You used to be able to hold ALT, and your mouse would unlock and you could mouse over your abilities and read about them. You could also ping the map to communicate with teammates with ALT. You can still hold ALT and press the number keys to upgrade your abilities, but ALT doesn't let you mouse over stuff anymore. You can still unstick the mouse with TAB, but that brings up the whole scoreboard UI. Why did Valve straight up remove a functionality from the game?
Changes to Scoreboard (TAB) and Extra Info (ALT)
Previously there was a lot of crossover between the TAB and ALT modes during gameplay. In this update we have separated the behavior of these two modes to better serve different functions. The keys used for each of these modes can be swapped within Keybinds Settings.
Scoreboard (TAB):
Enables cursor mode
Displays Scoreboard
Displays Damage Summary
Allows minimap ping and draw
Extra Info (ALT):
No longer enables cursor mode
Quick-upgrade Abilities (ie. ALT+1) each of these can be individually remapped
Can now more easily map ALT as an Alternate Cast button
Displays extra information on HUD (ie. Zipline Speed Boost Cooldown) - we plan to expand upon this in future updates
This is throwing me off so much because I used to press TAB+number to upgrade abilities. Splitting it into two different buttons makes things more difficult imo.
You don't have to to use alt+number to upgrade, just press tab instead. Or rebind it.
I've been avoiding alt because it meant camera input would stop, now I can actually upgrade shit mid fight faster, when before I was long pressing the ability keys to unlock abilities mid-fight to use them.