If you’ve been playing MMOs for a while then there’s a fair chance that you’ve splashed out on some specialist kit to improve your gaming. One of the most common accessories is a Razer Naga – a high quality gaming mouse bristling with buttons to make spells and abilities easier to execute.
I’ve been using one of these in Warcraft for a while, but I was also keen on getting it set up for Star Wars: The Old Republic. While Bioware’s MMO doesn’t explicitly support the Razer Naga, it’s very easy to reconfigure it and unlock the untapped power lurking in your Mouse. This guide should cover everything you need to get up and running, as well as a few pointers to some more advanced features.
To set up the Razer Naga for Star Wars: The Old Republic start by finding the mode switch underneath the mouse. In ‘123’ mode the thumb grid of mouse buttons map to the strip of number keys along the top of your keyboard. For me this isn’t very helpful as I tend to fire primary abilities with my left hand using these keys. By switching it to ‘num’ mode the thumb grid buttons map to the number keypad on the far right of the keyboard – something I never use while gaming.
The next step is to go in-game and start mapping these buttons to useful actions. The easiest way to do this is to create a fresh action bar. These action bars are called Quickslot bars in SWTOR. By going into the game preferences it’s possible to add a Left and Right Quickslot bar from the User Interface settings. So far, so good.
We then need to bind the number keypad presses to one of these Quickslot bars. To do this, select the Key Bindings tab in the bottom of the Preferences pane, then scroll down the list of bindings until you find the Left Quickslot ones. In this example I’ve bound the number keypad keys to Left Quickslot 1 through 9. The bindings for Left Quickslot 10, 11 and 12 are zero, minus and plus on the keypad. This should ensure that all the buttons on the Razer Naga are mapped through to the Quickslot bar in SWTOR.
The final step is to just drag abilities onto the quickslot bar in order to make them available for the Razer Naga to use. If you don’t want to use the bindings for a particular character then just disable the quickslot bar to stop the bindings from working. You can also leave specific buttons unbound if you prefer – I prefer to reserve button 3 for the Ventrilo or Mumble Push-to-Talk key.
That’s it for the basics. If you fancy a go at some more advanced features then just fire up the Razer Naga driver panel. From there you can reconfigure individual buttons to any keypress on the keyboard. You can even record macros that you can map to a button. The best way to learn how to use these features is to experiment and see what you can come up with.
That’s it for this quick guide, and I hope you found it useful. If you get stuck, need help or have a question then just shout in the comments.
I’m looking at getting on of these and I remember reading somewhere that the macros you define can switch automatically based on which application you’re using. I.e. the same button would automatically do different things in SWTOR, WoW or Outlook. Have you tried this?
Yep, it’s dead easy to set up as well. On the screenshot of the driver panel there’s a tab called “Manage Profiles”. In there you can create profiles that you can either manually activate or automatically switch to depending on which application is active.
Each profile has it’s own list of settings – what each of the buttons are bound to, are the lights on or off, what mouse sensitivity is used and so on. It’s pretty flexible.
I used to bind the naga keypad to the num buttons but I ended up binding it back to 123. Why? Shift modifiers. It’s pretty simple to make sure your num lock is on at all times (otherwise it REALLY effs up). But when you do SHIFT numpad 1… you get “home”. Since I use shift modifier fairly often, that did NOT work. I tried using a script to disable this behavior but the whole thing borked out on me a statistically significant number of times, so I decided to just cut my losses and go with the 123 setup.
I enabled a second quick bar and bound it to shift+1-12 naga. It’s not in the POSITION I would want the second naga bar, but it works.
I got this thing, the instructions are to download the driver. Then it says to configure it. There are no icons, no filenames, nothing. How the fuck do I configure this? There’s NOTHING in the “documentation” on where this is.
No probs. Go to Start->All Programs->Razer->Razer Naga->Razer Naga Configurator. You should get a configuration screen similar to the one in the bottom screenshot. You only need to do this for advanced changes though – the standard setup can be achieved just by flipping the switch under the mouse and going through the steps in-game.
Hi, just ordered the Naga and came across your website when i googled will razer Naga work with TOR.
Anyway i own the M11X R3 a laptop with obviously no number pad, so will the Naga still work with TOR with no number pad? obviously without owning the Naga i have no clue how it works and this question might sound silly.
If i am thinking correctly the numbers on the mouse will replace the numbers across my keyboard in using the skills i have set on TOR quick bar?
I hope this all makes sense and i hope you can put my mind at ease, many thanks!
You should be absolutely fine. All that you do differently is press the mouse buttons when sorting out your quickslot key bindings. They should still pretend to be the numeric keypad keys, so it should still work for you.
If that fails then fear not – you can still bind the mouse buttons to any other keyboard key. Just find 12 unused keys on the keyboard and bind them to those in the Naga Configurator. Then bind those keys to your quickslot buttons in SWTOR and you should be good to go. If you go down this route then I’d suggest setting up a profile to only enable those bindings when you launch SWTOR.
Appreciate your fast reply, many thanks 🙂
Do you know whether this will work across multiple computers? I travel occasionally for work and bought this mouse and plan to bring it with me when I travel so I can play SWTOR on my laptop when I’m in hotel and SWTOR on home machine when I am home. I’m hoping all configuration is saved in some kind of memory on the mouse so I don’t have to reconfigure the mouse on my laptop and my home machine.
Thanks
I’m pretty sure the settings are saved on your computer and not stored in the mouse. However, you could find the settings file and throw it in Dropbox or something similar. Then you’d have access to them and it should be a simple drag and drop to store your profiles on each machine.
Quick question. I just picked up the Naga to use along side my n52te. I’m having a hard time with what finger to use for buttons 4 and 5 (the ones just left of the left mouse button and towards the top of the Naga). I keep wanting to use my thumb, but it is common sense looking at it to use your index finger. Should I be using my index finger and just give it some time to get use to? Just curious as to what other use, what finger for those two odd placed buttons? I have the top one as my self heal in TOR and the button one is my voice communication button for Vent, Mumble, etc.
Appreciate it!
I actually have the middle mouse button as my voice transmitter for mumble, and buttons 4 and 5 are rebound of course but used with my index finger. I really cant see any other way to comfortably use those buttons with any other finger. Your thumb should be sat comfortably on the button 5 of the naga thumbpad ready. There are some pads which you can stick on the thumbpad keys to help distinguish between them.
Originally I was able to use just 3 buttons on the pad but they actually helped and now i use all 12. Although having a big hand does make 10,11,12 somewhat tricky to press sometimes.
Wow… I definitely dig that NAGA mouse… too bad it’s way out of my budget
I prefer the way I set mine up, similar to Njessi. I have main bar 1-12, bottom quickbar shift+1-12, left quickbar ctrl+1-12, right quickbar alt+1-12. The possibilities are pretty great for this mouse. The main thing though is to experiment with it. Find your comfort zone, because the way I have mine set-up may not feel right to someone else, and vice-versa.