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.
I’m now going to talk about click-casting. If you don’t know what that is, it may sound odd that I’m advocating something regarding clicking given what I’ve discussed in previous parts of Keybound. This is different — kind of.
Click-casting is not about clicking a skill on your action bar, but rather clicking a unit frame with any mouse button and (optionally) in combination with a modifier to throw a quick spell at that entity. This is vital when in a healing role, where targeting each person (particularly in a raid) cannot practically be done by keyboard. If you’re going to click each target anyway, you may as well cut those button presses down to half by click-casting directly on them. If you still really don’t get it, check this video.
There are a couple of addons with click-casting, but none quite as well-known as Clique. I can’t say a bad word about this addon — it’s easy to use, lite, and does what it says on the tin. You can also use a collection of macros, but I’ve never used this method and can’t find a whole lot of useful information in a Google search. My recommendation is to grab Clique. I do believe Clique only works for mouse buttons, whereas macros will do the job for your entire keyboard. This isn’t much of a setback for me, as I find it unnatural to press a keyboard button when hovering over something anyway.
Example Clique Setup
So, what should you bind? Well, that depends on your class. I find it useful to have interrupts, CCs and other utilities bound as harmful actions for use particularly on focus targets in PvE, as I never quite got sorted with focus macros in my usual binds. Anyone with heals, decurse abilities or other useful helpful actions should bind them without exception. I have a ridiculous amount of helpful click-cast binds on my Protection Paladin, including hands, taunt (this one is particularly useful), etc.
Click-casting is not a replacement for binds. I still strongly suggest that you bind everything on your click-cast list to keys as well. It is easy to get stuck into just clicking frames all the time, but there are situations where you’re going to want the speed and flexibility of running around and casting. It’s also very nice to have an MT targeted so you can unload heals on raid members via click-casting and use your normal binds when the MT is taking a hit.
And that’s the end of part 4. I’m slowly running out of things to talk about when trying to keep it strictly to the topic of binds, so part 5 will probably be a summary with some smaller tips that I couldn’t really fit in elsewhere. See you then!
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.
Default action bars
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.
Action bars with an addon
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.
Let’s take a look at the keyboard. I’m going to be using a QWERTY keyboard in my examples, but of course the only significance is in what’s on the keys themselves: a standard keyboard is a standard keyboard.
US QWERTY Layout
Pictured here is a keyboard layout with movement keys in blue and what I consider to be conveniently bindable keys in green. Conveniently bindable basically means those that I would consider assigning combat functions (meaning no portals, hearthstone, etc.). F-Keys are very useful and unfortunately not pictured, but I prefer to use them for your typical 10, 30 or 60 minute buffs. I recommend C, X, V, R, T and Q for use with bread and butter abilities because they’re easy to access whilst in motion.
Keyboard modifiers should absolutely not be disregarded: you’ll never get by without them. I’m using binds as obscure as Alt+~ for reasonably frequent skills, and find them to work wonderfully. Just move your hand around the green areas and see what feels comfortable and easy to access.
Speaking of modifiers, I strongly recommend unbinding anything using Space and a modifier, provided you use Space for jump. If you’re jumping around and want to hit your Instant Ability of the Bind (Shift+E) you’ll be sorely disappointed to see that your character remains grounded because Shift+Space is bound to dance.
Another important consideration when planning your binds is your memory of them, and how they fit in with other characters. For example, if you’re used to playing a mage whose Counterspell is bound to R it would be a good idea to attach the R key to a similar function on other characters. It’s for this reason that the binds I use on alts may perplex anyone but myself: they make sense on my main, so I use them on my alt. You’ll see this trend in my cat form binds. read more…
Many players seem to disregard the importance of key binding and even movement. Coming from an FPS background, it is strange to me that anyone would consider clicking their skills or willingly turn with their keyboard — the latter may seem convenient in lazy situations, but both severely limit gameplay. I’d like to discuss these topics and help to get the most out of your game through what may appear to be no-brainer basics. I am primarily a PvE player with a long PvP past, and I can certainly say that these “basics” are essential regardless of background.
Let’s begin with movement. You should be using the WASD keys to move around the game world; if not, you’re probably doing something wrong. By default A and D are set to make your character turn when pressed, and strafe if the right mouse button is held down. Is there anything wrong with the default setup? Yes and no. Keyboard turning may have its uses with some vehicles, but even that can be done just fine with the mouse.
Mouse turning allows for much greater flexibility than keyboard turning. You can flick your mouse and do a 180º, but you’ll find yourself waiting if using the keyboard exclusively. You also can’t circle-strafe (as required at Malygos) or pull off any similar actions. You’re shackled to two directions: forward and backward.
So why not fix it? I re-bound my A and D buttons to exclusively strafe back in beta, and still haven’t found a need for turning years later. As I said before, the default binds are fine, but you’ll just find it slightly inconvenient if you’re properly strafing all the time anyway. If you’re currently turning, try rebinding them and getting used to it that way. I had a guildy do this and he’s very happy with the result, after a little time.
I’ll continue on the subject of basic key binding in the next part.
Welcome to my shiny new blog! This place will house most things WoW, with an emphasis on addons and clever things to do in and with the game. It shall also contain some more personal WoW experiences, which you may or may not find at all interesting.
If you don’t know me, I’m known primarily as Strobe in-game — a tankadin on the Vashj-EU server, as you can see — but I have played and still do play a variety of different characters. For more details, I’ll be updating the about page.
I think that’s pretty much it for now. Some content should be incoming shortly!