I’m hesitant to make a big post about my UI rebuild, because putting words down about something is dangerous. The power of a name is dangerous. A name says, this is this and not that.
And I’m not ready to say this is my UI, not yet. I need to keep going and say, how about this? How about THIS?
The first two pictures were from last night. Not tonight, I’ve already made minor changes to it again tonight. But the keybinds got redone last night, and I have no idea if they’re working better for me or not because so much of PvP remains practice and learning where your abilities are so you never have to think about it.
The dramatic redesign of the Warlock class offered me, personally, an unique opportunity – to completely ditch the mass of keybinds I’d accumulated over the last 4 years of play. The bottom three pictures are UI snapshots from 2011. They’re overloaded, crowded, and I could probably work them with my eyes closed, and they represent two periods in my keybinding – before and after ElvUI’s destruction of my keybinds. At one point I had nearly my entire keyboard rebound and mapped with different variables; finally I moved into the three bar setup you see on Ultrax, really focusing on 123456qwertyasdfghzxc – the left side – plus Shift and Alt modifiers. Before ElvUI ate my settings, I had even more, and it looked terrible.
Because the class of my main has changed so much, I knew that I had a chance to try modifying my habits. I could rebind movement keys – I knew I would have room – and could try using more of the Naga keyboard. Stop moving exclusively with the mouse, use the keyboard too, centralize casting, etc.. In order to do this, though, I had to nuke everything – and I mean everything – and start over from scratch.
I’ve hated it even as I’ve enjoyed it.
I had to accept that I was going to suck, that I would not know where I’d put things. WHERE IS MY TRINKET oh there it is – this is not what you want to say in a PvP battle. I’ve had to accept that I would have to focus – really focus – on one class, one character, one spec at a time. That I would have to be able to say, okay, is that really a bind I can hit? I know I’ve trained myself to use Shift-Q for Life Tap… isn’t it better to hit Caps Lock and Q instead?
Every other time I’ve done this, I’ve thrown in the towel. I got too frustrated with my diminished performance during the game, too confused to keep track of all the different character abilities and roles.
I am trying ESDF and it seems okay. I am faster on clicking flags, because I’m not having to physically shift from moving with the mouse to clicking the flag with the mouse. This is good, because one of my weaknesses in PvP is beating people to the flag return. I got 2 tonight. (This matters for Battlemaster.)
But I’m still not fluid. I have to give each configuration a few days to work out the kinks, to adapt and adjust and give it a shot. I have no idea if this is going to work. But once I’m pretty happy with the binds, I’ll work on the UI a bit. I’ll bring up a healer next and look at VuhDo. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll give ElvUI or TukUI another try.
But I am wary of naming any of this my UI or my keybind layout yet. I don’t want to settle on it.