Moving to ESDF

[MiRai]

Just a quick update: It's actually feeling pretty good at this point.

I setup a random character with their own specific key bindings and was just using them to gather herbs and fight off random low-level mobs, but the basic movement keys are setting in fairly quickly. I keep bouncing back and forth between my AH character (who is still set to WASD) and I'm quickly finding that my fingers just want to keep going to ESDF -- WASD is now feeling foreign.

Tab and Shift are both feeling good. Alt is still good for me, as well.

Personally, I use WER for strafing/movement

I used to use Q/E for strafing (I think they're default strafe keys when using WASD for movement), but I stripped left/right turn from A/D, put the strafe keys there, and then used Q/E for regular key bindings.

with Follow typically bound to D (I don't backpedal).

I've heard of using D as a non-movement key binding (from the video link below), but I do like to keep it set to backpedal since I've found it useful while tanking (have played a tank as my main for 5-6 years now).

Z X C V B N (all of these can be reached with your thumb)

I'm not sure if it's the size of my hand, but at the moment I cannot accurately hit those with my thumb.

Z, X, and C feel much more natural when using ESDF. V has always felt weird, but I think it'll be easier with ESDF since my finger is closer to it now.

The beauty of shifting the hand over to WER, I find, is that it allows me to hit CTRL with the part of my hand just below the pinky finger. This acts like a 6th finger and doesn't require me to move my other fingers out of position--effectively doubling the number of easy-to-reach keybinds. This trick is entirely awkward to use in a WASD-setup from my experience.

This is interesting and I'm going to have to play more with this. I was thinking of just re-mapping CapsLock to CTRL and then throwing CapsLock down on the Menu Key button (left of LCTRL).

I have key up/key down IWT on F1-F4 because I noticed slight runaways when I was say, using AMS while in combat, so in this case they'll AMS and continue another IWT towards my target, giving me time to move back down to 1-5 which are DPS keys. I ended up doing the same for a lot of things, like fear break (lichborne/tremor/etc.) - IWT on key up so when they break fear they start running back right away.

I've been using the mouse wheel button as my Assist/IWT while multiboxing (I keep mine separate from rotations), but I wanted to move it off of there because that's the button I use for OPie while playing solo.

I really dislike having things differ drastically for my solo/multibox setup (key binding-wise), so I wanted to free it up, but I wasn't sure where to put it. I thought about putting it on a keyboard key that I could hit while also moving/DPS'ing, but I couldn't reliably put it anywhere and, to me, it feels so natural on the mouse.

So... I'm currently stuck with how I'm going to work this.

I never get big into modifiers and I don't know how long that takes to string.. I have I think shift 3, 4, and 5 and that's about it. I supposed shift could work well with R, T, Y, F, G, H, V also.

Every time I try to think back how I played my original WoW characters in Vanilla/TBC it's all a big blur, so I can't honestly say when I got into using modifiers, but I can say that they are crucial to my playstyle these days.

I never quite find a perfect keybind setup, and sometimes I settle for less than optimal ones and just get used to it and when I try to change to something else, things get sloppy. I used G for D&D and H for Unholy Blight 9 months ago and I still accidentally hit those and end up blowing tons of cooldowns. Those are now shift+3 and shift+4.

That's why I'm trying this new stuff out. I know that I've gotten too comfortable with a less-than-optimal setup and I know that I can do better.

There was this video by a russian guy I think on keybindings, he had the whole keyboard mapped out and colorized, taking into account hand sizes and positioning. If you could get over the accent and broken english he was really onto something. It was geared towards good keybindings for 3v3 but he had it all setup in such a way with modifiers that your hand never has to float around and everything was always within reach.

Pretty sure that you're referring to this video, which is great.

Then again, going from a G5/G7 to a G600 mouse, the 12 thumb buttons were awkward initially.
As opposed to two thumb buttons.
Also the third mouse button, under the ring finger took a while to get used to.
The mouse didn't feel right for a few weeks, but after a few days the binds were easy enough to use but I had to think about them.
Within a month, probably less time, the binds had been learnt.

If you stick with it, you'll adjust over time.

I personally find fancy mice and gamepads like that difficult to buy into because I fear that I'm going to become so comfortable with a very custom mouse or keypad and then it's going to become EOL and no longer be sold. Then I'll be scrambling to find something to replace it.

Take the Cyborg MMO7 mouse for example... This thing looks like it can get the job done. It has some buttons on it that fit my hand perfect, but I find it incredibly difficult to adapt to over the typical standard mouse.

I'm afraid that if I become too dependent on that mouse's super special button placement, that I'll be screwed if I ever have to move to another mouse that won't have a similar layout. I guess I could just buy 10 of them and hope they last me for 20 years. -_-

The same thing goes for the Razer Orbweaver. I want to try one out so f'ing bad, but I find it difficult to spend $130 on something that might just be a complete waste of my time. I used to use a Razer Lachesis before I moved onto my Logitech G700 (non -s model), and I would say that both of these are very standard mice (regardless that the G700 has a lot of buttons on it that I don't actually use).

Maybe I'm just worrying about it too much.