Kwana’s guide to using a WoW MMO Gaming Mouse
Kwana is one of three professional World of Warcraft players, currently playing for the Asian SK Gaming WoW.PvP team.
Back at the Extreme Masters Global Finals in Hannover earlier this year, he got handed a sample of the World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse and has used since then, so we figured that we’d ask him to let us in on how he uses the mouse. Hopefully this will help or inspire you guys when setting up. :)
Enough with the talking - here is SK.Kwana’s guide to using the WoW MMO Gaming Mouse:
Hi, this is Kwana from the Asian PvP team in SK Gaming.
I think more than a few people are curious about how to use the new WoW mouse which came out in February, so I’d like to introduce how I’m controlling it.
First of all there are 15 buttons on the mouse: 3 wheel buttons, 4 middle buttons, 2 single buttons and 4 buttons formed as a D-pad positioned on the left side as well as finally 2 buttons on the right side. Generally speaking, your average mouse only has 3 wheel buttons but as you can see, in this case the mouse has an additional 12 buttons.
I do feel limited to only using the left side of the hotkeys because I have to assign a lot of options using hotkeys. I should also add, that in case of playing the mage, I sometimes face the situation of putting additional buff spells on top of the essential skills. In this case, I find it difficult to change buttons only using the left finger when refilling my buffs.
Therefore, I can minimize the difficulty that lies in changing buttons when using a right-handed mouse, and assign the important attacking skills using shortcut keys on the keyboard with my left hand.
This is an overview of how I have programmed the buttons on my mouse:
Middle buttons:
Left side buttons:
Right side buttons (not used in Arena PvP):
Mouse wheel section:
Picture 1.
Picture 2.
First of all, let’s focus on the setup of the mouse wheel. This was specified in order to target focus immediately and the macro was determined by selecting ‘target friend(f2, f3, f4)’ with the left hand, turning down the wheel with the right hand to release curse quickly after focus target. Afterwards I programmed 4 buttons on the left side to focus on the secondary weapon and magic stave to be able to change these without any trouble.
As for Arena, PvPs against groups, including mages, require a penetration of 120. Therefore, in PvPs vs. mages, penetration gear (off-hand book+wand) is used, while in PvPs vs. non-mages, top-tier gear is used. Both settings are assigned to two different macros, with a total of four buttons being used. The gear is changed in accordance to the class composition of the opponents, and since the switch is made with the side buttons and without opening the inventory, it is extremely convenient. The equipment swapping is also very useful in mage vs. mage (1:1) situations.
The two other buttons on the left side are each assigned to the mage buffs: Frost Armor and Mage Armor. The reason for this is because Mage Armor is normally used, but when the mage is being targeted by several melee opponents, it is easier to switch to Frost Armor. As a result, my left hand can be used to activate attack macros on the keyboard, while the right hand is used to push mouse buttons to switch armor.
The left button in the middle is defined as slow fall. The most convenient shortcut key was selected to add buffs, and the upper button on the right side can be valuably used to target nearest Enemy immediately.
The big button in the middle, is currently programmed to ‘Select Target’ to target self easily.
And finally, the button at the bottom is not that active for me, but it can be used to see mini map except in PvP.
/Casper
August 4th, 2009 16:27
Whats going with this mouse ? Im using it 5 months and now.. now its a problem, right button is white, all theat brass cover just disapeared, now mouse looks terrible. Pity that mouse for such high price is so crappy made. I went to shop to ask about warranty and I heard that its my fault cus I used it too much. WTF should I use this mouse 1 hour per day or what ? So for players how play 3+ hours per day this mouse is crap. Sorry to say this. Can not add pictures of my mouse, so can not show you how it looks. Pity that even steelseries as company want to do nothing about this.
August 4th, 2009 16:35
Has there been any change in regards to the Mac drivers? I remember playing with the mouse at last year’s BlizzCon and having them say that drivers would be out soon after the retail launch.
Now that it’s been almost a year, do they exist?
August 4th, 2009 19:24
#1 Sorry to hear that you’ve had a bad experience- nevertheless you seem to have a faulty unit, so make sure to go through our official RMA process over at http://www.steelseries.com/int/about/contact_us/support/contact_support.
#2 We are still working on the Mac drivers, but make sure to check out ControllerMate which is a good alternative until we have a Mac solution ready. Link: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/utilities/controllermate.html
August 4th, 2009 21:20
Thank you Casper for your fast answer, I wrote request on support page, and now Im waiting for response. I will tell you how it finished. (I hope good for me cus this mouse with white stains looks terrible :P )
August 5th, 2009 08:22
#4 I could imagine :P
August 5th, 2009 23:52
When holding down the right mouse button to change direction, if I use the scroll wheal (which I use to map a lot of my commonly used abilities to), It will often break my holding down of the right click, and I will interrupt my rotational movement.
This basically makes it impossible to map anything to scroll up or scroll down, as I would have to constantly re-click the right mouse to resume my rotational control. Has anyone had this issue?
August 7th, 2009 15:52
I find it funny how I guy who can’t speak English wrote this review!
August 11th, 2009 11:22
#7 True, Kwana does not speak or write English fluently.
- but luckily he has a great team manager who helped us translate his guide, and additionally we are working with a great Korean distributor who helped us correct the final grammar. :)
August 11th, 2009 14:41
didn’t know that Hiro Nakamura plays WoW :D
August 19th, 2009 15:01
I purchased this mouse 3 days ago and i have had nothing but problems. I have to re-install the drivers everytime i want to use the WOW buttons (normal mouse functions work). I am running Windows Vista 32bit, is there anyone out there that might know a fix?
August 19th, 2009 19:31
I was very excited about this mouse when it first came out until I read all the horrible reviews. From the hockey interface to the poor build quality this mouse has been a curse to anyone that purchased it. My local gamestop told me NOT to buy it that is how bad it is. It looks like all the problems have now been solved … by another company
http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-mice/razer-naga
Simple button arrangement, great build quality, user interface based on dominoes mod which is already a known solid addon.
Logitech probably isn’t too far behind with their version.
September 1st, 2009 15:50
Yea, I bought this mouse last month. I can say that I’m really regret for buying this mouse, despite the looking I thought that this mouse works greatly and specially for WoW but I guess not, I can’t even asign one of my easiest skill such as:- “mind freeze” “blood tap” and all those stuff. Cause I’m using bartender but not the original WoW action buttons and it just doesn’t work at ALL!! I’m not using any of the extra buttons after all. Ughh, I guess Razer Naga is even better.
February 10th, 2010 12:35
I had problems getting the mouse to work with other games but a minor solution i did find. If u set your buttons in mouse config program to ACTION BUTTONS 1-10. u can change the ingame keybinding to 1-10 also and get a match. In Bad company 2 beta u can also use minimap as it is.
July 22nd, 2010 18:08
Interesting blog you’ve here, definitely a single being bookmarked. I believe your variety of writing and how you express issues is intriguing and gets me wanting to read a lot more and more! Thanks again from love from the USA.
August 18th, 2010 08:08
You have got your stage through very much much better than I at any time could, thank you!