Guild Wars 2

This isn’t really a Mesmer-specific question, but we have a lot of helpful people in this forum.

I’ve been trying to break the habit of using the A and D keys for turning and use the mouse instead (because it seems like this is how the most skilled players play).

For turning, I have tried to use left-clicking and sliding my mouse left or right. This can result in a pretty quick turn, and it leaves me free to use A and D as strafe keys (and that in turn opens up Q and E for other things).

But when I try to play this way, I find a few problems, so I’m wondering if I’m not understanding the correct setup. Here are the problems:
1) If I’m moving forward, I will not actually turn. When I letup on the mouse, I immediately snap back to moving forward.
2) Sometimes I don’t seem to turn even if I’m not moving forward. Especially if I am trying to make a small turn, sometimes it seems like it doesn’t get registered.
3) I have a hard time getting the right amount of mouse swipe to get the right degree of turning.

Am I just doing this wrong? Is it just a matter of practice?

Thx!

The amount of turning is practice.
My solution to the directional running is to ride the right mouse button constantly. Not ideal for sure. With a thumb-ball mouse, I don’t have to pick up to reset the mouse location.

I actually have no idea what your problems are (I’m having trouble understanding what it is you’re trying to say) but I do have an answer for #3.

You want to set your mouse sensitivity in-game to be as similar to your normal desktop mouse sensitivity. Removing mouse acceleration is a given too. There’s a plethora of sites where professional FPS players give advice on how to go about doing this that can be found with a simple google search.

Also, left mouse click moves your camera only. Right mouse click turns your character as well as the camera (since the camera is focused to your forward direction). So in combat you probably want to be turning the camera with your right mouse button.

Here’s what you do:

Hold W to move forward, or hit an autorun key when it suits. Straff when its time to strafe. Meanwhile you should be holding the right mouse button down whenever turning. As someone said, left is just combat.

Next, if you want to go up another level (and make your entire gaming experience far more fluid and fun) get something like this http://www.razerzone.com/synapse2
That way all your skill buttons (and anything else you want) are right there on your mouse.

Welcome my child. Welcome to the light side of the force.

Pretty much always hold down your right mouse button unless you’re relaxing or just autorunning.

Use WASD and bind E and Q to something you like.

Play like a 3rd person shooter.

HOLD DOWN RMB AT ALL TIMES

get used to it.

holding LMB only turns camera, useful for looking behind you while still running forward.

eldenbri.1059:

For turning, I have tried to use left-clicking and sliding my mouse left or right. This can result in a pretty quick turn, and it leaves me free to use A and D as strafe keys (and that in turn opens up Q and E for other things).

But when I try to play this way, I find a few problems, so I’m wondering if I’m not understanding the correct setup. Here are the problems:
1) If I’m moving forward, I will not actually turn. When I letup on the mouse, I immediately snap back to moving forward.
2) Sometimes I don’t seem to turn even if I’m not moving forward. Especially if I am trying to make a small turn, sometimes it seems like it doesn’t get registered.

Leftclick is just freelook, rightclick is turning around

+ to what others said about the right mouse button. Once you get used to mouse turning you will wonder how you played without it.

Few more ideas: GW2 is pretty complex game to learn mouse turning on. While you’re learning the mouse, you also have to think about 1) weapon skills 2) healing 3) Utility and Elite skills 4) F1-F4.

So, some suggestions:
1. Try is playing a FPS. Anything straightforward (Team Fortress 2 – soldier class comes to mind). In terms of the mouse and wasd, FPS gaming is exactly like GW2 without the right mouse button needing to be held down. Also, you don’t have to worry about all other weapon, utility, F keys. Don’t worry about score, teammates, anything really. Just concentrate on hitting your targets.

2) Start with the mouse sensitivity way down until you get comfortable. Then slowly increase it to where it feels good when playing pvp. This is personal taste. I know people with it very low. Mine is jacked up about 4 times as sensitive as when I’m just in windows.

