Party Cooldowns/Usage with ZenTracker/Nnoggie's and Click Bars

[z0k]

This serves as a both a guide (it took me some time to figure out everything I needed to get it off the ground as the information is disjointed) as well as some stream of conscious thoughts around the setup and whether it's worth it to use.

I spent a couple hours the other day wanting to overhaul my cooldown usage for my DK team. Historically I've used click bars as it gives more control, overall. The problem I run into with using round robin is that I spam buttons and inevitably cast a spell more than once. Plus with defensive cooldowns, I might not want to cast it on all characters.

So I started playing around with ZenTracker along with Nnoggie's and a clickbar setup to be able to track and cast cooldowns across the team. This can also be accomplished using Exorsus Raid Tools. I found with ZenTracker there's a bit more of a learning curve, in that setup really isn't that hard, but it's basically an addon wrapped on top of another addon, with a plugin built in as well, so everything didn't work exactly as I had expected.

There are two other challenges I've had that have made me question whether or not Exorsus would have been better to setup.
1.) Icons do not always propagate in the same positions. I'm not sure why this is, but I do find it quite annoying.
2.) In my unit frames there's no way to specify the order of characters outside of doing it in Alphabetical order, which does not match my SLOT order in ISBOXER.

The benefits over Exorsus are that it works a little better out of the box, shipping settings around seems a little easier, and it's already tied to the unit frames, meaning I don't have to make sure it's lined up perfectly, on each character, it's already snapped into place. By better out of the box I mean that I don't have to configure absolutely everything.

Before I get started on instructions for setting it up, here's a screenshot of what it looks like in my UI.
As you can see I've limited the spells that appear to the major ones I really care about. Gorefiends grasp is hidden because it's not uniform across all the DKs (3 of them are UH) so it caused some inconsistencies in layout that I didn't want to deal with.


ISBOXER SETUP

Underneath it are a click bar which was admittedly annoying to setup. It's a 3x8. Every 2 rows is for a specific slot. This is done because the slots are consistent for this team in the unit frames, although they're not in order by slot, they're in order by character name. The downfall of this design is that if I go to move this to another team, I will need to reorder the slots in ISBOXER, probably using a different slot.

One smart thing I did in the ISBOXER setup is that I created new key maps for these cooldowns. Example:


2,1 is Alt+1 to slot 5
2,2 is Alt+2 to slot 5
2,3 is Alt+3 to slot 5
1,1 is Alt+4 to slot 5
1,2 is Alt+5 to slot 5
1,3 is Alt+6 to slot 5 and repeating for every 2....I think you get the idea. Admittedly my choice to do the first line as 4-6 and the second line as 1-3 was a mistake at best.

Historically for click bars I've tied the spell to the bar, and not the keybind. I accomplish this through WoW macros inside of ISBOXER. This is limited though as it does not scale and is not very modular in general. My approach here was a little different however. By passing keybinds instead, I'm relying on the spells being in the correct place in the game. Do note that my usage of alt+num is actually how I would play this character in game if I were solo, which is nice because it doesn't feel limiting from that perspective.




ADDON SETUP

It took me more time than I care to admit to wade through the different posts to understand exactly how to set this up. It uses terms like front end and backend, which are terms I understand, but the application of them wasn't explained very well.

You really only need two addons for this configuration:
WeakAuras 2 - https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/weakauras-2
LibGroupInSpecT - https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/libgroupinspect

Once these are in place, you can get to actually importing what they refer to as the "front end." Back end by their definition is the addon you're installing on your WoW client, the front end are the strings you're importing into WeakAuras.

Once in game, you import two strings, one from ZenTracker, one from Nnoggie's.
ZenTracker - https://wago.io/r14U746B7
Nnoggie's - https://wago.io/PartyCDs

If you look at the screenshot on the Nnoggie's link above you'll actually see he provides guidance for what took me a while to find. Note that once you install the WeakAura for Nnoggie, all the spell governing is done by his weakaura, and not the ZenTracker addon in the in game Interface Options.

I just got disconnected from the game because of maintenance so I don't have a screenshot for that. Essentially I blacklisted a bunch of things to keep the amount of icons from showing up although it does give good control for modifying groupings and adding/removing certain types. The idea is to limit it only to cooldowns I'm actually going to use.

Final Thoughts
Overall, I'd put this in the neat category. It's certainly functional, although it comes with its fair share of downfalls. I do like the tracking is a little more accurate than Exorsus, but not really more accurate enough to know whether or not the setup is worth it.

I'll run with it for a bit before I determine how I feel. I've already had spells move around on the cooldown list for me.

[ovrlrd]

I remember back when I tried a trinity team for M+ (over a year ago) I ended up having a setup like this, only a lot simpler in implementation. I basically added a small bar that looked a lot like Noggie's CD tracker for each of my characters exactly at the left side of it's name on the party frame, then broadcasted to all windows using VideoFX. It took A LOT of adjustment, moving 1 pixel here, 1 pixel there, realignment and overall pita, but I got it working to the point where it was almost identical visually to the tracker, with the added benefit of allowing me to add/remove buttons and still be able to see their CDs through OmniCC. Unfortunately I don't have that setup anymore, but screenshots wouldn't help much since it would look like ZenTracker's WA screenshot.
Your approach is obviously a lot more sophisticated, but mine was easier to reutilize on different teams; I basically ended up having an ElvUI profile set for each slot, corresponding the specific actionbar that slot represented on the party order.