Why these keys and not others, what lives on every page, and how to move any of it. Ten minutes, and the pad stops being somebody else’s idea.
The pad is for the things your hands are not already on.
If you already have a key for it and your fingers already know where that key is, it stays where it is. The pad is for everything else.
That one sentence decides every key on this thing, and it is worth two examples, because the examples are what make it obvious.
It is the cheapest and easiest way into Silvermoon, and on a 15 key or an XL it is on the rail, so it is in front of you on almost every screen.
Here is the part that matters: having it always ready frees up your hearthstone. Your hearth can live where you are actually questing instead of being stuck in a capital. Plenty of players have already worked that out for themselves. This just makes it a key.
On a ring there is no rail to put it on, so it sits on the Travel page and inside the few folders where you would most want it: dungeons, raid, and travel itself.
You already have a mount key. Your hand is already on the keyboard. Taking it off the keyboard, moving it to the pad, pressing a key and putting it back is slower than what you already do.
It is about as useful as putting walk forward on a Stream Deck.
So the pad fills up with the other kind of thing. Commands too long to type mid-session. Things you would never give up a keybind for but need three times an evening. Whole sequences that are really one decision. The work you do between the fights.
And that is where the name comes from. Your action bars are for fighting. Everything else comes off the bar.
Seventy-six pages, and you reach all of them from one screen. Home has eight doors on it. That is the whole map.
This is the folder people ask about, so here it is plainly. Behind City you will find Downtime, and on it: your ground mount, your flying mount, mount special, and your wardrobe.
Not your everyday mount. The fun one. The specific mount and the specific outfit you pull out when you are standing around outside a dungeon, or messing about with friends, or doing a bit of roleplay, or just being silly. Those are not things you want taking up a slot on an action bar anywhere. They are things you want to reach into a toybox for.
The two mount keys ship blank on purpose, with the art and the name but no command, because there are thousands of mounts and none of them are ours to pick. The Pad Builder writes your two in for you, or you type them yourself. A blank key stays blank rather than typing something broken.
On a 15 key, every page has a Field Kit behind key 12, and every Field Kit holds the same things: your four spec swaps, ready check, pull, reload, cancel, and your hearthstone. It is there so that going one level down never costs you the keys you use most.
The bigger and smaller pads solve that differently, because the Field Kit is an answer to a problem only the 15 key has:
Some keys sit in the same place on every screen so your thumb finds them without your eyes. A page may leave one of these out. No page ever puts one somewhere else.
Every number on this page is a 15 key example. The idea is the same on every pad, but a 6 key and a 32 key plainly do not number their seats the same way, so do not go hunting for key 13 on a six key. What your pad does is at the bottom of this section.
| Key | What | Why it is nailed down |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Back | Up one level, from anywhere, always. |
| 11 | Mute | The one key you press without looking, usually in a hurry. |
| 12 | Field Kit | Spec swaps and the group keys, one press from wherever you are. |
| 13 | Arcantina | Always ready, so your hearth does not have to be a city. |
Still on a 15 key, inside the pages you actually sit on while playing, four more: ready check on 4, pull on 5, reload on 6, cancel on 10. Reload is on every working page because the game’s own windows wedge sometimes, and it is worse when you are the one running the group.
| Your pad | What never moves |
|---|---|
| 15 key Pro and Lite |
Back 1, Mute 11, Field Kit 12, Arcantina 13. Ready check 4, pull 5, reload 6, cancel 10 on the pages you sit on. |
| XL 32 keys |
The whole rail, on every page at once. Back, ready check, pull, cancel, reload, mute, hearthstone, Arcantina and all four spec slots. Nothing is behind a folder because nothing needs to be. |
| Ring 8 keys |
Mute holds the bottom right seat on every ring page. Your two page keys are physical buttons on the deck itself, so no key is spent on arrows and you get seven content keys a page instead of three. Inside a folder, the whole left column is how you move: Back on top, and the key directly under it goes deeper when the folder has more than one page. |
| Ring 6 keys |
Three content keys on top, and Previous, Mute, Next along the bottom. Mute is the middle one, every time. Inside a folder the arrows go away and the left column becomes how you move: Back top left, and bottom left digs deeper into that folder when there is more than one page of it. If the folder fits on one page, bottom left is just another key. |
Different seats, same promise: the key you reach for without looking is where it was last time.
Six keys is not a small pad, it is a different pad. Rather than folders inside folders, the top level is a loop you roll through, and folders hang off it. Here is the whole idea, both screens you will ever be looking at:
So on either ring there are only ever two questions: am I on the loop, or in a folder? On the loop you move sideways. In a folder, the left column moves you in and out. Everything else is content.
The layout we ship is a starting point, not a cage. Two things follow from that and both are deliberate.
They are not pages we ran out of time on. They are where your keys go. A pad with visible room on the front is an invitation; a pad with every slot filled is somebody else’s idea of your evening.
Upload your profile to the Pad Builder and you can walk the whole pad with your own icons in front of you. Change a title, change what a key types, swap its art, clear it, drag one key onto another to swap them, cut a key on one page and paste it on another. Folders move with everything inside them.
If you try to move something that will break navigation, you get told once and then it does what you asked. You own the pad.
Open the Pad Builder Browse every command
The same content fits whatever you own, and the shape changes with the size rather than just getting smaller.
| Pad | Shape | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| 15 keys | Full pad | The layout everything else is measured against. |
| 32 keys | XL | Most of the pad is one press deep instead of two. |
| 8 keys | Ring | Pages you roll through. Built for a Neo, whose two touch points turn the pages. |
| 6 keys | Ring | Three keys and previous, mute, next. On six keys the navigation is the design. |
There are two editions, Lite at 51 pages and Pro at 76. Both are free and both are full featured. The difference is size, not capability, and nothing is held back to sell you an upgrade, because there is nothing to sell.
The pad types into whatever has focus, exactly as if you typed it yourself, so those three head off almost every handshake problem before it happens.
Do not lean on the pad during a pull. Chat is chat. If the game is busy the line can miss, and a missed kick is a wipe. Callouts are the exception, because a wipe call is a lot of words you want out fast and that is a moment you are already standing still.
No. Every key types one line into the chat box, exactly as if you typed it yourself. Nothing is automated, nothing reads your game client, and nothing installs on your computer. You import a profile with Elgato’s own software, the same as any other profile.
If you favour a toy version, tell the key which one. Change its text to
/use Cosmic Hearthstone, or whichever one you have, and it will
use that. The Pad Builder can set this for you.
The commands are plain slash commands, so they keep working as long as the spells and items in them are still in the game. When a season changes the things that changed get updated here, and you can rebuild your pad from the Pad Builder with your own layout carried across.
Nothing. No account, no payment, nothing held back. If you want to support it there is a page for that, and supporting changes nothing about what you get.
Because your hand is already on the keyboard. See the rule. The mounts that are on the pad are the toybox ones, on Downtime, for standing around.
Welcome to our library.
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