How do you prefer to do it? I find the weapon wheels to be way too clunky especially when playing games like Doom Eternal.
I’ve been using the back buttons. Regular press for 1 2 3 4 and long press 225ms for 5 6 7 8. For some games a button chord for 9 and 10 but that’s rarely needed.
225 ms delay seems like a sweet spot. It’s short enough to switch guns quickly but long enough to make it different from a regular press.
I think it would be even better to have a proper numpad on the back of the steam deck but that would require some modifications. I think having 6 small back buttons per side is manageable and would greatly enhance FPS games.
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I was fine with Doom Eternal’s weapon wheel, since it slowed down time it gave me time to pick what I needed. If you’re wanting to do quick weapon swapping like some high level players do that obviously won’t cut it though. That said, I had the back buttons already mapped to dash/jump/chainsaw/etc so couldn’t use them for weapons.
One way you could set it up is with control overlays, where you have one button cycle through multiple weapons. So you could have a back button that switches to super shotgun, but with a second press switches to the regular shotgun. Repeat that for the other weapon types with the other back buttons.
You should give radial menus a try. I use one in Dishonored 2 and a different one in Warframe, both on the left trackpad.
In Warframe, the entries send keypresses for the eight numpad numbers corresponding to the direction that I press on the trackpad (bottom left is 1, top is 8, etc), which activate some of the hotkeyed gear items. In Dishonored 2, it just sends a number row keypress in order (first entry is 1, second is 2, etc), which switches the active power or weapon.
In other games, I just use it as a secondary D-pad (usually directional swipe) with a mode shift on one of the back buttons. My ideal setup would be to have an eight-way directional swipe without having to define a radial menu.
Steam Input is great, I just wish the config app was better.
I have tried but find it inconvenient to take my fingers off the thumbstick. Especially with Doom Eternal. It does work well for other games that aren’t so intense.
That’s valid. The only thing I miss from my previous XBone controller was the ability to use the D-pad with my right thumb, or even the middle of my left thumb to an extent. The asymmetric Xbox layout is supreme.
I’m pretty sure you can also combine radial menus with mode shifts. Dishonored 2’s default Deck config has a mode shift bound to L1 (which opens the in-game weapon wheel), which temporarily reassigns the left analog sticks as mouse input while the button is pressed. I’m pretty sure the same could be done with Steam Input’s radial menus too.
hard yes on the full numpad, but i’m also one of those freaks that uses an mmo mouse with 12 buttons on the side
Touchpad menus, left one as a simple click-to-select with a display of a numpad
The grip sensor on the Steam Controller 2026 works really well for this. I’d love to see it implemented on the next iteration of Deck.
