WoW Ravens

General guidelines for setting up your keyboard and mouse for optimal World of Warcraft PvP performance…

This short article will present you various ways to improve your control over your World of Warcraft character in order to meet PvP movement and hit requirements.

First of all, think of PvE (Player versus Environment) playing. You attack a mob, he runs to you and starts doing it’s hits and casting. It will always face you and it will never try to get to your back, where you can’t hit him because they are not “smart” enough to do so. You cannot also get to his back only if you use certain CC (Crowd Control) abilities, which mostly rogues need in certain talent builds. Because until level 18 (when you can first step into real mass PvP), and for some even later, people usually fight mobs, they get used to a style of play which is completely unsuitable for PvP. Fighting techniques with mobs consist in staying with your character still while hitting the mob. Also because the mob has a high number of hit points and low damage, the player has the time to build in his mind a sequence of abilities he/she will use against the mob. All these abilities are activated using the mouse cursor, which is easy and everything goes well most of the time. Also people use the number keys for the abilities in their main lower left toolbar, and they can use all ten of them because usually you can take your hand from the keyboard since you don’t need any character movement.

Now in PvP, things are a lot more different. Comparing to the description above, I will first identify the needs of PvP fighting, and then I will give solutions to fulfill those needs. So here we go:

-         In order to avoid being hit by an enemy in close combat, you must get behind him FASTER than he will turn to face you.

-         In order to be able to hit an enemy, you must turn to face him FASTER than he tries to get behind you.

-        Besides running to you, like mobs do, enemies will also try to run AWAY from you when their life is in danger or when there are certain goals to achieve that require them to stay alive, so there is the issue of catching the enemy.

-          Because you are continuously moving/jumping/turning and you have to do all of those fast, you cannot afford to move your hand away from the movement keys and the mouse must be used in a special way that will NOT ALLOW you to use mouse cursor.

-       A fight takes considerably less time (usually) than a PvE fight, so that means you don’t have time to plan ahead the sequence of the abilities you want to use against the opponent.

-       The enemy makes a lot of actions that cannot be foreseen unless you are a very experience player and know the enemy class very well which will help you to anticipate some of their moves and try to counterattack them.

-       Death doesn’t come with penalties like in PvE, a player dies much more in such situations and you must accept that there is a much higher chance to die in a PvP encounter than in a usual mob encounter, you must be prepared to loose without getting angry about it, it happens.

-          While fighting mobs the most important thing is your gear, while fighting human opponents you have a chance to OUTSKILL the opponent, even if he/she has much better gear than you have, which gives you much satisfaction but will also require much more practice to master it. It is an “Easy to learn, hard to master” thing, and this comes to a very good character movement, knowing the enemy and what can be used against him in order to maximize your inflicted damage while minimizing the incoming one.

After identifying some key points in PvP combat, in what comes next I will try to help you to boost your PvP performance by showing how to configure your input devices (keyboard and mouse), which will help you move/turn/attack the enemy in FASTER and PRECISE manner.

Mouse Setup

As you know the mouse plays a very important role in WoW, being used to perform tasks like clicking on toolbar’s buttons to perform certain actions, orbiting the camera around your character and by holding the left mouse button (default) you can also turn the character very fast in any direction by holding the right mouse button(default). This turning using the mouse is basically done instantly, opposed to the one done by using the rotate keys. As you may remember from above, we really need to keep facing the enemy, avoiding his attempts to position in our back. This can be done very easily with the mouse, so during fight this will be the main and most important use of the mouse. The second one will be to look to other directions (watch your back) while running in a specific direction. As you can observe here, there is no time for you to use the mouse pointer to click certain abilities because there will be no mouse pointer when you keep one mouse button pressed. In a PvP encounter where you have to run/jump and turn a lot, if you try to click certain ability buttons you will surely end up with the enemy in your back, and that means you will miss a lot of hits against him. Also, you will miss certain “hit and run” actions while running away from enemy. Now here you can say: no problem, I will use keyboard to turn while using the mouse for abilities. This approach is completely wrong, because you will turn too slow and there is no room for “rotate” keys near the movement keys, check the Keyboard setup bellow.

Your mouse has a very important feature that is set by default to a very unimportant game action: the mouse wheel. Blizzard thought of which is the most common use for this accessory and assigned the “zoom” function to it. This is completely wrong, don’t waste such an important feature of your mouse on such nonsense. Most of the time in PvP you will have zoom out at maximum in order to see what is in your back. If you really need zoom, you can assign it to some less used keys on the keyboard. Use the mouse wheel to the MOST USED TWO ACTIONS. You can assign it by clicking an action in the key bindings window and moving the wheel up/down to set it. Why is this useful? Well, while performing the turning with your mouse, or looking around with it, you can very easily rotate the mouse wheel with any of your fingers, performing the action instantly. More than that, you usually rotate the wheel more than one step, so this will allow you to rotate the wheel while the cooldown for a certain action is almost finished, giving you instant trigger of that action when is ready. No matter how skilled you are, you cannot do that by pressing a keyboard key, because there is always a delay between your brain observing the ability is ready to use and your finger actually triggering it. On the other side if you use the mouse wheel, you basically try to trigger the action over and over on each step of the wheel, and that action will trigger when it’s ready, faster than any other triggering method. So use your mouse wheel wisely, on the action you spam most during a fight.

Depending on your mouse, especially if it was built for games, it might have more buttons on it. Assign the ones you can access easily to important actions you use often. I repeat again, it is very easy to use buttons and wheel on mouse than the keys on keyboard, and you can do this while turning and looking around with it.

To resume, the most important uses of your mouse are:

-          Turn around while right clicking, it’s the fastest way

-          Look around while left clicking to watch your back

-        Use mouse wheel for the most two important actions, it’s the fastest input method available

-          Use any extra buttons that are available on your mouse

Keyboard Setup

First, since you use your mouse to turn, you don’t need your rotating keys (default ‘A’ and ‘D’). Assign these keys to strafe functions. You will gain a lot of movement freedom by doing this and your character will start to behave almost the same as in a first person shooter action game. Strafing will give you the ability to keep facing the enemy while moving around in circles and a lot of other moves that will confuse the enemy.

Second, since you cannot click the buttons on the toolbars with your mouse pointer, you have to use hotkeys for all the abilities you use regularly. Giving the fact that you cannot lift your hand from the keyboard because you must KEEP MOVING, you need to use all the keys around your movement keys (W A S D Space by default). Usually you can reach the first 4 numbers, Q, E, R, T, F, G, V, C, X, Caps Look, Left Shift, Left Control and Left Alt. These are many keys and you usually don’t need more to bind your most used actions. You don’t have to bind all actions from all toolbars. For example don’t bind your long cooldown abilities, because you can afford to click those in a fight, since you won’t do it very often. Bind only the actions you perform very often.

Third, since you use many default keys for these bindings, move everything like chat functions and other functions to the right side of the keyboard which contains keys you cannot reach without lifting hand from the movement keys.

Use any macro keys your gaming keyboard has (if you own one of these), they can be very handy if they are close to movement keys.

To resume this part, use strafe instead of rotate, use hotkeys and put them around movement keys.

I won’t give you here any certain setup for the keys, since it is best to make them yourselves to suit your needs. One advice I can give is to use the same setup for mouse and keyboard in PvE to get used to it. At first you will tend to use the old ways, try to force yourself to use the new setup even if you loose some time between moves, it pays of later after you learn it.

Have fun tuning your input devices and stay tuned for the next article.

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