Keybound: Part 5 — Misc.

Time to bring the Keybound series to a close. In summary:

• Always strafe, never keyboard turn
• Plan your binds, ideally with a template
• Bind everything
• Some keys are much more convenient than others, so save those for oft-used abilities
• Keep a central theme in your UI to lessen eye movement
• Rearrange action bars to make sense, not to make binding convenient
• Use BindPad if having trouble with the latter
• All classes can and will benefit from click-casting to some extent
• Any support classes should have some click-casting binds, without exception
• All click-cast binds should have normal bind counterparts

Now for some tips.

When planning binds, you’ll want a list of all non-talented skills which you can get from Wowhead. Use the “Last Rank” filter for easier viewing (eg. Rogue). Once you’ve got your talent build sorted out, go down the trees and write out any active talented skills. Finally, write everything by grouping it into different categories: major, minor and out of combat. It’ll be hard to categorise skills if you’ve never played the class before, so try to check Wowhead comments on the particular skill, or class guides. This will make it easier choose the keys, and you can check off each skill as you go along.

I do recommend binding potions, food and bandages on the action bar. You could do it through BindPad or a fancy-pants addon, but through the action bar you can easily replace these items as you go along. Because they’ll most likely be grouped up anyway ( I like to keep mine at the bottom-right), you won’t run into any problems.

The caps lock key isn’t really much use. If you’re the kind of person who uses it a lot, you’re probably not reading this right now. If you do use it a lot, then stop: it’s annoying and uppercase is harder to read. So you may as well re-bind that conveniently placed, useless key to something useful. Many people like to re-bind the key to Ctrl; others prefer Esc. For gaming’s sake, though, you’ll want something that you can use a modifier with. I chose to go for Backspace as it might improve my typing and I can bind it to anything I went along with a modifier in-game. Ordinarily, Backspace is too far away to be useful as a bind.

On Windows, AutoHotKey is a commonly used utility for actions like remapping hotkeys. I’ve created a very simple script which simply remaps the backspace key which you can find here. The AHK file is the source which you can edit, compile or run with AutoHotKey installed, if you prefer. I use a larger version of this script which also controls my volume and other various things, placed in the startup folder so I never have to worry about running it. Mac users could probably use Quicksilver or Butler to come about the same functionality, but you’re on your own with that one.

I’ll leave it there now. If I think of any more tips, they will probably be added to this post. I hope you enjoyed the series and I’d love to hear if it has helped you in any way, so feel free to leave a comment.