Lately Diablo 4 bugs out and produces an error I have never seen before.
First things first: I remapped a few keys in the “controls” menu. I removed the tick in the “Combine Move/Interact/Basic Skill Slot” and set the “Basic Skill Slot” to the “^” button. For clarity, I use a standard german keyboard layout, which means that button is right next to the “1”.
A few days ago I first noticed that my keyboard seemed broken. Whenever I wrote text anywhere, I’m talking outside of the D4 client here, the “^” character got added as if I pressed it by accident. But it happened really frequently, like every 2nd or 3rd character. When it first happened I didn’t blame D4, which was running in the background, cause why would I. I blamed my Logitech G815 keyboard, because my Logitech peripherals were giving me grief lately. After a restart the “bug” was gone and I used my keyboard as usual.
Today, while playing D4, I noticed something weird. On the UI, beneath each button, the mapped character is shown. But beneath my “Basic Skill Slot” the mapped character “^” was flickering like crazy. It switched between 1 and 2 “^” rapidly, like the button was held down. But the skill in that slot wasn’t activated all the time, only when I used it. So, sure enough, when I tried to enter text it looked like this: T^hîs^i^s a^tês^t. It doesn’t matter where I try to enter text, in D4 chat, in my browser, in Word that character is added all the time. Now I was intrigued. First I closed only D4 and the “bug” was gone. After I started D4 again, the bug was back. Next I assigned a diffent button (5) to that skill slot. Everything went back to normal and I could type without being impeded. The only difference I noticed was every button had the corresponding key shown as black text on white background, but the “^” key was shown as white text and no background. I tried a few different things next:
- There are a few more keys on the german keyboard which are shown as white text and no background, like “ö, ä, ü, ß”. When I assigned those keys, I could use them like usual, but, and I know this sounds made up, the “^” key stopped working. Instead of random “^” characters in my text I couldn’t get a single one. More peculiar even was the fact that with shift held down, I could use the key as normal it just outputs “°” on a german keyboard.
- When I assign a regular key to the basic skill slot, one that has a white background, all problems go away, even when I assign “^” as a secondary key. So for anyone else experiencing this bug, this is your workaround.
- The last thing I tried was “disabling” the “^” key like in item 1 explained and trying to use it in D3. This one was just for fun, but the button worked without issue in D3, except for chat obviously.
TLDR: Assigning the ^ key in D4 creates problems in every application, this shouldn’t happen.
