UI Question: How many visible action buttons/slots do you need?

[luxlunae]

I feel like every few years I pare mine down in a great UI sweep but then impatiently turn back on a couple of bars as needed and things get cluttered again.

At this point I'm back up to two full action bars (including the one with the basic 1-12 keybinds... although usually some of that is taken over by isboxer I do like SOMETHING that works to do attacking on those bars for when I'm not logged into the correct toon but nevertheless have to kill off a mob or two--like when i'm doing pet dailies), one hidden action bar with teleports/consumables, and one floating semi transparent bar that I seem to have visible... for professions? Yes, despite writing that snazzy tutorial on creating a professions wheel menu in isboxer several years ago, I mostly open mine manually these days.

I like to keep some clickable tom tom macros, quest specific stuff, and big cooldowns visible (let's be honest, I'm not setting up fancy weak auras for 10,000 alts I'm not raiding on).

How many visible action buttons do you keep in your UIs?

[Svpernova09]

Since the launch of Legion and the great skill pruning I've cut down a lot. I have 36 slots visible but often have many unused depending on the class.

Here's a recent screenshot:

[Wubsie]

Depends on what I'm running. For mixed teams I rarely have any visible action bars. I track CDS through addons so I don't see why I would need any. For teams consisting of only one class I run some bars. I only really have things with CDs visible though... No need to see Moonfire on my bars since it's always castable and I know the bind.

That's kind of what I try to do with my UI now. If it does not tell you something you need to know, hide it.

[JohnGabriel]

All of them.

[MiRai]

I've been using this layout for years now, for all of my characters.




There are four empty buttons and several things hidden behind modifier macros.

[MadMilitia]

I've been using this layout for years now, for all of my characters.




There are four empty buttons and several things hidden behind modifier macros.

Mine is similar to this but I have a few others.

I consolidate DPS down to two keys with gnome sequencer ST (single-target) and AoE. So it reads like:





Top left is consumeables.
Bottom left is emote bar (isboxer).
Left vertical is ST, AoE, BURST, SV (survive) gnome sequencer rotation block. Followed by CC options CTRL, nomod, ALT, SHIFT "[" = focus, "]" = target.
Cooldowns on the vertical right.

That's basically my layout now.

[Ellay]

Your WASD is taken, I am hardcoded into using it as my movement keys and I know it's inefficient. What do you use to move? Both left/right mouse click hold?

[MiRai]

Your WASD is taken, I am hardcoded into using it as my movement keys and I know it's inefficient. What do you use to move? Both left/right mouse click hold?

If you're referring to my post/picture, I use ESDF for movement keys.

[Ellay]

I wish I could do it, muscle memory ingrained.. would be amazing though to switch.

[MadMilitia]

I have a 6X6 bartender grid I keep on the left and a 4X3 grid on the right for healing.

The bartender grid right-most side is all rotations and CC. I'm a lefty so my keybinds are all on the left side.

The bartender grid looks like this:



The right-most side is rotation and CC. Top to bottom, left to right is:
DPS AE, DPS ST
Loot-A-Rang, DPS SV
Taunt Focus, Taunt Target
Interrupt Focus, Interrupt Target
Stun Focus, Stun Target
Grip Focus, Grip Target

The inner bar is just filled with cooldowns. I need to clean that one up.
The inner left bar is professions and some other important things.
The leftmost stuff is for consumables I need and bags.

Then on the right I have the grid layout. I use keypad healing something I've discussed before on here. It looks like this:



This setup completely maps to the numpad. Where The first DK on the bottom is NumPad 0 and the last Warlock is NumPad 9.
On that healing pad I do several things.

X = HEAL (Standard)
ALT + X = HEAL (Emergency and Wall)
SHIFT + X = HEAL (AoE)
ALT + SHIFT + X = Dispel
CTRL + X = window swap.

Where X is the numpad button I pressed.

Then I have an IsBoxer toggle set (Work in Progress) that shows the status of my keymap swaps. Like if I wanted AoE instead of single target attacks. It looks like this:



Again badly butchered right now as I'm moving a lot of stuff and changing the way some of them work. They illuminate different colors when I change state. For example the blue one is the camera view toggle. It goes from 1, to 2, to 3 and the icon on the toggle changes with every one. So I know what the current camera angle should be.

These toggles though are:
Standard Keymap toggle, standard broadcast, local rotation (to pass-thru rotation to current window), camera, ST / AoE toggle (turns green when AoE), IWT (red off, purple melee only, green all)
Targeting(SAFE, PvP, PvE), Invisible (follow ranged), invisible (follow all), TAB (to include TAB in the rotation or not), Raid Events (I have a huge list of raid priority targets in WoW macros I fire off when this one is enabled), Combat Follow (slaves will follow master in combat when they have no harmful target, some WoW macro magic there).

Anyway that's my entire layout. Still working on some stuff. Incredibly after all these years =D