Any repetitive stress injury solutions to all that clicking

From what I have seen that isn't true as even in a raid guild you will have a mix of people who use discord or some other voice chat but don't actually talk in that chat. Even if you assume that everyone in a guild uses some sort of voice chat there are still plenty of other people you will likely communicate in game with that you can't communicate with via voice chat. That is of course ignoring the fact that even for setting up various hotkeys you will still need a keyboard in order to do that. And when you are dealing with a casting class you will have up to 13 different spells that you will need to have keys for and that isn't counting the keys you will need for item and AA clicks. Really there are way to many things that need a key to ditch a keyboard and go to something else.

There is (or was) one in game but it isn't that great and almost no one uses it.

I am definitely one of those players that listens to discord, but responds with the keyboard.

You could try mapping them to other keys. I use q,w,e,a,s,d for my keys and this keeps my hands where I want them.

q - strafe left
w - move forward
e - strafe right
a - turn left
s - move backward
d - turn right

Yep. The problem with WASD is that these are incorrectly placed on a keyboard to game. They W-key is not straight in line with the S-key, and this forces your middle finger to twist, which can cause RSI down the line just like a mouse.

The arrow keys are properly placed. But a keyboard's numpad is much too close to the mouse position.

So you can either move the keyboard away from the mouse, or what some people do, is get a mechanical numpad or gamepad instead.

This is interesting information but EQ was designed to be played with a keyboard and it wasn't designed to play with a limited number of keys that you are suggesting people use.

Depends on the mouse you use.

This is a typical decent light gaming mouse. It has 4 extra keys, and a shift key which doubles it to 8 keys.

8 keys tied to macros is enough for me in MMO.

8 keys isn't nearly enough when casters have 13 different spells they can cast before you consider different item clicks and AA that they can use in an encounter. Yes there are some MMO's that you are able to get by with only 8 keys but that isn't all of them and isn't EQ for sure.

You can tripple it to 12 keys by just using CTRL.

But you're right, if you use 13 keys you would need one those G600 MMO mouse, or rely on the keyboard.

Then again, I largely play melee classes and I could easily play at my max potential with just 4 keybinds tied to macros. Maybe the problem is with EQ casters if you need to activate so many keybinds.

Btw, how do you even know where to hit with your fingers by using a full keyboard. On a mouse you quickly learn where those keys are. I can't imagine having to blindly find 13 keys on a keyboard with one hand.

You can do it on those mechanical numpads since the keys are directly around you, but with WASD I can't imagine it is easy with the shift and tab keys around you.

Another reason I bought a mechanical numpad for my games instead of a full mechanical keyboard is price. A decent mechanical gaming keyboard with red switches like a Ducky will set you back around $120+. A decent mechanical numpad will set you back about $30+, and it tends to be better built since they're simpler to make and tend to have somewhat straighter travel. On the second hand market you can get these for like $10.

Same way that I can type on a keyboard without looking at the keyboard while I am doing it. Just takes a little practice to get the keyboard layout down.

Muscle memory.
You also mentioned that you play melee more than casters. I think that is one reason why I avoid casters is because of too much clicking/button hitting. I have all my must have cooldowns on one hotbutton, and my burn on 2. Other than tapping the 1 key for autoattack, the 3/4 keys for sneak/hide, and a couple of the other top row number keys for always up disc rotation, I hardly use the keyboard except for movement (WASD) or typing in Discord or the game.

I was just demonstrating to my wife that EQ's UI is flexible, in that you can move windows closer to each ohther. When doing tradeskills, I move the "donor" window right next to the tradeskill container. The worst offender anymore to me is shipping parcels character to character.

The tendon stress can be helped by stretching in opposition. Gently press fingers back toward wrist to elongate tendons and reduce tension. Placing the fingertips of both hands on each other and pressing palms together gently and a third excercise of--- Imagine a rubber band around your fingernails with your hand in a position like holding a tennis ball, then place the fingers of the oppositte hand on the nails and extend the fingers while adding resistance with the other hand. This builds the finger and hand muscles in opposition to those tendons and supports the joints.

