WoW Keybinding Guide

If you are a gamer than you should fully understand the importance your reaction time. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing an FPS, RTS, or World of Warcraft, your ability to quickly make decisions and execute on them via the quickness of your fingers is of absolute most importance.

I’ve known a few players who were “clickers”, basically players who choose to bind very few or no keys at all. The argument being they didn’t need bindings because of the 1.5 second global cooldown. To me, this just seems absolutely ridiculous. It’d be like trying to type only using one finger.

Your hand on the mouse, no matter how precise, will not be able to outmatch your memorization of the keyboard. For the obvious reason, clicking buttons with the mouse requires not only quick decision-making, but also hand eye coordination. For players who bind their keys they only have to worry about choosing their next ability, and then simply they let the second nature finger-to-keyboard reaction take care of the rest.

The fewer abilities you have to click the better, binding all your abilities to hotkeys is crucial. For most of us, your left hand rests on the keyboard, positioned on home row. This should be your starting base for all your key bindings. Q, W, E, A, S, D by default are all your movement keys, even though you’ll primarily be using the mouse to move and change camera angles, having these keys bound to their original functions is important so you can continue moving while switching targets (since Tab target is hopelessly broken). As your mouse will be your primary camera angle adjuster you may choose to move your strafe keys from Q and E to A and D, thus opening up additional easy binds.

Depending on the length of your hand you’ll have to decide what will be the farthest reach for you, it will likely be 5, 6, or 7. Now draw an imaginary line down from that key and this is what will be, for lack of a better word, your WoW home row. The biggest thing to remember when your binding keys is that they need to be easy for you to hit, you don’t want to have to think about them or strain at all in clicking them. They all will have to be second nature to you, so it’s no longer a matter of adding a second variable of hand eye coordination into the choosing of a spell or ability.

My Key Bindings:

• 1-6
• Shift + 1-6
• F
• Shift + E, R, T, G, Y, F, V
• F1-F4
• Mouse Button 4, Mouse Button 5, Scroll Mouse Button
• Shift + Mouse Button 4, Shift + Mouse Button 5, Shift + Scroll Mouse button

There was a time when I was more or less a “clicker”, terrible I know, I had a few skills bound; sinister strike, eviscerate, kick, stuff like that, but I lacked many key abilities I needed to make myself a better player. I finally buckled down and bound everything, it took me probably two weeks to get really comfortable with everything I had bound, but in the long run it was a great decision.

I was faster in PvP, more efficient in PvE, and had gotten to a point where everything was basically second nature. Though this is what works for me, it might be work for everyone, you might have to try out a couple different setups to figure out what’s best for you. Though I truly believe, once you’ve given your set of hotkeys time to really get comfortable, it’ll make you a much better player and a stronger, faster opponent in PvP.