Seeing as it’s that time of year, I thought I may as well post the two videos of fast ram racing runs that I recorded over the past two years. I believe the track this year is the same as last year, so that video is posted first. The 2007 video is included just for fun, as the track is completely different now. Do forgive the old, ugly UI — it was functional, just not very pretty.
On another note, people should be receiving their meta achievements for What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been along with a pretty Violet proto drake. Congratulations and have fun with Brewfest!
Yes, Strobe got his too :)
Unit frames are one of the major information sources in the game. They give you the status of your target, group, raid, self and focus target amongst other possibilities. Other information may be available, such as aura1 status, level, class, etc.
Achieving perfect unit frames is something I’ve been struggling with since the very beginning. It is comparable only with the strive towards enlightenment; or the ultimate goal in one’s life. Consequently, the unit frames can never be perfect: what works for one player typically does not work as well for others. This topic requires you to do some thinking.
Default player & target frames
- The word “auras” is often used as a general term for buffs and debuffs throughout addons. Though paladin auras are considered a buff too — and thus an aura using this term — they are not strictly related. ↩
The action bar is the set of buttons and widgets placed at the bottom of the screen by default. Skills, items and macros can be dropped onto this bar for quick access. This interface element serves as the default method for binding such actions, as well as displaying simple cooldowns and range checks.
Default Action Bar/Bottom Bar
The Addon
One of the most popular items on the interface developer’s agenda, the action bar can be modified through a plethora of addons. Many of these allow movement, resizing and creation of new action bars. Features that change on certain conditions — such as stance1 changes, entry to combat, on proc — are also widely available, which may help druids or similar classes in particular.
First look at your needs. Before I became such an exclusive user of BindPad, I required the use of many action bars. On a druid or other stance-enabled class, I would need multiple stance bars (where by default only one changes on stance switch). My needs then simplified greatly as I started using rActionBarStyler — an addon which could, at the time, simply move and rescale bars using a single, static Lua configuration — and those needs were three stacked and rescaled bars without any of the art or widgets found in the default bottom bar. Nowadays I have a similar setup but with slightly different profiles for pet-enabled classes.
In any case, one need I’m going to imply is simplicity. You simply do not need the bag bar, mini buttons (character pane, etc.), latency display or art. Anything useful here can be replaced through superior, less intrusive means. Next, you’ll want to move and stack at least a couple of bars together for centrality. The rest is up to you.
Now pick up an action bar addon and get to work. Listed below are a number of popular choices, so just take a look at the author’s description and see that it fits your needs. read more…
- Stance refers to druid forms, stealth, shadow form, etc. It is not just a term used for warriors. ↩
Customised or otherwise, we all require an interface to interact with the game. The basic WoW UI may be an easy introduction to the game — as the designers most likely held as the highest priority — but it is sorely lacking for high-performance gameplay. In this feature I will offer some rather specific advice to building a fully-functional UI from the ground up.
Quake 3 with non-default cg_viewsize.
I’m a sworn devotee to the principal of centrality. Centrality — at least, that’s what I call it — is the practice of compressing information into one main space of the screen in order to reduce eye movement and therefore lend easy access to all major information hubs. I originally picked up on this principal from playing Quake, where it is possible to press a button which will incrementally reduce screen size by reducing the effective gameplay area and placing large borders around it. Players often used this feature in order to see more of the screen at once and therefore take in more information.
Because we play a game where information is key, players often seem to think that more information they display, the better and more function their UI. While there is some truth in this, it can quite easily lead to redundancy. The UI may be overly cluttered with displays that are used rarely enough to warrant removal. Finding a critical piece of information becomes harder and harder in the clutter. Remember: minimalism is just as important — if not moreso — from a functionality standpoint as it is aesthetically.
A good UI should allow the player to see everything they need in heated combat with minimal eye movement and effort. Where on the screen this information is placed is up to the user, though I would recommend toward the center as it is where the majority of the in-game action takes place.
Another of my personal preferences is in keeping the UI as similar as possible between alts. Certain classes require one or two very specific addons, but other than this there should be no difference between a tank and healer UI. Raid frames should be unintrusive enough not to hinder your gameplay yet display enough information for full-blown healing. Threat meters should be displayed in combat no matter the role. This all helps to keep a better overall interface and reduce the time it takes to re-learn to play an alt.
