User:Ogreinside/Controls

Intro
In my original article Keybindings I looked at ways to play efficiently with a keyboard, leaving the mouse for use only out-of-combat. This worked great for me as a Feral Druid, and while playing my rogue, but switching to casting as a Healer/Moonkin made it much more inefficient.

I was searching for the most comfortable playing style for WoW. I found for healing, it is vital to use some kind of click-casting. I'm not talking about clicking all your spells/macros, but rather for targeting. Even then, not actually clicking on any targets - I'll cover this in the Macros section below.

Some sort of keyboard is always going to be needed for efficiency. The sections below describe my setup. I use the n52te gamepad and Logitech G9 Mouse. I never touch the keyboard except to chat. However, the n52te is not required, you can still achieve a similar setup with mouse/keyboard.

Menus
I have always hated the default menu bindings. I used to bind all my menus to F1-F12 keys. Since you can't or shouldn't really be opening menus during combat, might as well have them where menus usually are in most applications, out of the way. However, I started binding all my menus to mouse keys, see below for details. In general, I say bind menus to keys that are out of the way, and will not hinder your combat. I think it is silly that the default bindings are things like "c" and "b". For combat (when using the keybaord) you would want those keys for more vital things. Even binding menus to ctrl+key would be better.

Mouse
I'm using a 9 button Logitch G9 mouse. Don't ask, just get it, it's by far the best gaming mouse I've ever used.

This is what I have bound to my mouse:

Of course left and right-click are unchanged. The scrollwheel on this mouse can be "tilted" left and right. So I have it configured to toggle my bags if I tilt it right, and toggle map if I tilt left. Ctrl+left tilt is character sheet, ctrl+right tilt Spellbook, etc. I find this extremely efficient, as I can open and close menus without ever lifting my hand.

The two trinket buttons are a little more tricky. By default these buttons swap profiles on the mouse. Instead, I used the Logitech app to auto-switch profiles based on what application I launch. So I bound these two buttons to numpad* and numpad- or something. It doesn't matter what you bind them to, as long as you bind it in game also.

Actionbars
I have recently tried to cut down on the amount of mods I depend on. One I could never live without is an actionbar replacement. I used to use Bongos, but since patch 3.0.2 it is no longer working. The author of Bongos wrote a new mod that is very lightweight and performs everything that was essential from Bongos, called Dominos.

Why do I use it? Two main reasons. First I can reconfigure the layout of my bars. Son instead of one long horizontal bar, I can make it a 4x3 table of buttons, or vertical, move it around, hide them if I want (we'll see why later) and so forth.

Secondly, instead of manually switching bars (default is shift+up arrow/downarrow I think), you can use this mod to temporarily swap your actionbar based on events, like if I hold ctrl down, I will get a new bar. Or f I switch to a certain stance/shape like Druid Cat in Stealth, I will get a new bar. Those of you may be saying, "wait, I already get a new actionbar when I shift to cat form." True, but not a different action bar for stealth Cat Form. I also do things like have a "healing" actionbar with all my heal spells on it. I have it set to switch to my primary action bar when I go Tree of Life form, and a full damage bar if I switch to Moonkin.

So why would you want to reconfigure your bar layout? If you read below, you'll see that I use the n52te controller, so I reconfigure my actionbar to resemble the layout of my pad. Even if you are not using this gamepad, those who read my Keybindings article know that I liked to remap the regular keyboard so I was pressing more comfortable keys such instead of 1-=. Reconfiguring your layout to match your keyboard is extremely helpful.

Here is an example of my setup when I have the Dominos configuration open:



You simply right-click on an action bar, and select the desired layout. This is my completed configuration. You see bars 8/9/10? They are invisible, but they are used when I go Cat/Stealth/Bear form. If you shift+right-click, you can toggle hiding it As you can see, it would not be very helpful to be right in the middle of the screen, and there is no real reason to show those bars when you are not in that form.

My main action bar is the lower left one (1).

If you right-click on it, you can choose different configuration options such as layout, and others:



If you select "Druid" (or Warrior/DK, etc, depending on your class), you can choose which bars show up in its place when you are in certain stances:



That's great, but what if you don't care about stances? Well, you can also swap bars based on modifiers:



You could have a bar that has nothing but pots and other consumables on it, maybe trinket, whatever, and have it swap into actionbar 1 when you hold ctrl. As a Druid, I use this technique to heal from any stance. As an example, I have "alt" modifier set to bring back actionbar 1. So no matter what stance I'm in, holding "alt" will bring up my healing bar (I have all my heals on actionbar 1). So I can hit alt+whatever in any form to cast that heal macro. Here's an example of my bear bar up, then what happens when I press alt:



You see the bar in the lower right? That is my "ctrl" bar. It swaps over with "ctrl". You can see the keybindings on there "S1, C1" and see how they correspond to the same key (1). There really isn't a need to have these shown like I do, if you want a cleaner UI, you can just hide these. The reason I show them is so I can click on them with my mouse if I feel the need (holding my daughter while she is screaming).

However you end up setting up your bars, I highly recommend spending some time thinking about your button layout. Make sure you are putting your most used skills/spells on buttons that require your fingers to move the least. In my setup, I have Lifebloom bound to the key that my left index finger hits in its most comfortable position, requiring no extra movement (basically the resting position). Since I spam this in raids, I can't imagine stretching my finger over any more than needed.

