User:Ogreinside/Keybindings

My keybindings

Theory
Update: I no longer use this setup. See my current Controls page for my latest setup. However, this is still a great way to play if you are using just a keyboard (or laptop), and are playing a melee type class for efficient single-target playstyle. The main reason I switched to using a mouse more was when I switch to a healing Druid. I found myself constantly moving my right hand back and forth from mouse to keyboard.

My idea was to assign my most used skills to the most comfortable positions for my hands/fingers. I play on a laptop, so using a mouse is more difficult (and slower) for me, at least when it comes to time sensitive actions like combat. I do use the mouse for quick turning, looking around, selective targeting, menus, looting, and general non-combat activities. Don't be fooled, we're not talking keyboard turning here :)

Using the default "1-=" bindings are not exactly the best position for your fingers, especially since you'll be hitting them thousands of times per day/week. Why not cause less work for your hands/fingers? I set out to map my most used buttons to those in my finger's home positions (j k l ; for right hand). This is has a very vi-like feel to it. I used to play FFXI, and everything could be done with the keyboard - even camera rotation. I always loved that. Mouse was always optional, but then again you can play with a gamepad since it is cross-platform on PS2/3, 360, PC.

For example, as a cat druid I would map mangle or claw (main attack) to j, so I can just hit that key with my right index finger while moving around as needed with my left hand, and other skills/spells to keys like k, l, i, and so forth.

Anyone who has played against a jump-happy player knows how frustrating it can be to move, chase, and try to hit spells/skills at the same time while they bounce all over the place. My philosophy here is that you don't want any skill/spell on your movement hand (left), since you need to always be able to maneuver. With that in mind, you can place anything with a casting time (summon mount for example) on your left hand - since you can't move and cast.

This does require touch typing, and is not for hunt and peck typers. For me, combat is all keyboard.

Default Bindings
I changed almost all the default bindings. The only one I use is W A S D, and even then, I've been considering moving to S A X D (S = forward, X = back) which seems more comfortable, but I'm not used to it yet.

You can't open game menus (like character sheet, rep, skills, etc) during combat, so I rebound all my menus to ALT+key. ALT+c = character sheet, ALT+p = skill sheet, etc. This frees up the normal key for valuable combat stuff.

There are other items that may need remapping. I changed chat reply from "r" to "ALT+r". I also changed targetting (tab) from the left hand so  I can move while targetting. I remapped targetting as follows:


 * Target enemy = [
 * Target previous enemy = ]
 * Target friendly = shift+[
 * Target previous friendly = shift+]

Other mappings:
 * Attack = backspace (you want to delete them, right?)
 * set focus = ctrl+backspace
 * target saved focus = shift+backspace (that lets me spam shift+backspace, backspace to attack)
 * assist = \
 * autorun = f (instant access to run, without interferring with W A S D too much)

One thing I noticed is that I rarely use the "attack" binding. If you have no target selected, and hit an attack skill, it will auto-target the closest enemy (even if out of range). This is how I mostly target. I may have missed some, but I basically wanted to free up all instantly accessible, comfortable feeling keys. Of course do whatever is comfortable for you.

Initial Setup
Now that all the default items have been remapped, it's time to configure your bars. Using the addon Bongos, I configured two 4x3 bars with bindings for my right and left hands. I configured them using the "stance" and "modifiers" page to change to different bars for my different stances/key combos (ctrl,shift). You will also notice a 1x3 bar that stays constant. These are instants (and trinket) that I want to use regardless of stance, and are easily accessible.

