Tuesday, July 7, 2009

That looks nice...


I figured one thing a lot of people look for when playing is a way to clean up their UI. There is nothing wrong with playing with the original UI, clicking on your spells, and keyboard turning for some people. If that's what you like, more power to you, WoW is just a game and the only thing matters is that you are enjoying it.

In my opinion though, no matter how well you can click, you will see an improvement, no matter which of the 3 roles you are currently fillings, be it dps, healing, or a tank, with an efficient use of key bindings.

I get a lot of questions while playing about my keybindings, and these are here just in case you can't make them out in the screen shot. Keep in mind, these are merely my suggestions.

3 Quick Rules:

1) Stop keyboard turning. The only thing you will possible need anymore is a key binding to go forward, and 2 to strafe. You can keep these at q w e, move them to a s d, wherever is comfortable. The point of this is to get you from using a and d to turn, which is slow to do and even more painful to watch. Unless its in arena, and you're melee dps on someone doing it. Right click your mouse and rotate, its tough at first, but the benefits are tremendous.
2) Keep everything home. If you're hands are going to be by the asdw keys, don't put spells out of reach of them that you are going to be using. I wouldn't want to bind lightning bolt to 9, flame shock to 1, and lava burst to 5. I know that sounds silly, but you should have heard some of the ridiculous keybindings people told me about. I'm going to assume you stuck with q and e as strafe, clearing up A and D. A and D should be bound to the meat of your rotation, they are easily spammable now. Make use of the shift key, hitting shift-A or shift-D is just as easy. This should fill up almost any class' rotation. How many more keybindings you are going to need depends a lot on your class. I recommend not going past the 5 for any of those "oh shit" buttons, and then keeping it withing the t-f-c line. This may not seem like a lot of keybinds, but when you factor in the ability to shift- or ctrl- letters to binds, you shouldn't have any problem.
3) If you have a mouse with buttons, use them. Just as hitting the A and D key are easy, using the buttons on the side of your mouse are easier. If you have them, make use of them. You're hand is going to be on it anyway.

Addons Used:
SpartanUI - Gives the general layout
Bartender - The bars inside SpartanUI (comes with SpartanUI but doesn't need to be used)
Grid + Grid Quickhealth (Raid frames + Quick Health grabs health updates from the combat log rather then the ui for faster health updates)
Clique (For when healing gets lazy, although mouse over macros generally are superior)
Quartz (Cast bars and debuffs on a target)
Elkano's Buffbars (Self buffs and debuffs w/timers)
Miks SCT (I prefer it over the WoW standard text)
Omen (Necessity for anyone, at least some time of threat mod)
Recount (To feed your dps e-peen)

I have a couple other addons that I make use of but these are purely for daily things such as questhelper, auctioneer, and gatherer. On a side note, my omen pops up where my recount is during combat, and my recount is set to hide on combat. Are there addons you couldn't live without?

Edit: Also, just noticed that 2 of my bars are missing. Above Bar1, normally I keep a couple totem macros and some specific mouse bound totems in there along with some randomly used spells and my bar at the top of the screen which contains potions (speed, health, mana), food, and health stones for the F1-F5 keys, which are easy to hit since I play on a laptop... oh well.

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