kebinding help

[hobblock 0]

So I am starting to realize I need to learn to keybind ( yeah still a clicker).  But everytime I try even a little, I get super frustrated and change back :(  So if im gonna learn I wanna ask some advice, Or how u guys did it.  Do u all have multi button mice? Or ive heard making a level 1 alt , to never click on helps, What do u guys think?  Im at a place I don't think I can be ALOT better till this changes.  Any advice or help with less would be great

[Orthios 271]

What I've found is that having similar abilities bound to the same key across multiple toons helps to remember which key does what.  I myself have a pretty standard mouse, with no side buttons and just left, right and middle scroll wheel.  I use esdf for my movement keys, instead of wasd, which frees up q, w, r, a, and g for various abilities, then using 1-5 and shift mods for everything.  This gives me enough buttons for almost everything, as there are still a few abilities that I find myself clicking.

[Lockybalboa 618]

My mouse

My "keyboard"

 

The mouse is imo indispensable, I *could* play without my side keys but it would be a major loss in my ability to keybind. The gaming pad was economical and its turned out to be just freaking amazing. I used to be getting $110-150 "gaming" keyboards every two-three years, this gaming pad was only $60 and has lasted me almost 3 and still going strong. I freaking LOVE this thing. Personally for comfort and ease of use I would take the game pad over the mouse if I had to pick one, having both is just awesome.

 

I never was a clicker so I don't really know how to tell you how to change, the starting a lvl one toon is something that I've heard a lot of people doing. Mostly its about forcing yourself to just DO it. You need to give yourself time to build muscle memory. Don't try and rush it, don't give up, just keep doing it. It's worth it in the end.
 

[Recklessfear 33]

Pro tip to stopping clicking: Make your action bars click-through. 

[Tuffeyy 1]

First of all, unbind your strafe keys (Q and E) and bind them to A and D, and move your mouse right click to turn

Because you are using your mouse to turn you are pretty much forced to press your keys for abilities.

 

I have a gaming mouse but never got round to binding the side buttons so I still use my keyboard.

 

I use 1-2-3-4-5-`-q-e-r-f for all of my abilities I push regularly. They are all very close to WASD so I dont really need to move my hand at all to press them. I use all those buttons again with SHIFT for things I dont use so often. Shift-e is my interrupt for example.

 

I basically forced myself to use my keybinds even if I knew it was making me play worse then what I was used to and slowly I got better and better at it. You'll find over time you will play better just because there is less "delay" between you press your abilities, I also tank so sometimes I need to press something in .5 seconds or die and wipe 24 other people :D

 

If you really are still struggling and have the time. Make an alt at level 1 and make sure you keybind everything as you get it. That way you get slowly introduced to it one abilties at a time, without having to think about pressing 15 different keybinds at level 90

[Kazistrasz 216]

First mouse stuff, then non-mouse stuff.

 

I am with Locky. Get a Naga. You'll thank us later. It's seriously the best investment I've ever made as a gamer. It's really werid at first, and it takes most people about three days to get used to. You'll start out forgetting what you bound where on the mouse, struggling to push the right button, and basically making a mess of anything you do, so don't do anything important. 

 

Having an extra 14 keys for binding is incredibly useful. The only thing to note is that since you'll use them bound as numpad keys (the other option is 1 to = on your number keys), you can't use shift-modifiers with them as shift+numpad keys give you arrow keys, home, pgup, etc.

 

If you get a Naga, I advise seeing if you can find one of the models from 2012 or so when they still put the Mouse 4 and Mouse 5 buttons (forward and back browser buttons) on the front left corner by your index finger. I personally think putting them behind the wheel was a stupid decision on their part, as having them on that corner made them very accessible. I usually have it set so that the front button sets the target as my focus, and bind other misc. things to the back button. For example, all of my hunter's pets and dismiss are on the back button in a macro. While I'm thinking about it, I should do that for my warlock.

 

I've never used the gamepad Locky has, but I know a lot of people who have similar and love them. I tried using the Nostromo (Razor's gamepad), but I just wasn't pleased with the sizing/placement of some of the keys. It's worth giving them a try, but a mouse is the best thing you could ever do for yourself.

