In games that don’t have good auto-save (like Skyrim), I’ll map one of the back buttons to quick save.

Some games have button layouts that make certain actions a pain. Two examples.

Horizon Zero Dawn - Healing is by default done by hitting dpad up. You generally want to press this button whenever you take damage to essentially trigger health regen, but doing so requires taking your thumb off the left stick, which means you can’t simultaneously avoid even more damage. Bind to back button, problem solved.

BallisticNG - Weapons are bound to X, discard weapons is bound to B, and accelerate is on A. So when you pick up a weapon, to discard/use it you either have to drop thrust (bad, never do that) or awkwardly shimmy your thumb to either hit X or B without letting go of A. Bind X and B to back buttons, problems solved.

In games where combat uses the bumpers a lot I bind the back buttons to that. For the rest of the games it depends on the what I find annoying to do repeatedly and end up mapping that to a back paddle.

For example on Breath of the Wild the back paddle was run which allowed me to run with one hand.

I use the back buttons in Deep Rock Galactic to mirror the A B X Y functions. This allows me to jump for instance without taking my right thumb off of the stick. I have found this is super useful as I can be steering my POV while jumping. Took a minute to get used to but now I absolutely love it.

Rock and Stone, miners!

I’ve only use them for emulation so far, to load & save states, also for fast forwarding on the psx and 3ds to take the grind out of rpgs

Often as a lazier way to press the face buttons for slow games. But also custom turbo patterns for fast games. E.g.:

• In Genshin Impact, the back buttons are all face buttons, but with select ones set to turbo for automatic item pickup, or dialog skipping, etc.
  • Also very comfy to use them while swimming
• In Hades II:
  • L/R4 are the two shoulder buttons for comfier portal/character interaction
  • L/R5 do autoattack and autospecial on turbo
• In Valheim, one lets me Dodge with a single button press instead of the chord the game demands you use
• In Balatro
  • L/R4 switches hand sorting modes, which has no in-game shortcuts, still
  • L5 restarts a run on long press
  • R5 quits to main menu and resumes with a multi button sequence, to “soft reset”
• In Tabletop Simulator, the most common actions like clicking, selecting, flipping a card, and drawing, are all mapped to the back buttons for ergonomics, freeing face/shoulder buttons for more advanced stuff
• In Minecraft, various back buttons are used to enable different overlaid controls when clicked/pressed based on the modpack.

Etc etc!

When I’m going from my desktop to the deck I miss being able to do things like press I for inventory or M for map, things like that. So usually I set them up to replace those little shortcuts to get me though games that need me to flick about a few menus to get to them.

My default move is to map the L3 and R3 clicks to two of them. (I even unmap the actual stick clicks sometimes because I click them by accident a lot.)

I also find it useful in games where the situation changes and A B X & Y completely change what they do. Like if a game is mostly exploring but sometimes in a car/plane/spaceship/whatever, I’ll map the back buttons and use them when I’m in the secondary situation. (There’s lots of other examples of games that temporarily switch genres on you here and there and using the back buttons helps me remember the controls.)

YMMV, I treat it on demand, but in most cases it’s unused.

Civ: End turn

Driving games: Shift paddle

It’s like the 4th mouse button. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you might enjoy having it mapped.

It varies per game, but my most common use is to replace the thumbstick clicks. I don’t like how it feels to click in the thumb sticks, feels like I’m adding extra wear and tear to them.

In first person games, I’ll often bind jump, sprint, reload, and melee to the back buttons so I can move and aim while performing those actions.

I mostly play modded minecraft on my deck, and they’re really handy for modifier keys or macros that you need to keep active while pressing something else using the front controls

Almost nothing. I don’t like how loud they are.

Nothing yet but this thread is giving me ideas :)

Fast forward in emulators. Also, the menu toggle in Retro Arch.

In Dungeons of Dredmor, an old mouse and KB roguelike, the community made a good layout where every button is mapped to a keyboard key to open the various inventory and crafting windows, etc. With the track pad right there to act as a mouse, it’s honestly just as good as a mouse and KB. Maybe even better.

R5 is always dodge, B/circle, mostly so I don’t have to claw grip. Rest depend on the game, but usually some mix of face buttons so I can keep thumbs on the sticks while picking up items or changing weapons/items/spells etc, and sometimes with a “hold to use” added in for the same reason.