Last Epoch

Good Morning Friends! If you have read my blog for any length of time you will understand that I truly and deeply love Diablo-style Action Roleplaying Games, or ARPGs as the genre tends to be collectively referred to. Even a good deal of my current love of Guild Wars 2 is rooted in the fact that for the most part, it owes way more lineage to Diablo than it does World of Warcraft. The only problem with all of this is that the older I have gotten, the less forgiving the deeply repetitive process of clicking to move and attack has become on my hands. At this point, I am on the late side of 40 sliding over forward towards 50, and after decades of heavy computer usage, I just can’t handle spamming the mouse button in quite the same way that I used to. For many, this has meant a shift to controller gaming for their ARPG fix which tends to be considerably more forgiving. However for me… I still deeply prefer the mouse and keyboard experience and have landed on a control scheme that works for me. I thought this morning I would share some of this wisdom for anyone looking for a way to play these games without killing your hands in the process.

Generally speaking, the ARPG is a genre that allows for quite a bit of customization of your keybinds. So far I have figured out a way to configure pretty much every game I have played in this manner. I can’t take full credit for this because my good friend Ace set me on this path some years back, but I have adapted their processes and made them my own over the course of adapting them to several different games. Essentially to understand this process you need to understand two common concepts within ARPGs.

• Force Move – This keybind will be called different things in different games, for example in Last Epoch that I have been playing most recently it is just called “Move”. Conceptually what this does is start your character moving to a point defined by where your mouse cursor is sitting on the screen. So if you drag your mouse all the way to the other side of the screen and tap force move, your character will path in a straight line to your cursor.
• Force Attack – This keybind is the opposite of force move, and it will stop all motion and cause you to execute a basic attack regardless of whatever movement inputs were in progress. While I am not actively using it, it can be important to know what this keybind is for the game you are playing in case you need to immediately stop executing a movement command.

One of the quirks of Force Move is if you hold the button down it will be constantly executing a move command toward wherever your mouse cursor is pointing. So effectively it is like your character’s movement is tied to the heading of your mouse cursor allowing you to “steer” the character by moving your mouse. In truth, once you have started doing this it feels way more intuitive than it sounds because your character goes where your mouse cursor goes, and once you are comfortable with it can execute some tight turns as a result.

Because my fingers are already very comfortable in the traditional WASD configuration, I opt for using W as my “Force Move” key allowing me to place my fingers in that orientation and then map other important buttons to be comfortably pressed within the orbit of the W key. There might be some variance between games depending on what is supported but effectively I tend to follow the same configuration setup when possible. It will depend slightly upon the abilities you have access to on a given “class”/build but my standard process follows something like this:

• W – Force Move – The button I am holding pretty much at all times to allow me to steer my character with my mouse.
• Right Mouse – Primary Attack – This is the button that I bind my primary attack to that I am executing the most often.
• Spacebar – Movement Ability – This is the key that I will tap when I need to execute whatever movement ability my character has. If it has no movement abilities I tend to bind a reactional ability to it that I might need to hit on a moment’s notice.
• E – Secondary Attack – This one is going to vary quite a bit, but if I need to hit an ability periodically other than my primary attack it is going to go on this key. For example, if I am placing totems or mines or something of the sort, it goes on this key because I find it most comfortable to press while holding W.
• Q – Primary Cooldown – This one also varies quite a bit, but if I have some sort of a survival cooldown I generally put it on this key. This is in part because Diablo III trained this to be my potion hotkey so mentally I associate it with survival.
• R – Situational Attack/Cooldown – Since this key is further away, I tend to place whatever I need to use that infrequently.
• 1-5 – Potions – You can blame Path of Exile for this shift, but effectively if there is a health potion button I place it on 1, and if there are other kinds of potions I place them on 2-5. I am very used to reaching up to hit 1 when things are going poorly at this point.
• Left Shift – Force Attack – If the game offers some sort of force attack key, I tend to put it on left shift so that when I press it, my movement will be canceled for the moment. This is useful for situations where you might need to pause on a moment’s notice to avoid getting into an area effect for a trap.

I’ve pretty much been able to adapt every game I have played over the last handful of years to some version of this keybinding system. You might have to dig around a bit, but almost every game seems to have some version of “Force Move”. In Path of Exile unfortunately I have to sacrifice a possible keybind, because they do not have a separate button that I could bind to it independent of the hotbar. The only game that I have not been able to configure in this manner was Lost Ark, which is probably in part why I never spent much time playing that game. That game had some very specific opinions on what you should be doing gameplay-wise with your keys. I don’t feel like I am losing much of anything though because there are other things about that game that did not exactly jive with me either.

So as we approach the early access testing period of Diablo IV, the very first thing I will be doing is configuring my keybinds to match something akin to the process I just highlighted above. This is what works for me personally, but I suggest it as a less damaging alternative to spamming your mouse click constantly to keep registering a movement input. I had a copy of the game gifted to me, so I will be checking it out along with everyone else when the early access period opens. I am not entirely certain it is going to be my jam, but I am willing to give it a shot. At the moment, however, I am very much enjoying my time in Last Epoch. I am sure tomorrow I will have a post talking about my experience playing it with friends.