Clickers Anonymous

Posted the following comment in response to a self proclaimed clicker and thought it warranted its own post. The clicker, dare I say keyboard turner (ooh harsh, we've all been called worse), was a bear even! Hard to imagine anyone could click anything with the ample posterior of a bear obscuring the screen, but practice makes perfect.

"From one reformed clicker to another. Bind as much around WASD as you can reach to action bar slots (even if you still continue to click it you will see the key binding on the icon and it will sink in eventually). Populate your action bars so that your most use abilities are on the easiest to reach keys. Infrequently used abilities go on the harder to reach ones.

Over time (a few minutes really to start seeing results) the benefits are high mobility with little to no sacrifice of access to abilities and much faster response times on using the ability you want when you want. Another perk is you aren't screwed when you lose the mouse cursor in the heat of battle. Longer term you start developing a muscle memory which enforces the aforementioned benefits and in turn helps with additional classes/specs. For example you'd probably stick your druid's Bash in the same spot as your paladin's hammer of justice. So if anything I noticed that it has improved my cross class/spec play style rather than confuse me.

Some abilities have a very tight correlation with abilities in other classes, other are more open to personal interpretation. Basically, you just match abilities based on what you think when you use them. Things like I want to keep that guy from chasing me, I don't want to die or I am out of mana and need more. Some are just oddballs and you sneak them in where you like.

Core abilities in your "rotation" (we use the word but does anyone still have one?), charges and interrupts will be the first things that become second nature. I've only recently begun getting better at some secondary abilities. For example I have B and V bound to a couple slots on my right side bars and on my hunter those are aspect of the dragonhawk and aspect of the viper. Getting away from clicking those was so very liberating and I found I wasn't forgetting I was in viper as much.

In the end I am still a clicker I just click with keyboard buttons instead of the mouse. There isn't much difference though since I still see the ability I want to use on the screen and then "click" it, it is a very visual process unlike someone who would hide the default UI and memorize key bindings."