Problem with #5 as a hotkey?

So my necromancer is using Staff and Dagger on its weapon sets, both the #5 skills for these weapons are ground targets.

I am able to use #5 as a hotkey normally while I'm standing still, but as soon as I start moving the game will not allow me to use #5 as a hotkey. It still lets me use the ability if I manually click on it while moving however. But I do not want to have to click the #5 skill my bar in the middle of combat just because I am trying to use a weapon ability while I happen to be walking, and I certainly do not want to stand still just to make the hotkey work.

All of my other weapon abilities are working normally, only #5 seems to not work as a button during movement.

I did not change any hotkey bindings, and I checked just to make sure nothing was different. How can I get my #5 weapon skill hotkey to work during movement again?

Edit: Holding "W" or "S" seems to be what is stopping "5" from doing anything.

That sounds like an issue with your keyboard. Maybe some key combinations are restricted to make the production cheaper. Check whether the combination W+5 works in other games/applications.That said, personally, I find 5 to 0 keys hard to use anyway; I think there's nothing wrong with changing your control scheme if the default one is annoying (my weapon 5 skill is actually Z, lol).

What @"Airdive.2613" said. A PC keyboard is a little computer in its own right, with CPU, memory, and I/O devices, although it can't be used for offloading computation (and it wouldn't be worth doing anyway, because the CPU in there (call it the "kCPU") is really, really feeble by modern standards). The kCPU talks and listens to the key array, and reports back to the PC what it heard. If the key array is laid out correctly, the kCPU can distinguish all key combinations, but historically, the key array was a grid, and if there was a route through the grid opened by three keys, you could end up with the kCPU thinking that a fourth was also pressed, and so on. Arranging the grid with all the keyswitches in one row and one column per keyswitch will relieve that, but it evidently(1) costs more, so only good gaming keyboards do it. (I say "gaming" keyboards because in general only gamers really need that level of combo detection..)

(1) If the cost was zero, all keyboards would do it. They don't, therefore the cost is not zero.

@Airdive.2613 said:That sounds like an issue with your keyboard. Maybe some key combinations are restricted to make the production cheaper. Check whether the combination W+5 works in other games/applications.That said, personally, I find 5 to 0 keys hard to use anyway; I think there's nothing wrong with changing your control scheme if the default one is annoying (my weapon 5 skill is actually Z, lol).

That's odd, cause I've been using this same keyboard for about 4 years and this problem just started today

@Klipso.8653 said:

@Airdive.2613 said:That sounds like an issue with your keyboard. Maybe some key combinations are restricted to make the production cheaper. Check whether the combination W+5 works in other games/applications.That said, personally, I find 5 to 0 keys hard to use anyway; I think there's nothing wrong with changing your control scheme if the default one is annoying (my weapon 5 skill is actually Z, lol).

Well your keyboard probabely are tierd after 4 years time to let it get its pension and buy a new one.

As an experiment, you can try binding an additional key to serve as the 5, maybe 'F6' since it's nearby (but really, any unused key will do). Then see if you can use the alt key in the desired (and previously successful) manner. If yes, then, alas, poor keyboard, we knew him, Horatio. If not, then it might be some other setting or something that you just started doing (that you don't notice).

@Klipso.8653 said:

@Airdive.2613 said:That sounds like an issue with your keyboard. Maybe some key combinations are restricted to make the production cheaper. Check whether the combination W+5 works in other games/applications.That said, personally, I find 5 to 0 keys hard to use anyway; I think there's nothing wrong with changing your control scheme if the default one is annoying (my weapon 5 skill is actually Z, lol).

Nothing last forever ...

I've also had the exact opposite thing happen. Got a new keyboard with a key that had a key that didn't work correctly. Took it apart to see if there was anything I could do the fix it. Found that there was nothing I could do so I put it back together. It's been working fine for years now ... despite the fact that the only thing I did was take it apart and put it back together.

@"Khisanth.2948" said:I've also had the exact opposite thing happen. Got a new keyboard with a key that had a key that didn't work correctly. Took it apart to see if there was anything I could do the fix it. Found that there was nothing I could do so I put it back together. It's been working fine for years now ... despite the fact that the only thing I did was take it apart and put it back together.

That is both my favorite sort of fix and the kind that infuriates me the most. With a lot of things technical (and mechanical), sometimes it's something minor that is hard to find/see and taking it apart shakes whatever it is loose or away or ... whatever.

For a time, I used to do volunteer tech support near the local university. People would come in with their term papers and thesis projects stuck on a hard drive they couldn't access (back before the cloud). And more often than reasonable-to-expect, the problem was eliminated by "re-seating," i.e. opening up the computer, disconnecting the drive, and reconnecting. Unfortunately, being a college town, that didn't satisfy people; they wanted to know why it broke, why this simplistic solution worked. And of course, there is no clear answer.

So I changed my approach. Just before turning the machine back on, I held up a copy of a big technical manual in the air with my right hand, placed my left on the computer, and shouted...

Demons! Begone from our brother's silicon chips! Your spirits are not welcome here.

After that, no one ever asked me again why it worked. They just thanked me.And then took off. (Sometimes very quickly, sometimes very slowly, backing up and out the door.)

at times it is good to use some compressed air to blow out your keyboard, mine is over 6 years old and works like a charm.

I would go through a cheap $15 keyboard every 18 months or so. GW2 is harsh. Haven't had any issues since upgrading and buying a Logitech gaming keyboard. Seems better designed for the pounding.

My G10 Keyboard (bought at release) lasted up until about 2 years ago. It only broke because it was passed down to my sons, who are notoriously brutal on accessories like that. Lol.I'm still using my Logitech Mouse; it must be 12+ years old.
Gotta love quality devices.

