It's not the size... ok well maybe it is.

This is for you Xtian!That baby sure is one big fugghernumper of an axe eh?

In other weaponry news, yes you (that's the general you) may buy me one of these for my birthday/Christmas/just because I'm awesome: Frostmourne!

Yes I'm a girl, perhaps that's not a very girly present, but I dare you to say that to my face if I'm weilding that puppy!

I promised myself I would never blog about RL

And I really am determined to avoid it. Although I confess I just love reading TJ's blog about the truly strange and amusing (perhaps more to us than her) things that seem to occur to her on an almost daily basis.

That said, I did the LJ thing a few years back and before that kept written journals for a long time. And frankly nothing incredibly interesting really happens in my life.

But I want to apologise for my lack of posts and that means a reference to me the player behind the boingy eared night elf.

So I say sorry to the 2 or 3 of you who read this blog but RL has been a little crazy of late with work getting busier, a mother in hospital (she'll be fine) a fuller social calendar than usual (it's festival season here and there is theatre and live music to be seen!)and of course my Warcraft with raiding, arena, PVP and alt levelling taking up my time.

I have a plethora of different screenshots and a list of blog topics in hand and hope to get back to some more regular posting soon.

Hotkeys or Clickity?

If you've been following along up until now you may have noticed references in my posts to key bindings and what not. Basically I am a hot key fiend. I like to have as much as possible bound to my keyboard. It is for this reason that I have the lovely G15 gaming keyboard.

It's interesting to me that Emelin who has been playing FPS style games since forever has a completely different playstyle from me. He ascribes to the 'clicker' school.

Clickers
Move around using the the WASD keys - plus strafing using Q & E. Points and clicks to activate spells etc.

Butan-stabbers
Move around using the mouse and bind keys to use different abilities and macros.

Since I'm firmly in the butan stabbing camp I'll give you my reasoning for why I prefer this style

1. Quick reaction times.
   I don't have to move my cursor to the point I want to click except for some out of combat things that I haven't bothered to hot key - like activating profession windows and the like. I can pretty much touchtype so I don't need to look at my keyboard while playing and keep 'like' items grouped so that I don't need to move my hand around too much while in combat.



2. Cleaner UI
   Because I can bind so many things to hot keys (especially with the G15 swoon) I don't need to have all those buttons appear on my screen. I use the bongos2 mod and set up some actions bars with abilities and etc which I bind keys to and then set the bar to invisible. This is great when you are using several macros as well.



3. Better movement
   When using the mouse to move you also have the ability to use the camera independent of the direction you are facing/moving. For instance I do this in BGs a lot when I'm on defence and scanning my surroundings for possible 'incs'. I also have the button 'v' bound to reverse camera so I can quickly see if X mob/horde toon is still chasing me.

Since I happen to have 3 toons that have reached a reasonable level this works well with the 3 different 'slots' for the 18 extra keys you have per slot with the G15. My slot for Jezrael is completely full with each key bound to an ability or macro. I have more macros key binds I want to set up too! Recently I've decided I want a hotkeyyed macro to turn growl on or off as I have been finding I am doing this quite a bit lately via clicking.

/play Intermission Music

I started this post about a week ago and since then I've been playing my mage a fair bit which has got me thinking.

I'm wondering whether the efficacy of clicking vs hotkeying is also impacted by the class you play. What I have noticed with my mage is that I will move around a lot more - in particular running in and out of melee range to drop arcane explosions and frost novas before returning to range. I've found it more effective to use the WASD keys to move around in this fashion - which therefore means I am using my other hand to trigger the keybound effects. This means I don't have that hand free for utilising the camera via my mouse.

On my druid I have found hotkeying to be fine - and especially good when I am tanking and need to use the camera to keep an eye on other mobs around my big bear butt (yes that is a purposeful reference to BBB one of my favourite feral druid bloggers).

I wonder what thoughts other people have? What's your experience? Do you think I'm smoking crack or just playing it? Teehee. Get it? Warcrack?
...
bah
...