In its default state, the vanilla UI has the following bars available (depending on class):
- MainMenuBar
- StanceBar
- MicroButtonAndBagsBar
You can alter that, still within the vanilla framework by activating individual bars on the Interface/!ActionBars panel to include these additional bars:
- MultiBarButtonLeft
- MultiBarBottomRight
- MultiBarLeft
- MultiBarRight
For pet-using classes there is this:
For classes using totems there is this:
- TotemFrame (not exactly for casting, but for some things it’s “buttonlike”)
On that same Interface/!ActionBars panel, you can choose to make your bars always visible (which helps with finding things).
For “Stance” classes, there are four hidden bars that are swapped in and out at need (3 are wasted on Rogues, 4 are wasted on all other classes except Druids).
These are, in ElvUI, Bars 7-10 but they’re not that rationally named by Blizzard. In fact, they’re not named at all. There are 48 buttons slots available there that aren’t implemented at all in the game for all but Druids (and then only as repositories for swapped out abilities) - Rogues need one of those bars, so they lose 36 button slots needlessly.
The buttons on those bars are (by default) swapped out for the buttons on your main bar when you change stances. It’s not subject to a lot of control by you (there are some minor things you can do to alter that, but by and large, you get one set of 12 buttons swapped from a hidden bar to your main bar with each stance).
The “Special Action Buttons” are the buttons on the stance swapping bars (according to the reading I’ve done - although there’s precious little direct documentation of the Blizzard vanilla UI).
There is an EXTRA ACTION BUTTON and a ZONE ABILITY BUTTON that are something other than what I think you’re talking about - those two are for the special quest-related abilities that pop up from time to time.
Frankly, if you’re trying to make sense of Blizzard’s button bars, I wish you luck.
That’s the worst mess of a control UI that I’ve ever seen in a game.
120 assigned action slots and you can’t touch half of them directly by default. If you’re not a Druid or a Rogue, 48 bindable buttons are hidden away forever, pointlessly. If you are a Rogue, 36 are.
If you want control over this stuff, you’re pretty much going to have to go to a bar mod.
ElvUI is my go-to for this (although it has the potential for altering a whole lot more, the bar-mod part of is so much more rationally designed than Bartender4 and Dominos that I strongly recommend it to everyone looking for a bar mod even if all they want IS a bar mod). You’d have to install ElvUI_ExtraActionBars to get bars 7-10 opened up (although if all you play is a druid, that wouldn’t do you much good).
That addon is modular - that is - you can turn off big chunks of it (or little ones) and only use the bits you want. You can literally install it and the extra action bars part and shut off everything else and just use it for your bars if you want.
Caveat: You’ll have to rebind your buttons with ElvUI. While the overall control of the bars is better in ElvUI (plus ElvUI_ExtraActionBars), Bartender4 does a better job maintaining continuity with Blizzard’s keybindings. Since keybinding is a do it once and forget it sort of thing and addon stability is a day-to-day issue, ElvUI seems a better bet to me.
Bartender4’s underlying code is a bit more fragile and I had unexplained bar wandering (a few pixels at a time) that drove me nuts.
Dominos’ code is a rat’s nest of spaghetti and spite. I’d stay away from that one unless you just feel the need to grab something written by anarchists.
I don’t know how helpful this is - hearing that you really can’t get there from here isn’t always what folks want to hear, but honestly, if you’re looking for sense out of Blizzard’s native UI, you’re going to be badly frustrated.