Warrior keybinding

[Emmalina]

Hopefully this is either useful to someone, or useful to me as a result of someone pointing out what could be improved!

Playing all my WoW time as a caster has never put me in a situation where I needed to worry about significant keybinding beyond binding spells to my 1-5 keys, and seeing as how all of that time has been spent healing, I've never worried about keyboard turning because I don't even need to face the target of my heal. However, playing melee has sort of led me to realize that there are pretty significant advantages to mouse turning and heavy keybinding, so I spent some time organizing it all and getting used to it. I still fumble around some, but I've found that the most difficult thing to get used to is timing since I can now react much faster than a GCD, so I'll be mashing Shield Slams and such before my GCD is up. Combined with some other minor UI changes, I think I'm able to spend all of my time looking at the center of the screen instead of constantly looking down to my keys to find which to click, which I think is much more important as a tank than a healer.

The Binds
First thing I did was unbind any key around WASD that was currently used and rebind it to a Ctrl modifier. So to open my Character pane I hit Ctrl + C, to respond to a whisper Ctrl + R and so on, leaving all those keys open. Then I bound left and right strafe to A and D, leaving Q and E open. This is the essence of mouse turning, the keyboard controls forward and back and strafing, leaving only the right mouse click for turning, which turns you much faster than the keyboard. Then I picked the keys that I felt were comfortable for me to reach when my hand is on the movement keys, leaving me with 1 2 3 4 5 Q E R T F Z X C V, like this:



That's 14 keys, however I need access to more than 14 abilities, so I also use a Shift modifier, meaning that Q and Shift + Q are bound to different abilities, same with 4 and Shift + 4. A bar addon can help with this. I use Dominos and have it set up in such a way that my unmodified abilities show as default



and when I hold Shift, my Shift modified abilities show.




I have the binds actually arranged like they are on the keyboard to help me get used to them. Taunt and Challenging Shout are floating out on that bar on the right, I have them bound to my two auxiliary mouse buttons.

Organization
Obviously I wanted abilities that need to be used quickly (Shield Bash) or abilities that are used often (Shield Slam, Revenge) on the unmodified bar for easiest access. My most common used abilities are on 1-5 at the top because I find those easiest to hit, and my lesser used combat abilities are on Z-V at the bottom. I did my best to group similar abilities, so both rage dumps (HS and Cleave) are close, spell counters (Shield Bash and Reflect) are close, pulling abilities (Heroic Throw and Charge) are close, with Shoot on the Shift modified Heroic Throw key.

My lesser used abilities are on the Shift modified page, including Shouts, combat CD's, and trinkets. I was concerned about having urgent CD's (Shield Wall and Last Stand) on the Shift page, but it hasn't been a problem so far. Disarm and Rend get relegated to the awkward Shift + X and Shift + C because I honestly never use them. I've yet to find a situation where I've needed to Sunder a CC'd target, meaning I couldn't use Devastate, so vanilla Sunder is MIA.

Battle Stance and Berserker Stance
Obviously all this stuff is relevant to Defensive stance and since I almost always solo in D stance, so I wasn't too concerned about my setup for Battle and Berserker stances. I have one big bar with all my multistance abilities, it doesn't change between Battle and Berserker, and I'm resigned to clicking those if I ever need to be in those stances.

Other UI changes

There are 3 addons forming the rest of my central UI that help keep all the information close by.

Digits - Just below my toon are simple numbers showing rage and percent health. This is just a quick reference for checking my health in case I need to hit Last Stand or something, and checking for enough rage for Shackwaves and Shield Slams.

Quartz - Below Digits are two bars. One bar is showing me the timer on a debuff I applied on my target, which is useful for refreshing Demo shout or Sunder. The bars stack for multiple debuffs. The long white bar is a swing timer, which helps for timing Heroic Strike spam. Both of these are options in Quartz, which is essentially a beefed up cast bar with lots of frills and crazy things I don't understand.

Mik's Scrolling Battle Text - I have MSBT set up mostly to show short term CDs like Shield Slam and Shockwave. Having big text right in the middle of your screen telling you that Thunderclap is ready is better than looking down to your buttons and seeing if it's lit, in my opinion. To the left of my character is just a Revenge notification that Revenge is off CD and usable.

Macros

I don't understand macro's very well, and honestly any macro I use I just found online somewhere. The only two I have at the moment are for Charge/Intervene and Revenge/Glyph of Revenge. The Charge macro just uses Charge if I'm targeting an enemy and uses Intervene if I'm targeting an ally. The Revenge macro is set up so that after I use Revenge, my Revenge button turns into a Heroic Strike button for a few seconds so I can just double tap the button to take advantage of the free HS from Glyph of Revenge. I'm sure there are ton's of macros that work magic between stances and stuff, but like I say, I'm not too familiar with macros overall.

[Tanc]

OMG how do you do that, just reading it gives me a head ache and confuse me...lol. the only reason why i use the keyboard is to move.

[Nasanna]

If you want to learn to turn with your mouse (and it really is quicker), rebind your Q, E, A and D keys to moves... you'll learn very quickly to turn with your mouse... that's what I did, I was sloppy for a couple days til I learned.

[Trismus]

Okay, basically here's how this works, and keep in mind that this was designed for PvP so it is not streamlined for tanking (or anything else in prot, really).


1,2,3,4,5 are all fairly common abilities that I use.

q,e,r,f are all abilities that I use nearly every CD. E is my primary ability, in Arms it is MS for instance.

a1, a2, a3, a4 are all abilities that I use in a more support function such as taunt (bound to a2).

s1, s2, s3, s4, s5 are all less common abilities.

z,x,c,v,b are all stance-dancing macros, except for b which is Bloodrage due to its distance from everything.

My mouse has a pgup and pgdwn button which I bind to on-the-fly abilities, mainly pummel/shield bash (the "STFU" key). The other one is execute, and the alt modifier is usually challengingi shout, alt pgdwn is Enraged Regeneration: that has a long cooldown but being extremely fast with it is extremely important.

Ultimately, it comes down to speed. The more important the ability, the faster I want to be able to use it. For example, my "oh#$%^" macro (last stand is applicable and shield wall, equips shields, puts me in defensive stance) is shift + 1. The modifier prevents me from accidentally wasting it due to long cooldown, but I can access it very quickly. alt-1 is Zerker rage, to break fear. Alt-Z is my pvp trinket, this may not seem that ergonomic, but with ring finger on Z, thumb on Alt I hit it very fast.

aR is a modified key, but I use rend quite frequently. G is unmodified, but requires a larger stretch, and Stoneform is fairly situational.


This is not a perfect setup, and I'm still re-organizing it for wotlk, but it's how I do it.



I hope that helps :>


-Tris

[fiere redfern]

If that set-up works for you, why would you link a screenshot where you're dead?   

[Nixphire]

Pretty good stuff I found here
http://www.pvptutorial.com/uitutorial/keybinding