CHAPTER 1: BEST KEYBINDS

THE ONLY KEYBINDING GUIDE YOU NEED FOR TWW!

We all remember logging into WoW for the very first time. You had one ability, your auto attack for whatever reason, some food, and these absolutely atrocious default binds.

Fast forward, what's changed in 20 years? Well, we may have a new ability, no longer have our auto attack and for some reason have lost our food, but you're still met with the exact same awful binds.

Now hopefully none of you watching this are still using these, meaning at some point in all our journeys we all went through the same process of picking and assigning new binds. But what if I told you, those very binds could be holding you back from reaching your true potential in arena?

So if you're ready to make a change then log into the game and park yourself next to a target dummy as we're about to walk you through exactly how to set up and optimize your key binds like a rank 1 player.

MOVEMENT KEYS AND CAMERA CONTROL

First though, before we even begin binding our abilities, there are some very important settings you need to change, and it's all to do with one thing, movement. When you load up World of Warcraft, like most games, your movement keys are set to WASD.

While this is fine, there's one very big issue here. A and D are, by default, set to turn left and turn right.

Many of you will probably have heard the phrase, keyboard turning, at some point. Well, this is where it comes from, and while there's obviously a lot of variation between binds, you'll never find any top player keyboard turning.

A lot of players opt for just straight up swapping A and D from turn to strafe to keep the standard WASD movement, while others just stick with QWE instead and rebind A and D for abilities. There's definitely a valid argument that WQE is slightly more optimal, as it gives you somewhat easier access to the number keys.

But honestly, it doesn't really matter. Just use whatever is more comfortable, or whatever you're used to here.

Now, as for why strafing is so important, it's simple. It gives you greater control and freedom in how you move your character.

Especially in situations where you need to utilize your mouse, such as killing a totem, for instance. As if your keyboard turning in the same direction, the second you let go of your right click, well, yeah.

But, to build on this further, if you've watched any WoW content, you'll quickly notice that good players tend to jump all the time. Sometimes this is just by habit, other times it's just ADHD.

But more often than not, there's actually a really good reason for this. And it's all about the keyboard.

And it's all still to do with movement. You see, when you jump in the direction that you're currently strafing, you carry the momentum for around the length of a GCD.

Freeing you to take your fingers off your movement keys to use any instant cast abilities of your choice. To best show you what we mean by this, say you're a mage that moves with WASD, and has Cone of Cold bound to R.

You can actually follow along with this at home. Take your left hand and rest it on WASD.

Pretend you're strafing to the right by holding D in order to kite in that direction. Now, try to press R.

In order to do it comfortably, you're habitual. You're usually going to remove your index finger, the same finger you're using to strafe.

In turn, pausing your movement slightly. Now compare this to if you use space bar to carry your movement instead.

Midair, I'm able to move my index finger up to R, hit the bind, and then move it back down to D without any lapse in movement. This is why jumping is so good.

All right, so you've set up your strafe keys and now your movement is smoother than ever. The final step before we get into binds is to make sure you have the right camera settings.

As you're probably aware, by holding in left click, you're able to look at the screen. You're able to look around with your camera without having to change the way your character is facing.

Now, hopefully you don't need me to tell you why this is important. The issue here, though, is that by default, if you're moving, your camera will always snap back, giving you only a brief amount of time to see anything behind or to the side of you.

In order to fix this, hit escape, go into your options and type camera in the search bar. By default, like we mentioned, you'll see the camera is set to only while moving.

You'll want to swap this to never. This then just allows you to still rotate your camera and look around freely.

Even while moving.

SETTING UP YOUR BARS

Anyway, now that we have movement covered and the default settings optimized, there's one more step before we can start keybinding, setting up your bars.

Now with most classes having a spell book that can only be compared to the menu at the cheesecake factory, we don't just want to drag everything onto your bars willy nilly and immediately start binding things. The best advice we could ever give you here is to start by grouping your abilities in a way that makes sense.

This not only simplifies the process of binding them, but also allows you to see what your cooldowns are at any given time in an instant.

