Much Respect for Laptop Gamers

dear gods, have I been spoiled. my home PC recently decided to up and die on me (hardware failure of some sort) and I've been getting my WoW fix on my work laptop for the last couple days. to all you pro healers, chain-pulling tanks and l33t dps out there that play on laptops, my hat's off to you.

my laptop actually runs WoW pretty well (newer macbook pro w/4GB ram), although I now understand the whole 'I hate Dalaran because I always lag' thing. coming from the perspective of running WoW on a fairly beefy PC with a 24" monitor, though, wow... what a difference. it would be one thing if my only experience with WoW was on a laptop, but since I'm used to something a little bigger it's been a challenge to play as well as I'm used to. lower-quality visuals aside, the two challenges I've run into are not enough screen real estate for my addons and not enough keys to map all my abilities to.

I've only installed a subset of the addons that I usually run (just bartender, DBM, recount and omen), but bartender alone takes up a good chunk of my screen and even ends up covering up most of the built-in quest tracker. with omen, recount and the chat window added to that, a lot of screen space gets used up. I don't know how people add raid frames and healing UIs to that and still see what they're doing...

my biggest challenge, by far, has been figuring out how to map all my abilities to keys I can actually use. some of the function keys seem to be wired into Mac OS to do specific things, so I've lost a few keys there. I've also lost use of the number keypad (because there isn't one), which is where I used to map convenience keys like auto-run, mounting and such. most disruptive, though, is not being able to map abilities to extra mouse buttons like I did on my PC.

I like to map abilities I use often but reflexively (rather than as part of a rotation) to mouse buttons; things like taunts, interrupts and stealth, for example. that puts the ability right at my finger tips so I don't have to hunt for it when I need it NOW, but keeps it out of the way when I'm rocking through my standard rotation. tanking with my paladin this weekend made me realize how much I'd come to rely on those mouse buttons; sure I can play without them, but my reactions aren't nearly as fast.

I realize I'm lucky to be getting my fix at all, as a lot of people don't have the luxury of a second computer to use if their gaming rig burns out. I'm very much looking forward to replacing my PC and retiring from laptop play, though ;)