Staying Alive In World of Warcraft

It's quite easy to get so wrapped up in your role as tank, healer or dps that you completely forget to check your health until it's too late. While checking health mainly falls to the healers, there are many times when the healer is helpless to do anything about the fact that you might be about to die. A classic examples of this would be a boss like Blade Lord Ta'yak in Heart of Fear, where everyone is taking extreme damage while making a mad dash through those "stupid" tornadoes. Another good example is the lightning phase in the Jin'rokh the Breaker fight where everyone stacks and takes a butt load of damage for a while. Perhaps there is a boss fight that just dumps a lot of damage on the raid and the healers are busy trying to heal up the other 9 or 24 members of the raid. Perhaps the healers will be able to get around to you or perhaps not and you either have to get a battle rez or lay there all defeated until the boss dies or the raid wipes.

But there is an easy way to remedy this, allowing you to not only live through most encounters which would kill any other player, but often times, you will be the last man/woman standing. These suggestions are as follows.

-Identify every single last "oh crap I'm about to die" spell you have and assign them to a hotkey. Damage mitigation spells and self healing spells would fall under this category. Make a habit of going though your spell book and looking for anything and everything that would allow you to live a bit longer or heal yourself up until your healers can have more time to fill your health back up.
-Also make a hotkey for Warlock health stones and healing potions or even those life spirit things you get from your farm or from picking flowers in Mists of Pandaria
-Once everything is hotkeyed either make sure you can always clearly see your health status by moving your healthframe to the same section of the screen or find a nice health warning mod that makes a terrible racket or your screen flashes once your health drops bellow a certain percentage.
-Then all you have to do is start popping those "oh crap" spells and items until you are safe again.

Personally, I use weak auras for this, as I do any time I need to know anything about my items, cool downs, status...the list goes on and on.

I typically assign an aura to pop up at various stages of my health. My Mistweaver monk for example has the following triggers assigned so that I know not only what is availible to me (off cd) and at the particular stage of my health that I need it the most.

1. at 80% or bellow I have Expell Harm reminder to pop up right on top of my character. I hit the appropriate key and I'm healed up.
2. at 70% Mana tea pops up for a quick 60+k heal
3. at 60% Fortifying Brew pops up and I hit that key
4. 50% is my lock rock and if it's an easy fight to keep mana on a healing potion. If you don't have a lock then put one in your group long enough to get some.

Here is a vid showing how quickly you can do this with weak auras

There you have it. If you would like some help setting up your "oh crap" auras just reply to this post with your request.