 

On to the non-mouse stuff.

 

I've gotten several people to stop clicking in the past. When you look at someone's UI, you can usually spot that they're a clicker, because they have enormous buttons that are usually pretty close to the middle of their screen (so they can "quickly" reach them to click). Break this first.

 

Make your buttons as small as you possibly can, and stick them off in the corner of your screen or somewhere that's very inconvenient for you to try to click. Go stand at a target dummy, and just practice your rotation. If you have to, stare at that part of your screen while you get used to remembering what button is where, but getting your buttons to a place where you can't easily click them and still interact with the rest of the world will help you break it.

 

I recommend coming up with a good scheme for your binds that makes sense to you. When I first got my mouse, I re-did my bindings completely and started using the same scheme I used now, which also helped drastically when I took a long break from the game and came back at the start of ToT after not playing since early FL. I wasn't a clicker, but it still made the transition very, very easy.

 

Here's what my bars look like (this is also exactly how small they are, pixel-for-pixel, in the bottom-right corner of my screen). Infernal should be on shiftE, and I shouldn't have Burning Rush on there twice. Something got botched with the AddOn I use to save my bar setups when I drop a spec for another (Hey Blizz, Trispec PLZ).

 

 

One of the first things I did was simply look at my keyboard and decide which buttons I had available to bind that were near my left hand, remembering to also include 14 binds from my mouse. I came up with 48 total, and I organize them roughly by where they actually are on the keyboard.

 

What you'll see there is that my mouse is entirely on the right side of my bars, organized like they are on the mouse in that 4x3 grid, with the forward and back buttons off on the side at the top.

 

Across the top, in green, are 1-8, with shift1-shift8 above them in blue. Below them, in yellow, are the rest of my keys. Q and sQ are the top left, just like the actual keyboard, and go down the line with E,sE, R, T, sT. F and G go on that line as well, over on the right end of the line. Below that I start with S and sS (unbind backpedal), then go with the bottom row in the same order down the line. Any of those keys that were bound by default for things like the menu got bound to shift-whatever, so my character pane is sC, my bags are sB, etc.,  I also bind ` for my Hearthstone, H for ground mount (really, H for "horse" since my first mount way back when was actually the Felsteed), and sF for flying mount (yes, F for "flying").

 

From there, I just started coming up with a scheme. My rotation always goes on my mouse. That's the one thing that changes significantly from spec to spec, character to character. The only time I really have much consistency in my mouse-binding is when I'm healing. After that, I just started going with things. The more likely I am to need something, especially quickly, the closer to my hand it goes. I'm consistent across characters.

 

X is ALWAYS my healthstone, regardless of character I'm on. F and G are ALWAYS defensives. F is usually weaker (for example, Divine Protection on my Paladin is F while bubble is G). I break this on my warlock since I don't always have SacPact. R is ALWAYS my res, regardless of character. Z is always interrupt, with sZ being a second interrupt if I have it or a stun. Q and sQ are ALWAYS reserved for CC, unless I'm tanking (I then use Q for taunt). T and sT are usually utility of some kind, with the bigger option being on sT just to guarantee no accidental pressings (Bloodlust on my shaman, Tranq on my Druid, Drums if I'm Zagam :p) and T being used for less important things (my teleport on my warlock, Soothe on my druid, Tranq Shot on my hunter, etc.). Anything to do with movement speed is generally S or sS, so Burning Rush and Nitro Boosts for my lock, Charge and Heroic Leap on my Warrior, or Dash and Stampeding Roar for my druid.  I use V and sV usually for some kind of resource-related thing, or otherwise they, and C, go to something I just need an extra button for. B is usually used for something I need to put on a target, but not very often--like Curse of Elements, Faerie Fire, etc.

 

For consistency, my cooldowns always go on my number keys. Even in my cooldowns, I usually try to maintain some consistency. If I'm healing, any external CD for a tank (Hand of Sacrifice, Ironbark, etc.) always goes on 2, while that happens to usually be any EH CD when I'm tanking (Might of Ursoc, Last Stand, etc.) with my 1 key going to whatever frequently-used generally charge-based CD I have (Elusive Brew, Savage Defense, Shield Block, etc.)