But before we start, now is also a great time to ensure you have your bars, unit frames and the rest of your addons set up in a way that enables you to easily see all the relevant information.

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Sorting and grouping your abilities on your bars like this isn't only useful for improving your awareness on your main, in fact it's this exact method that the majority of top players use. In order to seamlessly swap and perform well on multiple alts, so it's proven to work.

In order to do this we're going to want to separate our action bars into the following categories, rotational abilities, offensive cooldowns, crowd control, defensives, and mobility. So let's take a shadow priest as an example here.

Frequently used damage abilities like vampiric touch, mind blast, devouring plague, and mind flay can be grouped for rotational abilities. Offensive cooldowns like void eruption, shadow fiend, and void torrent can be grouped.

Then defensive cooldowns like dispersion, and evasion can be grouped. Then defensive cooldowns like evasion and evasion can be grouped.

In addition you can also instantly chest against vampirics with vampirics, when they rage line up might which can be helpful because elderly agents can explode and can't damage your NP as a result of this. Here we just pick off the process for CP and mobility.

Another very common way to build on this is to change icons that don't have cooldowns. For example as a shadow priest you never need to check if vampiric touch is available since it has no cooldown.

So you can create a macro with slash cast vampiric touch, but use the mind blast icon with show tooltip mind blast.

Then your play will center around this top 60%ommes, which is the highest you could go and remove them so as all the number of vilains will follow up- traded heroes and people you could head to your base and you can then choose another route. it makes it much easier to see when the abilities you care about are ready.

If you've ever noticed top players having the same ability on their bar multiple times, this is the reason why.

KEYBINDS TIER LIST

So with our abilities wrapped into neat little categorized packages on our action bars, it's time to start adding some keybinds. Now, many of you may have heard experienced players say don't copy my binds, find what works best for you, and it's mostly true.

Copying the best player's exact keybinds will likely end up terribly for you since our hands, keyboards, and setups are all very different. Instead, the first thing we'll need to do is figure out what actually constitutes a good keybind.

In order to do this, we've broken down the most easily accessible keys and ranked them for you so you can decide for yourself which binds you prefer. Don't worry too much though as in our next step, we'll go more in depth into specific ability assignments.

Starting with our S tier binds. Here, we've got the numbered keys 1 through 4, and either Q, E, or A, D depending on your strafe binds, R, F, C, and then finally mouse button 4 and 5.

These are the two side buttons on a standard mouse. Our reasoning for this is simple, it's all about how quickly and comfortably you can press these keybinds while maintaining full control of your keybinds.

So, let's get started. Take my personal favorite keybind, R, as an example.

Whether you're strafing left or moving forward, it's one of the most accessible and comfortable keys to spam. Then, even if you're strafing right, you can still comfortably hit it by using the jump technique we covered earlier.

Moving on to the A tier, we have 5, T, G, and V. These make the A tier since they are all still easily accessible with your hands being anchored to your movement keys, but just require slightly more stretching.

Next, as we drop down into our B tier, we've got two binds, Z and X, that although are both still right-handed, they're still comfortable to use. So, let's get started.

Let's get started. Let's get started.

Let's get started. Let's get started.

Let's get started. Let's get started.

Let's get started. Let's get started.

And there you have it. Here's a handy recap of our tier list if you want it for later.

ASSIGNING BINDS

Now though, it's time to start allocating these binds to the correct abilities. One of the most common mistakes players make when assigning keybinds is assigning their best binds to abilities without considering how often they actually use them.

Take a defensive like void shift for example. For all three pre-specs this is arguably one of their most important abilities, period.

It's off the global cooldown and needs to be able to be pressed on a whim without any delay. Surely it deserves a good bind, right?

Maybe even something like three? Well great, but now you've just assigned one of your best and most comfortable keybinds to an ability you use once every arena game.

No, instead we want to give our best binds to not necessarily the most important abilities but the ones we press the most. Knowing that let me walk you through my logic.

From my understanding of marksmanship hunter I know that although I still use aimed shot frequently in most cases it's going to be at a time when I'm stationary. For me personally because of this I'd prefer to put it on one as that's the S tier bind I like the least when having to press it on the move.

