4321

I don’t have anywhere near that dexterity, my little finger and ring fingers are practically useless.

This is what I use for abilities basically:

Keys:

1-4: index or middlefinger depending on the positioning of my hand.
W,S: middle finger.
A: Ring finger
D: Index finger
Alt, Space: Thumb

5-8 I’ll use my index finger sometimes, but everything else is mostly clicking.

On normals, my DPS varies a lot between the fights, but generally I’ve gotten it to 7k-10k depending on what’s happening. 10k is about where I top out unless it’s AOE.

4322

many of those ability you listed isn’t useful in combat, you can cast those buff outside and they last a long time.

I always have healbot so I never put any of my heal/buff/dispel on my toolbar anymore, mass dispel and dispel I keep on a hotkey, but I rarely use mass dispel.

you can also macro all your dps cooldown into one macro which save you a few more slot, doesn’t druid individual form get individual bars as well.

4323

As a DK tank, you have a hard, long-school-lock interrupt (Mind Freeze), a long-duration silence (Strangulate), and Death Grip, which can be used as an interrupt even for many abilities immune to interrupts.

You also have access to a powerful snare (Chains of Ice) which can be situationally useful, and you have to be super mindful of all of your vast host of AoE threat tools because most of them break CC and prevent its reapplication.

That’s a lot more to deal with than Wrath, which was literally “Can you put out enough AoE threat to hold the pack of mobs” as the only thing you had to worry about for 95% of the runs you’d do.

4324

I only use my mouse to navigate/target/etc, I use all the rest of my abilities via the keyboard.

It of course helps that I have a G-15 and all of my heals and what not are on my G keys.

4325

Every single ability in the 31 I listed (plus all the potions) is useful in combat. None of them is a long-duration buff. Maybe you should read before you snark?

4326

10k’s fine, really.

The thing about all those abilities is that you really don’t need most of them in the heat of battle. Sure, you need them on your bars, but there’s very few classes where you need easy access to all 30-odd. In my case (enhancement shaman), I hit these a lot: 2 (lightning bolt on proc), 3 (flame shock), Q (stormstrike), E (earth shock), F (unleash elements), R (lava lash). ` is Spirit Wolves.

That’s basically it for constant presses, but there’s less used abilities. V provides my interrupt, T drops my totems. Z is purge (although rarely used this days). Shift-R is Bloodlust.

Awkward keys like X are just for out-of-combat stuff. Anything 5+ on the number row is not going to be easy to get to so it’s for very rare occasions. I’m fine with having 6 abilities being regularly used in combat, I don’t think it’s too much - but then some classes barely have 3 and some have more. There’s something to be said for finding a class (and spec) that suits you. I found some classes way too busy and some way too dull!

4327

how am I even snarking, even on my rogue, I put my trick of trade which is 6 second buff/cooldown 30 seconds is assigned to healbot, if it’s a buff, it goes into healbot, way better than taking a hot key space.

yes bark skin can go into a healbot, even if it’s self only, thorn can go into healbot… there…

Main Action Bar (to =, in no particular order): Starsurge, Insect Swarm, Moonfire, Starfire, Wrath, Wild Mushrooms, Detonate Wild Mushrooms, Root, Hurricane, [B]Regrowth[/B], Cyclone, [B]Lifebloom[/B], and my trinkets/Lifeblood. Alt-Bar One (Ctrl-c, z, s-D, a-1 through a-4, x, s-v, v, alt-):
Starfall, Boomkin Form, Dispel, Cat-Dash, Solar Beam, Nature’s Grasp, Typhoon, Innervate, Treants, Rebirth
Alt-Bar Two (Mouswheel +ctrl/alt, alt-Q, alt-W, more mouse buttons):
Thorns, Barkskin, Warstomp, Hibernate, Soothe, Tranquility, Faerie Fire

4328

Yeah, I’ve done raiding, but only light raiding. I did MC, and some BWL, in Vanilla when BWL was introduced. After that, I came back and joined a friends small guild which only did 10 man Zul’Aman and and a little of the that insect place (the name is escaping me). After that, I left came back did some Kara on horde side (leveling with friends). Then I quit, returned for Wrath but didn’t do any raiding. Now I’m back again.

One of the big differences to me, is the overall pace of the fights. They are much faster than what I remember… And to be clear, my gearing and heroics I’ve done have been relatively painless, mostly due to grouping with friends. But I’m well aware of how much they are carrying me so I speak to this as someone who isn’t necessarily frustrated while playing, but frustrated with people who don’t understand where some of us are coming from in commenting on the content.

Which is primarily why I got seriously pissed at irdrisz’s, use the keyboard durrrrr comment.

4329

Aaron, doesn’t your bar change when you shift out of Moonkin form? It seems a bit odd to have two specs worth of abilities on your bars…

4330

Yeah, because the first thing I want to do when setting up my UI is sacrifice a huge chunk of my screenspace and go back to clicking my abilities.

