Keybound: Part 3 — Implementation

Most players use only their action bars for the skills: whether they’re binding or clicking, the skill must be placed on the action bar before it can be used quickly. This isn’t a bad approach and is certainly easier to setup than what I’ll suggest, but it is severely lacking in one area: freedom.

Ignore the binds in this screenshot and look at the action bars. Notice how far apart the main and side bars are and the lack of organisation. One theme you’ll want running through your entire UI is centrality. With all important information grouped and centralised, your eyes are moving less which lessens your reaction time. We can remedy one problem by installing an addon which allows you to move or replace your action bars, such as rActionBarStyler or Dominos.

Using one such addon, the action bar information is centralised (never mind anything else for now) which is just what we wanted. However, there is far more information than could ever be required. As in this example, some things could obviously be removed — first aid and cooking, for example — but others may not seem logical at first — such as lightning bolt and many of the shocks.

In my opinion action bars should be there to display information and nothing else. That information consists primarily of cooldowns and range. You don’t need two attack spells with the same range showing (provided they don’t have cooldowns) and you don’t need similar spells that share cooldowns available, such as those extra shocks. It is also a good idea to group information based on the type of information it shows. Long cooldowns can go together and “range checkers” can go from low to high, left to right. If you have a very specific rotation, try ordering skills that way.

You may be wondering how you’re supposed to bind those skills if they’re not on your action bar. There are a handful of addons that provide this functionality (SpellBinder and mBindings, for example) but my soul belongs to BindPad. Along with the ability to bind skills, items, macros, etc., BindPad allows you to create a nearly limitless amount of macros with no character limits, and features profiling which can be automated along with spec switches. It also features a very nice GUI which can be used to easily check up on your binds in case you forget (and you will forget) where you put those skills. Many people will probably get along fine with SpellBinder or mBindings, but this is quite unlikely (at the time of writing) if your class has multiple stances or forms.

This, by the way, is where these addons both shine and fall short. It is utterly impossible to organise your action bars on a multi-stance character if you’re binding through the action bars, but it is even cruder to get the binds setup through other means. I fully understand why someone playing one of these characters would forego organisation of the action bar for this reason, so read ahead with that in mind.

It’s all about macros. Because BindPad allows you to create macros within itself, you can make as many macros as you can bind through it. You’ll really want to look up specific class macros in order to see how things work, and WoWWiki is a good resource for this. Just be sure to stay away from macros that do more than one thing: in 99% of cases, it just breaks flexibility. Here’s a simple example of a Druid macro:


/cast [stance:1] Growl
/cast [nostance] Moonfire


This macro will cast Moonfire if in caster form and Growl in bear form. Once such a macro is created in Bindpad, simply bind it to a key and you’re done. One nice advantage is that you can go straight ahead and bind everything straight after you’ve planned it out! Bind all of your level 80 skills when you’ve yet to kill a single mob.

One more little problem with not binding directly to the action bars comes about when using vehicles: the vehicle skills will not be bound. You can hack around this like so:

/click [bonusbar:5] BonusActionButton3
/stopmacro [bonusbar:5]
/cast Hand of Reckoning

This macro is bound to 3 on my Paladin. I use this key to use Hand of Reckoning ordinarily, but the first two lines have it act as button 3 on the action bar when I’m in a vehicle. All that needs to be changed is the number at the end of the first line, which corresponds to which button you want to press with that macro. Just reformat the skills or macros bound to your numeric keys in this way and bind the remainder using the default binding interface.

This concludes part 3 of Keybound. I’ll probably be talking about click-casting in the next part, but don’t be surprised if something else pops up.