Read most of what Jafula said and my experience with him is that he has a pretty good grip on what he's talking about. Seems about at a similar point in his boxing as I.

Now more about my setup.

I box on a mac so hotstrings are not an option for me. Seems like you are interested in PVE content if I read your post right. Seems like you want to run instances solo.

Here is my setup. I liked a focus free setup at first using [target=targettarget] on all my spells. I disliked this because for any dps macro containing a castsequence it had to be reset with a modifier and that was just one more thing I'd have to think about. I've moved over to this current setup.

All of my dps macros start with this line.

/target [target=target, harm, exists, nodead][target=mainassist-target, harm, exists, nodead]

My hunter who is my mainassist looks like this

/target [target=target, harm, exists, nodead][target=tank-target, harm, exists, nodead]

When I hit my dps bigbutton once, my hunter grabs my tank(my brain)'s target. I hit it again and that target gets passed to my 2 other DPSers. They will continue to target that mob until the mob dies allowing me to switch targets on my tank all I want and know that my DPS toons will continue to dps their mob till it's dead. This allows for intelligent castsequences not to constantly be reset, or to not be reset upon a new mob being dps'd.

I am lvl 44 now on my toons and have yet to come across a situation where this "sticky" targeting structure caused me any problems. If you believe you will have issues, just bind another key that clears targets on all your guys.

As for making this setup leaderless, that has to do with hotstrings which are a lot of config from what I've read, but very usefull once configured. I'd recommend something like Bartender or another action bar addons. I'd arrange 5 sets of actionbars and work out all your macros across the bars so that bar 1 means toon one is the leader, bar 2 means toon 2 is the leader, etc. This makes your keybinds easy to setup in a logical manner. Hope that helps. I feel like i'm not making a ton of sense today.

As for hardware, here's what I wish I had.

  • Dedicated button for innervate
  • Dedicated button for each "oh shit" ability (Divine Intervention, Rebirth as wipe recovery, Psychic Scream, etc)
Outside of that, I have found that a normal keyboard suits me find for PVE purposes.

As for configuration options, I would highly suggest looking into symbolic links for your wow directories. They allow you to only have to keep one wow directory really up to date and spread your config files across multiple other directories making updating addons a breeze. My current setup is one main wow directory that I use for my Brain. With a little copy and pasting, any toon I log onto as my brain has the same UI and setup. 4 Slave directories that all link to a single WTF config folder making it so that no matter which wow instance I use, as long as it's a slave instance, it has the UI and setup for slaves. This makes it so that keybindings from my brain config don't carry over to my slave instances.