Kill shot is something that's really important to me. I know it's used when I get a proc or when the target is low but as it's instant will often be used while on the move so I'm going to put it on a slightly more comfortable bind for me when moving, with that being two.

Arcane shot follows more or less the same logic, you press it more often than kill shot and again while on the move I'm going to assign it to three.

Rapid fire on the other hand I know is my number one priority and something I'll get constant resets of, in my eyes making it more or less my main ability, which I'd compare to things like mutilate, mortal strike, ice lance, those types of abilities.

So for that reason I'm going to put it on R, leaving just steady shot which I'll then put on four. Following the same logic let's work in some frequently pressed but relatively short cooldowns to the A tier slots, which means the dark ranger ability black arrow can go on T and explosive shot can go on V.

Finally we can put longer damage cooldowns on to B tier binds as we press them far less frequently so I'll go ahead and put true shot on X. With a few of these keybinds now filled out and after practicing and getting a feel for the dummy there's one slight problem.

For me to press true shot which is off the global cooldown and then go immediately into an aimed shot for the optimal burst sequence it just feels well slightly awkward. Try to press X and then one at the same time, see what I mean?

Well the next step to perfecting your keybinds is to always consider what spells do I often need to use together and does my keybind layout make it easy to do. While it's no question that true shot doesn't deserve an S tier bind you can't assign it to the X key without considering how you sequence it.

MODIFIER KEYS

So, how do we solve this problem? Easy.

We use what's called a modifier. Modifier keys are a special key on the keyboard that will temporarily modify the normal action of another key when pressed together, also known as shift, control, and alt.

With shift being the best of the three by a long shot due to its optimal position for your otherwise inactive pinky finger to utilize. When thinking about modifiers, at face value they seem like an easy way to get as many spells into the S tier keys as possible.

While partly true, you can easily go wrong when following this logic. So listen up, as there's three rules you want to follow here.

Rule one, consider spell sequencing. If we think about our true shot problem from just a second ago, hitting x followed by one for aimed shot felt too clunky in practice.

So instead, why don't we assign true shot to either shift or control one. Now try to do that instead.

Hit shift one, then immediately let go of shift and hit the same key. Easy, right?

The second rule to follow is slightly bittersweet as it will wipe out a lot of your available modifier slots. Rule number two, use modifiers for focus.

Focus binds of the same spell. To play arena optimally, you're going to need either focus or arena one two three binds for important crowd control abilities.

So for my hunter, if I want to have scatter shot bound to G, it would make sense to then have focus scatter shot set to shift G. Now we understand rules one and two, let's put them together to illustrate the reason why these rules are important.

For the sake of an example, say you're a rogue with kick bound to three. Naturally, per our rules, that means focus kick should be shift three.

But imagine focus step was mouse button four. These are two off global abilities that are frequently sequenced at the same time in order to produce a rogue special move, the shadow step kick.

But with my binds, if I try doing this, I'm going to have to hit mouse button four and then press shift and hit three all at the exact same time. However quick I do it, there's always going to be some delay.

But if I just simply change my focus shadow step bind to instead be shift mouse button four, well, now I can do this entire sequence without letting go of my modifier, making it much easier to execute. Last up, we have rule number three.

Keep important defensives open. This is a rule that's very important to keep in mind when you're trying to get rid of a modifier.

This rule is very straightforward. Dying without using a cooldown sucks.

But imagine you drop dangerously low and are in a little bit of a panic, such as life. But ask yourself, what are you going to hit faster, shift R or just R?

I know what one I'd hit faster. Again though, factor in our previous two rules, mainly in this case your PVP trinket or gladiator's medallion.

If we have turtle on T, we will want our trinket to not include a modifier either, as just like with harpoon and trap, we'll want it to be easy to sequence them together. Subtitles by the Amara.org community

OVERLOOKED BINDS

Alright guys, by now you're likely on track to create a solid set of binds with what we've taught thus far. But before we get to arguably the most important step of this guide, there are just a couple hidden gems worth mentioning.

