Macros are your friends. Macro these onto a single key with meta keys to switch between them.
Lava burst/flame shock/frost shock
lightning bolt/chain lightning
Wind shear/purge/focus shear/focus purge/setfocus/clearfocus
healthstone/health pot
earthbind totem/earthgrab totem
Earth elemental/fire elemental
Lasso/stun totem
Ghost wolf/gust of wind
hex/focus hex/clearfocus/set focus
trinket 1/trinket 2/pvp trinket
Use a click-casting button for these:
healing surge
cleanse spirit
earth shield
Use a cast sequence macro for these since you use them together:
lightning shield/earth shield/weapon oil or imbue
As a troll, I have a macro for my haste trinket, bloodlust, ascendence, and my haste racial. I can also meta-key to activate individual abilities.
On live I have all my hotbars hidden, and use weakauras to track relevant information. Yes, I do keybind every single ability including obscure ones. Also, yes I understand the vast majority of people do not do this.
The actual keybindings number wasn’t the issue, it was just running out of space to put things. Again, this was more of an observation of the new UI. I will continue to use bar addons to have more than 5 bars. I am in no way asking for Blizzard to change something for a small number of people.
I appreciate all the recommendation and advice, and yes I know I am crazy for keybinding primal strike lol.
You’re not actually reducing the number of keybinds you use though lol, just taking up less space on your bars. Waste of time imo. I don’t struggle with the amount of keybinds I have either, I could easily bind another 20.
I use mouseover macros for all my healing spells, and I hate cast sequence macros, I just use OPIE for consumables/markers.
Most of the time you should have racials and such macro’d to your big abilities, but you should also have them bound to different keys in case you need to press them separately.
I appreciate your help and suggestions. I’m not trying to reduce the number of keybinds though, I’m trying to increase the number of available slots. It’s not a big deal like I said.
I too use Opie for things like markers and flasks/runes as well, fantastic addon!
I mean, that too, but my macro’d bloodlust, which uses berzerking, haste trinket, bloodlust, then Ascendence, also let’s me use the same key with metas to activate each ability individually. I know exactly where to find it, and if I want, I never need to mouse click it or remove my hand from wads position.
For me, it’s an issue of preserving screen real estate as much as anything. Only so many button slots exist. I’d rather not take them up with abilities that are thematically related to each other. I can have less-used spells and fun things on other keys that way. But that’s one of the great things about the game. Everyone has their own styles of play, and the customizable Ty of the UI, both via built-ins and addons is powerful.
Here is how I do my setup. This applies to almost all classes and specs in the game, they follow the same internal logic:
My mouse has 2 extra buttons where I bind my most spammed damaging spells. I use shift to have access to 4 skills, without having to move my left hand of the movement keys.
Q and shift Q are for self protection, E and shift E are for damage in an area. R and shift R is usually a major healing cooldown. F and shift F are stuns and interrupts. C and shift C are usually movement related abilities. 1, 2, 3, 4 and their shift versions are usually for skills with big cool downs.
While mouse overing other players, with or without shift, Q becomes big single target healing cds, E becomes area heals, F become dispels, C become speed buffs and right click and left clicks become versions of basic heals.
Trinkets, potions and things of this sort are usually integrated with macros and big cds (or small ones for low cd trinkets) to avoid having to press 10 random things at the start of a burst phase.
With this logic I was able to bind every single class and spec in the game, while keeping them consistent and intuitive. There are very few exceptions where more buttons needed to be added.
All classes also require a visible utility bar for things like hearthstone, mount, invisibility potion, and other random stuff.
The main difference I see coming in dragon flight is that the utility bar will probably have more things in it, for things like poison cleansing totem and other random utility. And that is ok, I don’t need insta reactions for random utility. My earth elemental can wait half a second.
