Guild Wars 2

This is not for me but for my wife. She wants to play but she is not good at the controls for the game. I would love to get her a gamepad or maybe a specially designed keyboard or mouse to make her experience more enjoyable.

Any recommendations?

Hey there, I play with a Razer Naga. Look it up, it has 15 easy to reach customizable buttons on the side. I have my weapon abilities keybound to Q, E, R, Z, and C, and my utility spells are 1-4 and 6 on the mouse. It’s easier than trying to hit the number keys on your keyboard, so take a look. It may help.

(If you’re worried about giving up the strafe keys, you can strafe just as easily holding down the right mouse button and pressing A and D. You won’t even miss them.)

Just a learning curve. No controller is going to get past it. The Hex mouse is nice and has just enough buttons on the side. The Naga has too many.

You don’t have to use all of the Naga’s buttons. :P I currently use 8 of the side buttons, so I think that’s worth it. But I’d only consider 5 of them necessary. Good suggestion with the Hex though, that may be easier to use.

The Naga is great but there is a learning curve to it. I imagine some who has difficulty with a regular Keyboard/Mouse layout is not going to adjust to the Naga very easily.

My advice would be to just keep at it, and stick with the regular Mouse/Keyboard. I use the Naga/Anansi combination, but that’s overkill for Guild Wars 2 and only good in games where binding hundreds of keys is actually beneficial.

I use a logitech G13 and can’t live without it. But it too has a learning curve. You hate it when you start with it, but eventually can’t live without it. I use it left handed with my mouse in my right hand and keyboard just for typing.

It has a little mini joystick that I have mapped wasd to (I actually use wqes, but you can do w/e)

I’ve tried a couple of different variations throughout the beta…now, post-launch, I’ve finally settled on what’s most comfortable to me.

I use a Logitech M570 Trackball mouse – this makes me able to control all of my movement & my camera via my mouse.

I have a Logitech G13 gameboard that I used through most of the betas… and as much as I really liked it, particularly the relative compactness of it (and the ability to rapidly switch between multiple profiles for the same game)… I really didn’t like the fact that I still had to switch back and forth between it and my regular keyboard if, for example, I wanted to type something in chat.

So my most recent purchase has been a Logitech G110 keyboard (yes, I DO like Logitech…whyever do you ask? LOL), and this has been a real win for me. It gives me 12 programmable G-keys conveniently located on the left side of the keyboard, along with the ability to have multiple G-key profiles if I need them. I did some fairly creative remapping of the keybinds in-game (F11), which are more convenient for my hand/finger spread. I found that for me, it was more comfortable to put my 5 weapon skills on the F1-F5 keys, with my heal bound to an easily reachable G-key and my elective skills bound 1-4. This simply works better for me and for how my mind works.

But my point is, I like having the flexibility of the 12 G-keys right there beside a normal keyboard and my mouse. I’m able to much more comfortably control the game without putting a huge strain on my hands and wrists and without a lot of inconvenient switching back and forth between a gameboard and a keyboard.

One thing I will say about the G110 – the keys squeak. Especially the space bar. This is slowly decreasing with use, but it’s a good thing my husband told me to not be a doofus, because I swear I was getting ready to try spraying a little WD-40 under my space bar. LMAO

I also like the fact that I don’t have to completely memorize which key is bound to which keybind like I had to with my gameboard. As nice as it was to have all those keys to map – suddenly not remembering where I bound dodge in the midst of a battle (look, I’m a middle-aged woman here… remembering what I had for breakfast is a challenge :p ) is a real pain.

I also love that the G110 has a switch that disables the Windows key – I just leave it off by default, but it’s just a nice extra little feature on top of the media controls, the built-in USB jack and the built-in headphone/mic jack.

Oh, and of course I like the pretty glowy purple keys!

Been playing MMORPGs for years with a Belkin n52te in the left hand and a mouse in the right. I am a very fast 10-key calculator user and the n52te conforms to the 10-key feel much easier than the G13 imho. While playing WoW I had one of the buttons on my mouse programmed as the <CTRL> key so that doubled the number of programmable buttons I had, but in GW2 I don’t think I’ll need that.

Looking to make it easier if at all possible for her to play. I am fine with a keyboard and mouse myself.

Thanks for all the info

Zoul.1087:

Looking to make it easier if at all possible for her to play. I am fine with a keyboard and mouse myself.

Given what you said in your first post, about her already having trouble with the controls, I tend to think a gameboard or controller could potentially make things worse… you’re not only having to acclimate to a new configuration, but you also have to remember what is bound where without the normal visual cues of a standard keyboard. Things like “I” for “Inventory” is pretty standard across most games… easy to remember, not to mention you can rebind via F11 to keys that are more intuitive to her. For example, I played GW1 for a long time… so in GW2 I bound my Friend list to the familiar “N” key.

With a gameboard though, the keys are simply numbered… that can take more time to get used to… and time matters when you need to quickly heal yourself, for example.

I also like that with my G110, I can pretty much leave my hand hovering over the left side of my keyboard… and I can use the G1-12 keys for less “dire” keybinds or as blindly-reachable hail marys. LOL My G3, G9, G4 and G10, which form a little “square” grouping of keys, are where my attunements are programmed (I play an elementalist – and as I mentioned, I rebound my 5 weapons skills to F1-F5). My G8 is a second location for my heal skill – an easy pinky movement away if I’m fighting and need a quick fix to my health.

One other thought…

You can completely alter the bindings in-game via the F11 options screen. When you consider that something like a gameboard is usually just 4 rows of keys anyway, you really could just do a complete remapping of a standard keyboard via the F11 interface. Group things more conveniently for her in whatever combination is comfortable on a standard keyboard. That’s really not any different than what you’d be doing on a gameboard – the only big difference is there’s no joystick. Personally, I found it very difficult to minutely control my toon with the joystick, but that just may be a lack of coordination on my part. The end result was the same however – I ended up never using the thumbstick for movement in-game.