It’s a subtle difference, but if you’re a mechanical keyboard user like me, it’s there. ![]() Razer These keys aren’t mechanical, and that’s to be expected given the Tartarus’ low price, but it’s still kind of a bummer.Ī smaller nitpick that most userse won’t notice: the Tartarus also lacks the Orbweaver’s mechanical keys. It was the only way I could access enough buttons to open my bags, hop on my mount, or chat with my friends without any difficulty. With just 3 rows of buttons on the keypad, I found myself constantly gravitating back to my traditional keyboard every time I was out of combat. Instead of just lopping off the right half of the keyboard, the Tartarus goes one step further and effectively does away with the 1-5 keys to boot. Even with access to the Orbweaver’s 20 keys, Nate had trouble mapping all the things he needed. All of his critiques apply here as well, and they’re exacerbated by the Tartarus’ comparative lack of features. My colleague Nate Ralph reviewed the Higher-End Razer Orbweaver earlier this year and came away feeling it too was a solid, if unnecessary, addition to Razer’s line-up of gaming peripherals. Worse, there was no way I could find to use the addon to map buttons to basic WoW functions like, say, opening up menus, so I ended up needing to exit out of the program and configure with Synapse directly anyway. There was no option I could find to turn off only part of the add-on’s display, so I was stuck looking at the useless bottom half of the overlay. Once I had that working I learned that the Tartarus’ WoW addon user interface wasn’t particularly customizable. There’s a Tartarus addon for WoW, but it’s not very useful or attractive at this point. It doesn’t play that nicely with other WoW addons, and it took me ten minutes to figure out I had to turn off another user interface element to even find the configuration button. Besides it being an awkward play-style to adjust to (where did I put my taunt again? Oh right, it’s thumbstick down + key 9), the WoW Tartarus addon simply isn’t very good. This alternate keybind configuration didn’t really help matters though. Doing so taught me a few things about how Razer envisions players using the Tartarus most importantly, Razer actually wants you to use the middle six buttons for movement, just like a regular keyboard configuration, and then use the thumbpad to swap between four key configurations on the fly, letting you multiply the 9 remaining buttons to 36 potential commands. This lets you customize your keybinds in-game rather than swapping back and forth from Synapse to WoW which, in theory, should speed things up. Since the Tartarus is a little bit outside of my gaming hardware comfort zone I tried to make the learning process easier by using Razer’s Tartarus WoW addon. ![]() If that sounds a little intimidating, it is the customization options can get confusing, and it takes time to learn to use them properly. The app is flashier than it needs to be but highly customizable- letting you bind any key to a macro and letting those macros and keybinds talk to other Razer products so that you could, for example, press a key on your Razer mouse and swap key configurations on your Tartarus. ![]() If you’ve ever used a Razer product in the past you’re probably already familiar with Synapse’s pros and cons. Razer might argue that the ability to program the Tartarus makes up for its lack of keys, and in a sense they would be right: configuration options abound as the Tartarus, like most Razer products, is customizable with Razer’s Synapse software. These tests helped me understand that, in addition to having to relearn how to use my keybinds, using the Tartarus requires me to accept a net loss in the number of keys I have access to. I went back and forth between playing games with and without the Tartarus, realizing that I could actually reach more keys by focusing on just a traditional keyboard and mouse control scheme. The problem with that plan, besides how awkward it is to adjust to steering my MMORPG characters with my thumb, is that it leaves only 15 keys within easy reach of my hands. When I first set up the Tartarus I thought the thumbpad and extra keys would be useful as a means of controlling my character’s movement in games like Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft, essentially freeing up my Q, W, E, A, S, D keys and the space bar to be bound to something else. The best way to configure the thumbpad’s eight directions is to set each one up as a “toggle” that changes the bindings on the other keys.
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