A Bloody Mess on the Keyboard

In Von's School of Bloody Mess, peripheral setup is paramount.

Know your enemy; your enemy is NOT the opposing faction. Your enemy is your own sloppy reaction times, my crayon-munching babes. You are here today, my fluffly little campers of doom, to understand how you can make real gains on your reaction times.

First of all, study this tutorial video on keybinding. For the unobservant recruits, a link is supplied under the video to a forum posting on keybinding that is also worthy of your attention.

For the truly thick amongst you, and by Arthas' bald left testicle, this camp attracts them, here is a brief summary of interesting facts from these sources:

Turf your turning keybindings ('Q' and 'E' keys by default). If you just ABSOLUTELY have to have them, consider SHIFT modifiers to the strafing keys instead (turn left with 'SHIFT-A', if 'A' is your strafe-left key binding).

Turning via the keyboard is just plain bad in combat. Those of the opposing faction who've actually studied their warcraft will accurately spin on a dime and have time for a coffee before you finish turning the same distance with your keyboard. Of course they'd rather be drinking your salty tears instead of coffee, and you'll oblige them quite easily with keyboard turning.

From now on, you turn only with the mouse. Learn it. Live it. Love it. Turn the sensitivity up all the way to 11 . You got to spin on a dime as fast as they can. Now... go out into a battleground and get used to the mess I've just made of your keyboard and mouse. Mmm... your tears are salty gooodness.

Turn on Sticky Targetting. A slip with the mouse which sees you lose your target to a random piece of landscape could be fatal. Don't be THAT chump.

If you are turning with your mouse, that's your right hand (if you're right-handed) completely occupied. It won't have the luxury of going near the keyboard. That leaves you with your left hand for remaining movement and your various actions. The trick here is to minimise left-hand movement. In a perfect scenario, everything you want to do can be done just by moving your left-hand fingers. Cluster actions you use often around the movement keys. The more you use an action, the closer to a movement key the action should be.

Now, here at Von's School of Bloody Mess, we like to turn things up a notch. Git out yer crayons, skirts. This dope is psychadelic:

Always make the nameplates of the opposite faction visible. A few pixels of red in an otherwise perfect camoflague works well.

Modifier keys were NOT made equal. SHIFT is quite combat-ready. CTRL is servicable, but less so, given its greater distance from your movement keys. ALT is not a combat modifier key. It's just too damn inconvenient for you to get to. By all means, try the ALT modifier. It's YOUR Graveyard respawn.

Get those trinkets keymapped. If I see a trinket NOT on constant cooldown when we go out to drill, you'll be shitting those crayons for a month!!

There are a bunch of default keys for useless things like showing your character, talents and other malarkey directly under your typical movement keys. Free those keys up for combat actions. If you insist on having them keybound, consider sticking them way out in the unloved regions of of the double-digit function keys.

That's it for today's drill, skirts. I'm off to sink my club into something squishy.