I’ve been away from WoW for a while, real life reared it’s ugly head and took priority– which is the reality for all casual gamers, I suppose.

But now that things are a little more settled, I’ve had a chance to start moving some of my ideas from paper to the screen. The main one being swapping to using separate keybinds for each toon as opposed to linking two actions to one keypress.

I’ve been playing around with fighting styles for Pattern (Balance) and Recognition (Feral Tank), but I haven’t found good combination for linked spells/abilities.

I get in range with Pattern, drop the follow, then move in Recognition to taunt in the foes. Once I have aggro, I start up with the ‘nuking from orbit’ (aka spellcasting). Unfortunately this sort of tag-team really doesn’t lend itself to pairing keystrokes.

So instead, I swapped so that Recognition was the lead and setup two new action bars.

On the top is the keybinds for Recognition, running from 1 through 7. The row below is for Pattern, running from Q through U. (This is the draft version, I’m still working out where things fit best.)

The macros in the second action bar are just visual reminders for Pattern’s keybinds. They are all empty for Recognition (unless there is something that links well). This change means each key sends one specific command, which it makes my game-play a lot more precise.

It also means I’m pressing keys twice as fast, but since I’m not PVPing it’s actually manageable. I’d last about 30 seconds in a battleground, but that’s not the point with these two (thankfully).

I may end up moving the keys around so that they run down the keyboard from 1 to A instead of over to 7, but it will depend on how it feel to play. Unless I shell out the moola for one of the zomgextrabuttons! mice, I’m limited to how fast I can type with my left hand– which sucks considering at work I only do 10-key typing with my right.

Ah well, can’t win em all…

Once I have a better setup, I’ll post a list of what I have where, what my rotation is, and what the macros are. It will be interesting to see what other folks think of my newest insanity.

Until then, have some bears!