3) Try heading to the cursed shore to practice. Mobs aren’t terrible, but hard enough to force you to concentrate.

Good luck and don’t get discouraged with it while you learn. It’ll become second nature soon enough.

There is also an option in the general options to turn off the auto correction on left mouse click combat viewing. So that when you use the left click to look behind you and let go you remain looking behind you. This is useful for targeting creatures or players behind you so you can, for example, use staff skill 2 to leap away from them. You of course would then need to use the left click to adjust your view to the front again after this. You see Osi use this a lot in his videos for movement.

I use the combat mod to avoid aching fingers/wrist – it’s absolutely horrible to hold rmb down constantly, and I would not be able to play without it. Probably the single thing I dislike most about the game.

I have the toggle for it bound to “F” – hitting F centres the cursor to the crosshair in the middle of the screen for full mouse control with rmb held down. Hitting F quickly allows me to move the cursor anywhere on the screen to select a target/object before switching back to the crosshair.

I’ve now got used to swiping the crosshair around 180degrees for a forward phase leap (“about face” key does not work with combat mod active, so you have to turn manually).

I’ve been running a specific setup for many years, spanning more than a few games and I feel its made the games much more fun and even given me an edge in pvp and meter wars. I’ll give you my setup in case you’re interested

Start with a Razer Nostromo Gaming Keypad or similar, this has a d-pad directional button like the platform controllers have. It also has a bunch of programmable keys. Also have a gaming mouse with a couple programmable thumb keys. I only use my keyboard to chat or do non combat stuff.

Movement: I’m always using the right mouse button to move the camera and toon. The directional pad on the gamepad is used for forward, reverse and strafing (turning when i’m not using my mouse-look). Jump and Dodge are set to my mouse thumb keys, I don’t double-tap to dodge.

Keybinds: My weapon abilities and utilities are bound to the gamepad; weapon 1-5 top row, utilities 6-0 middle row and bottom row is Tab>weapon switch>[use]>map. Thumb key under the d-pad is Shift and the F key abilities are remapped to Shift+1, Shift+2 etc so I can trigger them by pressing thumb Shift and mapped 1 key together. Key above the d-pad is set up to set Targets.

This is sorta a universal setup for many games, I just rework the key binds in the game to fit the setup concept. You can get good with any setup it just takes a bit of time. Develop a system that works for you, it just takes some practice and muscle memory to get effecient.

Another alternative to the gaming keypad is to make your own with a Makey Makey…

GL
Blood~

Not sure if related but, I’ve noticed issues with GW2 not wanting to register multiple key inputs. If I recall, I’d be on auto run, then press W and try to turn and it wouldn’t.
I’ve gotten used to it now, but I remember it being really annoying when I first started playing.

I’m just always holding down the right mouse button.

Love it.

The auto right click targetting is frustrated, but I just learn not to hover my mouse over enemies whenever possible.

I also keep on the “cast on mouse target” option or whatever it’s called to speed up my timewarp and blink.

I’m probably the oddball here. I use both wasd and mouse controls. Mouse control is mostly for open-world travel but when I enter battle, I switch without even thinking about it. I find tab-targeting to be useless in this game so I move with wasd while selecting a new target with the mouse. I’ve changed “a” and “d” to strafes. The “q” and “e” activate skill 6 and 7, respectively. Skill 8 and 9 are used by my mouse buttons 3 and 4. I trigger my elite by clicking on the mouse scrollwheel. Manually targeting reticules with the mouse is a lot easier too. if I get knocked back, I can highlight the area near my opponent and cast blink in about a second. Sometimes I can blink before my toon has completely settled from the knockback.

Agree on RMB… A good practice excercise is to find a big, open space with something in it (like, say, a wagon, a tree, or some other obvious landmark about as big as a character), and then, while holding your “A” or "D key (in other words, while moving sideways), use the mouse with RMB held down to keep the object centered in your screen. When done correctly, you will “circle strafe” the target to the left or right, never looking away or stopping moving.

