Tank like a girl

Just about a year ago, in one of my first posts, I talked about my weaknesses, the biggest one being a keyboard turner. I have since graduated from the school of keyboard turning noobs to G13 pros. It was a long, hard road in which I switched back and forth between my old-school playing method and my G13. Especially on Kadomi it was really difficult. But now it’s become second nature, and I can’t imagine moving any differently now. It helps as tank, as healer, as melee DPS, as ranged DPS. I really recommend breaking the habit.

But now I have another habit to break that I have inherited from my old days of TBC multi-target tanking: tab-targetting. Never was it more apparent that I need to figure this shit out than when I did my first excursion to Emalon in VoA-10. It was a motley group of 7 guildies, a friend plus two pugged people. As the better geared tank, I tanked adds. I’ll be frank, it didn’t work out. We only had 40 minutes left on the Wintergrasp timer when we started, so we had 25 minutes of attempts before heading out dejectedly. We had a couple issues, but we are fast learners, so I am convinced next time it’ll be a kill. If only Horde had Wintergrasp more often on Bronzebeard. It’s usually in Alliance hand as we’re heavily outnumbered.

My particular issue was targeting new adds and targeting the one that would blow up. BigWigs was so kind to mark the growing add with a skull so I just cycled through until I had the right one. Unfortunately I was hitting tab so frantically that I often missed the skull and had to tab some more. But that really wasn’t the biggest issue. The biggest issue was grabbing the new add. As it would pop up next to Emalon where we had the paladin tank and a couple melee DPS, I tried to click-target, but sometimes would miss or click on a raid member instead. In that time the add would often make for the next healer, and I was fail enough not to Intervene often enough. Add to that that my vigorous tanking killed two adds at the same time and you see a problem. I now know that I have to switch adds a lot more frequently to keep their health at just about the same level.

Veneretio did one of his Back to Basics posts recently about targeting, and he preaches clicking as the best way. I know he’s right. I zoom my camera out a lot on all fights, I know how to turn the camera angle, and yet…

As always, I am determined to master the target issue, so bring on the feedback, guys. Don’t be shy.