Sunday, April 12, 2009

Looking for an Addon Feature

Forum posts on Curse tend to go unread, because the only people that post there register, make one post, then never follow up (guilty as charged). So I ask you! I'm looking for an addon feature that I probably won't even use once I set it up, but I want to give it a shot before completely dismissing it out of principle. I use Dominos as my Action Bar mod of choice, as it lets me drag and scale and generally move my bars around how I please (Bartender works in a very similar fashion, I just used to use Bongos, which has become Dominos).

One of the older features of Bongos was the ability to break apart a bar, and drag individual buttons all over the place, while still retaining 'bar' behaviour. That is to say, my action bar 1 is my main bar for my warrior, but when I pop into defensive stance, all those buttons are replaced, but it's still my main action bar... so I actually have 'three buttons' that bind to my number 2 key, depending on what stance I'm in. In defensive stance that button is intervene, in battle it's charge, and in berserker it's intercept. My number 2 key always makes me run around, but the button behaves differently in different stances.

I do a similar thing with my 6 key, it's a spell interrupt. Battle and def stance have it set to shield bash, while in berserker it's pummel.

You get the picture.

So the problem here is when I want to move one of my actual buttons that's already defined to somewhere else on my screen. Like, I could make a whole new action bar that's only one button long, and throw whatever spell I wanted on there, but I want to have it be the one I already have up, that changes as I change stances. If I were to make a single button for my charges for example, it wouldn't switch as I switched stances, and would require three full bars (trimmed down to one button each) to retain that functionality.

Then again, maybe I'm just way too into my UI layout, and everyone reading this is like ".... huh?"

Look. Here's my current layout:


What I basically want to do is break that main bar up, and spread it out like this:


I know you want to puke, it looks ridiculous. Bear with me; there's a reason! The reason is that I use a Belkin n52 speedpad as my weapon of choice:


And my button layout matches what I have going in the second picture, look:


As a tank, I want to be able to keep my eyes on the action, and not down on my bar seeing when shit lights up. You can see I've already put little icons in the middle of my screen that light up with certain buffs etc. I use Satrina Buff frames, and its filtering fuction extensively. You can see if you look above that I have 9s of shield block glyph uptime remaining, my trinket has buffed me for 9s, I'm enraged for 10s, and spell reflect is up for another 4s. My shouts show next to my rage bar... look, whatever. I love fucking around with my UI, so sue me. I should write an article about just how to wring the maximum use out of Satrina, because that addon is shit hot, and not many know how to use it.


ANYWAY.

Do any of you guys know of an addon that can break apart your main bar like I've illustrated? Throw me a bone. I'll try any addon out, I don't fear the reaper.

19 comments:

Longasc said...

I just wonder why you do not simply take the Numeric Keypad. And why it is necessary to arrange the symbols exactly like on the pad, I mean you will not forget them if you use them frequently. :)

HP said...

I tend to only mess around with my UI in terms of looks. I have always used to default action bars so I can't help you here =X

What does Satrina do exactly? I'm wondering if it will be useful for me while healing...

Anonymous said...

I think bartender might do what you want with some fussing. i used it to break up my action bar to match the layout of my n52 is in my main action bar had 14 buttons in 3 rows 5 5 4.
you could change the individual position of each button in the bar by adjusting its position.
I don't know if that's entirely what you are looking to accomplish but that feature was in there when i played still last year.

and would a cooldown window/bar thingy give you the same effect? it would tell you when various skills are ready to be used again, and you can set a threshold limit like, anything under 3min.

Rich said...

@Longasc: it isn't bnecessary to arrange them exactly like the pad, I don't need to look at the pad at all to push the buttons or anything silly. I mean, I could just pull my action bar up to the middle of the screen, but would prefer some sort of radial thing goign instead of some big ugly rectangle across the middle of my UI.

@HP: i'm not sure it would help healing at all, really. Satrina is a replacement for your icons like 'Devotion Aura' or 'Blessing of Wisdom'. I like taking the ones that are only up for 10 seconds or so, and shoving them into the middle of my screen, so they don't get lost in the jumble of my 30+ raid buffs.

For example: My warlock has a talent called Nightfall. As my corruption ticks, I have a 4% chance to proc an instant cast shadowbolt. The little icon is a tiny purple thing in the long list of buffs, and will basically just show up unnoticed. If i happen to chuck a shadowbolt while it's up, it just flies out with no cast time, but I may miss that opportunity as I'm running during Heigan or something. By relocating certain buff icons to where I want to see them, I *notice* it more when it comes up.

It has a pretty robust filter system. You can make as many separate 'areas' on your screen where these buffs will show up, display them as timers or bars, sclae them, blah blah blah. I also like having my Debuff icons fucking huge and in a certain place on my screen, so I really don't miss them. That was mostly for PvP, but I've grown used to it now.

