Using action bar pages to free focus.

[maqz]

The idea to use action bar pages came up in a recent thread, Focus-free assist . I've been playing with it today, and it seems to work well. Time will tell if this is a viable setup. I just wanted to throw this out here if anyone's interested, and hopefully get some new ideas.

Background.

You need some way for each toon to remember who is the current leader. You want to be able to switch leader, if a toon dies or becomes mind controlled. You also want to remember a target, so that the toons can keep firing on one mob while the tank can target different mobs to manage aggro (this may be mostly for pve players).

In some situations you may want to remember a third unit, perhaps the mob to be polymorphed, in case it breaks and needs to be recast, or someone to spam heals on while still being able to cast some spells on the target.

We have target and focus, so a third way to remember a unit is needed. This is an attempt to use different action bars to decide who the leader is.

Setup.

My main is always the leader, as long as it's alive, so I have nothing special here. Bartender, the action bar addon I use, won't work for this anyway, more on that later.

The alts all use the default UI, which has six action bars. I have enabled the lower left and lower right action bars, leaving four bars to switch between. That's enough for five toons, since a lone toon doesn't need to assist or follow.

There are keybindings for switching to specific action pages, I have set ctrl+F1 to ctrl+F4.

On each action bar, the last slot is a different assist macro. Left click the macro, and it will assist the leader. Right click and it will target the leader. It looks like this.

/target [button:2] toonA
/stopmacro [button:2]
/cleartarget
/assist toonA

There are four of these macros, one for each possible leader. This macro won't actually be clicked, it will be called with a /click command. The last slot on the action bar is called ActionButton12, so now we can assist the leader with the command "/click ActionButton12" and target the leader with "/click ActionButton12 RightButton", and the actual leader depends on which action bar is displayed.

You can also bind this macro to a key, it will force your alts to assist you when pressed. You can also bind a raid target "skull" icon on this key.

The other eleven slots are used for spells and abilities, but they need to be the same on all four pages. This can take a little while to drag all the macros there and make sure it's all the same. I'd appreciate any tips here!

The total number of macros in this setup is one per spell, one for follow, and one for each leader. This is same as the one based on "...[target=focustarget]...".

A note on other bar mods. Trinity has different names for the buttons on different pages, so these commands would always pick the same leader. Bartender does not have pages as far as I can tell. I have not tested other addons.

Example macros.

These are not taken from the game, but from a text file I used to copy and paste back and forth, so they might be a little off. Just yell if you see any mistakes.

A basic damage spell macro:

#showtooltip
/click [noexists][dead][noharm] ActionButton12
/cast Fireball

This has the toon interrupt the leader's target without losing it's own target.

#showtooltip
/stopcasting
/click ActionButton12
/cast Counterspell
/targetlasttarget

Follow the leader.

/click ActionButton12 RightButton
/follow
/targetlasttarget

Healing. I have a lot of healing. Almost half the keyboard actually! That's why I wanted to free focus, but I'm still not sure exactly how to use it. Here's an example, heal leader's target and focus it, and a second macro to heal focus.

#showtooltip
/click ActionButton12
/focus
/cast [mod:shift] Greater Heal; Renew
/targetlasttarget

#showtooltip
/cast [target=focus,help,nodead,nomod] Greater Heal; [target=focus,help,nodead,mod:shift] Flash Heal

Crowd control, I'm still working on this. It's a two part macro, one on the leader and one on the agent. Set a target with shift, sheep a preset target without modifiers.

/stopmacro [nomod:shift]
/run SetRaidTarget("target",5)

#showtooltip
/stopcasting [target=focus,exists,harm,nodead,nomod:shift]
/click [mod:shift] ActionButton12
/focus [mod:shift]
/cast [target=focus,nomod:shift] Polymorph
/targetlasttarget [mod:shift]

[Chorizotarian]

This thread needs a bump. Has anyone else tried this? Works great for me. Here's my variation...

Targeting
I use a Bongos bar with 1 button (BongosActionButton61) and 5 pages for my assist macros. Each assist macro can do any of following, depending on which mouse button is /clicked:
1 = offensive target
2 = healing target
3 = target main
4 = follow

The assist macro for page 1 (shortcut = F1) targets my tank (Iaggo):

/assist [button:1] Iaggo
/stopmacro [button:1]
/target [button:2][button:3] Iaggo
/target [target=targettarget,button:2,help,nodead]
/stopmacro [button:2][button:3]
/follow Iaggo

F2-F5 select the other pages, each of which has an identical macro for the corresponding clone. (Substitute clone name for "Iaggo".) Every char gets all of the macros *except* the one that assists them. For that slot the button page is blank.

Offensive Spells

Every spell gets a macro that /clicks the current main's assist macro.

/click [dead][noexists][noharm] BongosActionButton61
/startattack [harm]
/cast Lightning Bolt

Clones keep their current target until dead then automatically pick up whatever the main is targeting. I can select a new target at any time by left-clicking the macro via a keybind:

(bindings-cache.wtf)

bind F CLICK BongosActionButton61:LeftButton

Healing

Every spell gets a macro that /clicks the current main's assist macro using RightButton.

/click BongosActionButton61 RightButton
/cast Lesser Healing Wave

This heals a friendly target or else my main.

Follow / Big Button

Follow is mostly taken care of by the target macro. Clones /click with button 4 via a macro. I also /click the SmartBuff button out of combat so I automatically rebuff.

