Overview
Describes the use of a third-party program to address Dark Souls II’s notorious mouse lag.
Introductory
For some reason, the PC version of Dark Souls II suffers severe lag when clicking with the mouse. It seems to be different for each user, but for me it is at least half a second. Even this short delay makes the game more or less unplayable, as Dark Souls II punishes repeated deaths much more heavily than the original Dark Souls.
Dark Souls II also has keys on the keyboard to perform attacks, which respond much more quickly. Thus, the solution is to get a hotkey program that “replaces” your mouse clicks with those keys.
This guide assumes you want to perform normal attacks / blocks with normal clicks, and power attacks / parries with shift-clicks (or anything other than a normal click.) This is because Dark Souls II has different keyboard inputs for normal and power attacks.
This guide also assumes you want the left click (H key) to be your right hand, which is the opposite of Dark Souls II’s default. You can adjust this either by switching the relevant keymap in Dark Souls II’s ingame settings, or by switching them in the script for the hotkey program.
Installing AutoHotkey
If you’ve already got this program, you can skip the rest of this section.
The program I’m using when playing Dark Souls II is AutoHotkey, which has moved around a bit and, as of writing this guide, was found here: [link]
When you install it, it will create a script in your My Documents folder called AutoHotkey.ahk, and should open it in Notepad. Later you can find it and tell your PC to open it with your text editor of choice.
AutoHotkey.ahk will be loaded automatically when you run AutoHotkey, but all other AHK files must be ‘opened’ with AutoHotkey the way you’d open text in Notepad or their scripts won’t work.
AutoHotkey,ahk will have some default hotkeys listed to show you how it works. Remove those, as they will be mostly useless to you, and see the next section for the script I’m using.
Script
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16620670/dsii/Dark%20Souls%20II.ahk
AHK files can be opened and edited in any plaintext editor. Either copy the contents of this file into your existing AutoHotkey.ahk, or save it anywhere and run it manually through AutoHotkey when you want to play Dark Souls II.
The hotkeys defined will only function while “DARK SOULS II” is the active window, so your mouse should work just fine everywhere else.
Because my Dropbox bandwidth may be limited, feel free to share this around, but please leave it / the credits up top intact so folks know where you got it from.
Adjusting to script ninjaing
This AutoHotkey script intercepts mouseclicks and doesn’t send them to Dark Souls II, so none of DSII’s click functions (including Ctrl+Click) will work, except for mousewheel functions.
This is fine by me because I don’t want accidents between attacking and not-attacking while talking to NPC’s, but this means you will need to assign those functions to convenient keyboard locations.
Due to conflicting influences from TF2 / L4D / Skyrim / Borderlands, my keymap has been set like so. You can change this to whatever works for you, of course.
WASD – Move
ARROW KEYS – Swap stuff (mousewheel still works for items and spells)
Q – Use item
E – Interact, Confirm
TAB – Cancel
1 – Toggle Always Walk
2 – Toggle Always Run
3 – Toggle Always Block
B – Menu Option 1
N – Toggle Two-Handed, Menu Option 2
CTRL+WHEELCLICK still works to toggle two-handed