[GUIDE] Bartender 4 - State Configuration

[y02mustang]

This is the second Bartender 4 guide I wrote tonight, and it's a more advanced guide, focusing mostly on State Configuration and how to set it up how you want it. This deals with stances and forms so is very useful for druids and warriors, but everyone can give it a read to find ways to improve their BT4 experience.


BARTENDER 4
Advanced Setup – Paging and State Configuation

Table of Contents
1. Beginning (#BEG)
2. Stance Configuration (#STANCE)
3. Changing Specs (#SPEC)
4. Final Notes (#FINAL)

Hello, and welcome back to Rayve's guide to Bartender 4 (BT4). I am by no means an expert, but after seeing some questions floating around MMO-Champion about BT4 and action bars I decided to do a write up on what the various options do. This is a more advanced guide than the basic one which Shego walked us through earlier, so let's wave /farewell to Shego and /welcome our Druid, Rayve.

This guide assumes you are familiar with the basics of Bartender or have read through the previous guide.

#BEG



In the screencap above, you can see that I have unlocked all of my bars, so you can see the numbers. Bars 1 and 2 are in the center of my screen and are the main bars I will deal with in this guide.

The other bars you see are 7, 8, and 9. These are not visible unless I hit “unlock” because these are the bars which are paged into Bar 1's location when I switch forms, and I have chosen to have them hidden at all times. (Or else I'd walk around with the Ferocious Bite icon biting my head off!... bad joke, you can groan.)

Here is a detailed view of Bar 1's State Configuration tab to give you more of an idea:



Here you can see that in “State Configuation” I have, firstly, enabled state configuration, which means Bar 1 is allowed to change its contents based on the options I choose here.

“Possess Bar” is checked because Bar 1 is my main bar, and when I'm possessing a drake or something similar, I'd like to be able to know what abilities I have available.

My Default Bar State is not to page, so this Bar 1 is what I see just standing around in normal form in this spec (resto, at the moment).

#STANCE

This next Stance Configuration section is the meat of it all, so I'll include a little close up.



[Note: Page numbers = Bar numbers here, so Page 9 = Bar 9, etc. Take a look at the first screencap if you want to see what spells I've put into Bars 7, 8, and 9, as long as you keep in mind that I do NOT play Feral so these spells are almost never seen, but Druids are probably the best class to use for BT4 examples]

First, when I'm in Bear Form, I want Bar 9 to show up in Bar 1's area, so I choose “Page 9” from the drop down.

I then do the same for Cat, Cat (prowl), Moonkin, and Tree of Life, choosing appropriate pages for each stance.

You may notice that I have Cat and Cat (prowl) as the same page number. This is because I've chosen to use Bar 2 to page into a different bar for Cat (prowl) – however, if I turn State Configuration off for Cat (prowl), I'd go back to this default caster state and that's not what I want. So for Bar 1, I want to see the same spells when I'm in cat form, whether I'm prowling or not.

Let's say I want to set up my cat form bar as Bar 7 – to do that, I need to see it so I can drag my spells into it, right? Right.

So, click on Bar 7 in the BT4 menu and make sure it is both “Enabled” and visible to you – if this is the first time you're setting it up, it should be; otherwise, uncheck any “Hide” boxes from the Visibility pane, so it looks like this:



Then, “Lock” your bars so you can drag spells. Open up your spellbook and put things where you want them into Bar 7. [You can see I already have spells in Bar 7, which is sitting on my head.]

When you've done that, simply go back into Bar 7's setup page and choose to hide it in all forms/stances. It should now disappear from your screen. I don't want to actually *see* Bar 7 all the time, because that would just clutter up my screen – I only want to see the buttons when I'm in cat form, and only in place of Bar 1. I don't want them both up at the same time, so I check all the “Hide Stance/Form” buttons in the Visibility page.

Note that no matter how you have Bar 7 set to display, when it pages into Bar 1's area it will pick up any scaling/sizing information from Bar 1. That's why I leave Bar 7 big and in the middle of my screen; since I only use it for paging into stances, it doesn't matter what it looks like by itself.

Meanwhile, on the State Configuation page, I ensure it defaults to it's own bar (Bar 7), but that's all I change. Paging in other stances doesn't matter here because the Bar 7 itself isn't visible on its own. [I have the same settings for Bars 8 and 9, because I only want to see them in certain forms.]


Now, if we have Bar 1's paging set up properly, we should see Bar 7's spells when we morph into cat form. Let's give it a try.

Here is Bar 2's State Configuration page:



You can see that I'm in cat form now, and Bars 1 and 2 have changed appropriately. [Again, I don't play feral, so don't judge my skills on the crappy Bar 2 spells you see; I selected Page 5 at random so you could see both bars change when I hit cat form.] Let's hit the Prowl button and see how things change.



While you might not be able to see me, you can hopefully see that Bar 2 has changed while Bar 1 has remained in it's cat-form state.

Let's take a look at another example.

When I switch to Bear form, this is what we get (remember, this is set to be paged to 9):



Here you can see Bar 1 has indeed paged to Bar 9's spells (sorry about the Bear butt in the image...). I have Bar 2's options up so you can see why Bar 2 reverted to my healing bar when I went to Bear – it isn't supposed to change! “Don't Page” in Bear Form, so it reverts back to the default state.

#SPEC



Here, you can see I'm in Boomkin form, so my bars have changed, just as I asked them to.

However, Bar 2's contents changed, even though I don't have it set to Page to anything in Boomkin form. The reason is because I switched specs entirely, and BT4 recognizes that – just like Blizzard's default bars would do. When specs are changed, all the button layouts (what spell is in what button location) can change, though state configuation stays the same. Even in Moonkin spec, when I drop into Bear Form, you can see the same layout for Bar 1 (bear form) and you can also see that Bar 2 kept it's default state.



[Got in a guild raid as I was doing this screencap, hence the blacked out raid frame name] But as you can see, the bar to the right of my Bar 1 has a different layout now that I'm in Moonkin spec, my spells are in different locations.


#FINAL

Personally, I don't use the Action-Bar Paging option, but if you wish, you can enable this on any bar in the State Configuation tab and be able to Shift+scrollwheel or Shift+1-6 and change the action bar, just as you can with normal Blizzard UI.


As you move down the page, you likely see the Modifier Based Switching – this is just what it sounds like, if you enable one of these and then hold down Ctrl/Shift/Alt, the bars will change to whichever you tell them to page. Similar to stance/form changing, but based on modifier buttons being held down instead.

Again, I don't use this myself, but I would imagine you could page your Bar 1 based on Ctrl/Alt/Shift and make it simpler in conjunction with keybindings.


There is also a Custom Conditionals section, but I haven't messed with that at all and so unfortunately have no input on this area... but it disables all the settings above it, so once I get things set how I like them I tend to leave them be.


I hope these guides were remotely helpful! Please let me know if you have any questions/concerns/corrections.

[Deleted]

Very late reply, I know, apologies, but I just wanted to say thank you for this awesome guide. Just started using bartender and the stances (shadowform) were driving me crazy. Thanks for taking the time to write this out so people new to bartender can understand it!

[Bigbazz]

On the subject of Bartender, the new patch caused my bar 7 to turn into a duplicate of bar 1. Bar 8 + 9 were also duplicates of bar 1, bar 10 was the solution and I just replaced bar 7 with 10. I'm not sure what caused this issue to happen, or if there is a better fix to it (like making bar 7-9 not duplicates of bar 1).