WoW demon Cortyn has a tank in the raid with a very special keyboard layout. One that incurs a lot of repair costs.
In World of Warcraft, there are now many ways to play the game. Do you use each ability manually? Do you use the assistant for support that suggests abilities? Or do you even use the one-button helper, where you hardly have to make any decisions?
Depending on playstyle, your settings in WoW can look very different. Some click all abilities manually. Others only have the essential 5-10 abilities bound to hotkeys on their keyboard. Then there are people who have almost every action on a hotkey and are more like playing the piano than playing World of Warcraft.
The raid leader and main tank of my raid group belongs to the last category. Every ability seems to have its own hotkey, and presumably, all the toys are bound somewhere too.
So far, it has been working surprisingly well. He plays a paladin, and not just any paladin: “The whole raid is already dead, but I can still survive solo against the boss for another minute and see how far I can get without the unimportant rest of the group.”
That’s highly annoying, especially when you can make a cup of tea on the side – but paladins are only connected to the Light so they can always be in the spotlight.
Many wipes due to annoying, completely unintentional disconnects
But in the Nether Peak, the current raid that changes the entire world of World of Warcraft, there were noticeable problems for the first time.
Because time and again during boss fights, said tank suddenly went offline, even though you could still hear his annoyed tongue clicking in Discord and he wasn’t dropped from the call. Well, that’s not so unusual; the person often had internet issues. But it was quite noticeable how concentrated it was.
Accordingly, my conversation with him proceeded quite disbelievingly:
“Just for the record: You have an ability on F4 and because your Alt key is somehow stuck, you’re closing the game and we keep wiping?”
“Yes.”
“… can I make an article out of this?”
That’s exactly why we are all here now. I don’t even know exactly where I want to go with this article. Somewhere between the fifth and tenth “Alt F4” wipe that evening, my subconscious must have thought: You need to write this down; no one will believe it later anyway.
Additionally, I can document for all eternity how many repair costs fall on the raid group due to the raid leader who once again leaves us in the lurch with an “Alt F4 and the day is yours” and exposes us to the deadly attacks of the bosses. He has more characters on his conscience than I can ever catch up with using Faith Jump and Switch Blaster.
I don’t know – tanks are just a very special kind of player that range somewhere between incredibly good and incredibly stupid. Because our raid tank is not the only one with strange settings – our dungeon tank in the guild also had a dark secret for years about how he played World of Warcraft.
After that happened a few times, we started talking about the cause. Because it basically always happened at the beginning of a fight when we were just attacking the boss.
If I hadn’t experienced it myself, I would have thought Cortyn, you’re making this up
, but:
Our tank has bound the “F4” key to a movement ability and activates it using this hotkey. This, in turn, leads to the “Alt” key sometimes being pressed in the heat of battle, which in turn leads to the game closing immediately.
Accordingly, my conversation with him proceeded quite disbelievingly:
“Just for the record: You have an ability on F4 and because your Alt key is somehow stuck, you’re closing the game and we keep wiping?”
“Yes.”
“… can I make an article out of this?”
That’s exactly why we are all here now. I don’t even know exactly where I want to go with this article. Somewhere between the fifth and tenth “Alt F4” wipe that evening, my subconscious must have thought: You need to write this down; no one will believe it later anyway.
Additionally, I can document for all eternity how many repair costs fall on the raid group due to the raid leader who once again leaves us in the lurch with an “Alt F4 and the day is yours” and exposes us to the deadly attacks of the bosses. He has more characters on his conscience than I can ever catch up with using Faith Jump and Switch Blaster.
I don’t know – tanks are just a very special kind of player that range somewhere between incredibly good and incredibly stupid. Because our raid tank is not the only one with strange settings – our dungeon tank in the guild also had a dark secret for years about how he played World of Warcraft.