Macros
I used to use Clique, but after diving into macros I'll never go back.

My basic healing macros is:

/cast [target=mouseover,help,nodead,exists][help,nodead,exists][target=player] Lifebloom

All of my spells are now setup this way. Why? Because I hate targeting to heal. Here is how the macro works:

This macro is designed to select a target in this order:


 * 1) First your mouseover target, as long as it is a friendly, non-dead unit, or:
 * 2) Your selected target, as long as it is a friendly, non-dead unit, or:
 * 3) Yourself

I use this type of macro for all of my spell casts, helpful or harmful. That way I can have anything selected (or nothing), and use mouseover for primary targeting. So target with mouse (don't click anything on the mouse), and press your macro key for the spell you want. Note that this works on the visible unit on screen, or the unit frame. I also enable auto self-cast, so when I do not have a target, it lands on me.

If you want to use a self-cast modifier instead, you can add that in the macro and have the last target a "select" target, which will let you use the mouse to click the target (the default behaviour if you have no target). This kind of defeats the purpose of an efficient mouseover targetting, but you might find it helpful for other purposes. You might try something like this for the last line:

/cast [mod:alt,target=player][target=mouseover,help,nodead,exists][help,nodead,exists][target=none] Lifebloom

This will:
 * 1) First Self-cast if you are pressing "alt" when you activate the macro, or:
 * 2) Your mouseover target, as long as it is a friendly, non-dead unit, or:
 * 3) Your selected target, as long as it is a friendly, non-dead unit, or:
 * 4) Highlight your cursor and allow you to click on your target

The "target=none" will highlight your mouse cursor and allow you to click on your target. This is probably not the best for efficient casting, but works great for things like a rez that aren't time intensive, but you want to make sure you select the right target.

If you decide to make mass changes, I highly recommend editing your macro file out of game, as this is SO much easier to do. You can certainly do in game with a lot of copy/paste, but trust me on this. You have two sets of macros, a general and a character specific one. Full details are available on the Macro page. Simply open  and

n52te
For those that are not familiar with the n52te, here is what it looks like:



It has 15 programmable keys, a thumbstick (8-way D-pad), scroll wheel (like a mouse), and additional thumb button. So in total that's really more like 35 buttons.

When I first bought this controller I was disappointed. I tried it a few times, but really didn't get into it. I found myself using it for leisure sessions, but when the action heated up I would quickly abandon it for the keyboard. It had been collecting dust for almost a year. One of the main issues I had was that it seemed I had less keys than I would with the keyboard on my left hand. However, I took a little break from WoW and came back after patch 3.0.2 came out. I decided since I had to learn new talents and such, I was going to force myself to learn to use this pad.

I realized that it wasn't about the sheer number of keys you had available, it was more about the combinations of keys you could hit in this layout. For example, I use my left pinky finger to press the 3 left most keys. I have these bound to shift, ctrl, alt (top to bottom). That leaves 12 available keys, which just happens to correspond to the size of the action bar. All the other keys can be bound to anything, it does not matter. For this setup I used the numbers keys 1-= just because it was easy, and the action bars were already setup that way. (It is probably best to bind them to function keys F1-F12 which are non-printable, so you can still press them while a chat window is open).

So now I can hit shift, ctrl, or alt with one finger (left pinky), and any combination of them (ctrl+alt, ctrl+shift, all three, however shift+alt is harder since they are left-top, and left-bottom), plus any of the 12 keys. So that is easily 5x12 = 60 unique key presses (not counting shift+alt). This is what makes the pad so flexible, try doing that with one hand on a normal keyboard. YOu can't comfortably hit something like ctrl+shift+1, not to mention ctrl+shift+9 with one hand.

A quick note on movement. I used to use WASD all the time, but I now use the thumbstick for movement. This essentially gives you the same thing with Up, Left, Down, Right on the thumbstick. By default the gamepad is 8-way, meaning it also has "Up/Left", "Left/Down", etc. However, I found this caused weird control issues, so I disabled all the diagonal buttons, and only use Up/Down/Left/Right. This is probably what took the longest to get used to. If you don't like this, at least configure the thumb button to execute individual macros, so you aren't losing any functionality. However, I love this control scheme so much, I use it in all my games: RTS, FPS, etc. The thumbstick takes a bit used to, but it is awesome. I can run and cast any combination of keys while moving.

So even though the regular keyboard seems to have more keys available to your left hand, let's say numbers 1-5, q-t, a-g, z-b, tab, caps, shift, ctrl, alt, tilde, space = 27 keys, more with F-keys, but we'll stick to the least amount of hand movement. Sure, 27 > 15 (though there really are more), BUT, it is extremely uncomfortable to hit combinations such as ctrl+5, or shift+q and so forth. Not to mention you will have to use WASD for movement, so that's really only 23 keys available. And how can you move with WASD and also hit a combination like alt+2 (one-handed)? It's not easy with the keyboard, but it is with the gamepad.

Anyway, here is my layout:



Other than modifiers, and the 12 action bar buttons, I use ~ for push-to-talk, the scrollwheel is pgup/pgdown which I have bound in game to next/previous enemy, and tab attacks. For extra flexibility, I have ctrl+left/ctrl+right bound to turn the camera.