What is the heck is proprioception??

[Conreeaght]

/stand
/clap
/salute

Well done Satorri. Can't even find words worth adding, other then right now I am referring your article to my friends and guildmates that would appreciate, or need to read it themselves.

[Satorri]

I know exactly what you mean Irat, I have lots of things like that built in. For example, R is always my primary interrupt on all my alts (and I have at least one of everything): Mind Freeze, Shield Slam/Pummel, Kick, Earth Shock, Counterspell, etc.

As a small item to add to the thinking, there are corollaries to be drawn here to visual cognition and the placement, size, and accents of your action buttons. But that's a whole additional wall of text!

[Brogan]

There were a dozen things I wanted to quote from people's responses.

The big ones!

esdf- I made the switch to this a long time ago. I'm a big fan. I also mad the S and F keys into strafe, and I no longer keep turn buttons, but instead do all of my turning and targeting (no tab-target bind) with my mouse. I felt like the use of the R and W buttons, instead of for strafe, was very comfortable for my most often used abilitys, Devastate and Shield Slam.

People mentioned the lack of functionality of the alt key along with this, and I think someone mentioned fewer keybinds due to this. I prefer it this way, not for fewer keybinds lol, but for more that DON'T use alt or ctrl. My fingers dont' like those, so I try to only do shift+key, and adding A and Q to the pool of keys helps.

I'm glad you linked this on our Guild forums Satorri, I find it very interesting, and I plan on making sure Andy reads it. Watching him pvp is intense with the number of keybinds he uses for his warrior, or trying to read through the post-it full of clique keybinds for his pally.

[Satorri]

zomg What's a Brogan?!


o.o


<3

[Glittersmith]

For everything there is wikipedia. Brogan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Great article.

[Spattznatt]

Nice thread.

Intuitive key bindings are directly linked to good situational awareness. The less time you spend preoccupied thinking about which finger to use or where to click the more time you have to look around you and see what's happening in the game.

One thing I found useful when setting up/learning bindings was to put similar functions near each other (even more important for the modifier key actions). For example mistakenly hitting spell reflect when you intended to hit shield wall is less of an issue than say accidentally letting off an AoE fear in the middle of a fight.

Likewise bind actions used in the same situation in a way that they can be easily used as a group. For example simply holding my modifier key changes my SS, TC, Dev keys into AoE mode for TC, Shockwave, Cleave.

Switching to a gamepad was huge for my ergonomics. Keyboards were designed for typing not WoW.

Anyway here's my layout (click for larger view). I'm still working a few abilities in for easy access but figured this might be useful to someone new.

[chefjeff]

I have gone so far as to remove all movment keys from my keyboard completly.I use the extra buttons on mouse to walk backwards and strafe and have keybinded my WASD buttons to abiltys.

[Satorri]

Nice, Glitter!

Holy crap, Spattz, nice graphic! And I envy your Belkan, I may have to pick up one myself one day.

And that's interesting Chef, I have not actually thought of doing that.

[Magnuss]

I have gone so far as to remove all movment keys from my keyboard completly.I use the extra buttons on mouse to walk backwards and strafe and have keybinded my WASD buttons to abiltys.

I suppose if you have the readily accessible mouse buttons available for it, this would be awesome. What kind of mouse are you sporting?

[Irat]

I have gone so far as to remove all movment keys from my keyboard completly.I use the extra buttons on mouse to walk backwards and strafe and have keybinded my WASD buttons to abiltys.

I tired this an went back to keyboard after a week or so, I found it much easier and natural to hold down a key and maintain my rotation then to hold down a mouse button and try and use other mouse functions, particularly when on fights like Maly where you are strafing and turning your camera and maintaining your rotation all at the same time.

[Satorri]

And that, Irat, is the point of the article. =)

What is natural is partly determined by your own comfort, but also significantly by your experience. Having used WASD myself so extensively, if I were to try that I would feel like a duck out of water as well. Only with time and lots of practice do things become 'natural' feeling.

[Satrina]

Muscle memory is fun. When I'm teaching new people fencing, I will give them a drill to practice and say "now do that with proper form two or three thousand times". They look at me and laugh, but they eventually learn that I'm not joking. There is no substitute for getting to the point where an action happens without conscious thought. This applies to any physical exertion where timing or accuracy is important, and gaming is no exception.

A game like WoW is such that ability triggers are more important than movement (except maybe in PvP, but we're talking tanking here.) Contrast to the typical FPS where movement is key and the triggering of abilities is limited to a few triggers. From this I submit that WASD is counterproductive in an MMO environment since it forces you to arrange the most important element of your play around the least.

The problem is, as Satorri notes, that most are so practiced at WASD through other games that we feel it is wrong to change that up. Back to muscle memory, one of the most amazing things about it is that you can have multiple memories for different activities. When you truly have the memories impressed, you will use the right one at the right time and that's that. The argument that learning a new set of memories will invalidate your old ones and cause your ability in other areas to weaken is without merit, except perhaps for elite level athletes. For you and me, not so much.

The hard part is getting that memory impressed. It's not something you can try for a week and say "doesn't work for me". Again, as noted it is a process of months to fully impress muscle memory. There are some things you can do to help the process along, whether you're working on learning to mouse move, moving from a clicker to a keybinder, or just working on a new arrangement of keybinds:

- Perform, perform, perform. Impressing muscle memory takes time, and that time is spent doing the new motions with correct form. A few thousand repetitions is a decent estimator. A video game has the advantage of not needing recovery time for your body, and you generally won't fatigue to the point where the drill becomes counterproductive because you lost form. You can likely impress faster for WoW -- but you still have to work at it.