For paladins it may be handy for things like skills that proc off heal crits, or somehting like Sacred Shield, or placeing your Holy Shield charges in a better to see area, or showing Light's Grace? I haven't played a paladin too extensively, so that's just browsing thru the talent tree and spell list. YOU know better than I do what you little ten second buffs are that come and go.

@Anon: I'll dig deeper into Bartender again right now and see if i can't find it there.

Tragedyx said...

Just cut your LCD screen and then glue it back in place where you want the buttons, kinda like what you did in paint to illustrate the idea in the first place.

BTW, I log on occasionally now, mainly just to gank and walk into old content and reminisce. Try to catch me on some time (Unignore my toons, yah?)

Khatib said...

Too bad Discord died. You could do ANYTHING with Discord once you got over the somewhat steep learning curve.

All my best UIs way back in like 2006 were Discord based.

Tal said...

Bartender has support for defining the behavior of each bar when switching stances and such, so you should be able to do it that way. It is a little "ugly" though - having a bar per button.
Alternatively, you could just use a macro that checks which stance you're in. With the "?" icon it should keep showing the right icon when you switch stances.

Rich said...

DISCORD!

I was trying to remember the name of it, yeah that was the most granular addon ever.

@Tal: I'm not trying to have a bar per button, I'm actually specifically trying to avoid that. I want bars, that behave like bars, and swap like bars, but have each button individually draggable.

Rich said...

and P.S. Trag*

your nephew was fucking hassling me for game cards. I told him to go mow a fucking lawn and he was like 'all my neighbors are black people' and i was like 'yeah so am I' (or "so is my mom" or some shit... I'm not, but just wanted to watch him squirm), and he got even more whiny and lame. but that was on your gf's account I think, I doubt I honestly have any of YOUR toons muted, but i'll double check right now.

Tragedyx said...

Lol, yea he's a fucking tard sometimes. The funny part is, out of all of my nieces and nephews (close to 30, not joking at all), he's probably the smartest and gets in the least trouble.

When are you on nowadays (If ever)? I wanna two man Ony again or something.

Anonymous said...

not sure if its still around but at one time i used and addon called Flexbar. it was very custumizable

Andrew said...

Trinity bars had a feature that broke the bars up pretty much into the configuration you are looking for. Not to sure if the addon still exists but it's worth a look

Pierre said...

"your nephew was fucking hassling me for game cards. I told him to go mow a fucking lawn and he was like 'all my neighbors are black people' and i was like 'yeah so am I' (or "so is my mom" or some shit... "

You should put that on your résumé to Blizzard to show how maturely you interact with people.

Wait... you already did.

Rich said...

I'm not sure where Pierre is coming from, but I have no issues with anyone knowing I'll tell someone to 'shut the fuck up and earn your own shit instead of begging for it'. That I managed to sneak in a 'don't be a racist asshole' life lesson in on the side was just bonus.

Not sure how many employers would frown on those two attitudes?

P.S. this is my blog. I created an entire extra website for my application. I'm noticing your name isn't clickable, which means you haven't even created one yet?

/boggle

Pierre said...

'shut the fuck up and earn your own shit instead of begging for it'.

I dunno if that would be a great line on a resume for a software development house. But it sure as hell would be AWESOME if you applied to the team "Gangzta Beetz" on America's best dance crew. I think they are looking for applicants too.

Dink said...

Bartender 4 does bar (page) swapping based on stances. And has a filtering mechanic. You can also turn the swapping off.

Rich said...

...because software development companies beg for stuff?

I'm still lost here...

Anonymous said...

@anonymous:

I still have some very fond memories of flexbar being as it was the first bar mod that I ever used, and I can think of one thing that it still has over my current bar mod (Bartender) - it was not limited to 10 bars (Yeah, I know, how many people chafe at that limit...well, on one of my toons I did set up enough little 2x2, 2x3, etc button boxes (and this was my druid so I already had different bars for bear, cat, caster and cat stealthed) that I was mildly annoying that I couldn't do my setup quite how I'd originally intended.

BUT

Flexbar was a real pain in the ass to configure. If I ever have to type /flex again (or w/e the slash command was) I think I will go fucking postal//wrist/drink myself into an early grave. No real reason to use it unless you are deadset on having more than 10 bars, and even then I'd try to find something else, anything else, anything with a gui.

dan said...

@anonymous:

I still have some very fond memories of flexbar being as it was the first bar mod that I ever used, and I can think of one thing that it still has over my current bar mod (Bartender) - it was not limited to 10 bars (Yeah, I know, how many people chafe at that limit...well, on one of my toons I did set up enough little 2x2, 2x3, etc button boxes (and this was my druid so I already had different bars for bear, cat, caster and cat stealthed) that I was mildly annoying that I couldn't do my setup quite how I'd originally intended.

BUT

Flexbar was a real pain in the ass to configure. If I ever have to type /flex again (or w/e the slash command was) I think I will go fucking postal//wrist/drink myself into an early grave. No real reason to use it unless you are deadset on having more than 10 bars, and even then I'd try to find something else, anything else, anything with a gui.