This may be a bit off topic, if so, feel free to delete the post.

While many people around this forum endlessly tweak their UI in-game to try to improve their performance, I feel that good input devices can have an equally significant impact on your game. Over the past few years of playing WoW, I found that the requirements for input devices are quite a bit different for WoW than they are for other genres like FPS; many "gaming" input devices simply aren't well suited to WoW.

What I'd like to see in this thread is what kind of input device setup people are using, as well as how it ties into your Warcraft UI. If you've been through some devices you didn't like, tell us your horror stories. If you've found some devices you couldn't play without, tell us why. If you're feeling imaginative, chalk up your own ideas for how an ideal input device would work -- if there's any place that hardware developers might look when trying to design hardware that caters to WoW players needs, its here, so let's try to get some ideas out there.

I suppose I'll go first, here's what I use for input, and what I like and don't like about the devices:

My Input Devices

Keyboard: Ideazon Fang

I'm one of those people that like to have -everything- bound to a key, I prefer not to even have actionbars shown on my UI. As such, I've endlessly tweaked my keybinds so as to ensure that every button I hit can be reached without having to move my hand away from WASD, and for almost every key I hit, I also have a function bound to Shift+Key, as well as Ctrl+Key. I used a G15 keyboard for most of my WoW career, but ultimately, I yearned to simply have more keys that were easily accessible without moving my fingers far from WASD, so I picked up a Fang, and I love it.

For those of you unfamiliar with what this device looks like:


Every button on the board is programmable -- so even the media keys at the top can be bound to whatever you want (I use these to open interface panes you wouldn't usually hit in combat, but still want handy -- character sheet, raid tab, professions, quest log, etc.).

The thing I like most about the board is the extra keys you have available without any extra reach. On a normal keyboard, I would bind buttons 1-5 (6 was a little too much of a stretch for my comfort), Z, X, C, F, G, R, and T. Moving to the Fang, I still have access to all these keys in their familiar locations, as well as access to an extra button on my thumb, 3 extra buttons with my pinkie, the 6 key, and the 7-8-9-10-11 keys, which are all close enough that I can actually bind them -- the F keys are normally in a somewhat similar location on a normal keyboard, but are too far away to reach for my tastes.

As for things I don't like about the device, the first on my list is that it's ambidextrous. This may be a plus for others, but I'd much rather have a design that's contoured for my left hand. The next is that there's even more room on the device to add extra buttons that wasn't really taken advantage of - I know that the number of buttons was one of the main things I -do- like about the device, but I think all WoW players can agree that the only time you can possibly have too many buttons is when you start making them difficult to distinguish between.

I should also mention that the thing is cheap -- $35 or so, which is a lot cheaper than a $100+ gaming keyboard like the G15 or Razer Tarantula.

Mouse: Logitech MX518



There are two factors which are most important to me in a mouse that I play WoW with: the number of easily accessible buttons, and the precision of the movement tracking. The MX518 comes up somewhere in the middle in both of these categories for me.

Precision tracking is always the most advertised feature in gaming mice like the Logitech G5/G7 and the Razer Copperhead. I played FPS for many years before I started playing WoW, so I'm used to picking up a new mouse every year or so as the tracking precision gets better.

It's disappointing to me, however, that most of the new precision mice are pretty much designed solely with FPS in mind. They feature few if any extra buttons, usually in the form of inconveniently located buttons to adjust the mouse sensitivity -- hardly useful for me to bind to extra spells and abilities. It's a shame, because I really, really like having abilities bound on mouse buttons -- mainly because they're the easiest to hit while kiting someone and/or moving. I'm a shadow priest, and all of my most commonly used abilities are bound to mouse buttons -- Mindblast, Mindflay, SW:P, VT, SW, Psychic Scream, Dispel, and Mana Burn, some of course using shift and control modifieres.

The MX518 has 4 buttons that are easy to reach besides left/right click, plus the button from clicking the mousewheel (which I'm not a fan of using, as I use the mousewheel to tab-target). I would really love to switch to a G5, but even with the new revision that has two thumb buttons again, I would hate to lose two of the mouse buttons that I treasure. The tracking on the MX518 isn't bad, but it's not the best that's out there, either. I'd love to see a mouse with the precision of the G5, but with more buttons easily within reach, perhaps with a layout like Logitech's MX610 -- which has 10 buttons, but garbage for a sensor.

I've got my credit card ready if someone can suggest a mouse or keypad that would be a better solution for WoW -- throw me (and the rest of the EJ community) a bone if you've got a slick setup!

