Honest question incoming. [shame] I am a clicker and a sometimes keyboard turner.
In an effort to break up all the raiding posts I thought I would see input from the collective.
A long time ago – somewhere in the middle of my WoW history I was not a clicker. i spent hours on a test dummy running side to side, back and forth and casting spells to be at the top of my DPS. (I was never good enough imho and part of why I stopped playing my mage for tanking; I was better at that).
Now, I just can’t seem to get back into not clicking. I start off with good intentions and use my buttons and mice buttons then at some point I get flustered with boss mechanics and fall back to the clicking.
It was a point of discussion recently with the usual things like have spell types set to the same across all specs and characters, have important CD’s on mice etc.
My interest is more towards how you manage to move your toon out of things at the same time as maintaining a rotation. From initial discussions I have small fingers because some of my friends are saying they can reach the number keys whilst resting on awsd…I have to physically lift my hand to reach them. Did my hands shrink? Did keyboards just get bigger? Are my fingers like little sausages and not as a joke (as my husband calls them!!?)?
Everyone of my friends had a different way of moving their character and I am actually impressed with the variants. I use my mouse to move the camera and I use WQE to move forward and strafe. I barely use SDA unless I am turning to look at something specific – which I think I use at the same time as my mouse?
My biggest struggle after a few weeks of buttons and not clicking is managing to target mobs at the same time as DPS and move. OMG this has kicked up the difficulty level – especially with the new raid.
So…how do you guys move your character around and target mobs? Whilst not being clicker?
I’ve already said what I do as a healer so I won’t repeat it here, but I must admit I have more trouble as dps with targeting while a bunch of mobs are moving around. I’m so used to having a nice set of raid frames to rely on. 🙂
I do wonder if being melee vs ranged vs healer changes the ease of not clicking, but you know i am slowly getting there, I still mess my rotation but it is happening less and less. I just keep hitting the wrong buttons but thinking I am on the right ones, so I know what i need to press but my fingers have moved too much. I was going to set my mouse up last night, but I got distracted with housework of all things. So I might try and get it done tonight after karate.
For movement I just use wasd (a&d are rebound as strafe, turning is unbound) and the mouse. If you need to be casting and moving at the same time you can hold down both mouse buttons and move or with more practice and well laid out keybinds you can strafe and use mouse look (right mouse button) whilst hitting the desired ability key.
As to targeting I am probably very ineffiecient here but I tend to tab target or click the mob nameplate. For more than three I tend to click the nameplate of the one I need to single out or just aoe burst them all.
Movement and targeting is another practice thing switching between mouse movement and key movement as needed. I would highly suggest unbinding key turning as that is easily achievable, and faster, with your mause and removing the binds takes them away so you can’t fall back on them. You could even rebind them to something more useful.
As I said above I use wasd (a&d strafe). For the original strafe key ‘e’ is bound for movement (dash, blink etc) and ‘q’ bound to status removers like remove curse and soothe.
It all starts with a well laid out keybind that works for you. Then practice till muscle memory sets in. If you play a fair bit of alts it helps to carry over the same keybinding setup as muscle memory will carry over and it can help reinforce it too. 🙂
The tab targeting is what I am struggling with 🙂 Honestly I think my keyboard keys are too far part for me to do this well. I am still trying to make it muscle memory but after 3 weeks I am getting much better at moving with the mouse (which I realllllllly hate!)
I am not strafing anymore so I might rebind those keys to something else so I don’t have to reach the number keys…