The many and myriad functions of the ESC key...

This has been bugging me for years and my search fu is weak (seems that ESC isn't a good term to need to search for!)

ESC, by default does a pair of things. It does /unselect, clearing your target. It also moves you out of your combat stance and puts away any weapon you have drawn like Claws or a Gun, etc.

Is it at all possible to clear that second functionality from the key? I got rather used to hitting ESC to clear my target then tapping a key twice to target the nearest target and fire a power. On weapon sets this means I will put away my weapon, then draw it again, then fire the attack, generally causing delays and/or rooting animations and looking generally funky and being annoying.

For the time being I try to remember not to hit ESC more than once on any weapon toons but sometimes lag and responsiveness cause hiccups. Also working on using the ` key for /unselect specifically but 7+ years of habits are hard to break!

I've tried /unbind and /bind'ing ESC to other things but it seems to retain the "unready" ability. I also tried some applications to swap the ESC key with another key (f12) and bind f12 to /unselect but this is not very on the fly in windows, requiring a log out and log in to take effect.

Programs that claim to be able to change a key on the fly seem to work, kind of, in that they switch the key to something else in windows but CoH seems to stubbornly hang on to the functionality. Perhaps through DirectInput or something, I'm not sure how.

I'm betting dollars to doughnuts, though, that I'll be told ESC "unready" can't be changed. Am I right Player Help forumites?

Thanks in advance.

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You can bind something to the key. I use

ESC "unselect$$targetcustomnear enemy alive"

to get it to target the nearest enemy. You could try just using the unselect part. But I don't think that will help you much with your redraw problem. Any time you haven't selected an enemy, you could put your weapons away, it just depends on how the signals pass back and forth between the server and your client. I have had to redraw in the middle of a fight when I hit an attack key after one mob dies. Other times it just switches over without doing a redraw.

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Justice Blues, Tech/Tank, Inv/SS
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Fighting The Future Trilogy
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Thanks! I'll give that another shot but I have actually already tried binding ESC to /unselect. ESC used to be that by default, actually, and I bind it to that on any new character I make.

Some forum searching has lead me to believe this may not really be fixable without some of the sillier workarounds I've found like literally changing the ESC key at the keyboard/windows level. Anyone else want to give this a shot or at least confirm my suspicions?

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