So, haven’t been playing a lot of WoW now and I’ve mainly been playing diablo 4 instead.
My left hand is in a better shape than its ever been, just from me playing diablo 4 instead of WoW since early access started.
Like, it’s actually insane how much wonders not playing WoW do to your hand.
I logged back in to WoW because a friend wanted to do a key and we tried his underrot 18 where group disbanded at first boss and then we did my 18 underrot where the run was +2. My hand legit is starting to feel like it did previously, just from that one attempt and then the one run. Playing a class(holy priest) that’s not THAT heavy on the APM.
WoW needs a serious look at how much you actually have to mash the keys(often with next to no cd on them) and how many buttons you have.
In all frankness, sounds like a you problem. There’s probably other players who share your sentiment, but it’s not about WoW but either about how you mash your keys, set up your keybinds, about how you position your hands on/around your keyboard/mouse/desk or about your genetics.
I’ve been playing this game on and off since release, including high APM classes, and I never had wrist or hand problems.
A former buddy of mine got himself carpal tunnel from playing at an utterly attrocious wrist angle. No doubt some people just have bad bones/sinews.
I’ve played WoW since the launch and I’ve never seen such an atrocity as current guardian druid. God damn 120 cpm in big pulls just from pressing your mitigation and then add on other abilities and off-GCD abilities and you’re easily at 160-180 ability casts per minutes. That is what wrecked my hand in the first place and I’ve had problems ever since I played guardian now. That stuff is not healthy and playing Diablo 4, which made me take a break from playing WoW and be put into a way lower CPM environment, has made me realize just how bad WoW has gotten, even with the other classes.
It really doesn’t matter, man. If you use your keyboard in a proper manner and have your keybinds set up to not make you have to jump halfway across your keyboard between your 2 most spammed abilities you really only have to move your fingers a fraction of a cm to push a button.
Like, I sincerely struggle to come up with a way to play the game that would ruin my hands other than terribly unergonomic hand positioning and unthinkably bad keybind setups. Maybe a terribly bad keyboard that requires way too much force to push the buttons. But other than that you really should not have to move your hands/fingers a lot ever if you set your keybinds up in a sensible manner.
I stress my hands more writing this than I do playing WoW for 4 hours. Your most pressed buttons should all be around your movement keys, so if you use WASD to move, everything you need to spam should be on 1-4, Q, E and those keys with CTRL, Shift and ALT modifiers (plus whatever buttons you can comfortably reach on potential extra mouse buttons). That’s 24+ keybinds that never require you to move your hand and never require you to move your fingers more than like 2cm. People with long fingers can even extend that to more keys.
The push of a button on a non terrible keyboard should be entirely effortless and require no noteworthy amount of force or finger movement.
As for the positioning of your hands/wrists you can google for “ergonomic desk sitting positions” and should get a chair/desk that let you assume that position.
there can be up to 30 keybinding in ffxiv for example, as you can see noone compains about hand problems.
If you want to complain about current guardian druid you can do it in more straight way
Been playing Fire Mage with Double Bloodlust last season, which also has a spamable off GCD ability (Fireblast) and it’s simply not an issue unless you ignore everything I said about setting up your out of game gaming environment and ingame keybinds.
Go ask the top guardian druids, fury warriors or outlaw rogues how they feel about the APM/button mashing. Ask them how their fingers/hands feel.
I watched a fury warrior that was and still is pretty good and he has had to take breaks from streaming/playing because of his fingers starting to hurt from playing fury, several times.
I use an MMO mouse and my right thumb does 95%+ of my abilites. I’ve had to adapt my hand so I move it before I press so my thumb isn’t bent when I press buttons with it.
After your crybaby thread about Guardian Druid (no offence) I’ve switched to Prot Warrior and Prot Paladin but levelling my Warrior is killing my thumb because Avatar and D Shout are at the bottom of my mouse.
It’s brutal. I went to my sister’s to play Halo on Xbox and my right thumb is sore when I need to jump (a) or switch weapon (y).
I can relate to this a lot. I’m kinda young, but the spammy playstyle in wow is also very unpleasant for my hand. It doesn’t hurt yet, but it might soon. Not sure how it is for other classes, but for fury it’s extremely spammy. So spammy in-fact that my buttons literally lag out sometimes. These devs have really zero chill
Have you fully optimized your set up? The game’s default keybindings are really bad.
Between a mmo mouse, a mechanical keyboard, wrist rests for both hands and a much more optimal custom keybindings I rarely feel my hands. If anything, I remember playing wow for hours as a teen back in vanilla and tbc, using all the default settings and pretty crappy standard keyboard and my wrists hurting way more then.
On top of that, maybe you do also overly tense up? You can spam buttons without tensing up, think of pianists and other musicians of the sort.
I’ve been doing more or less what Pancakes says above me. I’ve added more buttons such as R, T, F, V (and SHIFT modifiers). Got some weird buttons like [ ` ’ because of my mouse too.
Perhaps try some less intense classes.
One reason I like Shaman is that it’s reasonably straight forward and simple rotation. Not that I do high intensity content such as m+ or similar anymore.
I think Blood DK is a reasonably low intensity rotation.
I’ve never tried Guardian Druid so I can’t really compare.