Here is what my setup looks like:

Steps:


 * Aquire Bongos addon NOTE: I recommend disabling the "Bongos - RollBar" component when logging in. At least I had to, in order to see the need/greed popup.  I noticed someone else had the same problem on the mod page, so disabling it is best unless you can test it.  The problem is you can't generate a roll drop on demand.  I had to farm mobs while in a group with my guild just to make this happen, and it took a few hours.  I lost some good drops in an instance when I first used Bongos, because I couldn't see the popup.
 * Right-click on the Bongos icon by the mini-map
 * Under Action Bar I configured mine to use 10 bars (note that increasing it past 10 caused it to cannibalize slots from other bars)
 * Left-click on the icon on the mini-map
 * All the bars should light up. Move them around as desired.
 * Right-click on any bar to configure it.
 * Change columns as desired. I recommend a 4x3 bar for starters
 * You can click on "stances" and change which bar is displayed for that stance. For example, as a Druid my bar was bar 6.  I configured it to show bar 7 for bear, bar 8 for cat, bar 9 for prowl, etc.  This does consume available bars.
 * You will need to hide the actual bars that get used. For example, in my setup I had to hide bars 7-9.  This means they will only show up when the matching stance/form is active.  Shift+right-click to hide/unhide bars.
 * You can do this same thing with "modifiers" page. Simply choose a different bar to be displayed based on modifiers (I only used shift and ctrl).
 * Once your bar is setup, close the setup windows (left-click to close bars, right-click to close main config)
 * Now you can test it out by changing stances, and dragging skills/spells to each one to make sure they work.
 * Once satisfied, right-click to open config again.
 * Click on "bindings"
 * Hover over a slot, and press the key to assign. It is that simple.
 * If you have a bunch of existing bindings, hit ESC while hovering over to clear them

Movement Hand
I created a 4x3 bar for my left hand. Notice that I did not map keys to the location of W A S D, Q E (strafe), but the boxes are there to represent where my left hand would be, and thus the keys located close by:

You can actually drop items in the available slots (for example, quest item that you need to click), or even assign other keybindings if you like. I have not filled in some of the keys like "t", "g", "b" yet, but spells/skills with casting time will go here.

For my druid, I want to always have my heals available, no matter what form I am in. With one of the recent patches, it was changed so that you could begin casting a spell, and if you were in the wrong form (or mounted), it would automatically switch you to caster form (or dismount), and begin casting that spell. This is vital to Druids who want to heal asap:

If you look closely, you can see I have the bar bound to 1-5 (left hand). I also have 6, -, = (right hand) for spells I want available to my right hand. In this case I would only use these if I was in feral form and needed to moonfire a runner, for example. 7-0 are my forms, so no need to put them on here.

Muscle Memory
One thing you must do, particularly if you have been playing awhile, is re-train your brain. I highly recommend beating on some semi-easier mobs (5-10 levels lower) until you get a feel for the new setup. Maybe go quest or grind for a bit. After some battlegrounds, you should be good to go. Don't do like I did: while initially changing them, I tanked for an instance... felt like a complete newb. I was missing some skills on my bars, hitting the wrong ones, intending to use a skill and shifting accidentally, etc.

Screenshots
Using the "stance" configuration above, here is what my bar looks like for each form:

Bear bar:

Caster bar:

Cat bar:

Cat prowl bar:

What is really nice about this, is that you get an extra bar for prowl (you don't usually with the default action bar, only for bear/cat). This means I can approach someone in prowl, hit "j" to pounce, this will remove prowl and the bar will switch to regular cat form, so I can hit "j" again and this time it is mangle.

Additionally, if I hit CTRL, this bar changes to yet another bar (not shown here). This one has all potions/bandages. So "ctrl+j" will heal, etc." Shift is another one that I have buffs on (non-critical).

So in total, I have a (4x3) bar with 6 different sheets, plus 3 constant slots, and my 4 shift buttons = 79 unique slots, all with the right hand, and 15 (not including movement) on my left.

Alternative Methods
Of course this is all my opinion. I just hope that this helps someone play more efficient and/or comfortably. You could always opt not to bind all these keys, and just mouse click them. The alternate bars would still be quite helpful. You could do things like map CTRL/ALT to a mouse button, so you could hover and click as needed, while using the "modifiers" to quickly switch bars. Another thing I may do in non-PvP situations like questing, is to move with my mouse, and use my left hand to hit my skill keys j, k, l, ;, etc. YMMV.