Dragonflight Keybinding Guide for PvP (2023) - How To Set the Best Keybinds in WoW Dragonflight

If you don't have good keybinds, you are killing your rating gains. These days you can't afford to be slow with your abilities, while some of old PvPers might not have the same reaction speeds from 10 years ago, there is one thing we can count on to destroy these younger players, good keybinds. Today we're going to walk you step by step on how to set up your keybinds in WoW PvP and become a keybinds master in Dragonflight. So if you're ready to get started, then log into the game and park yourself next to a target dummy, follow the below steps and you will be playing better and faster.

Dragonflight Keybinding Guide PvP (2023) - Best Keybindings Setup, How To Keybind in WoW Dragonflight

Learning to key bind in WoW Dragonflight will take your game, whether it be PvE or PvP, to the next level. Proper keybinding can improve your gameplay a lot. This guide shows you how to keybind in WoW Dragonflight. We show you some tips and tricks on how to get started, but you could still pull from this even if you are experienced! Especially as a PvPer, best keybinding will help elevate your game to new heights and help improve your quickness and speed! 

What Is A WoW Dragonflight Keybinding

Whether it's a healing spell like Holy Light or a quick assault like Mortal Strike, keybinding allows you to use any skill in World of Warcraft with a single press of a button. You can also use keybinding macros and other features to greatly improve the quality of your gaming experience. It's highly recommended that you experiment with different keybindings. They'll boost your DPS, make you more situationally aware, give you the ability to respond quickly to unexpected events (like an opponent assaulting you), and give you greater control over your character. Do you ever wish your character would respond to your commands, but you weren't able to click fast enough or cast the appropriate spell? That’s exactly what WoW keybinding will solve, they provide you greater control over your character and enable you to accomplish all the things you've imagined but been unable to perform thus far.

How to Set the Best Keybinds for Any Class - 4 Steps to Keybind in WoW Dragonflight

Here are easy keybind setup steps for any class in WoW Dragonflight 2023:

1. Movement Keys and Camera Control

By default, movement keys are set to WASD. But A and D are bound to turn left and turn right coining the infamous expression keyboard turning. There is not a single rank one player we know of who has turnkeys bound. But instead, the overwhelming majority of gladiator level PvPers will use strafe binds to make their movement as efficient as possible. So what are the best strafe binds? Q and E are technically optimal since it gives you easy access to the essential numbered binds one to five. But if you like strafing with A and D, that's fine too. What matters here is that you are strafing and not turning.

Now we know why we should strafe, but why do pro players jump so much? Maybe you've noticed on streams that some rank 1 players love to spam jump, sometimes this is just a habit, but other times there is a really good reason for this. When you jump, you are Airborne for around one second which in some cases is the same duration as the global cooldown. When jumping any direction, your character is carrying the momentum midair and it's during this time you're now free to take your fingers off your movement keys to use any instant cast ability of your choice. So you've set up your strafe keys and now your movement is smoother than ever.

The next step is to make sure you have the right camera settings. Go to options and type camera in the search bar and change your camera following style to never. This allows you to move in One Direction while rotating your camera to look in another direction which makes it easier to see what is going on. This will allow you to monitor important things in Arena without having your camera snap to the back of your character. This enables you to control the information you see and make better decisions.

2. Grouping Abilities 

Before we get into the binds themselves, let's talk about how you should organize your bars. Let's pretend you went through your Spellbook and put each of your abilities on your bar one by one. Before you know it, you would have a complete mess of your action bars with no cohesion between different ability types. In PvP, you'll need to see what your cooldowns are at any given time in an instant, while also paying attention to other rotational spells if needed. To make all this easier to track, we can split up our action bars into a few different categories: damage/healing, offensive cooldowns, defensive cooldowns and mobility. As a rogue for example, mutilate Garrett and Rupture can be grouped for damage, then defensive cooldowns like vanish, evasion and cloak of shadows can have their own space too, so you can easily tell when these are ready. You can repeat this process for cc offensive cooldowns and even mobility, so that your eyes instantly know where to look when you need to plan out your next globals. When your abilities are packaged into neat little bins, you reduce the amount of visual clutter on your screen, which not only allows you to make better decisions but also saves you valuable time. At this point though, we still need some actual keybinds. Having good keybinds won't instantly make you gain tons of rating. Of course, binds and macros help you get on the right track. But if you really want to level up your gameplay, skill capped is the only place that promises results with a rating gain guarantee.

3. WoW Keybind Tier List 2023

So let's dive into this WoW keybinds tier list, which is great starting place before assigning them to individual spells. We copy the key binding logic of the world's best players, which is showed in this tier list. 

S Tier Keybinds in WoW Dragonflight:

The absolute best binds available to you in WoW include R, F, C, mouse button 4 and 5, numbers 1 through 4 and either QE or AD depending on your strafe binds. These are s tier because they are the fastest keys you can press while easily maintaining control over your character, especially when utilizing the jump technique. For example, it's difficult to press one while strafing left with Q, R, A, but if you jump first, you should have no problem quickly moving your finger to one.

A Tier Keybinds WoW Dragonflight:

We have tilde, 5, T, G and V. These make the A tier since they are still easily accessible from your movement vines, but require you to stretch your fingers a bit further.