These are binds that are not used by the masses simply because they are not super obvious, but for those that are aware of them, they unlock some excellent binds that are incredibly easy to press. Let's start with our first hidden OP bind, Tab.

Most players use tab for switching targets, as that's the default setting. While it works, especially for melee, it's more limiting compared to manually binding your targeting, which we'll cover next.

But if tab targeting is something you rarely do, consider integrating tab into your bindings instead. Next is Tilda.

If you look at your keyboard, Tilda is the button to the left of 1. As a whole, Tilda is just a key that most people neglect entirely, as it doesn't really have a purpose for most people.

However, when it comes to binds, Tilda is honestly just as good as 1, making it an S-tier bind. Then we've got the F keys.

To be real with you, this isn't a secret, especially for the older generation. Shout out to those of you that played Diablo 2.

But even today, a lot of players still utilize their F keys, and if you can get comfortable with them and have a smaller keyboard, F1 to F4 can be just as effective as using your number keys. Something also often neglected is your mouse wheel.

Mouse wheel up, mouse wheel down, and then clicking your mouse wheel in. Combine these with modifiers and alone can open up the potential for up to 9 extra binds.

And the last hidden keybinds are actually a set of binds that almost no one realizes they can use. Movement keys and spacebar with modifiers.

So that's Q, W, E, or W, A, D and spacebar combined with either shift, alt, or control. These are personally my least favorite as they will hinder your ability to jump or move, making them not ideal for commonly utilized abilities.

But for longer cooldowns or even things like buffs, your mount, water, or anything like that, they're good options. Phew, okay that was a lot.

But when it comes to setting up your binds, it's definitely worth investing the time.

TARGETING BINDS

We've certainly come a long way, but we've left the most important step for last, figuring out the best targeting keybinds possible.

Now listen, targeting binds are something some people may classify as optional, and granted yes, many players do fine without them, but I'm going to be real with you for a moment, and this is coming from somebody who played the majority of my WoW career without them.

If you don't use targeting binds, you are missing out. If you're new to WoW, great, start as you mean to go on.

Otherwise, if you're somebody like me who hates change and was set in my ways, this is your sign to take the leap. You will not regret it.

Anyway, there are multiple frames you can target with binds, including Arena 1-2-3, Focus 1-2-3, and Target Party Member 1-2 and Self. This seems like a lot, but the ones you prioritize depend on your role.

As any damage dealer, you should prioritize binding Focus Arena 1-2-3. Being able to quickly change your focus is incredibly important for not only utilizing your focus macros, but also for taking full advantage of your focus frame to gain more information.

As for targeting binds, it's a good idea to start with a focus frame, and then start with a focus arena. If you're going to target Arena 1-2-3, it's still just as important.

Ideally, in a perfect world, you want both, but if you're just going to settle for one, I'd opt for Focus. Clicking nameplates or just tabbing between targets is of course less optimal, but far less detrimental.

As a healer, you should instead prioritize making binds to Target Party 1-2 and yourself. You can then pair this up with Focus Arena 1-2-3 if you have the binds to do so.

And as for what binds to use for these, we've yet to mention them, but MMO mouses here are like a cheat code. Arena, like we know, is 3 targets, and you can use them to target a target.

And most of these mice have 3 buttons in a row, but they're obviously by no means required. The main piece of advice here though is to pick 3 binds in a row, as it's just a lot more intuitive.

Common options are binds like Shift Control or Alt-1-2-3, F1-F2 and F3, again you can use modifiers if you want, and then Z-X-C. Then something a lot of top healers take advantage of is their mouse wheel.

You can do mouse wheel up for Party 1, mouse wheel down for Party 2, and then click your mouse in to target yourself. But of course, you could use these for enemy and focus targeting as well.

Anyway, while targeting binds may seem intimidating at first, they're undoubtedly one of the best ways to make your gameplay faster and more reliable.

VIOLENCE, SPEED, MOMENTUM: WHY PROS JUMP

In many games, jumping is an essential part of movement. From 8-bit platformers to modern day fighting games, jumping has a key role in how games are actually played.

WoW is no different, and you've probably noticed that rank 1 players jump all the time. But why?

