Keybindings

[MongoJerry]

Well, I experienced my first hardcore death. Luckily, it was my backup character, but it still hurt. And, the frustrating part was that it was due to poor keybinding options and not due to what I was trying to do. It happened during the Belile encounter. A green swirl appeared at my feet, and I clicked to move away. However, my cursor was over a portion of Belile, so my character fired Magic Missle instead of moving. Dead character.

Now, yes, there is a "Move" key separate from the Move/Primary Skill/Interract key, but it's clumsy to have two separate keys that move you, and the move key does not interract with vendors and objects. I want to use my mouse to move around and interract with objects, and I don't want to fire off Magic Missles when I'm not expecting to. What I want is simple: Allow the Primary Skill key to be assigned to a keyboard key and allow there to be a separate Move/Interract key. That way, I can Move/Interract with the left mouse button and fire Magic Missle using a keyboard key. That kind of setup is very natural to me.

I started a thread on this topic on the Diablo 3 forums and would appreciate it if people here would reply to the topic in the hopes that it gets seen and responded to by Blizzard employees. Thanks!

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5151267115#1

[Elric of Grans]

I have got caught doing this too, but I seem to recall Diablo, Diablo II and every other Hack and Slash game I have played operating the same. Move/Primary Skill/Interract on the same button makes the most sense. I can see a justification for a toggle key that makes it Move-only, but I am quite happy having Primary Skill on the mouse. These games are called click-fests for a reason.

[MongoJerry]

I have got caught doing this too, but I seem to recall Diablo, Diablo II and every other Hack and Slash game I have played operating the same. Move/Primary Skill/Interract on the same button makes the most sense. I can see a justification for a toggle key that makes it Move-only, but I am quite happy having Primary Skill on the mouse. These games are called click-fests for a reason.

I'm simply asking for the option, not to make it the default option. I've always been used to using the mouse to move and keyboard to cast spells -- at least that's how I always did it with Diablo II and other similar games.

[DeeBye]

Can't you just unbind Magic Missle from your left-click and have it set at whatever they call "auto attack"? That way you'd have just run up to the enemy to try to melee (and out of green stuff), and it would still allow you to interact with vendors. There's probably something I'm not considering here, but I'm not quite sure how you have MM keybound (both to LMB and a keyboard key?).

[MongoJerry]

Can't you just unbind Magic Missle from your left-click and have it set at whatever they call "auto attack"? That way you'd have just run up to the enemy to try to melee (and out of green stuff), and it would still allow you to interact with vendors. There's probably something I'm not considering here, but I'm not quite sure how you have MM keybound (both to LMB and a keyboard key?).

Unfortunately, no. That's the problem. There is just one big keybind for "Move/Primary Skill/Interact" and you are given no choice but to have the Primary Skill slot be your left mouse button. You can't keybind it to a letter on the keyboard. This is the mistake that I would like Blizzard to fix.

[Concillian]

Can't you just unbind Magic Missle from your left-click and have it set at whatever they call "auto attack"? That way you'd have just run up to the enemy to try to melee (and out of green stuff), and it would still allow you to interact with vendors. There's probably something I'm not considering here, but I'm not quite sure how you have MM keybound (both to LMB and a keyboard key?).

There is no autoattack on a wizard. The closest thing is wanding. You literally cannot make your character swing their weapon, only cast spells or shoot their wand.

[swirly]

I wish there was an option to separate those commands as well. I decided quite early that I didn't want to be super clicky with my mouse. So the setup I've been running with looks like this.

Spacebar: move
1: primary attack
2: primary utility spell
3:whatever
4: whatever
LMB: secondary/big aoe attack
RMB: leap/summon dogs... stuff like that with a cooldown, but that I need easy access too
Shift: force stand still, though I almost never do this
Q: potion

My play style ends up such that I hold space to move around and hit 1 on the keyboard for most things. I can and do sometimes still move with the LMB, but it is pretty rare. Probably need to move the force stand still to tab instead of shift cause my pinky ends up feeling awkward reaching for shift.

I generally can't use this system for the first bunch of levels since skills/bar options are even more limited then, but I do try to move to it as soon as I can. I think it should keep me from having the issue Mongo has. If I want to move I should always do so since it will be ingrained to use the space to do that.

[MongoJerry]

I wish there was an option to separate those commands as well. I decided quite early that I didn't want to be super clicky with my mouse. So the setup I've been running with looks like this.

Could you please respond to my post on the Blizzard forums, so that the post gets boosted a few times? I'd like Blizzard to be aware that there is a problem here that needs to be fixed.

The trouble with the separate move key is that it doesn't have an interract ability, and this game depends so much on interracting by picking up loot, talking to npc's, picking up shrines, going to other zones, etc. So, if you choose to use the move key, you're still in effect forced to use two separate move keys -- one for moving in combat and another for all of the interactions. I'm glad it works OK for you, but that would be awkward for me.