I will begin to explain building a UI piece by piece in the next part.
I’m off to Germany for 10 days. This may allow me some time to do some writing for the blog, though it will probably be impacted by the meagre chance of an internet connection and thus the ability to play WoW.
Update: Holiday ended early, so I’m back.
There was an unfortunate, gaping hole in my key binding implementation which involved the use of OPie and vehicles. While I used some macro voodoo to get certain macros working with vehicle action bars, this could never work with OPie for one simple reason: you could not call an OPie ring from a macro. There is now a workaround.
The Fix
First off, you’ll need a version of OPie which supports macros. At the time of writing, Echo 1.39 is the latest available from WoWInterface. After having installed that, go into your Blizzard key bindings config and bind the default action bars to keys you’d like to use in a vehicle. I’m using the logical default: 1 to = (not recommended for normal skills, but for vehicles I deem it fine).
Now bounce along to the OPie bindings (Interface -> Addons -> OPie -> Ring Bindings) and find the ring you’d like to bind to a vehicle hotkey. In my example, I’m using button 4: — my “Special” totem ring. Alt-click the button under “Binding” and use the following code (thanks to Foxlit, OPie’s author, for suggesting the nobonusbar option):
/click [nobonusbar:5] 4
Hit enter and your OPie ring should now work fine if you’re not in a vehicle, with the corresponding vehicle button if otherwise.
The Not-So-Fix
This is what I typed up whilst waiting for the new version of OPie to work for me, and was a hopeful fix that unfortunately doesn’t actually work with the current implementation of macros in OPie. I’m leaving it here in case it’s of any use to any of you.
After updating OPie, pop over to the OPie Ring Bindings panel and click the arrow next to the ring you’d like to bind. Doing so will open up a small dialogue with a macro ready to be copied which will look something like this:
/click ORLOpen OPieEquipmentManager
Copy this text and scuttle along to BindPad. Choose the skill you’d like to convert into a vehicle binding and right-click on it to convert to a macro if necessary. The format, as I’ve detailed before, should be as follows:
/click [bonusbar:5] BonusActionButtonN
/stopmacro [bonusbar:5]
# Stuff to do if not in vehicle goes here
Thus if in the vehicle we want to press action button 1, but outside the vehicle open the Equipment Manager ring, we would use the following:
/click [bonusbar:5] BonusActionButton1
/stopmacro [bonusbar:5]
/click ORLOpen OPieEquipmentManager
I’d finally like to take the opportunity to mention that I found how to bind macros to vehicles thanks to someone (Phanx?) over at the WoWInterface forums quite some time ago. Credit all goes to whoever that person was.
If you read For the Sake of Convenience, you’ll know that I recently switched some obscure, Lua-config only addons for more mainstream, easier to configure and update alternatives. For the most part this has been working just fine, but not with unit frames. As I’ve said before, it’s very hard to strike a balance between user-friendly and powerful unit frames whilst ideally keeping it all in a lite package. oUF_Nivaya just isn’t cutting it for me now, with particular regard to the raid frames. It’s a great addon, but certainly needs some more development to get it where it needs to be.
So after a single raid I switched back to my own oUF layout. I’ve spent so much time editing it already that it’s really perfect for me. I shouldn’t need to update for a long while (hopefully), and I’ve already been using it for months. I did consider trying out PitBull again after enjoying the use of CowTip, but there’s really no need at the moment. And of course, Stuf is always an option despite every layout I’ve seen being horrendously ugly. Perhaps when my layout breaks, I’ll shop around more.
Just thought I should mention.
Now that my shaman has been level 80 for a while, I feel I can talk about the way I manage totems. I’m not entirely sure of the details with the 3.2 totem bar, but I imagine it’s still important to have quick access for totem switches.
First off, I’m going to introduce OPie. This is an incredibly powerful addon that allows you to bind keys to a “ring”, which will essentially pop up a radial menu when pressed. You can then move your mouse to the appropriate “slice” of the screen and let go of the button to act upon whatever was in that slot. It’s also worth mentioning that you can move the mouse cursor to the correct “slice” and then tap the bind to get the corresponding effect. It’s very similar to usual key binds, but with a little bit of extra work.