That’s retarded.

Some of my stuff is in mouseover macros through PerfectRaid + Clique, but guess what? That’s still abilities I have to bind, because those macros? They’re still bound to something, even if that something is shift-mouse3 or ctrl-mouse2. And I still have them bound, because guess what, many of those are macro’d to cast on the target of target under certain circumstances, or to do self-cast for faster self-dispels, and fuck, why would I ever want to have to click my Barkskin when it’s a damage-reduction cooldown?

Your suggestion is met with a massive thumbs-down.

4331

I think the heroics remind me of Zul’gurub more than anything else.

I did MC (completely clueless, took orders well but didn’t understand how my class worked at all really), BWL (bit better there but not by much), and then stopped. In TBC I switched to the Shaman and “learned to play”, first as a healer, then as a ranged DPS, raiding Kara/SSC. Got bored of the various frustrations involved, though. Dipped a toe into the harder stuff after the guild had them on farm.

Wrath I got to 80 then promptly quit in disgust at being behind my guild’s power curve already. Came back just as they added LFD. Barely raided at all except towards the end, but I did level a Paladin and learned how to tank heroics which was pretty instructive. So ultimately my history is patchy and I’m far from being one of the raiding elite, but I do genuinely appreciate the challenge of heroics in Cata.

The greatest skill you can pick up is situational awareness, which took me bloody ages.

Edit:

Which is primarily why I got seriously pissed at irdrisz’s, use the keyboard durrrrr comment.

idrisz doesn’t understand how he comes across. He’s like this in all games discussions and it’s pissed me off before but I don’t think he means to be as insulting as he is. Language problems if you ask me :)

4332

10k is nearly stars aligning dps for me. I’m not really near that at normal through put.

4333

All of these are abilities which I have on my bar in Moonkin form because I may need to use them during the fight, and I don’t want to have to shift out, wait for my action bar to change, then use them.

4334

I see. Well, I’m sure you recognise that it’s a bit of an outlier having two entire specs worth of abilities and saying you need them all. That’s fairly rare (and I say this as someone who obviously uses a few resto abilities).

When there’s “emergency” skills like heals and other things I tend to have them bound to a shift-button and then stick them on a hidden bar. I know what the key combo is so I don’t need them onscreen. Helps me massively to keep my UI manageable.

4335

There’re only, what, three Resto skills on my bars? Regrowth for throwing a spot heal, Lifebloom for kiting/moving while healing, and Tranq as an oh-shit.

On my Ele Shaman, I still have Healing Rain and Healing Surge on my bars, that’s only one fewer than my Druid. :)

4336

No, that’s it. I didn’t do Aman, but Gurub. I’m getting all these Zul’s mixed up. It’s the one where you fish up a boss. Heh.

The greatest skill you can pick up is situational awareness, which took me bloody ages.

Yeah, I totally agree… but the more people have to rely on the looking at the UI, the less situational awareness people are going to have. That’s why I recommended lowering the total number of abilities to mitigate increasing the difficulty of the encounter mechanics. Realistically, that’s not going to happen, because WoW is already what it is, but I’m talking more in the abstract of how the problem could be addressed.

idrisz doesn’t understand how he comes across. He’s like this in all games discussions and it’s pissed me off before but I don’t think he means to be as insulting as he is. Language problems if you ask me :)

I’m pretty sure he does understand how he comes across. But we can agree to disagree there.

4337

I was counting dispel (thought it took you out of Moonkin). Don’t you macro your trinkets/lifeblood in with your spell abilities, or is there a major DPS boost to be had by lining them up with some particular proc?

4338

And that’s why I’m a fan of “pick a class that suits you”. If my Shaman took as much work as a TBC-era Affliction warlock it would’ve made me quit the game forever.

I find my Retadin to be pretty straightforward in comparison to my Enhancement shaman. Hunter as well.

I’m pretty sure he does understand how he comes across. But we can agree to disagree there.

It isn’t going to kill me to concede the point on this one… :)

4339

Dispel does not take me out of Moonkin.

When I pop my trinkets/Lifeblood, it’s to pop an in-Eclipse Moonfire, followed by Insect Swarm (which will have the benefit also of Nature’s Grace). There’s also Treants to be considered (they gain some, but not all, stat boosts from procs).

However, I use Moonfire at other times (I spam it while on the move because of Lunar Shower, I refresh it outside of Eclipse). So no, I can’t just macro it in, more’s the pity.

4340

idrisz doesn’t understand how he comes across. He’s like this in all games discussions and it’s pissed me off before but I don’t think he means to be as insulting as he is. Language problems if you ask me :)

I just don’t understand, when I play games, if I get frustrated or feel slow, first thing I do is look up ways to improve thing myself(that only get you so far in some of the games), not waiting for developers to change it to suits me or blame on everything else.

You can call me snarky or stuff, but I play League of legend with a bunch of Qt3 people, and I’m probably one of the least non-raging people in a very rage-filled genre.