Too many keybinds: what to do when your class has forty buttons

Rebuild the bars around your hand, not around the class

Group by frequency, not by category. The abilities you press every few seconds belong on the keys you can reach without moving your hand at all; things you press once a pull can go somewhere awkward. Most people do the opposite because the default bars are ordered by when the game gave them the spell.

The other half of this is consistency across characters: defensives on the same keys on every alt, interrupt on the same key on every alt. It costs an evening and it pays back forever.

Use modifiers instead of new keys

Shift, control and alt triple or quadruple what your reachable keys can hold, and modifier presses are much easier to learn than a new finger position. Pair related abilities on the same base key: the ability and its cooldown, the single target and multi target version, the heal and the big heal.

Macros, and their limits

Macros can combine things the game allows to be combined, and they are genuinely useful for utility. What they cannot do is make a decision: a macro cannot know that your proc is about to expire, or that this cast is the one worth interrupting, or that you should hold the cooldown for eight seconds. Once you need a decision, you have left what macros can do.

The game’s own assist features

Modern WoW ships assist tools that highlight a suggested next ability, and a single-button option that presses a simplified priority for you. They are a real improvement over nothing and they are worth trying first because they are free and built in.

What people usually run into is the ceiling: the simplified priority leaves out large parts of what a spec actually does, it does not use your cooldowns the way a good player would, and on several specs it costs you throughput compared to playing by hand. It is a training aid, not a replacement for the rotation.

A full rotation assistant

This is the step where the keyboard work leaves your hands entirely. Rice Rotations watches the fight from the game picture, decides what comes next including cooldowns, interrupts, dispels and defensives, and sends the keystroke from a second PC or a virtual machine. Your hands are left with movement, positioning and the calls that matter.

It is the heaviest option on this list and it is not free, so work down from the top: bars, modifiers, macros, built-in assist. If you are still dropping half your rotation because the spec asks for more fingers than you have, this is what the assistant is for.

• Forty specializations across every role, one subscription
• Cooldowns used on the fight rather than on cooldown
• Dozens of settings per spec, so raid and Mythic+ can behave differently
• Built for PvE, Windows client only