Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Rogue Nostromo

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In light of the new n52te, I've updated this post a little with my current set up. Go look at my preview of the new Nostromo.

I'm not going to go over the entire Nostromo deal. I think Phaelia does a great job here. I'm just going to give you my parry, dodge and spin on it.

Why did I decide to go to a Nostromo? I was tired, oh so tired, of hitting Sinister Strike as quickly as possible over and over again. I don't have tendonitis or carpal tunnel and I don't want either. So, when I felt the first twinge of something in my left hand from hitting my [1] key over and over again, I decided that maybe something needed to be done.

My goal with using my Nostromo is two-fold: 1) eliminate hand stress and 2) consolidate the majority of my play onto my Nostromo and mouse, the keyboard is simply for chat and nothing more.

As you might see, my key layout may seem a bit strange. My Nostromo layout evolved from my normal keyboard bindings: Q for Stealth (as it is right next to the movement), X for Sprint Riposte (I no longer use Riposte in my build), etc. I haven't bothered remapping them to something that makes more "sense" as it allows me to switch back to full keyboard and know where pretty much everything is still.

My Nostromo layout

But those are just the keys that are bound. Honestly, it doesn't matter one way or another which key you have mapped to the nostromo except for the "modifier" keys such as "alt","shift" and "ctrl". That is as long as you then map your action buttons in World of Warcraft to the same keys.

I've mapped my functions in the following way:

Hopefully, everything is pretty self-explanatory. SS is Sinister Strike and CoS is Cloak of Shadows. But you already knew that, right? Beatdown, Stun, Bleed, Feint and Stealth are all WoW macros described below.

I've used the outer 3 right keys and outer 3 left keys for system functions regardless of my character. Having esc and tab enables me to quickly handle targetting and escaping out of whatever dialog I'm in. Character, Map and Backpack are also essentials for allowing my left hand to remain on the Nostromo for all my functions. I've also mapped the mousewheel on the Nostromo to my Social window to determine who is on in guild, the Quest window and I use the forward turn of the mousewheel for my mount with a shift+forward mousewheel for my flying mount.

The backstab key, the fourth key in the top row, is the one key I have a Nostromo macro on. I've setup the macro like this:

So, it's basically spamming the key over and over again every half second as long as hold down the key. I use this with Backstab Sinister Strike,shift+key for Sinister Strike and alt+key for my cast sequence of Blade Flurry, Evasion and Adrenaline Rush. I use this on every character for whatever ability I need to hit over and over.

Next, I have created the following macros to further consolidate functionality. Most are based so that they do one function in stealth mode and another outside of stealth. And the Stealth macro is mashable. You have to press alt+stealth to get out of stealth and you press shift+stealth for Vanish.

  • Beatdown
    /cast [stealth] Sap;Slice and Dice
  • Bleed!
    /cast [stealth] Garrote;Rupture
  • Feint
    /cast [stealth] Pick Pocket;Feint
  • Stealth
    /cast [stance:0] Stealth; [stance:1, modifier:alt] Stealth; [modifier:shift] Vanish
  • Stun
    /cast [stealth] Cheap Shot; Kidney Shot
  • Uber
    /castsequence reset=120 Blade Flurry,Evasion, Adrenaline Rush

Finally, I use the mouse for steering and the directional pad for strafting and backwards movement. Further, my mouse has four buttons and I've mapped the far right button to autorun and the far left button to my Ventrillo speak button.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

I tried some of your macros and none of them work during combat. Like vanish works outside combat but when fighting and I hit shift vanish buttons on my n52 it says Im in combat. Same goes with the other ones.

Chris Connelley said...

@negzero7: Interesting. That is verbatim the macro I use currently. Make sure the button you have bound to the macro isn't on the bar that changes when you stealth. If you need more help, just mail me at parrydodgespin at gmail dot com

Unknown said...

In case you are interested, I figured out what the problem was. For stealth a key-binding was overriding the macro in combat. For the others, I found out you have to put any modifier-attack before the no-modifier-attack or for some reason it doesn't read it right. Thanks for the push in the right direction, I love my new macros!

Chris Connelley said...

@negzero7: woot! Awesome. I'm glad to hear it. Yeah, I think I may write up some new macros because I'm a bigger fan of the modifier key myself now. Something nice and complex for my Stun/Bleed macro:

/cast [stealth] Cheap Shot; [stealth,modifier:shift] Garrote; [modifier:shift] Rupture; Kidney Shot

It ties the two commands better and I could remap them to a new key more quickly.

Booray said...

I, too, am a huge Nostromo fan but I wonder why you are using macro's on some buttons. It seems that you are keybinding to the keyboard when you could be keybinding to the number keys used by the hotbar. This would allow you to take advantage of the hotbar shift between stealth/unstealth without having to do any shift/alt functions yourself. For example, I have a Pickpocket/CS macro in the #1 slot on the stealth bar and SnD in the same slot on non-stealth. I then created a Nost macro that presses the 1 button TWICE whenever I press it. So, I sneak up and press the 1 button, it pickpockets/CS/Snd.
I also created a Nost macro for SS so you just hold it down (you did that) You wouldn't need a macro for stun, just put CS and KS in the same slot on the hotbar.

Back when I had Riposte I had a nost macro that pressed Rip/SS everytime I pressed the button. I have a nost macro that presses Blade Furry/Ad Rush on one press as well. Come to think of it, I should add Evasion in that Macro too.

Dajay said...

Really interesting. Not usual that players gave out their "secrets". Make me feel i'm gonna take one of those n52te too.

Peter said...

I tried the repeat key over and over, but found I lost a lot of control with it and I ended up losing energy to that extra SS when I had 5 points all ready. I have it setup in a similar way to Booray, why not utlise the stealth bar for stealth stuff.. :)

Also with the modifier key (be it alt/ctrl/shift) you only need one with that you have access to 24 keys which is MORE then enough to put macros/other stuff etc on them.

I never used to have a modifier key at all it was jump, I am stil trying to get used to it. I had it set like that for over year and 1/2 but I can see the benifits of having 24 action butons at your desposal.

I still come back and read this post, as I pickup diffrent things from it thanks again for posting it.

As for the new n52te I am SOOooo getting it :)