Hallo!
Is pinging deliberately bound to the ‘show enemy names’ hotkey?
So, the default key to show enemy names, which I use more for showing items on the ground, is left-control. (Item names light up anyway when you go close enough, but if you hold down left-control, you can see them from much further away.) Holding down this key while clicking the mouse also pings the skill (or item) into the chat window, or sets a target.
I hold that key down virtually all the time while playing, to spot pickup-able items/gathering nodes, and I’ve got adept at briefly letting it go before I click, so it doesn’t ping targets or skills. Except of course when I want to ping – then I use it as well.
Now I’ve got an injury and it’s painful to hold the key down. So I thought I’d bind it as a toggle key to my G13, ie switch it on and voila, i don’t need to strain my poor little finger! (First – is this allowed? O.o)
Then I thought I’d split out the two functions that happen under that key. Showing items/enemy names has nothing to do with pinging skills/setting targets but they happen to both use the same key. I remapped ‘show enemy names’ to right control, thinking I could then use left-control for the tagging as I’ve always done, and right control for the visibility settings.
But blow me down with a feather, they really do seem to be tied to the same key, even when I’ve remapped which key that is! I’d always thought that the two tagging keys (map pinging with shift, and skill/target pinging with left-control) were fixed in stone and couldn’t be remapped; which would be an inconvenience but I guessed there were technical reasons for it. Turns out, they’re weirdly attached to some totally unrelated hotkeys. Am I just being a thickie and they are separable?
If not, and these are two separate features permanently attached to the same key, surely this is a bug? For starters, the two features lend themselves to exactly opposite use: visibility options you probably want to have mostly on, or at least treated more like a toggle – if you want to see enemy names, or item names, you want to see them for a period of time (eg, while I’m doing this activity/in this map/until I switch it off), whereas tagging options are by their nature a single-click type of thing – you don’t want to tag everything, just the one thing you’re flagging up. It’s pretty odd that I have to play a key permanently pressed on my keyboard, in order to see items, and that the only reason to let it go is not because I don’t want to see those labels any more, it’s because I want to do some other action that is completely unrelated but will get screwed up if I happen to have that key pressed. Secondarily, on the control options window where you bind the hotkey, it’s peculiar to call the key ‘show enemy names’ – if they’re tied together, it does loads more than that and I bet most people use it more for the tagging than for showing enemy names (and, I suspect, it’s not the enemy names they want so much as the items.)
So, have I missed something, or is it a bug, or does everyone think it’s fine?