B Tier Keybinds WoW Dragonflight:

The B tier binds are Z and X since these are a bit awkward to press while moving. You can really feel the difference if you try jumping left and pressing 1, then jump left and press Z or X, it just doesn't work for most human hands.

C Tier WoW Dragonflight Keybinds:

We have 6, Y, H, B which are much slower to press compared to the keys we covered earlier. This doesn't mean you should never have these as binds, but instead these are just the least desirable binds for frequently used spells.

So, the best binds are the ones that are easily accessible from your movement keys and the further away we get from our strafe binds we set earlier, the worse the keybind becomes. So now we know one of the best keybinds is 3 since it was on the S tier, before we dive in and think sweet ice block is an S to your ability three is an S to your bind, they clearly go together stop right now even though 3 is a good bind, it doesn't mean it is the best bind for your strongest ability like ice block for instance. This is a spell that will only be pressed once or twice a game. Anyway, instead of assigning ice block to an S tier bind, we can set frost bolt to 3 since we will be using it all the time and while we're at it, set icelands to one cone of cold 2 and polymorph to E. Now we have some of our most used abilities on our absolute best keybinds. At this point we will have to start thinking about our highly reactive spells like interrupts. We also want these to be on easily accessible binds, so for now we will put counterspell on F. We can follow this process for the rest of our commonly used spells reserving S tier binds for abilities that we will use quite often. 

4. Modifiers and Rotations

For most people, shift will be the best modifier, with control and Alt being a close second thereafter. Modifiers are meant to achieve a few different things but if their core are designed to get you as many S tier binds as possible. But we have to warn you not to go down a rabbit hole when it comes to assigning modifiers. Don't do anything without thinking about it first, instead you should follow three rules:

1. Think about spell rotations. The first is to think of common spell sequences that you will press. Let's go back to our Mage, we need a keybind for Icy Veins which we will be using quite often with frostbolt or polymorph. If our bind for Icy Veins is X and our Frost bolt is bound to 3, that's going to feel really awkward and slow to sequence together. Instead, we could put Icy Veins on shift 3, which will make it much faster to sequence together with our other casted spells.

2. Use modifiers for focus marcros. The second rule to follow is crucial to becoming a better player and involves using modifiers for focus macros of the same spell. For example, as a warrior, we might have our Pummel bound to F which means we can use shift F or Ctrl F for the focus macro of our interrupt. We can do this across all of our interrupts on all of our characters to make things intuitive no matter what class we are playing. 

With these first two rules in mind, we can mesh them together to start thinking of advanced sequences of spells where one or more of them is off the global cooldown. Back to our Mage, we already have our focus counter spell bound to shift F, following the logic we discussed earlier, since it isn't on the GCD, we need to think about a combo we do often with CS. Blink or shimmer, in order to blink CS, we won't be needing to spam this ability all game, so let's put it on tilde. What that means is if we need to blink and then focus CS, it will mean pressing tilde, then holding shift while pressing F. This will feel awful, not only because our fingers will have to move all over the place, but also because we are combining a modifier with a non-modifier spell in the same sequence. Instead, we should put blink on a bind that's incredibly easy to press while also pressing shift F to focus counter spell. But making the keys easy to press together is just one part of good binding, assuming focus counter spell is on shift F and your normal targeted CS is on F, it's important that you're able to both blink CS your target with F and D while also being able to press shift F and D at the same time to counterspell your focus target.

3. You may need to opt out of modifiers on key abilities. It's for this reason that when considering keybinding sequences that work together, you may need to opt for having no modifiers on key abilities. In this case, it's best to leave D exclusively for blink which will allow you to both press D and F to blink CS your target while also being able to press shift D and shift F to blink counterspell your focus target.

As long as you followed as many of the 3 rules as possible for your most important spells, you're on the right path to success. 

Keybinds for Targeting in WoW Dragonflight

If you really want to play as smooth as possible, you need some targeting keybinds. There are multiple frames you can target with binds including Arena 1-2-3. Focus Arena 1-2-3 and target party member 1, 2 and self. This seems like a lot, but the ones you prioritize binding depends on your role. 

- As any Damage Dealer, you should prioritize binding focus Arena 1-2-3, this might seem counterintuitive but being able to quickly change your focus is incredibly important for utilizing your focus macros.

- Keybinds to target arena 1-2-3  is still important as a DPS, but focus 1, 2, 3 takes priority for all roles. 

- As a melee, you can avoid target 1, 2, 3 entirely and instead opt to tab target. Even the best melee in the world use tab targeting to quickly change who they are attacking. 

- Ranged on the other hand definitely should bind focus 1, 2, 3 with target 1, 2, 3 being highly suggested, since you have more flexibility with who you can attack at any time. In any case whether you value targeting or focus more, set Arena 1 to mouse wheel up, then Arena 2 and 3 on either mouse wheel down or middle mouse click. 

The second best keybinds for arena targeting would be 1, 2, 3, QWE or ASD depending on movement keys or ZXC. 

- As a Healer, instead of prioritizing targeting enemy player frames, you should instead make binds to target party 1, 2 and self, these are the most important since you'll be interacting with these the most often. After that, you might want to prioritize focus Arena 1-2-3 over target Arena 1-2-3, simply for the fact that you will need to target your partners most of the time.