When you can get the motion down smoothly, focus on performing the circle strafe while also keeping your cursor centered in the middle of your display – that way, if you need to fast-cast a AOE effect on a specific place you won’t have to stop moving and/or waste valuable time re-positioning the cursor. It sounds hard, but after a few hours’ practice it will start to feel automatic, and your speed will go way, way up since you won’t have to perform contortions to keyboard-turn.

BONUS: if you put Dodge on your mouse button in preferences you can Dodge seamlessly at any point without having to interrupt the circle-strafe (or any movement, really) by double-tapping the movement key or fumbling for whatever keyboard key you have bound. I noticed that my dodging became much, much faster after I bound middle mouse button to that action… Just something you might want to try, since you’ll be learning a new set-up anyway.

It took me some getting used to but once I did it’s great

go into spvp where you are under pressure and force yourself to turn using the mouse durring fighhts. it will be frustrating at first but you should learn under the most tense situation so everything else is easy in comparison and you dont crumble if you get into a fight in wvw or w/e.

zaxon.6819:

go into spvp where you are under pressure and force yourself to turn using the mouse durring fighhts. it will be frustrating at first but you should learn under the most tense situation so everything else is easy in comparison and you dont crumble if you get into a fight in wvw or w/e.

I would suggest doing ImagoX’s training before doing this. That would make it less frustrating. With that said, this is a must. Nothing will improve your skills more than trial by fire.

Karmasutra.9351:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Here’s what you do:

Hold W to move forward, or hit an autorun key when it suits. Straff when its time to strafe. Meanwhile you should be holding the right mouse button down whenever turning. As someone said, left is just combat.

Next, if you want to go up another level (and make your entire gaming experience far more fluid and fun) get something like this http://www.razerzone.com/synapse2
That way all your skill buttons (and anything else you want) are right there on your mouse.

I’m left handed so I’ve had to train myself to use mouse with right hand over the years. Getting a multi-button mouse has been game changing for me. I have everything bound to it and I just use keyboard for dodge and tab target and shatters. I promise, a gaming mouse is worth investing in.

In practice, three’s nothing wrong with whatever plays/feels better to someone. Far be from me telling someone how to use his/her keyboard and mouse to attain “leetness” (no offense intended.)

In my case, there’s no need to rebind anything, as I can still “mouse turn” with my touchpad, and I actually find the qweasd “full mobility” quite nice on occasion (so yes, it’s nice to turn with the mouse, but there’s no need to rebind keys for me.)

People get used to how they play other games, and that’s fine, but what you prefer doesn’t need to be a rule for others to follow. Give your preference as a player’s hint, perhaps, but don’t look down on others if they keyboard turn? What’s there to gain from doing so? Bully points? :P

A gaming mouse is perhaps nice to have, but isn’t needed. I play on a laptop. :P It’s all good if it works for ya (this notebook’s keyboard buttons are probably nicer than most normal desktop keyboards with huge, clunky buttons, so there’s that.)

I didn’t think anyone in this post was being a bully. Everyone had some really great informative pointers to share. Take from it what you will. You can duct tape your keyboard to your head and swing your mouse around like a lasoo if it makes you happy. I don’t judge.

I just use this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiWGEMFdKSQ

Best practice is to just hold down right-mouse button when you want to turn since left-mouse only turns the camera. It allows you to make a lot more split-second actions and reactions when you need to get out of something quickly or about-face in a hurry.

Combat mode for the win. Also played a good 3 months of TERA prior to this game, so the transition from that game’s action combat to this one with combat mode was cinch.

Thx for all the help. It’s a sad thing that I just assumed left-mouse-button would be the one to control turning. If you ever want an exercise in frustration, try to move around using this… lol

Anyway, I’m trying the practice exercises now