The other day I received a Belkin n52te in the mail. I man­aged to find it used at a good price and decided to go for it.

For those unfa­mil­iar, the n52te is a gam­ing con­troller. It’s goal is, really, to replace a key­board with a sim­pler, single-handed device. Its design empha­sizes speed and its soft­ware, I feel, empha­sizes macro use. Its lay­out fol­lows the cou­tour of a human hand, although your mileage may vary there depend­ing on the size of your own hands.

So why get this device? The most hon­est response is that I felt it looked inter­est­ing. I fig­ured there was lit­tle risk to boot. If I dis­liked it, I could sell it on eBay with­out a loss. The other rea­son was for LotRO, which as of late is  the only game I play reg­u­larly on my com­puter beyond Spelunky.

Most MMORPGs force you to fill your screen with icons and LotRO is not rein­vent­ing the wheel in that regard. I don’t have any sig­nif­i­cant trou­ble with this, but I’d be lying if I said it was intu­itive. I mem­o­rize my key lay­outs even­tu­ally, but I find myself jump­ing between mouse and key­board selec­tion for the same skills. When you have skills on screen requir­ing you to jump between ctrl+shift+1 and ctrl+shift+0, it’s sim­ply not pos­si­ble to do any­thing with­out mov­ing your hand from the mouse to the key­board and back again. The whole process just seemed silly to me.

I thought with the n52te that, per­haps, I could cre­ate a key lay­out that I felt was more intu­itive. Instead of press­ing ctrl+shift+1 to acti­vate an abil­ity, I could press a sin­gle but­ton. Instead of press­ing tab to cycle through ene­mies, I could roll up on the scroll wheel.

Once you have the n52te installed, com­ing up with how you’d like to lay­out your con­trol sys­tem is a job in and of itself. This is largely because it’s going to take some time to fig­ure out what makes the most sense to you. I decided very early on that I wanted my abil­ity icons onscreen to mimic the lay­out of the n52te itself.  This meant turn­ing on all of the quick slot bars in LotRO’s options, mak­ing sure all of them were assigned key presses in the game and mov­ing them around (alt+\ allows you to do this) to match its key lay­out while still allow­ing me to have access to as many abil­i­ties as possible.

The n52te lets you cycle through three dif­fer­ent key maps at the press of a but­ton. They are iden­ti­fied by a series of lights on the lower-right hand of the unit that are col­ored blue, red and green. With my Rune-keeper, I decided to group my skills into three sets because of this. I thought healing/support skills would best be iden­ti­fied by green, attacks by red and any­thing else by blue. You can see my thought process in the fol­low­ing image:

The idea here is when I switch to the blue light on the n52te, the but­tons will access what I have out­lined in blue on the left. I can quickly switch between the three when­ever the sit­u­a­tion demands it.You can see the actual key­strokes I’d have to make on a key­board in the left-half of the image. I don’t have to really get into why press­ing 05 on the n52te is eas­ier than press­ing ctrl+shift+2. I dou­bled up Shock­ing Touch  (the yel­low hand icon) just because I find it use­ful in both situations.

So what about the rest of the device? Well, I made the joy­stick (actu­ally a dig­i­tal direc­tional pad with a cap on top) con­trol my character’s walk­ing direc­tion. The round but­ton above that acti­vates auto-walk (also known as num­lock!). But­ton 15 (the one directly beneath the stick cycles through my three key maps. The scroll wheel has three func­tions: press­ing it like a but­ton ini­ti­ates attack (which I rarely have to use, as my in-game set­tings have me auto­mat­i­cally attack a tar­get when using attack abil­i­ties); scrolling it up cycles through nearby ene­mies; and scrolling it down cycles through nearby Fel­low­ship members.

I’ve been happy with the results. It takes some get­ting used to the basic idea, but I’ve mem­o­rized the key lay­outs more quickly than I have on a nor­mal key­board. Hav­ing the on-screen icons match up to the key lay­out makes this a snap. I love that I can quickly cycle through friends and ene­mies and do what’s needed of me quickly. It still leaves the mouse open for other things as needed too.

The soft­ware allows you to make mul­ti­ple pro­files as well. You can have these load up with a spe­cific exe­cutable if you wish, or you can turn them on man­u­ally. This means you can have a lay­out pro­grammed for each of your char­ac­ters if you wish. It also means you can eas­ily shift between a FPS and a MMORPG.

Macros are eas­ily pro­grammed and the soft­ware allows for ones far more com­plex than what I’ve detailed thus far. You can include pauses between keys if you wish, allow­ing you to cre­ate a chain of skills under a sin­gle but­ton press. This isn’t some­thing I felt I needed for LotRO, par­tic­u­larly as I find my needs in each bat­tle to be different.

There are other sim­i­lar devices out there and all have their ups and downs. Log­itech recently released the more expen­sive G13 unit, com­plete with its own LCD screen. Belkin also has the pre­de­ces­sor to this unit, the n52. It lacks the back light and foot grips of the n52te, but many claim it has supe­rior soft­ware (on the n52te, this is a bit of a down­side: the soft­ware works and I was able to pro­gram it eas­ily, but it has some nag­ging issues that could def­i­nitely be improved). The orig­i­nal n52 also has the added ben­e­fit of being ridicu­lously cheap on eBay at times.

Should you run out any buy one of these? It’s dif­fi­cult to say. I’m happy with it, but I also watched sev­eral videos of it in action, read reviews and browsed forums before mak­ing my deci­sion. Research your pur­chases! I imag­ine the n52te will appeal to many peo­ple, but I also imag­ine that most are totally fine with their cur­rent key­boards.

Related posts

• Runekeeper Rumination: Volume 1 (5)
• Rune-keeper Rumination: Volume 3 (2)
• Your Current Thoughts on Quest Guide and Self-Rez? (17)
• Why LotRO?: Story, Lore and Those Less Fanatic (2)
• Why LotRO: Questing Annoyances! (3)