[DeeBye]

Spacebar: move
1: primary attack
2: primary utility spell
3:whatever
4: whatever
LMB: secondary/big aoe attack
RMB: leap/summon dogs... stuff like that with a cooldown, but that I need easy access too
Shift: force stand still, though I almost never do this
Q: potion

Using the default Shift for "Force Stand Still" and also using the default 1-4 keys for skills is incredibly awkward and will result in a crippling deformity of the hand. Playing a Witch Doctor, I use "Force Stand Still" like 90% of the time while actually using combat skills.

This is what I have going on as far as keybinds, and I think it works pretty well:

LMB: Move/Primary Skill/Interact
RMB: Secondary Attack/Utility Skill
Space: Force Stand Still
1: Spammable/Low-CD skill
2: Spammable/Low-CD skill
3: Long-CD skill
4: Long-CD skill
E: Health Potion
Mouse side (thumb) button: "Move"

I rest my left hand with my thumb over the Spacebar for "Force Stand Still", and my ring finger on "1" and my middle finger on "2" (my left pinky finger never listens to me, and contributes nothing to society so it just sits there in time out). My index finger rests on "E" for potion quaffing, but can easily find it's way to "3" or "4" by feel for the long-CD skills.

[Mavfin]

For me, since I was used to a mod-key macro setup in WoW, and used Clique to heal, I'm used to hitting ctrl while key-ing or mouse-ing :

Left/Right no modifier: unchanged, I had no issues moving on Belial
1 --> Button 3
2/3/4 --> ctrl left/right/middle

So, I don't have to worry about keys at all other than touching the ctrl or shift on the very left side of my keyboard, or the q to heal, and my fingers can find all those pretty error-free.

I realize that's not an 'ideal' setup for some, but for my hands, it works wonderfully. I don't miss stuff, I don't hit the wrong keys, and I stay alive.

As far as the left-click doing what it always has, that doesn't bother me at all. I like the movement as it is, since I spent *so many hours* using it before, it's just natural. I'd be really confused with wasd and this camera setup. No thanks.

[Kevin]

I remapped 1-4 to asdf, I'm so used to shift to stand still and with my keyboard the most natural place for the fingers is on that row. I remapped what space bar used to be to x, and space bar to the potion key because I'm mostly playing hardcore and having the biggest key on the keyboard be the "Oh shit!" button makes sense. Actually I put space bar as the secondary key, q will still drink as well. So my fingers shift one spot to the left from a normal typing position so the pinky is always on the shift key.

I thought about using modifier keys like Mav, but with the fact that the keyboard bound skills will break any current animation and cast I can be faster by just keeping the spam skill held down and just hitting my keybinds to use those spells, assuming I have a mob targetted still the spam skill on the LMB will fire off as soon as the keybind skill is done and I didn't have have to release it.

I've had a few issues with casting when I wanted to move and I did look for a toggle key that prevents interaction when held like Mongo wants (likely the control key for me though possibly w with how things are set up) but it's not a big issue and it existed in previous games like this so it would be a nice thing but I can live with it.

Actually when I say I remapped 1-4 I didn't do that, I added asdf as secondaries. This is because my razor mouse has the 12 button "numberpad" on the side and I can use default settings and have all those skills available there too. I don't use them that way much because well the mouse is still too small for my hands and my fingers would get very uncomfortable if I kept my hand in a position to easily use those. I got this mouse in part because I thought it would be bigger (I didn't pay attention to the dimension it was listed at and I had no place I could try before I bought so I took advantage of the online deal a few months back). I still get some use out of those extra buttons but not as much as someone with smaller hands probably would.

[MongoJerry]

As far as the left-click doing what it always has, that doesn't bother me at all. I like the movement as it is, since I spent *so many hours* using it before, it's just natural. I'd be really confused with wasd and this camera setup. No thanks.

No, it's not doing what it always has. That's the point. In Diablo 2, you could map all of your spell keys to the keyboard, which is what I did. I put "auto-attack" on the left mouse key, which was irrelevant to a sorceress. Therefore, the left mouse button was in effect "move/interact" and I could use all my spell keys from the keyboard. This is what I want.

Instead, Diablo 3 is forcing me to use to the left mouse button to fire one of my skills and is not letting me remap it to the keyboard. This is an issue in two cases. One is like the case in Belial, where I want to move out of the way of something and accidentally click on a big boss and fire a spell I don't want to cast. The second case is where I want to actually close in on a monster pack to fire off a close range Frost Nova and again instead I click on a monster where I want to go and fire a Magic Missle. I don't want to have to have two separate move button keys. Just let me adjust the controls the way I want them to be.

[MongoJerry]

Partial success! I got a blue response to a post I made about keybindings (see posts #20 and #21 in the thread):

http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4487359056

I'm crossing my fingers that this helps bring some action on this.