get near, or causing me to veer off course while flying.  Dangerous situations, like flying into the range of the Garadar bat riders, or nearly running into aggro range of bosses.  I felt like I had a better sense of where I was going and a better ability to control precisely how I got there if I continued to use the keyboard.  Eventually I stopped trying to use the mouse for movement in most situations, because the camera angle frustration and the way I'd often wind up looping around and facing the other direction when I just meant to go a few feet sideways.

Fast forward to Ulduar.  As our guild was learning the General Vezax fight, one night our uber DPS warlock - the liaison to the officers for ranged DPS and the one who determined who got raid invites - called me out in vent for keyboard turning out of a coming shadow crash.  Never mind that I was actually not getting hit by the shadow crashes, except for a few instances where I tunnel visioned and didn't notice he'd targeted one on someone standing close to me.  Those had nothing to do with keyboard turning, and everything to do with a concentration lapse.  Moving with the mouse would not have helped.

Now, there were times when moving with the mouse would make a significant difference, like Yogg Saron's purple rays of doom.  Clearly there's a significant difference between the slow about-face of keyboard turning and the instant spin of a mouse-look, and especially when you're doing the fight without Freya's assistance, it makes a huge difference.  And I made a point of turning with the mouse for that fight. 

For other encounters, strafing out of the ubiquitous fire or whatnot is certainly a better option than keyboard turning, and for that reason I did re-bind my strafe keys on my druid (cuz "Q" for cyclone is just too good to change).  I make a point of practicing strafing now and then, and I run around Dalaran moving with the mouse more often than not.

Still, when things get frantic, or when there's a chance of something going wrong if I don't move in exactly the right direction or need to keep a close watch on my position, I tend to move with the arrow keys more often than not, because the times when I've tried to use the mouse it has not felt natural.  I did an experiment one night on Festergut, moving with the mouse on one attempt, and moving with the arrow keys on the next, and when I used the arrow keys I was able to minimize my DPS downtime because I didn't overshoot where I intended to stand, turn too far, run into someone else's bubble of personal space, etc.  I played better and did better overall moving with the keyboard.

So, perhaps I'm a noob.  It's not because I don't know how, or haven't tried playing "the right way".  It's just that when it comes down to the wire, I suck less playing like a noob.