Confession time: I’m pretty excited about Guild Wars 2. After being able to get in to both press beta weekends, I’ve been impressed by the amount of detail already in the game. All the major game systems are present and correct, letting me get a real feel for what’s involved. You can find some of my more general thoughts on the game over at ZAM.
As part of the process of adapting from more stationary MMOs like World of Warcraft and SWTOR to ones that are more movement focused like TERA and Guild Wars 2, I’ve been reassessing how to make the most of my MMO-designed Logitech G15 and Razer Naga Molten. It’s not as straightforward as you’d think. Guild Wars 2 only has a single action bar with 10 abilities, which in theory would make the Razer Naga pretty much redundant. Add modifiers like weapon switching and profession abilities into the mix, and combine them with trying to limit moving your left hand so you can stay mobile, and you can see why a different approach is needed.
It’s why I spent the last four weeks playing movement based games like Team Fortress 2 in order to get used to moving again. I used to play a lot of Counter Strike and Quake 3 Arena back in the day, but raiding as a Mage in World of Warcraft has made my reflexes and spacial awareness soft and flabby. There’s only so many ways you can stand at the back pressing One, One, One, Two and occasionally moving out of bad stuff.
This is where the transition to Guild Wars 2 gets interesting. Instead of a whole bunch of abilities, I have 5 weapon skills, one healing skill, 3 slot skills and one elite skill. I can swap around my healing, slot and elite skills out of combat, but they generally tend to stay fixed. The five weapon skills, on the other hand, can be swapped in combat. This is done either through switching between two sets of weapons, or through a profession ability like the Elementalist attunements, or through a Slot or Elite skill, like the Engineer’s various toys.
It’s at this point that I started to seriously look at keybindings. When you’re in a crowd movement is less of an issue. But if you’re facing mobs alone or trying to survive in PvP movement is as important as dealing damage. I haven’t done a single arena in World of Warcraft, and it really shows in how much training Guild Wars 2 has put me through.
So where to start? The initial issue is left hand movement. Skills are bound to keys 1 to 0 along the top. WASD is home to your standard movement, with Q and E providing strafe movement. Q, E, W and S will also provide a double-tap to dodge if needed. Beyond that keys F1 to F4 provide access to special profession abilities, while the WTF key (`) will provide weapon switching for those professions that support it. Tab still does target switching.
By default your first skill is set to auto-repeat after the first cast, but you can do this with any other weapon skill if you prefer by holding down CTRL and right-clicking it. Useful, but its ultimate value depends on what weapons and profession you’re playing with.
The first option is to look at mapping the F1-F4 keys to the buttonpad on the Razer Naga. This only frees up four keys, meaning that either my heal (bad) or elite skill (not so bad) also gets thrown to the Naga. It also doesn’t prevent me from occasionally bashing the Esc key by mistake when trying to move from a weapon switch to F1. While it might have some potential, I eventually had to drop this one.
The next option is to bind my heal, slot skills and elite skill to the Razer Naga. This works to a point, although I had to put an adhesive pad on the heal button to make sure I could find it reliably and quickly. I think this could have potential as most abilities on the right of the actionbar are on a longer cooldown, but I can see it causing conflicts with having my voice chat push-to-talk bound there as well. During the more recent press weekend this was the setup I eventually ran with.
There is a third option, and that’s largescale rebinding. I can either look to drop everything down a row, so that WASD becomes SZXC and re-form everything around that. This way I can still map the profession abilities on F1 to F4 to the Razer Naga and still avoid kludging Esc. The other way is to potentially unbind the turn keys A and D and backpedal S, drop the bindings for strafe and move forward down a row to replace them, and instead rebind my heal and slot abilities to QWER and F. Both of these have potential, and I’m hoping to find one that feels natural over future beta sessions.
Is the Razer Naga worth using with Guild Wars 2? Well, yes and no. If you’ve already got the classic version or even a Razer Naga Molten then I’d suggest giving it a fair go, using the training stickers or adhesive pads to help your thumb retrain as needed. If you’ve not got one but you’re considering it, I’d suggest a closer look at the Razer Naga Hex. The button layout is designed for MOBA use, but I reckon it’ll be ideal for Guild Wars 2’s reduced dependency on hotkeys. Plus it’s green and, as we all know, green is good.
Meanwhile if you’ve got any keymapping suggestions of your own then feel free to share them. April 10th is only a few short weeks away and the promised land of beta awaits. Any planning done now will probably pay dividends later. Just remember, if you played last weekend then respect the NDA!
