Clicking won’t harm you much in PVE, but in PvP a few precious seconds can mean winning or losing a battle.
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I was a clicker. From Vanilla-Wrath even when I came back a week for every expansion. I did not start keybinding until I came back for a few months in Legion.
For me, it made a world of difference. There was only so good I could be as a clicker. Went from bottom-middle of the pack in BGs to top dmg,top hks, least deaths, running flags, making caps, defending bases and more importantly making plays that just wouldn’t be properly executed had I been clicking.
Took my new keybinding powers to a Vanilla pserver and its a complete 180. Do you know what its like to scramble looking for Blind on your action bars only to misclick and hit Feint? Doesn’t happen now that Blind is Mouse Button 2
Say we dueled and you mouse clicked your abilities. I would strafe behind you almost the entire time. So you’d have to use your mouse to turn and click your abilities. Mean while I don’t.
It’s just like starcraft 2, if you don’t learn your keybinds you’ll never get out of bronze.
Can there be a healthy mix of keybinding & clicking? I’ve watched some pretty famous PvPers streams who occasionally click… would they be considered “bad” for doing such? Miliseconds… do they really matter? Time…haven’t we just made all of this up? Clicking my way to your hearts.
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I think this is the crux of it.
In PvE, you don’t need to be constantly turning, moving, turning the camera. Situational awareness, yes, but mostly that’s to be aware of patrols that might cause trouble. Raiding, the tank handles most of the boss and trash pack positioning. Questing, you set up your pull and position it. Mobs have a limited number of abilities, and usually predictable movement which includes not spastically trying to get behind your back once you’ve got them attacking you.
In PvP, whether we’re talking about BGs or wPvP because you roll on a PvP realm, you have other players, unpredictable movement, a whole slew of abilities they could use that you might need to react to, and they will spastically try to get behind your back where you can’t hit them but they can hit you.
I’m mostly not a clicker because I was playing FPS games - the idea of WASD movement, and number keys for weapon changes. However, I used to RP via channel, and I’d be doing that while questing, while doing dungeons and raids. If I had the text chat open and was typing, I was clicking the abilities and even using the mouse (hold both buttons) to move. Non-optimal, but completely doable without sacrificing much performance.
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There are skilled players who purely click on everything. It’s not common, but those people exist.
That said, unless you have a disability that makes it impossible, having keys/mouse buttons bound for things usually gives you a faster reaction time, which can be a difference between life and death.
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Most players back in the day were clickers, that’s why most people could success in most parts of the game. I’m not saying that it will different this time, but you will notice a huge difference between clicking and using keybinds.
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Haven’t clicked an ability in a very very long time.
clicking is certainly inferior to keybinding, sure you run into clickers who are better than binders, but the clicker would be way better if they were a binder.
Clicking the flag? Baddie sighted. Its not about where your mouse is, tho when the flags about to drop you should be ready but if you are actually attempting to click return/pass the flag the only way you would ever beat someone like me on the return is if we DC.
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This.
Mouse-clicking some little-used abilities is ok. But all your main abilities should be hotkeyed and macro’d and you should practice using them until you can do so by reflex without looking at anything.
Having a proper UI with hotkeys gives you a much faster reaction time on your key abilities than any mouse-clicker. Faster reaction time usually = much better player.
A second advantage of hotkeying your abilities is you can activate them while holding down the right mouse-button and using the mouse to move. Mouse clickers can’t do that since they are using the mouse cursor to activate abilities rather than control movement. This means mouse-clickers are much less maneuverable on the battlefield.
No there isn’t. If you are clicking anything, you are slowing yourself down but that much more.
If you want to click then click do whatever, it’s just simply worse.
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One of the best things you can do in the game is get a mouse with extra mouse-buttons and then setup shift-macros so each button can activate 2 abilities.
Once you’ve done that spend some time at the target dummies practicing your UI and macros until you can use your abilities by reflex without even thinking about them.
It may take a few hours to setup your macros and UI and practice with it. But this is time well spent. It will make a bigger difference in the quality of your gameplay than anything else you do in-game.
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This.
You become a faster, more fluid, more mobile version of what you were before. Biggest reason IMO is because you can look at your positioning full time and respond instantly to your opponents instead of flicking your eyes down to your bars constantly to make sure you’re clicking the correct skill.
Positioning is critical in PvP and clickers are a step slower. Facts.
lol keybinds
what kind of noob doesn’t send commands to their wow client via wireless electrodes in their brain?
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I never believed this.
Also going to let you in on a little secret. 99% of healers are “clickers” because addons like Healbot allow them to simple click on a name and cast a heal. Now granted, the specific button clicked and the modifier (shift, alt, ctrl) used will cast as different spell, but at the end of the day, it’s still clicking.
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What I Like About This Post…is how kind and rational a tone this whole discussion has.
Kudos to every poster here!
if you want to kick the habit I suggest reading this, its an old article but the info is still good.
Let’s answer the more important question: Are you a bad player if you don’t rebind WASD to ESDF?
No. Not in the slightest.
interesting idea, however, I will be playing a warlock in PVE, so I will just bind all keys other than wasd to shadow bolt and just slap my keyboard furiously to top meters. So I don’t think I will need the extra room to the left of my hand for more binds.
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