Understanding Trinity Bars

When I FIRST installed Trinity Bars, I found myself staring a the screen wondering to myself: WTF.

How do you set this up?

When you add Trinity Bars as an addon, and log in to your character, what you see is basically an empty bar that looks pretty much like the standard actionbar. Why is it empty? How do you do this magical "unlimited buttons" and "unlimited macros" thing that it's supposed to do? I had to figure that out.

First of all, it was really easy to add spells to the buttons by just opening the spellbook and dragging spells to the bar. But what happened to the bars I had before? did the addon erase all my previously configured bars? Usually a bar addon inherits the buttons I had selected before I installed it.

Well, here's the thing. Trinity Bars uses independant stand-alone buttons that are separate from the built-in buttons.

Understanding Action ID's

What you need to understand about Wow's usual action bars is that they use Action ID's. Inside WoW, under the hood, WoW has a concept called Action ID's. Wow's usual buttons are linked to Action ID's, which are like little button containers that live under the buttons.

In Vanilla (no addons) WoW, you get a button bar with 12 buttons on it. When you drag a spell to the button bar, you're actually placing the spell into an Action ID container that is attached the the button.

Let's say you start a new Mage. You open your spellbook and drag Fireball to action button number 1. When you press Shift-2, the Fireball icon disappears! This is because the action bar shifts out the Action ID's that are attached to the buttons. Press Shift-1 and the Fireball icon comes back.

What's actually happening is like this: When you start up WoW, the 12 buttons of the action bar contain ActionID's number 1 through 12. When you press Shift-2, WoW changes the ActionID's that are on the bar from 1-12 to 13-24. Your Fireball spell is still contained in Action ID #1, but button number 1 is currently showing Action ID #13. When you press Shift-1, WoW changes the ActionID's back to 1-12, and Fireball reappears.

WoW internally has 120 action ID slots. The first six sets of twelve action ID's correspond to the Shift 1-6 that you can do to the standard action bar. There's more sets of 12 that correspond to other bars. For example, if you play a Druid, when you shift into Cat Form, the bar swaps out Action ID's 1-12 for another set that's only for Cat Form. It does the same when you shift to Bear Form. Rogues have a set for Stealth mode, and Warriors also get a set for their difference stances.

You can kind of see the Action ID concept better if you switch on the game's built in Extra bars - Bottom Left Bar, Bottom Right Bar, Right Bar, and Right Bar 2 (all can be switched on from the Interface Options -> ActionBars screen). When you switch these on, you will see extra bars on the screen in addition to the main bar. What makes this interesting is that if you press Shift 3, Shift 4, Shift 5, or Shift 6, the main actionbar changes to match one of the extra bars on the screen. If you then move some buttons around on the main bar, you will notice one of the additional bars will also be changed. This is because the main bar has the same Action ID's as the additional bar, and when you change the spell on button on a bar, you're actually changing the ActionID's contents, which reflects on any button that has that same Action ID.

Got it? I hope so.

So, back to talking about Trinity Bars. In Trinity, each "Button" is a stand alone button that can be configured to contain a spell, or a macro, or an item... or, an Action ID. When you FIRST install Trinity, however, all the buttons are configured to be SPELL type buttons, instead of Action ID's. Most other Addons default to showing Action ID's (that because MOST other addons have no concept of a button holding anything but an ActionID). What makes Trinity different is that you can create as many "buttons" as you want, and any of them can contain pretty much anything.

To make life with Trinity easier, at least to START with, I recommend changing the starting bars from SPELL type to Action ID's. That way, at least it will behave as you expect an action bar to behave. Here's how to do it:

First, find the button on your Mini Map for Trinity bars. The button looks like a blue bird flying straight up. If you Right Click that button, you get Trinity's template editor, which you don't want yet. if you LEFT CLICK that button, you get 4 more buttons that spin out. The bottom button is for controlling individual buttons. You can either Left click or Right click it. If you right click it, you'll get Trinity's dialog box that pops up to help configure buttons. If you just Left click it, it stays hidden, but you can still do what you need to do.

When you click that bottom button under the blue bird (looks like a piece of a keyboard), you will see that your buttons now show the word "spell" on them. Now, right click the first button a few times until you see Action id:#. The first button should hopefully show Action ID:1. If it doesn't show 1, don't worry, we will fix that in a minute. Now, right click each of the other 11 buttons until each one shows Action ID: and some number. You might even notice that your original spells now show up under the label that shows Action ID.

If they correctly numbered themselves from 1 to 12, then you're almost done. If they didn't we need to fix it:

To fix it, you will need to right-click that bottom button that looks like a piece of a keyboard. The Trinity Button Edit dialog box will pop up. Next, left-click the first button on the action bar. The Button Edit box should update to show the settings for Button number 1. On the edit box, if the button is set to Action ID, you will see a section called "Action ID Editor". It's just a slide control that can be set from 1 to 120. Adjust the slider all the way to the left to set the button to ID #1. Next, find the button below the slider that says Apply. What this does is automatically adjust all buttons that come after the one you're editing to be the next sequential action ID's. Now, click the red Done button on the top of the Button Edit box, and Trinity will go back to normal mode, and your buttons will now be ready for use. If you had spells and icons on your bars before installing Trinity, they will now be back to normal.

This, I HOPE, should be enough to get you started exploring the settings of Trinity Bars. Those 4 buttons around the Blue Bird button are your main method of tuning and adjusting Trinity Bars. Try right-clicking each of those buttons to see what options become available. the top button lets you create and edit the bars that contain the buttons. You can create as many bars as you need. The button on the Right lets you control keybindings. All you need to do is point at a button and press a key on the keyboard to set a binding (this is freakin brilliant, btw). The Left button lets you lock all buttons so you don't accidently mess them up during play.

If this is helpful, I'll consider writing more guide to using Trinity. Please leave a comment is this was helpful to you.