When you’re playing WoW, you need to be able to react fast. Especially if you’re doing PvP. But also in “normal” playing, questing, killing mobs, or going in dungeons, you will survive longer and kill faster if you have the right keybindings.
In short: Instead of breaking your fingers in the effort of reaching [`] while hitting the [F6] at the same time, or instead of losing speed by grabbing the mouse and click on tiny icons, you should profit from easy to reach keybindings.
Warning: It takes a while getting used to, but after a couple of days, you’ll never want to go back.
My son paid me a visit a couple of weeks ago, and I asked him to teach me about doing battlegrounds. He has the duelist title, and recently he sent me a picture, showing that he had had 41 kills with no deaths in a battleground. So I kind of assumed that he would know something about this stuff.
His first move was to teach me new keybindings. He told me to use [W] to move forward, and to stear with my mouse, and after a while I did okay with my warlock, but died miserably again and again with my rogue. These keys were not logic to me.
Anyway, since I needed to know which keys to use for my disc priest, I did a search online and found a great article about keybindings. I recommend you read it, especially, if you want to get keybindings for a rogue and/or priest.
Move and Stear With Your Left Hand and Your Mouse
The first thing it stated was:
WASD sucks!
What is WASD?
These are the four keys people traditionally use to move around with. [W] = forward, [A] and [D] to strafe left and right, and [S] to move backwards.
The author claimed that ESDF would be much better. And he’s right.
Reason? If you’ve learned to type blind, i.e. without looking on your keyboard, you’ll keep your left hand fingers hovered above ASDF, and stretch one finger at a time to reach the keys near those basic keys.
So reaching up to touch [E] to move forward, makes it much easier to hit the other keys, you’ll need, when you want to shoot, cast spells, run a macro, move, etc.
I’ll show you in a moment, how you change your keybindings.
Keep your right hand on the mouse, and while you’re pressing [E], drag your mouse around while holding down the left mouse-button.
Try moving around a bit. This alone will probably take a few tries to learn.
How to Change Your Keybindings
You change your keybindings by hitting [Esc], and clicking on Keybindings.
This is my toolbar (click on the image to get a larger format):
As you can see, the trick is to use only left hand keys on the keyboard. Numbers from 1-6, letters from Q to T, A to H, and Z to V. And then combinations with Shift. I have three Alt-buttons as well (Alt+1 to Alt+3).
You should put the things, you use more often, on keys that are easy to hit, like 1-6, R, T, G, Q, target with A, move with E (forward), S (strafe left), F (strafe right), D (backwards). When I made those changes, it didn’t take me long to get adjusted to them, and my gameplay became both better and easier.
I’ll show you how I set up my toolbars. First the bindings that I share with all my other chars (except some specific keys, which I’ll tell you about later).
We’ll take the keybindings from the top, but I’ll skip those that are unchanged, or has unbound keys.
I break the pattern below, only with my warlock. I use the X to get health from my blue pet (the voidwalker) to me. Yeah, cruelty is my middle name.
Okay, the following is my keybindings for my lvl 40 warlock, so I’ll update it, when I get more possibilities. But as you can see, the pattern is the most used spells on keys that are easy to reach. And if you can add logic to the pattern, it works better. For instance to have Fear on key 1, and Howl of Terror on Shift+1 makes sense. At least to me 😉
|
Key
|
Action
|
Shift Action
|
|---|---|---|
|
R
|
Life Tap
|
|
|
T
|
Drain Life
|
Drain Mana
|
|
G
|
Curse of Agony
|
Curse of Exhaustion
|
|
V
|
Racial Ability
|
Healthstone
|
|
C
|
Shadow Ward
|
Demon Armor
|
|
W
|
Dispell Macro (me)
|
Dispell Macro (friend)
|
|
Q
|
Ventrilo
|
|
|
A
|
Target Closest Enemy
|
Enslave Demon
|
|
Z
|
Health Funnel
|
|
|
X
|
Sacrifice
|
|
|
H
|
Detect Invisibility
|
|
|
1
|
Fear
|
Howl of Terror
|
|
2
|
Corruption
|
Macro
|
|
3
|
Immolate
|
Macro
|
|
4
|
Drain Soul
|
Curse of Tongues
|
|
5
|
Shadow Bolt
|
Wand
|
|
6
|
Searing Pain
|
Macro
|
The macros, my son made me, are:
Dispell Macro (me): /cast [target=meille] Devour Magic
“meille” is my chars name. Write your own chars name, and it will work much better for you.
Dispell Macro (friend): /cast Devour Magic
The following are the macros I have on Shift+2 and Shift+3. My son had originally tied those to mouse movements, and you can do that as well. His pet is always set as passive, so he’ll ask it to attack:
/petattack
And to become passive again:
/petfollow
Seeing, how I was doing in battlegrounds, he also made me a dummy button (I still wonder why 😉 ):
/castsequence reset=combat/target Corruption, Curse of Agony, Fear, Drain Life
I don’t use Ventrilo, so I have only Q and only Shift+Q.
If you need to learn how to make basic macros, please read this tip: How to make simple macros for World of Warcraft