(I was once upon a time a competition rock climber, and played EQ)

I learned how to touch type on a mechanical type-writer several years before the first personal computer came out. Over the decades I have done a lot of writing and generally touch-type (and had to get out of the habit of double space after period ). If you type a lot and learned how to type with the 'home keys' and all that, it's really easy for your fingers to know where they are on the keyboard because there is a little bump on the f and j keys, where your two index fingers should be resting on a QWERTY keyboard when your hands are on the home keys. Everything else from there is a taught 'reach' for various fingers. Why would that be different for gaming on a computer?

Touch typing is different though, it's easy to do because your fingers remain on the keyboard. It took me about a week to learn how to touch type at a reasonable speed (thank you Garfield typing pal).

But gaming is not the same. If you have to access 13 keybinds on your keyboard with a single hand, you would have to lift your hand away from WASD no. I assume right? Or are you able to access 13 keys, or whatever people need, around WASD without really lifting your hand.

And how do you fire off macros if you bound them to keyboard letters while you're in chat. I can fire any macro with a mouse button while chatting because EQ has no idea what mouse triggers are, it's the mouse software sending commands. But if you use the letter E on your keyboard to fire a macro while you're in chat, it's not going to fire is it, it's just going to write "E".

It seems much more complex than just using a gaming mouse with buttons or a gamepad/numpad.

How in the heck did double space lose its place as a standard? Everything looks like a run on sentence now.
But I grew up taking a typing class in high school on the old IBM typewriters, so learned how to touch type as well.

502 gang rise up. I put the weights in it because I don't want a mouse that's gonna get blown around by a stiff breeze.

Protip: don't let them build up that much. ngl, I crudely made an AHK to do conversions because it was a pain doing it for multiple accounts, and I didn't let the agents pile up nearly that much. There really should be a mass conversion and a way to do it faster.

You have to remember that a good majority of EQ gamers grew up in an era where even FPS games were keyboard/mouse...and the mouse only had two buttons. I have a gaming mouse but guess how many buttons I use on that mouse...2. While a good amount of gamers have adjusted to these newfangled mouses, some of us haven't, and have developed the mouse/keyboard style of gaming to a lost artform.

If you learned touch typing the old school way, you can type any letter or number/special character (above the letters) and space. Yes, your fingers leave the home keys or else you would be limited to asdfjkl; (just like some people's password), but you return the finger you moved back to its home key position so it is oriented to know where the other keys are. For those of us who transitioned from a manual/electric type writer to a computer keyboard, the clt and alt were just added in to the repertoire as bottom key positions and the function keys as a super-top row. The num-pad is a data entry calculator like set up, a different homekey positioning, same with the arrows and the other controls above. There are several different keyboard layouts and distinct preferences based on the variation of touch-typing one learned.

Using a gamepad/numpad and so many buttons on the mouse/trackball are actually more complex to me but it does come down to when my fingers and the brain moving them were trained to enter stuff.

In EQ, as in most games with chat, you have to press some sort of button to enter 'chat mode' vs command mode or key entry. That's why, unless you accidentally hit the key to enter chat mode, WASD will move you vs type into the chat (and there is an incredibly funny story with that from the early days of EQ). It's no different from any other key bound to an action. By default (I think), hitting x will make your character crouch or duck but only if you're not in chat mode. Anytime your character isn't doing something and you're madly mashing the key that -should- do something, ta-da you were in chat mode and hitting the key to send it will "say" that string of letters or numbers you were trying to use to trigger macros or actions or whatever. You can change most of the key combos (and I have changed a few) to be more comfortable to your own style. I don't think you can change the key to enter chat mode in EQ, but you can in other games. To initate chat mode, it's just the enter key which is also the key used to exit it and send what is on the chat line into the applicable channel (denoted by a / destination or the default for the chat window into which the typing was going which is why, on rare occasions I have sent a group chat of "12311111111" with a bit of frustration). But, yes, this is why you can't send a macro while you're in chat mode using the standard keys of a keyboard.