Guild Wars 2

Trying again, posted this about 5 minutes ago but it never made a topic.

Many things keep me from being good at this game (I’m fine with that, I don’t need to be), but I’d like to be DECENT at it so I don’t hold my friends back when we play, and apparently one thing that is hindering this is my inability to use buttons 7, 8, 9 and 0.

I play with one hand moving my character (wasd), making my primary attacks (1-5) and sometimes healing (with difficulty I can reach 6 on the same hand).
My other hand is, of course, holding my mouse to keep my camera on target.
To use 7, 8, 9 or 0, I either have to lift my left hand and stop moving my character, or use my mouse to trigger the attack (which is slow and frequently lets my target get offscreen).

As a result, I frequently run passive boosts in these slots -which many people seem to think either make no sense, or weaken my character’s damage output/survivability.

I was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to use these slots.

I’m using a standard wireless keyboard, and a standard wired mouse that has 2 buttons and a scroll wheel, so please, don’t say “put 7-9 on the buttons alongside your mouse” (which has been what most advice in-game has been so far)… my mouse has no such buttons

You don’t need a special MMO mouse, a tiny keyboard or massive hands to push your character to his/her limits. Here is old my keybind setup, which you can adapt as you feel fit.

Before all else, I don’t use Double-Tap to Dodge, because I do lots of jumping puzzles. Instead, I had Dodge bound to Shift, i.e. Shift dodged back, Shift+direction dodged in the appropriate direction.

Keybinds:

A, S, D — Forward, Strafe Left and Right
What? No Back? Yes. No Back. Backpedaling is slow and has no use cases 99% of the time.

Q,W,E,R,T — Weapon Skills
Z,X,C,V,B — Heals, Utility and Elite
1,2,3,4 — Profession skills
F1,F2,F3, etc. — Hero Panels, Inventory, etc.

If a gaming mouse is out of the question, how about using shift + key?

For example, primary attacks are 1-5. Then add the shift key to those keys. What is now your skill 6 becomes: shift 1. Skill 7 becomes: shift 2, and so on.

To do this, go to options, control options, click on the skill you want to change then hold down shift and the key you want to put the skill on.

I’ve never understood how people can use WASD to move and the same hand on the keys above for skills. If you can manage that you’re already doing better than me.

But what might help sometimes is to use the mouse to move. If you hold down both mouse buttons the character will run in whatever direction you point the mouse. If you’re already using the mouse to control the camera it should be easy to start doing. It’s not as precise as WASD, but most of the time it’s good enough, especially if you’re only doing it temporarily while using the 6-0 skills.

Another possibility I know a lot of people use is to move the movement keys down a row and put the heal, utilities and elite skills under the attack skills. Or put them around the side.

(My solution is to put all the skills onto the number pad, along with things like weapons swap, take target and dodge, then use the arrow keys to move, but that only works if you’re left-handed.)

The way I do it is, I use redundant keybindings extensively. Sometimes I let my SO play on my account and she isn’t used to my keybindings, so I always keep the default ones as option 2, whenever it’s possible. I had a long period of playing the game on a touchpad (sometimes while drinking hot beverages in one hand), so I had to learn to multi-task and incorporate key redundancies.

First of all, I’m right-handed, so I use my right hand to steer the camera.
My left hand stays on WASD, which I keep for what they do best – move about.
I find Backpedaling to be useful, as it is good for avoiding and misguiding enemy shots.

But really, it’s very simple:
Pinkie – Shift; Ring finger – A; Middle – W; Index – D; Thumb – Space.
Putting your hand like so (and assuming you have a QWERTY keyboard and your dodge is keybound to V – this is important later on) will allow you to very easily do the mystery of jump-dodging, which has its great uses, some of which are: jumping over large gaps while in combat, proofing a jump against hits, and being awesome in general.

I have good mouse skills, so I can use them to their best. Therefore, I do not use specialized strafe keys – I use RMB + A/D to strafe instead. Combined with what Danikat added about moving forward with RMB+LMB, you have good mobility if you are eating cheesecake and if you have only a finger and a hand at your disposal.

Skills 1-5 are left as they are.
Skills 6-ELITE are switched about.

6/Heal – Q
7/Util – E
8/Util – X
9/Util – C
ELITE – Shift+V

The sense behind the Elite being Shift+V is that you will never dodge while casting an elite. Furthermore, if you cast your elite by accident, the dodge is right there, so you can cancel it.

All those keys still allow you to use 6-0 by default.
This also allows you to keep Z for sheathing weapons.

F1-F4 skills I keybind redundantly. F1-F4 work as they are, or they can be cast as Shift+1, Shift+2, … Shift+4.

And finally, a huge quality of life improvement for me is that all my interface functions (hero tab, guild panel, WvW, and TP, but not inventory) are exclusively keybound to Shift + their usual key. This is so I do not open stuff mid-combat, which happens often if I forget to hit Enter while replying.