Thanks for talking about this, it’s an important topic for playing more movement based games (especially in pvp). FPS training is definitely a good idea as well.
I personally would recommend rebinding your attacks to your naga instead of your utility skills there, that way you can activate your abilities even if you have two fingers pushed down to walk a certain direction while moving with your keyboard. If you need your index or middle finger to hit a keybind, and they’re currently moving your character, you lose time/mobility by removing them and pushing the key. The naga helps with this a lot.
Just my 2 cents 🙂
Interesting. I guess it kind of depends what you’re using as your move forward control. In MMOs I generally use both primary buttons together to move forward, with freelook to control the direction I move in. In FPS games it’s WSAD with strafe bound to A and D, weapon select and reload nearby and primary fire/alt fire on the mouse. I’ll give your suggestion a go and see how it works out. Cheers!
Yeah, I tend to avoid the double mouse button to move and camera because sometimes I like to just free camera it. I’m also a ESDF mover instead of a WASD person. I find it gives me more options for keybinds.
I’m really bad with using F-keys for combat, in most mmos I rebind keys heavily to my standard setup. Its funny you blogged on the Razor, only few days ago I was recommended it. GW2 will be a big challenge to me key-wise, but I don’t know how well the mouse would work for me…maybe i should practise first?
Getting practice with the Razer is pretty important, as otherwise it just becomes an expensive (if pretty) peripheral. The trouble is, with games like WoW or SWTOR where you have a huge amount of active abilities I’d really suggest the traditional style Naga. If GW2 or MOBAs like LoL are going to be your thing then the bigger buttons and alternate layout of the Naga Hex might be more up your street. I guess it depends on how you see yourself going in the future.
Either way, if you’re going to get one then I’d suggest getting it before the general access betas start following the pre-sale, as it means you can get into good habits early 🙂
I plan to use the Razer Naga, 17 button mouse. How can maximise my gameplay with this and a general laptop keyboard.
Should I set 1-0 on the naga and leave the WASD combination?
I will use the mesmer with a sword and torch, what is the most effective skill slot bind?
This may not optimize the naga but it is a solid system. Unbind all movement keys except w,s. I then rebind the 2 strafes to side mouse buttons and mouse turn by holding in right click. Now you have q,a,e,d,r,f,c plus 1-5 all easily reachable without moving your left hand from its “home” of w,s. Add shift modifier and you have plenty of binds.
Glhf!
Switch to ESDF for movement is my suggestion. Not only will the keybinding posibilites greatly expand for you, it is natural home position for typing.
Since I’m notorious to _always_ use the mouse look by constantly pressing the right mouse button, I will have to move by keyboard. Fortunately, I’ve got a Naga, so I plan to map all the 1-0 keys to it. Still, this leaves me with the action keys F1-F4 in place, which I think I could map to (keyboard) 1-4 conveniently. Does this make sense to you?
Also, _right now_ I got the idea about mapping F1-F4 to Shift-1 – Shift-4 to use as secondary bindings also on the naga. Can you tell whether GW2 does support this? It would mean that I can use the left hand for movement only and have the mouse to use skills and move the camera. This would be such a charm! Do you think it’s possible?
I have the Razor Naga 17 buttons also.
I plan on using WASD like in other mmorpg’s because I move my camera and zoom in/out a lot (and turn with it also). I think the Razor is perfect for GW2 since we don’t need 2-3 full hotbars of skills. My autorun will be on the pressed down scroll button and see those little buttons right on the left of your left click? Well, adhesive rubbers come with the mouse so I put them there for easy to find heal and weapon switch. Weapon skills will be on mouse buttons 1 to 5 and profession toggle 7-10-11-12. That leaves 6-8-9 free and I don’t plan on binding anything to them. Rubber on button 7 is enough for me to find my profession buttons easely. My push to talk will be bind to X because it’s so easy to reach even when you are moving around.
I plan on remaping my actionkey to the NUMpad keys and put the naga in advanced mode, So it reads the Num-pad keys rather than the regular numbers. that will allow me to move my f1-keys down to the Number keys and use wasd or esdf movement and put my F1-f4 actions into easy reach so 1-6 are now NUMpad 1-6 I put 7-0 on 789 and “-” and put my Tild “`” on 0 now Movement is fluid like a shooters with easy to reach special. and my right thumb does the actions.
I plan on having all skills on my naga and have ALT 1, 2, 3 ,4 for my pofression skills. As far as movment and tabbing go’s they can be the two non num-pad keys or even mouse wheel.