With the Raid Finder coming in patch 4.3, many new players will be storming their way through the halls of Blackwing Descent, the Bastion of Twilight, and the fiery plains of Ragnaros' domain. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond - your addons folder will never be the same. I don’t know how helpful this is - hearing that you really can’t get there from here isn’t always what folks want to hear, but honestly, if you’re looking for sense out of Blizzard’s native UI, you’re going to be badly frustrated.Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. I’d stay away from that one unless you just feel the need to grab something written by anarchists.
Since keybinding is a do it once and forget it sort of thing and addon stability is a day-to-day issue, ElvUI seems a better bet to me.īartender4’s underlying code is a bit more fragile and I had unexplained bar wandering (a few pixels at a time) that drove me nuts.ĭominos’ code is a rat’s nest of spaghetti and spite. While the overall control of the bars is better in ElvUI (plus ElvUI_ExtraActionBars), Bartender4 does a better job maintaining continuity with Blizzard’s keybindings.
You can literally install it and the extra action bars part and shut off everything else and just use it for your bars if you want.Ĭaveat: You’ll have to rebind your buttons with ElvUI. That addon is modular - that is - you can turn off big chunks of it (or little ones) and only use the bits you want. You’d have to install ElvUI_ExtraActionBars to get bars 7-10 opened up (although if all you play is a druid, that wouldn’t do you much good).
If you want control over this stuff, you’re pretty much going to have to go to a bar mod.ĮlvUI is my go-to for this (although it has the potential for altering a whole lot more, the bar-mod part of is so much more rationally designed than Bartender4 and Dominos that I strongly recommend it to everyone looking for a bar mod even if all they want IS a bar mod). If you’re not a Druid or a Rogue, 48 bindable buttons are hidden away forever, pointlessly. That’s the worst mess of a control UI that I’ve ever seen in a game.ġ20 assigned action slots and you can’t touch half of them directly by default. There is an EXTRA ACTION BUTTON and a ZONE ABILITY BUTTON that are something other than what I think you’re talking about - those two are for the special quest-related abilities that pop up from time to time.įrankly, if you’re trying to make sense of Blizzard’s button bars, I wish you luck. The “Special Action Buttons” are the buttons on the stance swapping bars (according to the reading I’ve done - although there’s precious little direct documentation of the Blizzard vanilla UI). It’s not subject to a lot of control by you (there are some minor things you can do to alter that, but by and large, you get one set of 12 buttons swapped from a hidden bar to your main bar with each stance). The buttons on those bars are (by default) swapped out for the buttons on your main bar when you change stances. There are 48 buttons slots available there that aren’t implemented at all in the game for all but Druids (and then only as repositories for swapped out abilities) - Rogues need one of those bars, so they lose 36 button slots needlessly. These are, in ElvUI, Bars 7-10 but they’re not that rationally named by Blizzard. On that same Interface/!ActionBars panel, you can choose to make your bars always visible (which helps with finding things).įor “Stance” classes, there are four hidden bars that are swapped in and out at need (3 are wasted on Rogues, 4 are wasted on all other classes except Druids).