Believe it or not, the Fragpedal can handle all game genres. This is the first tactical RPG to be covered on Good Work Matters. Dragon Age: Origins has a ton of configurable hotkeys on the 0-9 keys and the F1-F4 keys. Justin, a member of the GWS Innovation Squad, created this profile for Dragon Age: Origins. He plays entirely too much of this game, so he knows what he’s talking about. Here he is:

Configuration #1 – Swap Weapons & Hot Routes

Playing any of the three classes in Dragon Age often requires that you use two weapon sets, each with distinct abilities.  Unfortunately, the good folks at Bioware decided to use the ‘/’ key to switch between these sets. ‘/’ is awkwardly far from the wasd keys, and it’s tough to hit in battle.

Mapping ‘/’ to the footpedals instantly makes managing any archer or arcane warrior much simpler and more effective.  This will cut down on casting time and prevent you from taking damage from the on-coming rush of baddies. Quarterbacks only get three-to-five seconds to make their pass, so they use pre-determined routes and look to their favorite receivers first. With the ‘/’ key bound to the leftmost foot pedal, you too can place your “go to” commands on the three other pedals.

Here are a few hot routes I use for a party composed of a mage, rogue, and warrior.

All of these abilities are designed to manipulate your enemies and give you time to regroup and reassess your potion.  This is primarily a defensive setup and should be used to catch your breath when you realize that you need to regroup and stop enemies from attacking a weaker character.

Configuration #2 – Battle Quickstart

When you enter a battle in Dragon Age, there’s an initial round of actions that you want each of your characters to execute as quickly as possible. This configuration helps you get into battling shape quickly. Ideally, you want to distract enemies away from your mage and rogue and direct their firepower towards your tank. Protect your fragile assets and absorb the shock where you are the toughest. I assigned the best initial command for each of my characters here.

This is how I start most battles. With this Fragpedal set up, the pedals reduce the time to get battle-ready and also distract enemies from your mages/rogues ASAP. Place the best ability to cast at the beginning of every battle to button 4, the leftmost button. Below, you can see how I use this:

Dragon Age is heavy on tactics and requires a lot of rapid, micro-management commands. So moving the character and action hotkeys to the foot pedals has helped me stay in the pace of the game a lot! I have a few ideas for how to make these configurations even better, that other gamers might want to take up or I will work on soon. You could get a lot more out of the footpedals if you use Timed Press macros, so that different commands could be triggered by the same button, depending on a tap / brief hold / long hold.

I would recommend using Timed Press macros so that buttons 1 and 2 could select your 4 characters (F1-F4) independently,  and the other two buttons could select 6 hotkeys. The character-select pedals would use binary timed presses, so that if you hold the pedal down for longer than 1/4 of a second, it would select a different character than a tap would. For the action-hotkey pedals, I would use a three-layer Timed Press macro. For example, I would set the maximum time on the tap to 150milliseconds, the brief hold to 500milliseconds, and holding the key longer than that would execute the 3rd-layer command.