Action "Bar" Jackson

Alternate title: You wanna have some fun? Try playing without using your number keys.

Alternate Alternate title: WTF!!!! This is turning into the run from hell.

Being a sucker for helping key people up, and then losing my spot in Kara to them, I run the dungeons for the Kara attunment a lot. Luckily I enjoy them, and Old Hillsbrad and Black Morass the most, despite the schlep to get to them. Just something about BM and the long drawn out endurance battle that I like. Plus, I'm usually on add duty, so I sort of get to do my own thing, while at the same time contributing to the team. I just wish the stupid trash clearing part would be taken out, I really feel it doesn't add anything to the experience, but oh well, I'm no video game designer, and the portal sequence is fun enough to make up for it.

Everything's going nice, trash gets cleared. Assign out the chrono beacon duty. I typically like to do it in alphabetical order of toon name, starting on portal 13.

We start the portals. When I go to engage the first add that comes out of the first portal, I hit my Pet Attack / Hunter's Mark macro, and all is well. Cringer faithfully dashes over and starts growling, chewing and swiping at my target. When he builds up about a thousand threat, hit my steady shot key. And my smelting skill window pops up? What? I close that, and hit steady shot again. Smelting. What What?

Ok, maybe Arcane Shot. First aid window pops up.

Holy S!!!!! WTF is happening? And by now, the little packs of 3 bats are coming. Quick, hoping to stop them from getting to the shield, I hit my multi-shot key.....and pop into Aspect of the Monkey!!!!!

Not having been born yesterday, I begin to suspect my action bar is behaving funky. Glance down, only to see that my entire action bar has been replaced with what appears to be a random collection of my relatively un-used abilities, nearly none of which are useful in combat.

Crud. Not wanting to stop the battle, even though we're right at the beginning, I think real fast about how I can fix this. First thought is that it'll be easiest to locate some things that I know roughly where they are in my spells/abilities window. Fire that guy up, flip to the Marksmanship tab, and grab Arcane Shot and Multi Shot and put them to their right spots. Then slip over to Beast Mastery tab and get Aspects of the Hawk and Viper.

Arcane and Multi go on my main action bar, and are mapped to my keyboard number keys.

My Aspects go in my right-most vertical action bar, and are not mapped to any keys.

Well, now I think I'm gtg for at least two of my shots, and I'll be in the right aspect for battle. Ok. I can do this.

Hit my multishot to grab those bats who are now eating the shield....and switch from hawk to viper!!!!!

WTF!!!!

All confused, I try to examine the two action bars more closely, and I see that it looks like my right-most action bar and my main number key-mapped action bar have become duplicates of eachother. When I added viper to my right bar, it also got added to the corresponding location on my main bar, overlaying multishot on key 8.

Ok, this sux. But at least I sort of got the gist of it. So I more carefully re-add the 4 abilities I need, this time, all to the main action bar, so I wont have any conflicts.

We make it to portal 6, where you get a little break to mana up, and to also fix any hosed action bars. Using only my main action bar, I replaced my normal shots, and got ready to rock. The shield hasn't taken too much damage, so if I can get squared away, we can still do this.

Things go OK, but we eventually wipe on portal 12, due to lack of DPS causing fight to last too long, causing healer to go OOM, causing tank to go OOH and die.

Regroup, and this time I told the crew that I'll use my beacon on portal 12, so we can kill that one fast, and then we'll have to take 13 with no beacon.

I took a few more moments before we started to finish off any action bar stuff that was still wonky.

Things go nicely and by the time we get to portal 12, the shield is still at 100%, so I'm stoked. I whip out my beacon, get the little green AOE target thingie, place it over the boss, and click....and....nothing. Where's my dragon smiting my enemy? Nothing, nathan, nada.

WTF!!!! This is turning into the run from hell.

So quick thinking, I decide that the sheild is at 100% so we can let the adds go for a while, and I'll focus my DPS at the portal boss. It works, and we take the boss down, and the adds took the shield down to 58% before we finished them off.

Portal 13, no beacon, but we take care of that one pretty easily. Portal 14, team mate whips out his beautiful dragon helper, and we smash that one.

I'm working on cleaning up one of the adds from 14 when all of a sudden, smelting shows back up on my F-ing screen. It happened again. Luckily, the beacon helper flew over and ate up the add for me.

I look at my action bar more closely than last time, and I see that this time, my right action bar and my main action bar have completely swapped. All my normal spells are over on the right, in the correct order. WTF?

Not wanting to make it worse, I decided to try to mouse my way through the rest of the fight. HOLY COW!!! You wanna have some fun? Try playing without using your number keys.

Portal 15, the lady, who's key run this was, can't figure out how to use her beacon, so we down that guy without any dragon help. Using my mouse only, I manage through the adds. What a mess it is to basically turn your left hand into a useless appendage, other than for movement, which I don't do a lot of during add duty in BM.

Portal 16 and 17, nice helper dragons come to the rescue.

Final boss, down without much fuss, but still quite the fun little battle using only mouse clicks for shot rotation.

I got Hourglass of the Unraveller, which is nice. Guildie got her Master's Key, which is nice. Of course, that's another DPS'er with CC ability to compete with for Kara spots, but oh well. Maybe I'll find a guild that actually values forming a team and letting people feel somewhat comfortable with their position on that team. Or maybe I'm a sucker.

And what's the deal with the action bars?