That’s that! It has never failed me
Enjoy button mashing!

personally i use 1-5 as they are, WASD to move and then 6-8 are on QER.
my heal and my elite are on the side of my mouse (there are many mice that really have 2 side buttons without being an expensive gaming mouse, but these could easily be relocated to something like Z and X or similar, which i dont use. also got my dodge set tp tilting my mousewheel to the right(another function many mice really have), this allows for very quick dodging, but something like V for dodging could work just as well. Also the f1-f4 i personally feel is too far away from WASD to use fast enough so i bound those to shift+1-4 (though a few times in the start i ended up pressing shift+f4 by accident, but i learned pretty quick to NOT do that xD)

on the topic of dodging you do yourself a HUGE favor by binging dodge to a single key instead of double-tapping. First of all it is just quicker to press once than twice, second you dont accidentally dodge off a cliff and die. and last but certainly not least it open up the possiblity of diagonal dodging by holding down 2 movemement keys (like WD) while pressing dodge, meaning you get DOUBLE the amount of directions to dodge than with doubletapping.

Also yes Ojimaru.8970 while back-pedalling is rarely a good idea (though i argue there are occasions when it is useful), by not binding backwards you also remove the option to dodge backwards, diagonally backwards (both diagonally left and right), meaning that is a total of 3 different dodge directions you missing out of, and thus is a LOT of control over where you end up after you evade enemy stuff etc, you are doing yourself a HUGE disfavour unbinding backwards

Tried to do as little as possible to the default keybind scheme.
Movement: Fwd=W, Back=S, Strafe=A/D
Profession Mechanic: F1-F4
Weapon Skills: 1-5
Heal: Q
Utilities: Z,X,C
Elite: E
Dodge: V
About Face: R
Stomp: F

I moved the skills 6..9 to r,t,g,b and 0 to “press mouse wheel”. Whatever was on r,t,g,b I moved to somewhere else. G for the guild window for example is not that important and could be moved to the right half of the keyboard.

I also use ESDF for movement instead of WASD, and use strafe left/right instead of rotate. Think of “move everything one key to the right”. So you can feel and use the small knob on the F to firmly position your left hand.

1..5 = weapon skills 1..5
r = heal
t,g,b = utility skills
press mouse wheel = elite skill
v = interact
c = get nearest target
x = dodge
w = get target
q = run

Do you have a mouse wheel that can be tilted left and right? If yes, use it for weapon swap and AoE loot. I use:
tilt mouse wheel left = AoE loot (“pull things to me”)
tilt mouse wheel right = weapon drop/weapon swap (“push things away from me”)

The default ^ as weapon swap is unfortunate, because I often press it instead of 1 in the heat of the battle, often throwing away conjured weapons I didn’t want to throw away yet.

I just double-tap for dodge and use zxcvb for my 67890 actions, keeps a tight range on the KB

You could always give my odd key binding setup a try.

Rather than using the 1-9 keys above the normal keyboard, I instead use the numpad 1-9 keys. I use the other keys around the Numpad for stuff like weapon swapping (numpad /) and my elite skill (numpad *). Numpad 0 for jump. I use the arrow keys to move. I use the Ins / Home / Page Up / Page Down / Del / End cluster for profession skills (AKA F1-F4) as well as sheathing my weapon. Shift for loot / interact.

In essence, all of the keys I use to play are clustered on the right side of my keyboard, rather than spread out across the top. So I leave my right hand on my mouse, my left hand on the right side of the keyboard, and I can hit everything I need without moving my hands around too much.

I only put my hands on the normal letter keys when I need to type messages or do inventory stuff.

Hihooo,
I work with this setup:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – normal weapons skills
R = Skill 6 / Heal skill
Shift+Q = Skill 7 / Utility 1
Shift+W = Skill 8 / Utility 2
Shift+E = Skill 9 / Utility 3
Shift+R = Skill 10 / Elite

Works totally fine, if you want to keep the normal setting of WASD

Danikat.8537:

I’ve never understood how people can use WASD to move and the same hand on the keys above for skills. If you can manage that you’re already doing better than me.

But what might help sometimes is to use the mouse to move. If you hold down both mouse buttons the character will run in whatever direction you point the mouse. If you’re already using the mouse to control the camera it should be easy to start doing. It’s not as precise as WASD, but most of the time it’s good enough, especially if you’re only doing it temporarily while using the 6-0 skills.

Another possibility I know a lot of people use is to move the movement keys down a row and put the heal, utilities and elite skills under the attack skills. Or put them around the side.

(My solution is to put all the skills onto the number pad, along with things like weapons swap, take target and dodge, then use the arrow keys to move, but that only works if you’re left-handed.)

The way I do it for 1-5 is
1. get into combat and trigger auto attack with ring finger.
2. Skills 2 and 3 are triggered by middle finger, while strafing left or right as appropriate
3. Skills 4 and 5 are index finger trigger.

I had an older mouse with browser buttons on the thumb position. The front one was dodge and the rear one was a stun breaker.
Skills 6-0 I triggered with my mouse. I always make it a point to never lose sight of my pointer. I did this by always making sure it was centred in the screen and to permanently hold down right mouse button while in combat. I’ve gotten the hang of swinging the camera around really quick to keep my eye on the action regardless of what’s going on.

But now, I’ve bought a Razer Naga which has 12 thumb buttons, so I’ve set it up to have
Mouse wheel click = Profession skill F1
1. Dodge
2. Stun breaker
3. Weapon swap
4. Utility 5
5. Utility 6
6. Elite
7. Profession skill F2
8. Profession skill F3
9. Profession skill F4
10. Heal skill

I’m so used to it now that I can even do dodge jumps without mashing V and space bar