 

All of my buffs (DI, PW:F, Horn of Winter) go on the s1 through s8, or anything else I need to be ready for combat (my lock pets, Gateway, etc.) The furthest number keys get used for things I really don't want to accidentally use in combat, but don't want to click out of my backpack, like my Invis pots when I'm doing CMs.

[Killingjoke 4]

Honestly the best advice is find something that works for you. One persons keybinds might work for them but have feel very uncomfortable for you. I would just mess around on a target dummy and see what feels good for your fingers.

[Liquidsteel 279]

From Vanilla through Wrath I played with both hands on the keyboard like a noob. I was a keyboard turner with my left hand, and my right danced around the number and function keys.

 

I was pretty bad.

 

Returning just before MoP, I decided it was to learn how to play properly.

 

What I did was force myself to ONLY use my left hand for abilities. My right hand was, for all intents and purposes, glued to my mouse.

 

It was super hard but after a week it was like second nature. 

 

I've actually gone a step further this week and turned my action bars to only be visible on mouseover, and added in some extra weakauras for the stuff I was just glancing down on previously.

 

Just practice until you get to the point where your hand just knows what button to hit.

Edited July 13, 2014 by Liquidsteel

[Gnar 26]

I feel your pain bud.  Clicking is a perfectly acceptable path and no one should say that it isn't.  I have played for two years as a clicker and I do great damage while still having the best awareness on my team.  Just like binders develop muscle memory, so do clickers.  That all being said, there are just some things clickers cannot do, and that is why I am going through the painful transition myself.

 

Since I started to understand the game more and more, I needed certain things about my play to change.  For example, I needed a lot of mouseovers for things like havoc and the imp dispel.  Then I started to heal on my druid, and if you click and heal, you are probably looking at a lot of "dead" tags.  At this point, I bought a Naga and used the side buttons but the binding only stuck 100% for the healing. Now, pushing Heroic Garrosh has got me wanting to transition my DPS characters because trying to Havoc an add in intermission, then click a different add, then go to my bar to hit CB, and then hope I'm not too slow on Shadowfury (which I already have bound) is far to scary to let happen.

 

My solution is do something that requires you to keybind and get a Naga.  Playing the healer really got my fingers used to the buttons on the Naga and binding in general.  It was very easy to learn how to do when I had no other way to possibly play. Now, to get the DPS transitioned, I'm leveling another warlock.  I'm finding it much easier to level a toon I already know because I'm not fumbling thinking of what buttons to click. I know what I want to hit and now its my brain and fingers turn to find that button. Another really helpful idea is to make your action bars mouseover if you use elvui and make them shaped like the side of a Naga (in case I wasn't clear, get a Naga) so that the action bars image can get burned into your mind and then your fingers.  Also, when you use modifers like shift, which you will have to do, try to put abilities together that function similarly or together.  My example is binding Rejuv with Swiftmend because you need Rejuv on a target to Swiftmend most of the time.  Another example is Healing Touch paired with Regrowth so now all I have to do is go "o shit need a faster heal *shift* done".

 

TLDR: GET A NAGA, shape your bars like the Naga, bind similar things together, and do something different or fresh like healing because you literally cannot click.

[Orthios 271]

Though of this the other day, but try going to the brawlers guild to learn your keybinds and to move away from being a clicker.  The fights challenge you in odd ways, most of the time where clicking is simply not as viable as using keys.  One fight that will be nearly impossible to do clicking you abilities will be Hexos at rank 8, where you have to turn him so that he doesn't touch the lights on the ground, while maintaining 100k dps.  

[hobblock 0]

yeah I know its gonna take whatever is comfortable for me.  Just gotta figure it out, So to break key turning habits, I unbound A and D , im gonna assume most ppl hold both mouse buttons to walk then? and just tab target things on the fly?  sorry , I know lots of ?'s just feel completely lost with this change

[Gnar 26]

Tab if you don't care what you are hitting or cannot click it.  Keybinding leaves you mouse available to be in the middle of the screen no longer making it a hike to click mobs and then click abilities. Just click what you want to attack and go.

[Liquidsteel 279]

I bound A and D to strafe, movement with a mix of strafing and mouse buttons, and W if I have to.