Arrows keys are much superior, just like it has been proven left handed people are the chosen ones. Also, the idea that your hand would be cramped is ridiculous, as only 2 fingers rest on them(you never have to press more than 2 of the arrow keys at a time), other nearby usable keys are entire numpad, the 6 keys from insert/home/pageup section, and right side of the main keyboard.
When *just* moving - left hand on arrow keys, right on mouse. I play in third person, usually with the camera pulled up, and angled kinda down, so I'm looking over my shoulder from a decent distance. During combat - left hand on number keys, right on arrows. Use control to strafe, and my 0 on my number pad for "move down". I have E and G set for extended target window, with S to cycle nearest NPC. A, Q, W, B, M, X and L are all hotkeys, as well as every single button on my number pad, and all of my F-keys. Only F1 and F10 remain of the original mapped keys; the rest have been remapped. Page up opens all my bags, page down closes them. Insert fires my burn hotkey, Home sets off rake's rampage, Delete is my bp click, and End has 3 dots on it. Obviously, the things I use the most are easiest for me to reach during combat - targeting, burn, epic, spam key, etc. Stuff that I rarely if ever use during combat is in the harder to reach spots.
I also use the mouse - more specifically a combination of the mouse and WASD. I'm left-handed but I've always controlled a mouse with my right hand, and I think that's pretty common among us, we tend to be fairly ambidextrous.
Arrow keys here. I always found it easier to assign my left hand to the various hotkeys, and use my right for movement. I know many FPS players and others will disagree with me though. Then again, I'm right handed, and I shot left in hockey, batted right in baseball, and dug holes in the ground in golf.
Playing a rogue I need to use the quake style circle strafing techniques all the while to try and keep behind the mobs. That really needs combination of key + mouse to do well, and it's natural therefore to have the key movement side next to other commonly used keys (eg number keys). wasd is just so much less crampt than using left hand on arrow keys. I used to use the arrow keys when I started, but it just didn't work well for rogue play IMO once I started raiding and suffering lots of push.
I also use WASD and Arrows depending on what's going on. During a burn, I use arrows, with standard turn left/right functionality. My strafe keys are numpad 4 and 6. (Having both available makes it easy to reposition during a burn without losing DPS.) Numpad 9 cycles NPCs, 7 cycles corpses, 8, 5, 2, are mapped to extended target. 1, 3, 0, and . trigger hotkeys. (. is fade on every character.) On the left side of the keyboard, 1-5 are my spammy combat keys, while long reuse discs are triggered from Ctrl + a number. (Same for spells, alt + a number. Only insane people click every spell or hotkey with the mouse during a burn.) Oh, and \ and Space are both set to jump, so I can easily reach it no matter what keys I'm using.
Just like Feradach above i use the number pad for movement. 8 4 6 2. Look up,down 9 3. Autorun 7. Autoattack Numlock. Toggle nearest NPC +. Toggle nearest PC / . Toggle last two targets *. Toggle nearest corpse .(del). Consider target 0. Toggle Last Target and Myself - . Left hand rests on 1 2 3 4 (Nearest the F1-F4 keys for group targeting) of which are my most often used spell hotkeys which differ depending on what im doing but typically yaulp is 1 and /Assist is 2. i do alot of Left Shift/Alt/Control work with my left pinky and thumb. Typing is quick and natural in between spell casts. i touch the Mouse as little as i can get away with. Also play in first person.
I mean that 99%+ of the time I'm only using my mouse to move. The only time I'll use an arrow is when I need to move backward because of push on a raid. Don't get me wrong, I use WASD in pretty much every other game but for some reason, I learned to move in EQ using just the mouse.
I use a combination of the arrow keys and mouse for moving for raids, and the wasd plus my mouse for moving when I am doing my own thing and boxing and being more lazy. My numpad is assigned to all of my hotkeys that I do not has assigned to the 1-12 keys. The + on the numpad is cycle through nearest NPC, * is PC, and . is Corpse. I play in third person as well. I find if I use my left hand to move with wasd as well as using that hand to hit my hotkeys, it becomes an issue as then I am limiting myself to being stationary every time I hit one of my hotkeys ( And I use a lot of hotkeys). Or if I am moving with wasd and need to hit some hotkeys, then I am placing both hands in the same are of the keyboard which is silly and cumbersome. Moving the right hand across the body to the left side doesnt work so well. Because I use both the 1-12 and the numpad #'s for hotkeys, each hand can easily hit those that is closer to them. I also use Ctr+2, 3 and 4 for 3 of my more important discs I use, which also makes using the arrow keys more efficient for me since I use the left hand for that. Also strafing is easier using the arrow keys, and I strafe a lot.