Change the default key binds. Or get a MMO mouse with 12 thumb buttons. I honestly couldn't play MMOs anymore with a normal mouse. Got both the Razor Naga and the Logitech G600. Both are pretty the same. The Logitech is better if you have bigger hands.

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:For a time, I used to do volunteer tech support near the local university. People would come in with their term papers and thesis projects stuck on a hard drive they couldn't access (back before the cloud). And more often than reasonable-to-expect, the problem was eliminated by "re-seating," i.e. opening up the computer, disconnecting the drive, and reconnecting. Unfortunately, being a college town, that didn't satisfy people; they wanted to know why it broke, why this simplistic solution worked. And of course, there is no clear answer.

Sure there is, and it goes something like this:

There are lots of vibrating parts inside a PC, fans, the shiny-biscuit drive(1), [in the days when it was relevant] the floppy drive, even the hard disk itself, and over time those vibrations can work together with the weight of the cables to loosen them just enough for the connection to be flaky. I reconnected everything, so all those connections are now working well.

(1) CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or Blu-Ray, they are all shiny-biscuit drives, and they are one of the biggest sources of heavy vibrations since hard disks are normally correctly balanced to not have significant vibrations.

Actually, @Steve The Cynic.3217, I started with that possibility. (Additionally: people working under deadline mash their keyboards and bang their desktop; that can also put connectors out of whack, especially if they were flaky to start with.) And no, that didn't work. (Just once, if I recall correctly.)

The issue for people isn't so much that they wanted to know what happened this time. It's more that people nearly lost their (at the time) life's work and it scared them. They feared it could happen again and they wanted to know what price they could pay to avoid going through that twice. In other cases (after speaking to folks about their reactions), it turned that they hated the idea that something so mundane could cause such heartbreak. For them, the near disaster was epic; they expected an epic explanation.

Or more simply: sometimes accurate explanations don't satisfy our human nature.

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:Or more simply: sometimes accurate explanations don't satisfy our human nature.

For sure, but your statement was that there was no clear answer. If you'd said that there was no satisfactory answer, I'd have agreed, for pretty much the reasons you cited. And of course the price to pay is the trivial inconvenience of (shock! horror!) making backups of that life's work...

For what it's worth, for a while in 2001-2002 or so, when we lived in Oxford (on the "Town" side of the "Town versus Gown" divide(1), thanks), my late wife was doing some personal research in the Bodleian Library. So there she is, surrounded by a bunch of students who were, in theory, the best and brightest that British (and other) secondary school education could provide, and many of them have their laptops with them. So far, so good, except that she got roped into helping more than one, and not one of them had the faintest clue or comprehension of how they would go about making backups, nor even why they should do such a thing, despite having the same kind of panicky reaction to their computer's response to having coffee, or worse, Coca Cola or orange juice, spilled on the keyboard...

(1) There are ordinary folk who live in Oxford with no links to the university. They are the "Town" side. The students, professors, and so on at the various bits of the university are the "Gown" (from the academic "gowns" that infest university graduation ceremonies everywhere) side. There is a certain ... tension, shall we say, between the two sides, in part because the university's buildings occupy about two-thirds of the city centre, and the university gets a wide range of special treatment, while the university people tend to think of the ordinary folk as a blight on their beautiful university. To be sure, a similar tension exists in every university town, but it seems worse than usual in Oxford, although I guess it's much the same in Cambridge.

@Steve The Cynic.3217 said:

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:Or more simply: sometimes accurate explanations don't satisfy our human nature.

Still, the point is that the answer wasn't clear for the client, even if it's clear enough for you or I. To them, it could have been any of a number of things, including vibrating drives. But because we (mostly: I) couldn't recreate it, it wasn't definitive.

With stats or economics, for example, a lot of times there's a clear answer that some won't understand (sometimes the fault of the explainer, sometimes it's just confusing). In this case, there are lots of possible explanations, but nothing we can say with certainty. Nothing that helps the person decide, "if I do this, then the problem will recur and if I do that, it won't."

With a vending machine, people accept that you can just kick it to release the candy bar or soda that got stuck. Computers then (and even now) are still kind of magic for a lot of folks and they don't for a minute believe it could be something so mundane as cooking up some bad vibrations... especially when I couldn't point to which part of the innards was at fault. I seriously had someone remain 15 minutes trying to find out from us what specifically went wrong and why reseating worked. And they would have kept at it, if there wasn't already a line of others.

And in the end, the demonic possession explanation worked better. The client didn't believe that one either, but... maybe... well computers are sort of weird, aren't they? Plus, what can you really ask after tech support literally lays hands?

And of course the price to pay is the trivial inconvenience of (shock! horror!) making backups of that life's work...I'd like to say that people took it as a learning experience and backed things up. But... we had some repeat clients. And (embarrassingly) we even had someone on our volunteer team who had to bring in their own computer for the treatment.

For what it's worth, for a while in 2001-2002 or so, when we lived in Oxford (on the "Town" side of the "Town versus Gown" divide(1), thanks), my late wife was doing some personal research in the Bodleian Library. So there she is, surrounded by a bunch of students who were, in theory, the best and brightest that British (and other) secondary school education could provide, and many of them have their laptops with them. So far, so good, except that she got roped into helping more than one, and not one of them had the faintest clue or comprehension of how they would go about making backups, nor even why they should do such a thing, despite having the same kind of panicky reaction to their computer's response to having coffee, or worse, Coca Cola or orange juice, spilled on the keyboard...Yup, this was parallel. Not "Oxford" (or even Cambridge). Being smart at school stuff doesn't mean one is smart.