As it turns out, there are a few reasons, and they might come as a surprise. So stay tuned as we show you the advantages to jumping in WoW PvP.

Let's start with the first reason, violence. Maybe that's a bit dramatic, but let's explain.

Obviously in arena you need to press a lot of globals, and chances are you do this with your left hand using one of these fingers. But that creates one huge problem, you are probably using the same fingers to move with your W key.

This means that you can't move forward with your main movement keybind while also using the same finger to use an ability. Imagine trying to press W and 1 at the same time, it really wouldn't work, unless you were playing with a claw grip like venruki, but let's not go there.

Jumping can allow you to move in any direction while also being able to move. So you can use a global.

While jumping, you carry over your current momentum, meaning you can continue moving in any direction without needing to hold down movement keybinds. This temporarily frees up your fingers to use other globals during that short moment where you're in the air.

This means you can press more damage globals, and inflict more violence on your enemies. Or I guess reverse the violence by pressing healing globals instead.

You might not think this is a big deal, but consider how often you're pressing movement keys during arena. Chances are you are moving a lot, especially as a melee DPS.

By jumping, you can do two actions at the same time, which would otherwise be impossible, or at least really difficult for human hands. So if you want to make sure you're maximizing your global cooldowns while moving, jumping is one way to do that.

Next up, we have speed, and how jumping makes it even better. Most classes have at least one movement speed increase.

Take sprint for example. This gives you a static boost to your mobility during a fixed duration.

Jumping during movement speed increases allows you to carry that momentum forward in the air. Here for instance, jumping without a movement speed increase would be a good example.

Jumping without movement speed increases would be a good example. Swap is a unique owling move that causes our rogue to fall to her death.

But with sprint up, the same jump can be easily made. You might already know this by jumping around in game, probably in battlegrounds, or simply farming those hidden chests in Xerath Mortis.

Many arena maps have a Z-Axis, meaning jumping from one tier to another can be bolstered with speed. Consider this iconic moment from hydra 7 where he makes this jump on blade's edge arena.

This would've only been possible while jumping, and a movement speed increase would've made him go even further. One quick note though, if you get hit with a movement debuff in the middle of your jump, it will slow your trajectory mid-air.

So just to wrap everything together, jumping gives you different forms of momentum in Arena. For one, it allows you to use more globals since it frees up one of your fingers to actually press abilities while moving.

And if you really don't like jumping for whatever reason, there is one workaround to this issue. If you want to keep your momentum while pressing globals, you can do that by simply holding down your right and left mouse buttons and move with your mouse alone.

Or you can even set a keybind to auto-run, allowing you to keep pumping while still moving forward. But if you do like jumping, it goes tandem with speed increases and very specific movement options on many Arena maps, and sometimes it can create some sick outplays.

And if we're being perfectly honest, jumping is actually just a fun thing to do, which can help you stay entertained when fighting 10-minute games against outlaw rogues. But we want to know what you think.

Is jumping part of your gameplay? What are the reasons?

Do you have for pressing your spacebar? Let us know in the comments below.

Alright guys, that about wraps it up for this one. We hope you learned something today.

As always, thanks for watching. See you soon.

MASTER DAMAGE WHILE KITING WITH ONE SIMPLE TRICK!

What was the first advanced skill you learned in WoW? For me it was kiting, and I learned to do this as a 14 year old noob.

Turns out what I learned was actually way more important than I knew at the time, and we're going to show you why in the next 60 seconds. When we made our video about why pros jump, we got some comments claiming this might be useless for ranged EPS.

Well, that's just wrong. The same reason you should jump as a melee can be applied to ranged.

By jumping while moving, you carry your momentum with you. This is really the only way you can truly move in a straight line while still pressing instant cast on your enemy, and this doesn't really lose you any globals since your time in the air is around the same as the GCD.

This works out well for a class like Shaman since Windshear has a short range and a positional requirement.

If you're running away from a fight but need to quickly interrupt a cast, you can jump midair, flick towards your enemy, and land the interrupt before hitting the ground, keeping your momentum in the same direction. In fact, any instant cast spell with a positional requirement can take advantage of this tech.