Playing a shaman without OPie and trying to bind all of your totems is not something I want to think about — I switched to using the addon at about level 16 and haven’t looked back since. However, you’ll still need to organise totems for easy access within OPie. Whilst leveling my shaman, I made the big mistake of creating binds for each element of totem. It took me a long time to select the correct totems, and I never really got used to it.
My Layout
The trick is to really break them up according to the way you work. The setup that I found to make sense involved using two major rings and popping a maximum of four totems in each. 1-2 of these totems would be of a certain element, while the other 1-2 would be of one other element. These two rings comprise of the totems I use the most by far, and so I rarely have a use for other totems. Of course, the others still need binding and sorting out.
There’s another ring for resistance totems, a ring for cooldowns (fire/water elementals, mana tide), quick access (cleansing, tremor, earthbind, stoneclaw, grounding) and miscellaneous (magma, searing, fire nova).
oUF_TotemBar
Once all rings are sorted out, you’ll want some sort of timer addon so you can see when a totem is destroyed or about to expire. There are a couple of these around with varying features, so I’ll leave you to WoWInterface’s Shaman addons section. I use oUF_TotemBar, plugged into my oUF setup.
I don’t foresee me removing all of these rings and switching to the totem bar in 3.2. As I understand it, the totem bar is there for quick access to mostly a full set of totems. Sure, it’s definitely going to be nice to pop them all down within one GCD, but it’s also not something that you can change around on the fly. Totem binds are just not going to disappear.
If you’re having trouble with your totems, give this setup a try. It’ll take some getting used to, but I can certainly recommend it!
Time to bring the Keybound series to a close. In summary:
- Always strafe, never keyboard turn
- Plan your binds, ideally with a template
- Bind everything
- Some keys are much more convenient than others, so save those for oft-used abilities
- Keep a central theme in your UI to lessen eye movement
- Rearrange action bars to make sense, not to make binding convenient
- Use BindPad if having trouble with the latter
- All classes can and will benefit from click-casting to some extent
- Any support classes should have some click-casting binds, without exception
- All click-cast binds should have normal bind counterparts
Now for some tips.
When planning binds, you’ll want a list of all non-talented skills which you can get from Wowhead. Use the “Last Rank” filter for easier viewing (eg. Rogue). Once you’ve got your talent build sorted out, go down the trees and write out any active talented skills. Finally, write everything by grouping it into different categories: major, minor and out of combat. It’ll be hard to categorise skills if you’ve never played the class before, so try to check Wowhead comments on the particular skill, or class guides. This will make it easier choose the keys, and you can check off each skill as you go along.
I do recommend binding potions, food and bandages on the action bar. You could do it through BindPad or a fancy-pants addon, but through the action bar you can easily replace these items as you go along. Because they’ll most likely be grouped up anyway ( I like to keep mine at the bottom-right), you won’t run into any problems.
The caps lock key isn’t really much use. If you’re the kind of person who uses it a lot, you’re probably not reading this right now. If you do use it a lot, then stop: it’s annoying and uppercase is harder to read. So you may as well re-bind that conveniently placed, useless key to something useful. Many people like to re-bind the key to Ctrl; others prefer Esc. For gaming’s sake, though, you’ll want something that you can use a modifier with. I chose to go for Backspace as it might improve my typing and I can bind it to anything I went along with a modifier in-game. Ordinarily, Backspace is too far away to be useful as a bind.
On Windows, AutoHotKey is a commonly used utility for actions like remapping hotkeys. I’ve created a very simple script which simply remaps the backspace key which you can find here. The AHK file is the source which you can edit, compile or run with AutoHotKey installed, if you prefer. I use a larger version of this script which also controls my volume and other various things, placed in the startup folder so I never have to worry about running it. Mac users could probably use Quicksilver or Butler to come about the same functionality, but you’re on your own with that one.
I’ll leave it there now. If I think of any more tips, they will probably be added to this post. I hope you enjoyed the series and I’d love to hear if it has helped you in any way, so feel free to leave a comment.