Guild Wars 2

Before I got into gw2, I was a big League of Legends fan. For anyone that has played LoL,they will know that using your mouse to use abilities can be very difficult, so you would have to get used to having one hand on the mouse and the other on the “qwer” keys for your abilities. I was just wondering if there was some way to use that muscle memory from LoL in gw2. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that in order to do this, you would need 3 hands (one on the keys, one on the arrows to move, and one on the mouse). Now, I do know that you can change all the keys around on the keyboard to fit your liking, but I was wondering if anyone plays using the keys to use abilities rather than the mouse, because I would love to get back to memorizing which key is for which ability and play like that.

I’m not sure if doing this will even make that much of a difference, but I thought I would try to get some feedback and see what other players do to improve their skill.

Why would you use the arrow keys? :O

Yea, keybinding will be very helpful. You can check this out:

http://taugrim.com/2012/06/27/guide-to-guild-wars-2-keybinds/

I find this guide very helpful. Will get some time to get used to. Give it a few days or even a week. Works wonders. You can also modify it a bit to your liking, but I find this setup very very effective and not stressful for my hands.

It works for any class for me. Well maybe except for Engineers since I tend to use more than 1 kit and kit swapping makes me crazy it takes one hell of muscle memory effort to get used to. :O

It is safe to assume that a majority of players can use and get used to the default layout of keys because they’re a pretty standard pc layout.
Mouse for looking around, targeting, and interacting sometimes (some use the mouse to click skills, competitive types use the keyboard for that).
wasd for forward, strafe left, strafe right, and backward (standard pc movement scheme – no one uses the arrow keys, that’s extremely inefficient).
various other letters for specific actions or interface elements
(the following are actually listed on the skill icon itself)
1-0 for skills
F1-4 for auxiliary skills for whatever the class puts there.

There should be a muscle memory learning curve if you have forgotten how to use the keyboard for pc games, but since you have to look at the skill to click it in the first place, just look a little harder at the number on each one and remember to use your left hand to tap that key instead of your right hand to click the button.

I cheat and use a Razer Naga, that way I can toss a majority of my abilities onto the 12 mouse buttons and keep one hand on the mouse and the other on the movement ‘wasd’ keys. The abilities that don’t fit on my mouse I put close to the ‘wasd’ keys so that they’re within easy reach. I bought this mouse specifically for GW2 earlier this year, I would be lost without it now.

I do also have a Razer Naga, and a Logitech G13. That definitely makes my life easier. Before having them, I mapped almost everything to the keys around qwes. I replaced A and D with skills, changed the swapping weapon to the mouse, and lots of other changes, so basically you can start with QWES for strafing, move forward, backward, and the start playing with the others. Keys 1 to 5 are near your fingers, so from 6 to 9 can be remapped; 0 has a large cooldown, so you won’t be using it a lot. Jumping and F are used a lot, so you want them very accesible. Select Nearest Target and Next target are used a lot, so you also want them near your fingers. Then play a lot until you get used to your new configuration.

I remapped my 5-9 skills. 5 (heal) is now a button on my mouse. I changed 6-9 to Shift-1 to 4 so that I can use my left hand only to press them. Then my right hand is free to always use the mouse.

Thank you for all the help with this. I am still not sure if I will be able to master doing so much with just my left hand, but I will keep practicing and hopefully I will get better. I also started using ‘wasd’ to move around as well as changed my jump and dodge to much easier positions. Thank you again for all the help, I really appreciate it.