Posts with tag belkin

The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes.

We heard a few days ago that even rated matches being played out now will not earn Arena points (which would reset at the opening of Wrath anyway.) That's kind of a slap in the face! for folks who were hoping to win that one last piece of gear before the expansion hits on Thursday. Still, this really cements the idea of us being stuck in a Limbo Season, and supports the idea that now is the time to review the last few months and take some time to understand our lessons learned.

Last week, we started reviewing the answers given by Colosseum interviewees through the last three months. There were three basic themes that seemed to repeat themselves. We'll take a second to review those, then progress with our analysis of the Colosseum so far.

Our good friend Phaelia from Resto4Life (who, I'll have you know, will be live on our podcast this week -- more info tomorrow) has an extremely in-depth guide to setting up and using one of the most popular controllers for World of Warcraft, the Belkin Nostromo keypad. Some people swear by the G15 or the Zboard, I personally like to keep things vanilla with just an Apple Keyboard and a gaming mouse, but whenever you ask WoW players what they use, it seems like the Nostromo always comes up.

And Phaelia's got it down -- from setting up button mods (she's using Bartender, one of Adam's essential addons for 3.0.3) to configuring the keyboard itself and even putting in macros for all three Druid forms, if you've ever wanted to use the Nostromo, there's probably something interesting to learn here. Seems really complicated to me -- I'm not sure if I'm willing to commit that much work into getting my interface exactly right, especially if there's a chance that a big patch could wipe it all out.

But I can see how half the fun of playing the game is getting the controls just perfect, and if tweaking things that much makes you play that much better, more power to you. If you want to dive into the world of custom controllers, Phaelia's guide will probably be invaluable.

The Nostromo n52 Speedpad was listed by several readers as an essential WoW tool, so we're putting it to the test. I'll be using the n52 for the next week's play, and will return with an updated take on the peripheral; here's a quick first look at it. For some reason the n52 Speedpad seems popular with rogues; to get a feel for its functionality, in the first day of play I've tested it with a druid performing every role from tanking to group healer as well as soloing.

Setting up the n52 was easy, although substantial changes were made to its default WASD-style setup. With fifteen buttons as well as a directional pad, scroll wheel and orange thumb button, the most obvious mapping seemed to be to assign the numbers 0-9 to buttons 1-10, with the other keys reserved for shift, information panes such as map and bags, and jump.

By spending some time tinkering with both the n52 Profile Editor and WoW's keybindings, the pad was ready to prove its worth in real combat.