Trinity Team Cognitive Load

First time poster here...

I've been multiboxing WoW for several months now, and I absolutely love it. I won't go into my whole history of teams, but after some experimenting and a fair bit of success I decided I wanted to bite off a true trinity team - tank, healer + 3dps.

Here's what I've done to try to get it manageable, and I welcome any critique or suggestions. (Technical background, I'm using isboxer in "pro" mode and GSE to help with most dps rotations)

1 - Party frames are near the middle of the screen. They have 2 clickbars over them for 4 different clickable heals (left-click, right-click on each of the 2 bars)
2 - Healer's tacit "dps" rotation is to spread heals across the whole team
3 - Have as many "oh shit" buttons as I can keep in my brain hot-keyed (self-heals, self-damage reductions, blessing of protection)
4 - All melee dps to simplify movement - all just follow the tank as I need to move out of ground-poop

My question is actually pretty general, and not team-specific. Those of you who are also running a trinity team, how do you keep up with the cognitive load of dealing with movement, healing and maintaining reasonable dps? It's not going so well for me so far.

I've run a trinity setup of Prot Pally, 3x Frost DK and a MW Monk for this expansion in dungeons and I've had pretty decent success with it doing some "OK" level mythic+ with relative ease. I've been too lazy and/or busy to really push high ones.

I think a lot of these kinds of things are really down to preference in playstyle, apart from encounters that require specific things out of your team. Personally I usually drop my healer off to the side somewhere to free cast healing and only move it if I need to. I have a separate mapped key to make only my DPS toons follow my lead, so I often move those separate from the healer. Additionally I also have WASD+Ctrl/Alt/Shift modifiers setup for moving different action target groups out of harms way. And as a lot of people do with melee, I have IWT in my rotation so it just gets spammed. I do have a key for a mapped key step state action that toggles the "auto-iwt" on and off in my rotations as well so I can turn it off if I want to.

Frost DK is fairly simplistic so it's easy enough to macro and there is only one proc that I really have to worry about, which I chose to do using a custom, invisible menu. Pally is pretty much a case of "if it's available, press it" as far as attack spells, so it takes no real baby sitting.

Healing I handle with a combination of the pro-config, virtualization actions that change my healers rotation, essentially toggling it in to different "healing modes", and click healing through a repeater region. All my heals are also set up as 2-tier macros with the first line being the same heal with a [target=focus,help] conditional. This way I can set focus on a toon (through the repeater region) and my healer will just heal the focus target as long as it exists. Naturally I have a key for dropping focus as well.

I'm currently running 2 teams which are Priest(main) and 4 hunters ..
while driving from the priest i can just do the basic healing spells with mouseclick (left right scroll up/down middlemouse click and then some shift left and right click). for my hunters' dps rotation i use multiple step-rotations. so basicly spamming 1 button which then converts into 5-6 spells ingame for cooldown maintaining.

My second team is 5 druids, 1 guardian, 3 balance, 1 resto.
on this team i use the guardian as main, just to make sure i have the aggro and not the healer or dpsers.
for DPS and tank rotation I use wowlazymacro's and gnomesequencer. I have a single target rotation and a multiple target rotation.

now for the healing i'm also using wowlazymacro's and gnomesequencer, but in combination with focus on leftclick.
U can find the whole explination over here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/144831930
this video helped me setup for the healing with gnomesequencer.
it's not always working when you need a heal when mouse-over, but you'll get the hang of it when you try it out!

what team are you thinking of as trinity team?
for the movement, i just use my arrow keys for the slaves to move forwards, backwards and strafe left and right.

Sorry for my english, and I hope I kinda helped a lil bit :o

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Originally Posted by Wubsie

Healing I handle with a combination of the pro-config, virtualization actions that change my healers rotation, essentially toggling it in to different "healing modes", and click healing through a repeater region. All my heals are also set up as 2-tier macros with the first line being the same heal with a [target=focus,help] conditional. This way I can set focus on a toon (through the repeater region) and my healer will just heal the focus target as long as it exists. Naturally I have a key for dropping focus as well.

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wubsie, would it be possible to work this out with some video footage, or images? I mean the menu of different healing modes? .. it seems nice

Thanks for the responses! I will process them in more detail when I'm not at work.

I have a lot of 110 toons spread across my 5 accounts, so I have a lot of teams. My current A-team trinity team is:
Pally Tank
2x Ret Pally
1x Fury Warrior
Healer is either Disc priest or Resto Druid

Ret rotation in GSE is super easy, as you said. Fury rotation dps is not great... timing of cooldowns is too finicky, so I might swap him out for another ret pally I have on the same account.

I'm finding disc healing easier simply because there are fewer buttons to press. I feel like druid should be idea with so many instant-casts.

My other weirdness is that I'm left handed, so the ctrl-WASD can't work for me, and I am not really quick enough with the ctrl-arrow keys. Maybe I just need to practice that more to control the movement.

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Originally Posted by tanknspanker

wubsie, would it be possible to work this out with some video footage, or images? I mean the menu of different healing modes? .. it seems nice

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Oddly enough, I have videos on both subjects. Sorta quick ones and not as fancy, indepth or well articulated as Mirai's stuff, but shows of the setup "ok" I suppose:

My healing setup overview (old team, same concept)

Handling procs with menus

@tanknspanker - that video is great!! One thing I did as a result of it is moved my party frames to an even more central position on my screen. I then was able to do HOV+4 under the timer just last night, so that's def a step in the right direction!

A few followup questions, if you don't mind:
1. do you use "autohotkey" or any other software to rapidly spam your dps keys for you?
2. You talked a lot about your dps cooldowns, which is awesome, but what do you do about things like frenzied regen, ironfur, tranquility, etc? Do you have separate keybinds for those?

Thanks again!

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Originally Posted by hummuslover

1. do you use "autohotkey" or any other software to rapidly spam your dps keys for you?

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Auto-repeating keypresses is a big no-no in WoW and can get your accounts banned. The general rule is 1 press = 1 ingame action per client. It's not hard to spam they key yourself, and if you're worried about the spam speed, you can make your mapped key trigger on both Key Down and Key Up, essentially doubling your spam speed without breaking any rules.

That would have been my followup question too - thanks for this info!

Lots of ppl on wowlazymacros talk about 80ms spam speed and that just seems inhuman. I timed myself and at most I get like 150ms at best. But I'm also an old man.