In World of Warcraft arena or general PvP there were (not any more as far as I know) some skills that separated great players from the best. Crowd control effects like Polymorph (Mage) or Blind (Rogue) broke on receiving damage. Priests (the third of the infamous Rogue/Mage/Priest arena comp) had a skill called Shadow Word: Death (SW:D) that would damage the priest and subsequently break the control effect. The timing was dependent on lag and difficult to hit against experienced players. The perhaps most well-known PvP movie is Hydra 6 and the SW:D trick is shown around 1:30.
 
The reason I’m mentioning this is to explain some of my hotkey choices for SC2. For arena to avoid priests anticipating the control effect, Blind and Gouge for me as a Rogue player, it was necessary to bind the same control effect up to five times. Three binds were enough for arenas (arena enemy 1-3). 


Image by DALL-E 2; image hosting by imgbb.com

That would, however, leave one unable to do duels (1v1 test fights outside of arenas) or to hit the focus target (additional target, possible to hit without targetting the opponent, mostly used in the 10v10 Rated Battleground mode). Some skills (Shadowstep as a Rogue) were usable on friendly and enemy targets, bringing it to seven binds for Shadowstep alone. Most Rogues didn’t go to that length and used options like fast binds to move the focus target around. But rogues were members of arena teams mostly because of their control. Using Blind (long cooldown, ranged 8 second control) only to be countered by SW:D was on higher levels a guaranteed loss.

Vishas and I wrote an extensive Rogue guide, detailing the over 100 keybinds (and how to bind them using sophisticated macros with limited characters) needed to play a rogue at maximum potential. The problem was that it was impossible to train the arena 1–3 binds outside of arenas, and so a rogue needed five additional players to simply train their own hotkeys or create training macros to use the binds on NPCs. Both of us never played in a truly great arena team, but were respected within the community for our profound knowledge of the arguably most difficult to master class in World of Warcraft.

For that reason, I abstained from using non-standard binds for SC2 until now. Mizenhauer suggested using Rapid Fire to improve my gameplay. But I suspect where this will lead:  At the least thirty hours of training to simply being able to use something like TheCore, probably a lot more. But “Aiming High” (money well spent by the US DoD) is not avoidable if I, as a diagnosed gross motorist, want to reach the Master rank. Time to turn a real-time game into a spreadsheet game once more.

What would greatly interest me is if there are Random players who use TheCore or something similar. If not, I will have to choose Protoss because it’s the evil race.

Some links about me:

• Tobias Clemens Häcker on YouTube Music
  
• Tobias Clemens Häcker on Facebook (as Franz Bieberkopf)
  
• Tobias Clemens Häcker on LinkedIn
  
• Tobias Clemens Häcker on X (Twitter)
  
• Tobias Clemens Häcker on Reddit
  
• Tobias Clemens Häcker on Instagram (barely used)
  
• Tobias Clemens Häcker on TikTok (using only German so far)

You are welcome.