I’m going to disagree with some of the advice above. Truth be told, neither of us is “right”. Personally, I feel that completely committing and binding everything is the way to go. Your actionbars are still there, and in a real pinch, you can always click. But if you (really I mean me) allow yourself to rely on that, you’ll never really switch. I’ve read people who say they tried and failed until they did what previous posters said and gradually moved a few abilities at a time to keybinds and that’s what worked for them. For me, I had to go cold turkey, all at once. You do you.
Mouse turning and keybinding will be a step backwards so that you can go farther. Think of it like backing up to get a a running start. When I first switched, for about a week (I was playing about 40 hours a week back then) I was like half as good as I was clicking. You have to build the memory of where those keys are and the muscle memory of hitting them without thinking about it or looking at the keyboard. That will take more/less time just depending on the person, but it is unquestionably the superior way to play. Some people can play at a high level as a clicker (not many), but even they would be better if they learned to keybind. Plan, plan, plan. Think about those abilities you must hit fastest, like interrupts for stopping spell of doom, and make sure you can hit those keys so easy you don’t need to really think about it. Bind your most frequently hit buttons in the next easiest to reach spots.
The exact methods will vary from person to person. For some, they will use a 20 button mouse and bind actions to those. For some, almost everything is on the keyboard. My personal best has been to put all my movement on the mouse and all of my actions on the keyboard. I need 6 side buttons on my mouse. I move by holding left+right click and mouse turning. I strafe left and right with two of the side buttons. I jump and backpedal with side buttons. The only exception is auto-run is a button I hit with my thumb on my gamepad keyboard. My keyboard is actionbar keybinds only. I don’t know many, if any, people who do it the way I do. Most use three keys, like a-s-d and make those a=strafe left, s=run forward, d=strafe right and bind all of their actionbar keybinds around those three. (keyboard turning is BAD even if you’re a clicker so you should never use turn-left or turn-right on a keybind) Some will shift that over to make more room on the left and use s-d-f or d-f-g for movement.
For healing, I click-cast heals. I bind those six side buttons to mouseover heals. My dps are still keybinds on the keyboard, even when I heal.
The key is KNOWING you will be worse for a while. Start getting used to it in low pressure, like questing, training dummies, or mog farming. You will likely never feel “ready” to try it in harder content, but when easy content gets boring, it’s time to step it up. Turn up the pressure and try it in a low level dungeon. When that gets boring, try it in “current” dungeons. To really test your keybinding reflexes, try it in pvp.
