Guild Wars 2

Perhaps the following might be interesting to anyone wanting to using a game pad in GW2 and WvW. It probably applies to PvE and PvP also. I got mixed results.

By luck I found an old Logitech F710 game pad that I used to play The Witcher 3 so decided to see if if would improve my game play in GW2, especially WvW. I’m an older player, was a clicker, but now use KB and mouse, yet i’m still clumsy especially during a fight.

I used the trial version of Pinacle Game Profiler and the information from here:-

http://pinnaclegameprofiler.com/forum/showthread.php?25192-Guild-Wars-2
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There is also Xpadder but there isn’t a trial version available.

Here is a comparison of the two:-

http://www.xpadder-vs-pgp-vs-j2k.com/index.html
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Anyhow, I spent perhaps 3 hours on Saturday morning in Heart of Mists setting it up and practicing.

The F710 had just about everything I needed for fighting in WvW – movement, camera, weapons and utilities, weapon swap, function keys, targeting, look back, map etc. It used single button press for weapons and hold button for utilities.

In Heart of the Mists playing by myself it was wonderful – really fast movement, firing off weapons so easily, placing traps, looking backwards etc. After an hour I was much much better than using my keyboard and Logitech G300 mouse combination.

In the early evening I went into EB where there was lots of action, really large fights between our side and the others – many dozens of players.
Well it was a disaster for me – got to the fights easily enough then found the gamepad was useless – movement and fighting just stopped – the buttons either took a long time to trigger the desired action or nothing happened at all. It wasn’t just lag because the keyboard and G300 mouse were working great. Such a huge disappointment

I think the PGP software places the game pad key events in the Windows events queue but somehow when the machine is heavily loaded as when 2 zergs are fighting then the the key events are delayed or perhaps the software never creates them or more likely PGP is slow in creating them. Perhaps someone else knows what the problem is or how to get this working?
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My machine is Windows 7 x64, quad core, 8GB ram.
If PGP worked during fights then it would be perfect for me.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support

Logitech G13 gamepad works perfectly in WvW. Good in combination with Logitech G600 mouse. No need to use the keyboard for anything except chat.

Andronica Farwyn.7684:

Logitech G13 gamepad works perfectly in WvW. Good in combination with Logitech G600 mouse. No need to use the keyboard for anything except chat.

Thank you. Someone recommended this to me a week or so ago, said they had good success with it. I might yet go with this although the F710 was awseome – except in fights.

I dabble with a gamepad from time to time even though I still prefer mouse/keyboard. With the Action Camera mode turned on it works pretty well. I use a standard XBox controller and map the buttons to key presses via AutoHotKey. Even under heavy load during SM zerg fights, keys work as well as the keyboard with this setup.

In these types of games, 3rd party programs are always a use at your own risk. I personally don’t think it is an issue since it is mapping one key from the keyboard to one press on the gamepad.

This is what I started with and customized to work with Action Camera:

Straegen.2938:

I dabble with a gamepad from time to time even though I still prefer mouse/keyboard. With the Action Camera mode turned on it works pretty well. I use a standard XBox controller and map the buttons to key presses via AutoHotKey. Even under heavy load during SM zerg fights, keys work as well as the keyboard with this setup.

In these types of games, 3rd party programs are always a use at your own risk. I personally don’t think it is an issue since it is mapping one key from the keyboard to one press on the gamepad.

This is what I started with and customized to work with Action Camera:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyHcobjYfT0

I finally managed to get my F710 gamepad working quite reliably with Xpadder.
It works in mass fights with no missing key events. Only thing, after an hour or two some events vanish so either I just restart GW 2 or if in a critial period go back to using keyboard and mouse. Strange though, with F for interact, Xpadder works immediatly everytime whereas my keyboard sometimes doesn’t respond.

I used the info from here to get Xpadder set up:-

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/XBox360-controller-mapping-for-Guild-Wars-2-Enjoy/first
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By the way, the current gamepad key bindings are not very intuitive for me but still much much faster than keyboard and mouse. The setup for PGP was more natural and hardly needed thinking about. Now I just need to figure how Xpaddder’s settings work, then try to get those PGP keybindings working with it.

About PGP – I tried using an app called Prio to raise its interrupt/response level but PGP’s level was already set to very high and wouldn’t go any higher.

About AutoHotKey – I must have setup something wrong because it gave severe problems on my Windows x64 machne – text from its keybindings kept spamming my apps even when GW2 wasn’t running. Later I might try and figure that out.

Conclusions – for me life is much easier using gamepad – especially fighting and exploring. Whereas for laying seige or interacting with Inventory then keyboard and mouse are superior.

Another update – Xpadder – very UNRELIABLE tonight – 30 minutes in EB and in a large Zerg fight – some of the buttons didn’t give any response. I relogged and some of buttons were still broken.

Earlier, I’d just entered EB, only been in 30 seconds and triggering swift caused an internal error in GW2.

Guess I’l have to try AutoHotKey

I use the Razr Nostromo N52. Never had issues in 5 years other than for some key binding "Shift(Dodge)+click(Skill)= Open chat box and you can’t move until you clear it. This does not happen if using keys for skills.