Mouse/Keyboard vs. Controller: Your Thoughts

[Chardrizard]

Fulltime keyboard, occasional mouse when in urgent needs to target a needle in haystacks.

[Frein]

I'm very familiar with this method of playing, actually. I'm not a big fan. I've always been a clicker. I'm also a lefty, so I'm always re-configuring my keys.

The bolded part is your problem. Ever since WoW modernized the KB+mouse interface, clickers have been at the bottom of the totem pole. It's just slow and inefficient. In the early days of WoW I remember meleeing down clickers without taking single hit because they'd be so slow at turning around and using their abilities.

Fulltime keyboard, occasional mouse when in urgent needs to target a needle in haystacks.

This is how I play as well. I'd incorporate the mouse more if we had full access to all our abilities (instead of only one row) and were allowed to bind our keys freely.

[Alastor]

The bolded part is your problem. Ever since WoW modernized the KB+mouse interface, clickers have been at the bottom of the totem pole. It's just slow and inefficient. In the early days of WoW I remember meleeing down clickers without taking single hit because they'd be so slow at turning around and using their abilities.


This is how I play as well. I'd incorporate the mouse more if we had full access to all our abilities (instead of only one row) and were allowed to bind our keys freely.

Actually, as a rebuttal, I've tried both clicking and full keyboard methods in WoW, and I've been immensely more successful as a clicker. This is a personal thing, of course. A new player who has no idea what their abilities do or where they are is going to take a long time with a mouse, searching for the abilities. As a practiced player, I never had any issues keeping up with keyboard players. Furthermore, the mouse has become a very viable option due to the addition of add-ons that allow you to move your abilities across the screen and the wide-spread use of gaming mouses like the Naga, which have the extra buttons. I use the keyboard with my right hand for movement, targeting, and push-to-talk, but my mouse is my number one tool when it comes to WoW.

[Frein]

Actually, as a rebuttal, I've tried both clicking and full keyboard methods in WoW, and I've been immensely more successful as a clicker. This is a personal thing, of course. A new player who has no idea what their abilities do or where they are is going to take a long time with a mouse, searching for the abilities. As a practiced player, I never had any issues keeping up with keyboard players. Furthermore, the mouse has become a very viable option due to the addition of add-ons that allow you to move your abilities across the screen and the wide-spread use of gaming mouses like the Naga, which have the extra buttons. I use the keyboard with my right hand for movement, targeting, and push-to-talk, but my mouse is my number one tool when it comes to WoW.

I'd hate to turn this into a WoW debate from 2005, but this is just mostly nonsense, so I'm going to post a rebuttal anyway. The reason why I would always be behind the back of a clicker was because they controlled the character's rotation with the keyboard rather than the mouse. This made them turn very slowly as opposed to the near instant 180 degree turn of a mouse. The reason they were forced to do so is that the mouse controlled ability use and you couldn't mouse turn and click an ability at the same time.

Abilities bound to mouse buttons are a legitimate reason to trigger abilities using the mouse (I did this too) but that's not the same thing as clicking at the graphical interface. The key is having your abilities behind a single button press available at all times while simultaneously retaining maximum mobility control. Because of the number of needed commands, I don't believe it is possible to achieve this using only a mouse even if it has a ton of programmable buttons, so keyboard hotkeys are necessary. Especially hunters needed to be able to jump, turn around mid-jump to fire an ability and land facing their original running direction and this maneuver is physically impossible to perform if clicking is involved.

Also, there never were any top competitive PVPers that clicked their abilities.