MMO Keybinding 101

Now that Cataclysm is out and one missed interrupt will wipe the group again, it's more important than ever to remove the barriers between your brain and your character. Allow me to help you discover a new world of ergonomic comfort and gameplay efficiency without having to buy any new hardware.

I know how hard it is to learn new keybindings, particularly for a game you've been playing for a while. But I promise you, it's worth it. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I had constant pain in my left wrist for a year before I went to the trouble of changing my binds. Plus, having your skills on a single, easy-to-reach keystroke makes it a lot easier to get that critical interrupt off than having to contort your hand to reach something obnoxious like ctrl-7.

Our goals here are simple: put as many hotkeys near your left hand as possible. This allows for more skills to be bound to keys and makes them easier to reach (and remember) at the same time. Stuff that you rarely use (sheath weapon? Really?), or that is generally accessed outside of combat (social panes, inventory) should be put on the right side of the keyboard.

To that end, we're going to put movement on ESDF instead of the traditional WASD.* I know it seems like madness, but bear with me here.

* I do still generally use WASD for action games, because most of those a) don't have many skills you want to bind to a ton of different hotkeys, and b) you often want to hold shift and/or ctrl while moving to enable walk, stealth, or the like.

My basic World of Warcraft setup looks like this:

Movement ESDF
Main skill bar [Mousewheel up] [Mousewheel down] QWRTAGZXCV
Secondary bar [shift-variants of main bar]
Tertiary bar B23456 [plus shift-variants]

This gives me 18 skills within easy, easy reach, and 18 more from combining the shift key with them. For reference, this lets me have every single one of my skills and cooldowns as a tanking Death Knight at level 85 on a hotkey, without having to switch pages on my action bars or resort to control- or alt-variants. I can raid for hours without discomfort. It's amazing. I never have to click on defensive cooldowns like Icebound Fortitude, because I have enough hotkeys that it can sit on Q even though I can only use it once every three minutes at most.

As for social and out-of-combat stuff, there are plenty of keys on the right side of the board that are useless for binding skills to. I put bags on K, character sheet on J, dungeon finder on I, spellbook on P, social on O, etc.

Specifically to WoW, I love having my Lucky Charms raid target symbols on the numpad, with skull at [NumPad 0]. This lets me easily mark the next kill target as we're mowing down trash packs, or mark a new add for death during a boss fight.

I realize that habits are hard to change. I understand that you can play just fine with Flash Heal on shift-6 and clicking Power Word: Shield with the mouse. But I guarantee that your reaction will be faster (and your wrists healthier) if you put in the effort to get over the learning curve to use more efficient keybindings like these.