/click [nocombat] SmartBuff_KeyButton
/click BongosActionButton61 Button4

[Djarid]

I like it, I think it is good nay ingenious but I will stick with my focus/leader and trinity

[Kaynin]

I've no reason not to use focus myself, but this is very likely one of the better options for multiboxers that need their focus for other things such as CC.

[Chorizotarian]

Here are some screenshots to make this hopefully clearer. I'm using just 2 of my normal 5 chars:
- Pally Iaggo = F1
- Shaman Katator = F2

I actually don't even have them grouped. It doesn't matter under this system, though of course you would want them grouped once you were questing.

Hotkey setup:


Default setup with Iaggo as main:


Switch to Katator as main:

[Maiden4Life]

I really like the idea of this method since it will allow me to free focus up for CC targets. I can see using the CC macros and different modifiers on each toon's macro so that my main can assign a different target to each mage and have them remember it. The one problem I have is that I use Trinity.

So I played around a bit and got around the problem of Trinity having differently named buttons for each page on the bar. Thought I would post my solution here for those that use Trinity to be able to use this non-focus method.

In the Trinity options you have the ability to Enable the Blizzard bar. Also, whatever you put in the Blizzard bar is still available for use even if you have it hidden and use trinity keymappings/macros for everything. Trinity has its own verions of ActionButton12 which does not interfere with the Blizzard one and is called TrinityActionButton12. All of this is what allows my solution to work. Note that it is a little convoluted but once set up, works just fine. So here is what I did.

1. Temporarily enable the Blizzard bar in the Trinity Global options
2. Open up the regular Blizzard macro window
3. Build the 2-5 macros that handle using a different "mains" to get targets from in the Blizzard window .
4. Place those macros on the Blizzard bar pages 1-N (where N is the number of toons you play at once) in the last slot on the bar
5. Disable the Blizzard bar in the Trinity Global options.
6. Map whatever keys you want to the action bar switching (I used the same function keys that I use to swithc PiP in Keyclone so my main automatically switches when I change windows)
7. Build all your macros in Trinity to use /click ActionButton12

And that is it! Even though the blizzard bar is not visible, switching pages still happens as expected and you can click that page's version of the macro with the same click command. An additional helper for this just as a visual cue to me that it is all working fine is that I created a 1 button Trinity bar that has 5 pages on it and copied the same macro images and titles into each page button there. So when I hit the keys to switch action pages, that Trinity bar follows suit and if something goes wrong I'll know because I will actually see that the bar didn't switch.

Hope this helps, I was really excited to get Trinity working with this method!

Mark.

[Chorizotarian]

Cool idea! I wonder if that would work with Bongos too. I actually don't like having to create a special bar for Bongos because if you change the size of any of the bars it messes up the button numbers. I'll have to give it a try.

[Maiden4Life]

So my team of 5 just got Ragefire Chasm on farm status . LOTS of fun and during it I managed to get some nice CC going so I thought I would update here with the macros I used for that, just a simple mod of the stuff in the OP for this thread.

I roll with pally tank, priest, lock and 2 mages. So I wanted to be able to assign CC targets to the different classes as needed. Following is the macro on the main for assigning targets:

/stopmacro [nomod] 
/script SetRaidTarget("target",5); 
/stopmacro [mod:alt] 
/script SetRaidTarget("target",4); 
/stopmacro [mod:ctrl] 
/script SetRaidTarget("target",3);

This allows me to set different raid icons on whatever my main has selected. It uses fallthrough logic for the modifiers (I use all 3: shift, ctrl, alt). Obviously if I assign targets in the wrong order it will clobber other icons. But I always assign in the order of shift, then ctrl, and lastly alt. So if I hit Shift it will assign 3 icons to the target with icon "3" being the last one. If I use ctrl, it will assign 2 icons ("4" being the last) but then stop before reassigning icon "3". And alt does the same.

Then on my 3 toons I have variations of the CC macro like this (note the slight change to the mod/nomod parts):

/stopcasting [target=focus,exists,harm,nodead,nomod] 
/click [mod:shift] ActionButton12 
/focus [mod:shift] 
/cast [target=focus,nomod] Polymorph 
/targetlasttarget [mod]

The nomod change is needed so that I don't have one mage (his assign was done with Shift) trying to sheep while I am still assigning the 2nd CC target (using Ctrl for example). The 2 mages have the shift and ctrl version of the mod part and the lock has alt as the mod and Fear as the spell. At a later date I can switch this to Banish or Shackle for the priest as needed but I am still a lowbie (lvl 15).

I have all these macros bound to the 'G' key on my keyboard. So CCing is as simple as:

1. Target mob A on main
2. Hit Shift-G
3. Target mob B on main
4. Hit Ctrl-G
5. Target mob C on main
6. Hit Alt-G
7. Pull with main
8. Hit G and all 3 targets get CC'd
9. During the fight if I need a refresh on CC, hit G again and all 3 refresh.

Super fun and the only caveat is that you have to give the alts a second to see the main target switch as lag can affect this and if you go too quickly with assigning, alts will either get no target or 2 will have the same target. But after playing last night I was even able to assign CC and execute it during the fight a couple of times when I did a bad pull or got an add.

Hope it helps!

Mark.

[Chorizotarian]

If anyone is still interested in this system you might want to check out my addon ActioBarTargeting. It does the same thing automatically, without any manual macro or bar setup. The key innovation is to use the actionbar macro conditional, which may not have existed when we originally discussed this.