Even as a rogue, I use the keys and ctrl to strafe. My number pad tho.. man. Numlock is autorun again, because screw having to relearn something that wasn't broken after over a decade of using it. / cycles nearest corpses. * fires a /loot key. - is still screenshot. + turns on autofire. . is my key in key for vent when i use it. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are my 5 potion slots. 7 is /corpse, 8 is /corpsedrag, and 9 is /corpsedrop. I'd have to look in game to see what 6 is, because I honestly don't remember. Is it possible I have an empty slot I could be using?! The rest of my stuff is pretty straight forward, but it's evolved over the last 6 years. I get something new, and have to figure out which key I'm going to tie it to, depending on how often I'm going to use it. I also unmapped pretty much every method of opening and closing windows that I keep up all the time. There's no accidental closing of my player window, or song window or whatever while typing. I have to click them to close them. Which actually freed up several more key combo's that I could use for other things. Though it also means I'm pretty useless for answering questions like "How do I get my player window back?!" because I never remember the default. EDIT: I should probably mention that the size of my hands probably helps with my setup. Stretching from the Ctrl key with my thumb, to the arrow keys, to getting my pinkie onto the 0 on the number pad is about the extent that my hand stretches comfortably. I have to spread my fingers just a bit to rest them on the home row keys. That certainly changes what's "in range" for me, and eases up on that cramped feeling as well that so many of you seem to have. My mouse (a standard sized one) is actually a bit too big for my hand. The little laptop USB ones are a perfect fit though!
I used to use arrow keys in the beginning of EQ (like pretty much everyone else, I assume) and kept at it for years, but every time I'd play a game outside of EQ, it would use WASD. Eventually, arrow keys just didn't seem right anymore, and WASD made more sense. Previously I had the keys all around the arrow keys assigned, and it worked well. However, I find I have many more key options with WASD, better hand position on those keys compared to the keys adjacent to the arrow keys, and also, like others have said, you don't have to move your hand across the keyboard to start typing to someone when your hands are already by WASD. I've always used the mouse with mouse control activated for camera movements and strafing. It gives you a lot of control with your movement, especially for pulling and such.
That's actually an interesting idea. It would certainly give you a greater key range to work with. Your hand would be in the correct position for typing as well. Just wondering how hand comfort compares between the two.
I haven't gone all-out on this, but there are a few repeat offenders I got rid of. First and foremost, the Petition Window. Laggy thing that it was, that could break me if I accidentally hit it, so that one no longer has a keybind. The other, and nearly as severe, was the group disband key, previously Ctrl + D. As a monk, I end up standing a LOT (Ctrl + S) and this was a common miss-key for me. I do still have one, though. It's mapped to Ctrl + Numpad 5. Way outta the way for anything I commonly do.
Oh, me too - I'm not sure it's as high as 99% but generally the vast majority of my movement is done with the mouse, I only use the keys to strafe I think. It's funny how hard to quantify it is - it's such an instinctual thing by now it is hard to visualize.
Platforming games use arrows(or a controller). Everything else uses wasd. All my gross movements are controlled by my left hand on keys that are surrounded by keys that can be bound to commands. While the precise movements are done with the mouse in my right hand. The old Best of the Best tournaments were awesome for watching wasd+mouse using FPS players beat the crap out of eq exclusive arrow users. It's trivially easy to stay on the back of someone turning with arrows if you're used to playing FPSes. I can see the merits with using ESDF, you get another row of buttons to the left of your control hand. But switching involves rebinding every game you play and retraining years of muscle memory.
I use everything! Back when we bards had to twist songs manually I ran around using arrows and twist the songs with my left hand (1234), or move with asdf and click songs with the mouse. When more precise movement was needed (quick peek around a corner) asdf + mouse. Nowadays I mostly use asdf + mouse to move and look around, but still switch to arrows whenever convenient.
I would say that at first, changing anything about the UI / keyboard / mouse control is annoying and uncomfortable, but with time you can get used to anything. When I first changed from arrows to ESDF, I made a lot more noise moving my character around. It went away after a while (months, maybe). I am pretty happy I switched over. There is (was?) a bard on Bertox who had a gaming mouse with 12 abilties / hotkeys bound to it, which sounds pretty awesome. I don't have any experience with fancy mouse combos, though.
