Thursday, July 12, 2007

Working Toward an Uber UI

Jayna's posts have inspired me to set up a better combo of my UI, hotkeys, and macros. I absolutely loved the screenshot of her UI, so I'm basing what I'm working with off of that. I am not finished messing with this, but the basic layout has emerged.

Screenshot #1: You can see the basic theme here. What's missing from this shot is the target frame, which is identical in placement and look to Jayna's. I'm just dumb and forgot to focus on a target to get it in the shot. The pet bar is enlarged, and the Demonology abilities are offset from the others to reduce clutter in the main set of buttons and to make them easier to find. The abilities I left on the bar are either abilities on a cooldown or those that I don't use often enough in the middle of combat to justify a hotkey spot. What you can't see from this is that I moved my direction keys over to the right by one key, allowing me to keep my fingers on the home row so I can mash buttons easier without looking.

Screenshot #2: This shows my spellbinder bindings. This is where I differ somewhat from Jayna's setup. Rather than heavily utilize the number keys, I set up my keyboard to place my most-used abilities on the home row.

The main difficulty I can see with this setup so far is the lack of a hand on a mouse during combat. Jayna's setup seems to have this problem too, though. Basically I plan to use an addon to grab both targets when the match starts via mouseover, and then move my hands to the keyboard.

2 comments:

Silvenus said...

I use the keyboard for typing.

I got a Nostromo n52 SpeedPad almost 2 years ago, and it's changed the way I've played WoW.

Takes some getting used to, but I essentially have 48 buttons (through the use of modifiers like Alt, Ctrl, Shift) that I can get to easily using only my left hand.

I highly recommend them to everyone who hotkeys instead of clicking buttons with the mouse (blech).

Derrick Crowe said...

Wow I've never used it. I'll have to check it out!

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