Project Lore

Via an overzealous nerd with shoes from the 80s

Generally speaking, watching another person play an MMORPG can be incredibly boring. PvP matches and raiding aside, the audience always knows what will happen, the avatar will kill the mob with plenty of HP to spare. World of Warcraft is no different in that respect; thank god for WoW's customization. Rather than watching the shining graphics on the screen, I watch a player's hands to see how they have mapped their keys for their personal settings.  It has proven to be far more interesting.

For every type of player that exists in Azeroth, there is a type of play style. One of the best warriors – one of those people you'd hate on Ventrilo though - I have had the privilege to play with moved around with the arrow keys, mapping his abilities to keys in the area.  A hunter from our guild didn't hit any hotkeys, relying entirely on mouseclicks.  A pair of my druid friends are a clear case of convergent evolution, mapping all of their healing keys as close to WASD as possible, including Q, E, R, F, G, C, V.

My brother, a Holy Priest from the beginning and a RTS master, only used 1-5 for his spells. Five spells isn't enough for any class, let alone a Priest.  He simply would hit Shift 1-5 to change his bars as needed, effectively giving him 25 keys to play with. His “uber-micro” from his Red Alert and Warcraft III days are what enabled him to keep up with the required speed necessary to be a main healer.  Those frantic keystrokes and movements to flip his bars to the correct spells at precise moments was stunningly beautiful.

And here I am, a fourth alternative to the default layout. I have applied a few tricks from my RTS playing days as well. The ability to hit CTRL, Shift and Alt with ease – years of training - frees up the rest of the keyboard for use with macros. In an attempt to give 1-6 as many uses as possible, I chose to map CTRL 1-6 and Shift 1-6 to additional bars instead of their default actions. The new keybindings allow me to keep spells, abilities and macros on my top and side bar, but avoid the need to mouseover to them. Mousing is for newbs. My personal attachment to palming CTRL has lead me to only purchase keyboards with raised keys and after I have played with them in meatspace.  On the flip side, my mouse requirements are incredibly basic.

Do you guys go about your business with the default layout, or have you changed the title's key layout as much as your User Interface?  Are you a mouseclicker or do you have a gear out mouse with as many inputs as a keyboard?  What is the craziest play style you have witnessed or heard about? Heck, I even use ` (the key next to numero uno) for Stealthing.