Emulating World of Warcraft extra mouse buttons

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Background and context information:

According to many WoW players including me, one of the best mouses for World of Warcraft is/was the Steelseries MMO Cataclysm Legendary Edition. It features 11 physical buttons.
While there are a broad range of options for multiple button mouses today, none of them has the same features as the legendary edition: actually map extra mouse buttons from the in-game binding interface.
Current mouses actually requires you to map those extra buttons to keyboard keys/macros or shortcuts. Essentially when you press the mouse button, it has the same outcome as pressing a keyboard key.
It was really convenient having the options “Mouse Button 6”…“Mouse Button 11” and being able to use that in Healbot back in the day.

Why does it matter ?

Even when using the new in-game binding interface and mouse casting feature, having to map extra mouse buttons to keyboard inputs does not work the same because:

  1. You have to give up keyboard bindings to use on mouse buttons
  2. Even if you use modifiers (some default mouse software maps them to Ctrl+1…Ctrl+9) it still has the effect of applying that modifier while using the button, which may produce unexpected behavior when you have macros using the same modifier.
  3. It actually works as a mouse over macro, you can’t actually bind it on “click” to unit frames. The behavior is a little different.

The request
My intention with this post is to hopefully have a Blizzard employee pass along a suggestion/request to the developers to help us have this feature back on more modern mouses.
I see a few possibilities here:

  1. Is it possible for us to have some details on how the older mouse integrated with the WoW client ? Was it a special HID feature ? Did the driver map to a certain key combination ?
    With that information it would be possible to emulate the same key combination, or even write some custom driver to integrate any modern mouse.

  2. Would it be possible to create a similar feature in the game client that allows for integration with modern mouse ? Perhaps making the game client recognize less used key codes (F13-F24 for example) as extra mouse buttons.
    This would allow mapping any modern mouse button to those unused key codes, at very least we could map the mouse without wasting any regular keyboard bind.

Note: Even the new Aerox 9 mouse from Steelseries (World of Warcraft anniversary edition) does not work as the old legendary Edition did.

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Not from this forum. It’s just fellow players here and we can’t pass on ideas/questions/requests to developers.

I recommend General Discussion since they have a team to collect feedback there.

1 Like
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This is the post that led me to believe it could be achieved here: TWW Client not recognizing WOW Lengendary Mouse extra mouse buttons - #31 by Joynueer

Seems the same category to me, and did have an interaction with an official account, but I already know chances are slim anyway.

Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll post it there later just in case.

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Just because you don’t receive a response in a thread doesn’t mean it hasn’t been seen, particularly general discussion. The problem you’re talking about may be in a pipeline to eventually get fixed, some problems take longer to fix, just wait it out and look for a temporary fix if you can.

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To answer your question no… the steelseries mouse all of its functionality was hard coded not only into the game but stored on the NV memory on the mouse. Trying to create a add-on or an emulator that would function would most likely not work. An emulator would most likely trigger the anti cheat software. If you could even get it to function.