Wow, that's amazing. Like a keyboard editable UI. Wish I'd heard of it before I bought my Nostromo a few months ago. What's the response time like? I've found that the Nostromo can be a bit laggy for my liking.

that truly seems pretty amazing, definetly gonna check out the prices on that one!

I have been tempted on and off to get an Ergodex for a year or two. I have not bothered since they do not support Mac OS X, and I do not feel like snooping USB traffic and writing a driver (which is just me being lazy, since when I bought a an Intel Mac I wrote a driver for my n52, since Belkin had took over a year to release one).

The thing that worries me about Ergodex is that they seem really small and sort of out of their league. They mentioned they were evaluating Mac OS X and Linux drivers years ago, and not a peep. Meanwhile they still have not managed to get their product to be Vista compatible either. Not only that, but occasionally their site has multiday outages, and their links to their current drivers are broken 8-(

They may make a really unique and great product, but I can't help but feel I would get it, fall in love with, become totally dependent on it, wear it out, and then be unable to replace it. Anyone who used a Fingerworks device and had to transition off it knows what I mean...

As for the Nostromo being laggy, it is probably all in Belkin's software. Their drivers really suck (at least the Mac ones do). The Nostromo is literally just a normal USB HID class keyboard device with half the keys disconnected. Plug it in without a driver, and you can literally see it send normal keystrokes. If you use a third party keyboard driver that supports remapping and macros (people seem to like ControllerMate for Mac OS X, no idea if there is something like that for Windows) it may perform better.

I use a Nostromo N52 with ControllerMate, and I've never suffered any lag, so there you go.

My setup: WZSC are bound to the center four keys on the keypad; the D-pad is modifier keys. I don't use the scroll wheel. The thumb key is tab. I'm short by a couple of keys, but if I get off my butt and tailor my macros a little more I can get around that.

I've been thinking about a Fang; it's cheap enough so that I could try it out happily.

My mouse is an old Microsoft five-button trackball. I'd love to find a replacement, since Microsoft doesn't make that model any more, but I haven't been able to find any in a bit of Internet hunting.

This is definitely a valid concern... they are a very small, niche company so it's definitely hard to tell what their longevity is. And I think a lot of their focus has been soaked up by their work on the CH MFP and work on 1.4/Vista support has suffered because of it.

I really should have pointed out the current lack of Vista support in my little post... sorry about that and thanks for pointing it out.

Edit: I should check my own links haha... I knew about the CH MFP but I kept seeing concept pics of it with wheel controls and other junk on it and thought it was a more flight sim customized version of the Ergodex but it looks like it's pretty much the exact same thing.

Belkin Nostromo n52

I really liked my nostromo for wow.

For general keyboarding, I've always been a fan of Mac keyboards. I just go the newest one, and typing on it is...fantastic!

I have a n52. It has one major disadvantage, the keys are hard to press.
It is very good for fast stuff, like melee classes, where you have to move and use more than five skills often.

I found a solution working for myself with G15 to have access to almost 40 keys with my left hand. I did this by mapping the WASD to my mouse buttons. I have a Logitech MX1000 mouse and it has tilt to left and right on it's mouse wheel. I bound 'q' and 'e' to have strafing and the small thumb button is 'w', large is 's'. I don't use 'a' or 'd' as those are imo inferior compared to turning with the mouse.

Using ctrl as a modifier key I can keep my left hand on the G-buttons of the G15, there are 18 as you know, with ctrl 36 in all. I can reach tab and the leftmost button of the highest row of keys (left to number 1). This has been enough keys for me. I use tab-key for jumping and mapped next/previous target to mouse wheel. Zooming is ctrl+mousewheel for me, friendly target is Lshift+mouse wheel. I could get 18 more keys using shift as another modifier but frankly I haven't seen the need for it yet - maybe when we get new spells in Wrath..

Logitech G15 with a Razer Copperhead mouse. I have unusually strong and dextrous pinky fingers, apparently, so I can effectively use the off-side buttons on the Copperhead in my UI.

I still have everything bound on 1 through =, but all my stuff from 6 to = is uncommon stuff, whereas Ctrl/Alt/Shift 1-5 are more common.

My G keys on the g15 are setup as follows: First 6 are window pane toggles. This allows me to unbind keys around the WASD area (namely C) for use elsewhere. G7-12 are bound to various commands through the use of binding combinations of Alt/Ctrl/Shift and F7-F12.

G13-18 all change my UI completely. i mean like, completely. They are bound to keyboard macros on the G15 console which hit a series of keypresses using combinations of Alt/Ctrl/Shift + Num Pad buttons, and run macros to change over my profile in most of my addons. Being able to switch from a melee DPS ui to a tank UI to a healer UI to a PVP healer UI to a barebones UI really helps sometimes. Mostly for convenience.