Guide to key mapping

About Key Mapping
With DDO when playing some class's you can sometimes reach the limit of what you are capable of doing physically on the keyboard and simply put require more keys; that is exactly what Key Mapping does.

Some players have differing reasons for wanting more keys, it can be as simple as constantly hitting a key by accident which is common with ergonomic keyboards, also taking into account the personal stance of the player at the keyboard in their chair too; it can all affect your game-play and hence in turn what keys do what exactly.

For example: Your role is healing the group in and you're in a boss fight scenario - you hit the heal and get the hand down to W-A-S-D, and suddenly the character panel is blocking my view of my impending death.

There are other (and more expensive) ways around this such as purchasing some extra hardware to assist your game-play (G13 gameboard or Mad Cats are some). For most players DDO runs on the hardware they already have (usually a keyboard/mouse setup).

So there are in-game options to help out in this area, you could go into Options/"Key Mapping" list and find the odd key or two that is causing a disruption to your DDO and change it to another out of the way key.

Or you can take advantage of DDO's Key Mapping features which are advanced and extensive for an MMO as well as being organized. You may be a player that is busy repeatedly hitting the same button over and over for individual targets and may not realize that the auto-targeting (default "G") will do all this for you.

You will hopefully only have to remap a few keys but if you want a fully customized DDO experience that id both advanced and easy at the same time then read below to get set up.

Working the list
Correct me if I am wrong, but I count 7 sections in the Key Mapping list. Interaction, Movement, Camera, Panels, Interaction (I call it "interaction 2 or Combat"), Selection, and Shortcuts.

Shortcuts is about 2/3 of the whole list and that totally depends on how you set up your shortcut bars for whatever character you are building. The only thing to notice other that under the shortcuts is that Bars 1-10 can be assigned to keys other than the "control+1,2,3,..." Bars 11-20 cannot be assigned to a single key. So, lets think. My left hand: all the movement keys and the number keys 1-6 which fire the commands I have put on the Currently Active shortcut bar. My right hand: on the mouse (common wheel mouse: left-click=button0, right-click=button1, and wheel which is Also a button=button2). On the right side of the keyboard, a numeric keypad. What if my big old warforged thumb could reach over and change the Currently Active Bar to another one. I happen to have 4 keys right next to the right edge of my keyboard, but maybe you only have 3. Now, that is 3 or 4 Shortcut bars that thumb can send to busy left hand by one press. So, shortcut bar 1 has a bunch of battle stuff in slots 1-6, shortcut bar 2 has dungeon crawl stuff like sneak and search in slots 1-6, Bar 3 has other stuff (heals, spells, items...), and Bar 4 has more other stuff like potions.

Lets add it up. Regular old keyboard, regular old mouse, regular old right thumb. Busy left hand has movement and slots 1-6. Right hand has aim/attack and whatever you put on the regular old mouse. But now thanks to some Key Mapping of the right hand side of the regular old keyboard, the regular old thumb becomes an important support character because it can completely alter all of the 1-6 keys for the left hand. Now busy left hand does not have to use a lot of ctl+whatever commands to change Bars.

Of course nothing beats preparation and caution, but if you should suddenly find yourself in a tight spot, nice to know that you have 3 or 4 times more options.