"Dance Steps" for keyboard turning tanks

Even if you mouse click your abilities, you should be familiar with and able to use mouse turning at least a little bit. It's really good for fine tuning positioning and can be sucessfully done during the global cooldown.

** before anyone says LTFPS, let me explain that I learned great keyboard turning skills playing WolfenStein 3D in elementary school, then Doom in high school, and then Doom 2 in college. **

A general rule if you are going to be a sucessful keyboard turner is to turn off all of the camera autofollow in your interface options. You, and only you, are going to choose where to look. When you strafe or run, the camera will not change, but when you turn, it will.

The first thing to remember when tanking while keyboard turning is that there is no collision detection in WoW, so you can run right through the little buggers. Second is that backing up does absolutely nothing bad to your ability to use or hit with melee attacks.

When you need to turn a pack of mobs, or just one mob, take a step into the mob, start turning and strafing simultaneously, then turn and back up a step. The key combination is:

W - WA - AE - SA - S

You'll actually overlap these in sequence. Switch from forward stepping to backward just at 90 degrees. This turns much faster than you'd expect.

That should flip the mob over, and is a good way to pick up a mob behind you. Remember that as long as you have a mob within the 180 degree area in front of you, you can hit it. That means you don't have to turn all the way around to engage. If you practice the strafe/turn opposite directions thing (the [A][E] key combination and the [Q][D] combination), you'll start to see how versatile keyboard turning can actually be. And you'll see why I completely owned in the original Doom multiplayer! (ofc back then you had to be trickier because [Alt] was the strafe key, so quickly alternating strafing left while turning right required a lot of coordination)

Another thing to practice is using strafe and manually setting your camera angle in the direction you are moving. Using strafe instead of normal running in effect allows you to keep enemies in front of you AND behind you within your 180 degree attack area. Occasionally throw in a backward step here and there to be sure they're just barely in front.

When you use charge, you'll frequently find yourself facing the camera, and sometimes it's hard to tell what's going on. A good habit to have is to take a few steps backwards using [S] to get your bearings. Then use the mouse to reposition the camera.

You CAN be a sucessful tank using the keyboard, it just takes a little more finesse. In fact, I think you the best tanks are often keyboard turners because character positioning is completely independent of your view, and strafing/backing up are much easier to do when your fingers aren't reaching for that essential taunt.