No, the problem is not using the keyboard for movement. That’s actually generally ideal. The problem is turning using your keyboard (rather than holding your right mouse button and moving your mouse to turn). The default keymap has A and D bound to turning, which is something you should never be doing via the keyboard in combat (unless you happen to have a disability preventing the easy use of the mouse, in which case it’s of course absolutely acceptable!), simply due to how slow keyboard turning is, and how delayed it makes your movements.
While you can certainly stick with A and D bound to turning and use Q and E for the strafing, the fact that they really should never be used that way in combat is the reason it’s usually recommended to bind strafing to those keys instead. It also wastes valuable key real estate (Q and E) that could instead be used to bind action bar slots closer to the movement star.
I disagree. I’ve never been a fan of using letters for keybinds. All mine are are numbers with or without modifiers. Used to be I would take my hand off my mouse to press those numbers, but then I got a mouse with a number pad.
Also being able to turn one handed means I can take my hand off my mouse and not be gimped trying to turn a corner in non-combat situations.
In vanilla up through WOTLK I was AWESOME at dps, but I used to click instead of bind… Serious. I got so good at it nobody could tell because my DPS would be high. Even on the mobile bosses and kiting.
In Cata I got a razer naga… WOW… It took a bit for me to learn, but I have no idea how I ever survived and did good DPS with the clicking… ugh…
Except turning corners with your keyboard is innately gimped due to the slow and fixed speed it turns at. Unless you’re trying to precisely draw a curve on the ground for some reason (like the circle runes down in the academy in Azsuna, and then only if they are precisely the correct diameter to match that turn rate), turning with your mouse is always both faster and more precise.
Personally, I use a mouse with 6 side buttons (the Roccat Nyth, which has 12 button slots, but is customizable anywhere between 3 and 12 buttons), with 2 being on my primary action bar (specifically, my interrupt is on one, and the other is used for rapid-response abilities (like Feign, Disengage, Fel Rush, etc) and defensives (usually on shift or control modifier). The other 4 are on an auxiliary bar I use for utility abilities and some of my more complex macros (like one that swaps my current target and my focus target).
You completely missed my point. I wasn’t saying it was faster. I was saying that I’m running through stormwind right? I need to take my hand off my mouse to get a drink. Having A and D bound to turn rather than strafe means if I get to a corner, I don’t have to set my drink down to turn.
I just use the arrow keys for those situations. No need to compromise your combat movement abilities and take up key real estate around your movement star for something you just use when running around town or auto-running between quest objectives.
Uh, I dunno what the others did but when I was still using my old laptops, I used strafing almost exclusively during combat (primarily for kiting), and I actually taught myself how to jump shoot while using the touchpad. But it took practice on my part. (I also used the touchpad for tight turns. It’s also how I got past the Hexos fight in the MoP Brawler’s Guild.)
Basically, I used a combination of touchpad and keyboard on my old laptops.
Your advice — both you and Xaedys — is nice and neat, but you’re overlooking one small thing: not everybody has the same movement span in their hands. So hence your advice? It made me cringe in horror, because it’s just so uncomfortable and difficult for me.
Why is that? Simple. I’m a petite girl. I’m five foot tall, I have always fluctuated between 125 to 140 pounds, and my feet and hands are tiny. (I wear women shoe size 5. Those are impossible to find in shoe stores.)
I’ve had regular adult men be able to wrap their pointer finger and thumb around my biceps.
So, what I’m getting at? My hands are small, as I’m a tiny person.
The suggested layout here would work for the average-sized person. They won’t work for me.
(Hint: that’s one of the reasons I heavily favored using Q and E for strafing during combat because my fingers couldn’t comfortably stretch from the numbers to A and D — it was just too far for my tiny little fingers.)
And now? My new laptop is bigger than ever. I’m still figuring out a good way to move as quickly as I used to during combat. That’s one of the reasons I ended up having to remap and start clicking on some of my abilities.
One thing I’ve seen work for that, btw, is to shift moving forward down to the S key. Backpeddling is also a big no-no, especially in combat, so some peeps prefer to have a linear movement set (A, S, and D, for strafe left, forward, and strafe right), with backpeddle either entirely unbound, or only bound on the arrow keys. That frees up another key for action bar usage. I would imagine it would also help for small-handed peeps like you, since QWE apparently works well for you.
You know, that always felt gimmicky as hell to me.
That said, there are peeps that advocate for using double-mouse-button rather than the keyboard for forward movement. Keep the right mouse down, spin camera as needed, left click (with right mouse still clicked) to move forward.
I have Alt+A and Alt+D bound to turning for those scenarios. I’ll never accidentally press them in combat, but can still easily reach them on the rare occasion I want to.
I typically do, but to be honest, my movement is usually some variety of forward+strafe, with my camera angled or spinning from side to side to keep awareness, using strafe to keep moving generally in the correct direction. Or I use E (I use ESDF instead of WASD) to move forward and left spin my camera to see around or behind me while I move without spinning my character. That’s not possible when using the both-mouse-buttons style of forward movement.
I often alter between several ways of movement. It depends a bit on what I’m doing. Either keyboard or double mouse button-clicks.
But either way, this is not what I meant with “click-to-move”. I remember there being an interface option which allowed us to have a sort of “move-to”-command(like that for our pets but for us instead), similar to how you moved units in WC3 as an example, but for WoW. Like I said, I dno if it’s still an option as I haven’t looked in…almost a decade I think.
Yep, I do sometimes. Press “forward”-key on keyboard and use right mouse button to turn. Again, it often depends on what other keybinds I’m using on my keyboard in the moment.
This is how I move most of the time. FPS style movement, where the WASD cluster is used to move in a given direction, and the mouse is used to look (or turn) in a given direction. This allows for precise movements and very fast 180s, especially great on a Hunter who needs to jump shot while kiting.
That flips the camera only, not your character. If you’re trying to do a jump -> 180 -> Disengage -> 180 -> keep running combo, that’s very difficult to do with two-mouse-button movement, and it’s straight impossible to do with keyboard turning due to the rotation speed (you land after barely having turned 90 degrees in the first half of the spin).
That’s how little I use it!