Fortuente

How to enable Mouse Look in WoW

January 19th, 2008

Have you ever wondered how to enable a more traditional fps-style mouse-look mode in WoW? I know I have; the constant click-and-hold nature of WoW has played havoc with my wrist tendons and I also often find it clunky to use in pvp situations - especially when I’ve taken a week off to play Team Fortress 2 and have to readjust back to the WoW UI.

The term “mouse look” refers to the ability to move your character simply by moving your mouse. This is a feature found in many types if 3d games (an rpg example is Oblivion), and is a predominant feature of the fps genre. WoW’s default mouse-look mode is activated when you press and hold down the right mouse button while moving it.

A really easy way to enable mouse-look mode is through the simple macro:


/run if IsMouselooking() then MouselookStop() else MouselookStart() end


Clicking this macro will cause your pointer to disappear and your mouse will behave as if the right mouse button is being held down. To disengage mouse look with this script, simply click your right mouse button and the pointer will return. Because this is a macro, you can also easily bind this to a spare mouse or keyboard key.

Now while this feature works great in general, World of Warcraft was not designed for it. If you attempt to keep this enabled all the time, you will quickly run into a few annoyances - the biggest one being that you are unable to target or click on npcs, mobs or other players.

The lack of targeting is not a problem at all for pve play and a minor inconvenience (depending on your skill level) in pvp. To target and engage mobs or pvp players simply use your TAB button and normal action keys; you can also rebind your auto-target (TAB) to another button if you don’t like TAB. As far as your action keys are concerned, if you are a clicker you will probably just want to ween yourself from that habit.

There doesn’t seem to be any option for using mouse-look mode in your day-to-day interactions with friendly npcs, vending machines or the mailbox. But we can chock that up to being a necessary limitation of the WoW UI.