Rebinding and remapping hotkeys in Starcraft 2 is one of the most overlook advance features in this game.
Rebinding and remapping hotkeys are currently used by a lot of Professional gamers to improve their micros and macro abilities. Blizzard Entertainment had done a wonderful job in the hotkey features in SC2. Most of the hotkeys are perfectly assigned. However, some of the hotkeys are still being kind of wrongly placed. I'll give you an example here. Let's take the hotkey for Immortal from the Robotics Facility. The original hotkey assigned to this unit is '
I'. This seems to be good at first sight as it uses the first letter of Immortal. However, the more I play this game, the more I feel that this is wrong. I have added an alternative hotkey of '
R' for Immo
rtal. This instantly improve my gameplay. So the new hotkey for
Immortal will be 'I' and 'R'.
Why Assign and Rebind HotkeysThis feature aims to change some of the custom hotkeys for the custom assigned hotkeys from Blizzard in SC2. The main feature of using this remapping hotkeys is to assign the keys '
Towards the Left side of your Keyboard'. As you all know, having the hotkeys towards the left side improves and smooths your gameplays thus having better unit creation and upgrades. If we take the example of the Immortal before, everytime when we wish to train an Immortal, we have to move our left hand to the 'I' button.
This is not very efficient as we have to move our left hand too far to our comfort. With 'R' hotkey set, we can immediately train the powerful unit. Imagine when you are trying to Hallucinate some Immortals for their awesome defense. You will have to press 'C' 'I' 'C' I' on an on. You may miss the 'I' button a few times. If we use 'C' 'R' 'C' 'R' this can be done easily.
Heroes of Newerth and Dota The best examples are
Heroes of Newerth and Dota from Warcraft 3. Remapping all the abilities to
ASDF is one of the most used feature for top players.
Upgrades on ForgeAnother hotkey rebinding that I found really useful is the
Upgrades from Forge. Up until now since the launch of SC2, I am still not used to the original hotkeys assigned by Blizzard for upgrades on the Forge. Thus, I have change them to
Weapon (A), Armor (S) and Shields (D). This is really useful for everyone. The reason behind setting them to A,S,D is humans are visual creatures. We got used to seeing the three upgrades from left to right starting with Weapon, Armor and Shield. Thus assigning ASD to them eases our hotkey capabilities.
Remapping CameraCreate Location 1This feature enables you to Hotkey a Location to button such as F1, F2, F3. And you will be immediately brought the the location once you press the assigned buttons. Let me tell you, every professional players use this
Location Hotkey Feature. However, I am unsure what keys do they assign to. My best bet is that they set them to F1, F2 and F3.
F1 is often remap for your Main Base.
F2 for your Expansion and F3 for your Third. Main Base and Expansion is the most used. Some professional gamers do not hotkey the third base. Setting hotkeys to your bases improves your macro and micro abilities. For example, you catch a Terran Drop heading to your main base. Thus you Press F1 and micro your units instead of Clicking on the Minimap first. F1 is definitely faster than the Minimap option.
However, do not take my words for the exact hotkeys used by pro gamers here. This is just my guess. Some of them may be using F2 and F3 for main and expansion. F1 is left to its original feature for idle workers. If you have change F1 to your main base, you can set your
Idle workers to ~.
Let's take a look at the hotkeys I have Changed. This is just my personal preference.
Protoss- Immortal - R and I
- Forge - Weapon, Armor, Shields to A S D
- Cyber Core - Air Weapon (A), Air Armor (S), Hallucination upgrade H and C.
- Fleet Beacon - Graviton Catapult G and C
- Robotics Bay- Gravitic Boosters (Observer Speed) B, Gravitic Drive (Warp Prism) G and A
As you can see the hotkeys used above, most of them are being assigned to
Upgrades. For example Upgrade for Warp Prism, we can assign an additional hotkey of A. A is the hotkey for Warp Prism on Robotics. This eases our macroing ability. The easiest way to assign the Upgrades for Units such as Observer speed, Warp Prism Speed is to assign them identical to the unit hotkey.
Zergs and TerranIf you are Zerg or Terran you can go ahead to assign your own personal hotkeys like the examples shown above. For example, I always find Metabolic Boost 'M' hotkey upgrade to be very troublesome as the key is located towards the bottom right of keyboard. You can always use 'Z' or even 'S' for Speed. Do try out rebinding and remapping your hotkeys in SC2. You will be surprised how useful this feature is in Starcraft 2.
