UI and tracking cooldowns?

[Mashugana]

I'm suffering from ability overload. How do you guys configure your UI so you can see when key abilities come off cooldown?

 

I've looked at a lot of UI setups and people seem to favor 3 consolidated ability bars at the bottom middle of the screen. How the heck do you see an individual ability come off cooldown in that mess?

 

Or are there only a handful you use and you tend to just get a feel for them?

 

In other MMOs I've put a bar with a few key icons in the middle of the screen - this lets me see cooldowns but really kills immersion.

 

Thanks for any advice

[Anduhar]

The game has a built-in interface editor under the "System" section of your menu bar. You can move your quickbars and change their sizes as well as the number of buttons on them. There's lots of other stuff you can do with it. I would also recommend looking through your rotation and the abilities you're using regularly. Many of the abilities for each class are very situational, you may be using some abilities regularly that you really don't need to use which can contribute to the ability bloat on your bars.

 

Here are some class guides for 5.0 to help with that:

http://dulfy.net/2016/12/22/swtor-5-0-class-guides-master-list/

 

I personally use a 12 programmable button mouse with the buttons in a 3x4 grid. My main quickbar is towards the lower middle of the screen and formatted 3x4 to match the keys on my mouse. They're keybined accordingly. That bar has my main rotation (plus a few misc abilities I use a lot) and then to either side of it there are two other bars with situational and misc abilities. I don't have any issues identifying when abilities are off CD and when I can use them.

Edited March 1, 2017 by Anduhar

[Battilea]

I use the advanced layout provided by the game. That gives me four bars. The right one is mostly used for out of combat stuff, like quick travels, the out of combat healing ability, and so on. The main abilities I use cover the first six eight or so slots in the center top bar and center six slots in the bottom middle bottom bar. Combat abilities that are more situational and/or with longer cooldowns (that aren't potentially crucial like the stun break) go in the other slots. And that leaves the left one, which gets things like spring, guard, stealth abilities, speeder(s), and potentially a couple of long cooldown "oh crap" abilities if I'm out of room in the center bars. Those four bars get no mod (center top) shift (center bottom), control (right), and alt (left).

 

So basically, that gives me all my commonly used combat stuff as 1-8 and shift 1-6, with the cooldowns in a relatively small block.

Edited March 1, 2017 by Battilea

[Adric_the_Red]

In your Preferences, there are options for cooldown display "styles" (click the droplist and then hover over the different styles for descriptions). It might be helpful to change the style of cooldown from the default, so it's different from the GCD style.

 

You also can add cooldown "text" to show a countdown until the cooldown is finished. Along with enabling/disabling the text, you can adjust its size, and select when to have it start showing tenths of seconds (from zero to 10 seconds before the cooldown ends). The switch to showing tenths also changes the color of the text from yellow to red, so a bit more reinforcement of the CD being almost done.

Edited March 2, 2017 by Adric_the_Red

[Mashugana]

Great advice - thank you all