- Practice in a non-pressure environment. Get a situation where you can perform the motions while thinking about them and ensuring you get the form correct. In sport you do drills. In WoW, you grind. You don't just decide "time to mouse move!" and head off to raid. You'll be frustrated and your raid will be confused at why you suddenly suck. You'll probably just revert to what you know "works" while writing off the idea.

- Self-evaluate. Nobody is going to be there to watch what you're doing and say "that's wrong". At the same time, there's a lot of latitude in what is "right" here. During the impression period you have to be your own coach and analyse what you are doing to make sure it is the most efficient way you could be doing it. This includes making sure your keybinds are laid out in their most efficient way and if you're training yourself to mouse move, that your strafing/back up buttons are placed on the right buttons on the mouse so that your movement is as crisp as possible.

- Games within the game. To better learn mouse moving and get it impressed faster, I made little games where I'd move through the raid during downtimes, circling around people as closely as possible without touching them. Then do that while strafing left, then right. Then backwards. With camera pulled way out, with camera pushed way in. This is related to the second point above - they're just drills. Whatever muscle memory you're trying to impress, you can help yourself by having drills that you do to help yourself along.

- Remember that this takes time. Don't be Ed Gruberman.

[Ermoki]

I am a 1 year player, but I have always played a tank. I tried other classes at first, but when I rolled my Warr it was love at first pwn.

I learned quickly that keybinding was essential, especially as a tank. One has to be able to fire commands and look around, check on raid, track down adds, taunt off mobs and whew!!! If I tried to click tank, I would be fail for certain.

I often have thought that there should be a better way to keybind, but could find no plausible suggestions. This post make alot of sense and the ESDF suggestion made by one poster is something I think I might try.

As I said, I have been tanking for a year now and have muscle memory already. I realize that it will take sometime to retrain my left hand to fire attack commands with my pinky, but if it makes me more effective, so be it.

I can move around and use the camera with my mouse. I can move forward jump, spin and Shockwave with the best of them. I like this jump, spin, attack alt target and back to original target. Sounds fancy!!

My biggest problem is cycling targets with tab. Any suggestions or alternatives?

Thanks,

MOKIIIIIIIIIII!!!!

[Fini]

I know ESDF bring more key around it but it seem to me that it put alt at a bad place (under your hand) and shift and ctrl a bit far; with WASD (or ZQSD for me, AZERTY computer ^^) I got alt near my thumb (to be exact my thumb is between alt and space) and shift and control near my pinky.

How do you use these with ESDF? especially alt (ctrl and shift are reachable, just a bit far). If yu dont use them much then you are loosing more keybindings that what you gain.

Nice post btw Satorri; again ^^

If you're all for one-button wonders, then ESDF is gives you more single key actions. WASD is better if you wanna get the most out of modifiers. you can use both your pinky (shift, ctrl) and THUMB (alt) to hit modifiers. Personally, I'll drop alt out of the equation and use that as a push-to-talk,until I can retrain myself to use my middle mouse button for that function. I need to rebind and retrain, I'm using 1-5 (mostly threat rotation) and mousing 6-8 + oh crap cooldowns and movement/strafe on WASD+QE. I could do soo much better than I am, and I'm not doing badly now.

[Satorri]

Ermoki, my personal solution is that I only tab to pick up a target if I need a quick target. I keybind every ability so my mouse is free purely for camera changes and clicking targets. I can't imagine how people play without overhead health bars, I use Aloft, though the in-game ones are just as useful. For dpsing it let's me see who is how close to dead while watching the situation, for tanking it shows the same (which can also give me an indicator of who's going to get nuked next and who needs threat).

[ArchV]

Awesome post.

I'd like to promote ESDF as well. One of the huge advantages in my mind is that WoW contains alot of typing... guild chat, friends, etc. Having your fingers on ESDF by default puts your hands on home row for immediately transition from moving to typing without having to shift your hand over. I'd love to try out one of the fancy controllers like the one pictured above, but I might get annoyed haivng to go back and forth to the real keyboard to type things. Then again, it might work out fine. After all, I move my right hand from the mouse to type... Also going all mouse for moving and having no movement keys sounds interesting, I might give that a shot!

[Forklift]

I switched to ESDF and used it for over a year, until I sat down and weighed the pros and cons and realized I was losing more than I was gaining. Then I spent two weeks mispressing keys and getting readjusted to WASD.

As ESDF, you gain Q and A, but you lose Ctrl1, Ctrl2, Ctrl3, Shift~, Shift3, and Alt+everything. It's not worth it; I found out the hard way.

[Kazeyonoma]

I had the same kinda discovery Fork, I tried using ESDF for a while until I realized I couldn't easily access alt + anything.

went back to WASD asap.

[Irat]

So where do you think ergonomics plays into the whole situation? Surely it is more comfortable the new movement is the easier it is to learn. How much do you think it plays into how you should be considering your bindings? And does it become a non-issue once the action is bound to muscle memory?

[Kazeyonoma]

ergonomics should be at the center of keybinds. What it boils down to is what is comfortable, and if you aren't comfortable, something is wrong, even if it's "saved" to muscle-memory. This is why people have back problems as they age, they get "used" to sitting improperly.