Sausaletus Rex
Apr 25, 2005, 01:16 PM
As most of you know, you can customize the GUI and key commands for Guild Wars in a few easy steps (for those of you who don't know, you can customize things through the customize option in your menu and change your shortcuts through the options menu.) and that gives each of us an incredible ability to organize the critical information being displayed to us for the best effect. The interface is how we interact with the game and using it effectively can give you a significant advantage. Laying things out well and getting an input scheme that's comfortable means that you'll be better able to manage the information going to and from the game. The question, though, is just what's the best way to do so?
So, I'm curious as to what sort of customizations people use. Do you change your setup depending on where you are? Or d you have a favorite setup that you change to as soon as you can?
Personally, I've been fiddling with things to figure out a good way of going about things. There are a few things I always like to do.
First, I want to centralize all my information so that I don't have to keep glancing around for important things. In PvE, I like to set my XP bar right next to my health and energy, in PvP I don't care about it so I don't. Those I usually set to the left hand side of the screen and make a bit larger to ease clicking on them rapidly. I'm left-handed and I use an inverted mouse scheme (ie I click with my left hand) so when I'm using a mouse it tends to gravitate back to the left side of the screen meaning I have further to move to click. Then, I put the enchantments/hexes/conditions box next to the party health bars so that they're a lot easier to see. Since I tend to play a healer a lot that makes it a snap to see if I've got something nasty on my character as I'm trying to keep my party alive but it's also a lot more central to the screen and lets me see them easier. I usually shift those down a bit and move the mini-map up to the right hand corner of the screen and set the chat box opposit it along the top of the screen too. I do that because, visually, it's a lot easier to notice things below your line of vision than it is above them. By setting those on the top while looking at them I'm getting a glimpse at the field of play and everything else at the same time but they're also not crucial and can be cut from my field of view when I don't need them. Finally, I move the target health and skill display to somewhere near the mini-map just above the party health, as well, letting me get a view of what's going on all at once. The basic idea is to organize things by keeping the things I use a lot close together, especially if their function is related and to leave a nice large view of things in the middle of my screen so I can watch a battle as it unfold. I also tend to zoom out as far as possible to get as much perspective on things as I can.
As for customizing my hotkeys, I use the WASD movement scheme for the most part so I like to set my commands up in a ring around my movement keys, especially my skills. I leave the first 4~5 skill hotkeys mapped to the numbers but I shift the rest to, say the T,G, and B keys so I can reach them easily as I move. That means I have to reassign some other hotkeys like opening up the guild tab but that's not a big deal compared to being able to easily reach my skill buttons. As I said, I like to play a healer, so I map the party selection function (normally these don't have a hotkey) to my numpad. I'm used to using a phone so I map the first party member to the first key on the pad, '7', the second to '8', the fourth to '4', the eighth to '2' and so on, letting me swap back and forth easily. I use numpad '3' for the "go back to previous target" command and '0' for self-target. As it's a bit of a pain to switch that all around, I tend to keep that layout even when I'm not a healer so I map a lot of the targeting functions to keys around the numpad, too.
Again, the goal is to keep similar functions closer together to make them easier to use. It's something that works for me and might not necessarily work for you, but it's the sort of thinking and planning you'll need to do to carve that little edge out of your interface. That's me, anyway, what about you?
So, I'm curious as to what sort of customizations people use. Do you change your setup depending on where you are? Or d you have a favorite setup that you change to as soon as you can?
Personally, I've been fiddling with things to figure out a good way of going about things. There are a few things I always like to do.
First, I want to centralize all my information so that I don't have to keep glancing around for important things. In PvE, I like to set my XP bar right next to my health and energy, in PvP I don't care about it so I don't. Those I usually set to the left hand side of the screen and make a bit larger to ease clicking on them rapidly. I'm left-handed and I use an inverted mouse scheme (ie I click with my left hand) so when I'm using a mouse it tends to gravitate back to the left side of the screen meaning I have further to move to click. Then, I put the enchantments/hexes/conditions box next to the party health bars so that they're a lot easier to see. Since I tend to play a healer a lot that makes it a snap to see if I've got something nasty on my character as I'm trying to keep my party alive but it's also a lot more central to the screen and lets me see them easier. I usually shift those down a bit and move the mini-map up to the right hand corner of the screen and set the chat box opposit it along the top of the screen too. I do that because, visually, it's a lot easier to notice things below your line of vision than it is above them. By setting those on the top while looking at them I'm getting a glimpse at the field of play and everything else at the same time but they're also not crucial and can be cut from my field of view when I don't need them. Finally, I move the target health and skill display to somewhere near the mini-map just above the party health, as well, letting me get a view of what's going on all at once. The basic idea is to organize things by keeping the things I use a lot close together, especially if their function is related and to leave a nice large view of things in the middle of my screen so I can watch a battle as it unfold. I also tend to zoom out as far as possible to get as much perspective on things as I can.
As for customizing my hotkeys, I use the WASD movement scheme for the most part so I like to set my commands up in a ring around my movement keys, especially my skills. I leave the first 4~5 skill hotkeys mapped to the numbers but I shift the rest to, say the T,G, and B keys so I can reach them easily as I move. That means I have to reassign some other hotkeys like opening up the guild tab but that's not a big deal compared to being able to easily reach my skill buttons. As I said, I like to play a healer, so I map the party selection function (normally these don't have a hotkey) to my numpad. I'm used to using a phone so I map the first party member to the first key on the pad, '7', the second to '8', the fourth to '4', the eighth to '2' and so on, letting me swap back and forth easily. I use numpad '3' for the "go back to previous target" command and '0' for self-target. As it's a bit of a pain to switch that all around, I tend to keep that layout even when I'm not a healer so I map a lot of the targeting functions to keys around the numpad, too.
Again, the goal is to keep similar functions closer together to make them easier to use. It's something that works for me and might not necessarily work for you, but it's the sort of thinking and planning you'll need to do to carve that little edge out of your interface. That's me, anyway, what about you?