Hotbar Swapping

This guide is going to teach you how to swap hotbars ingame which will allow you to very quickly change a character's playstyle/ability line up without changing the keybinds that you're using to activate those abilities. In English it basically means that you can swap between Slowing & Debuffing on a Shaman and then back to healing all while still using the same keybinds.

All you need to do in order to do this is to go into the Everquest Options (which you can access by pressing Alt + O in game) and go to the 'Keys' tab. You'll then want to select the Hotbar you want to edit from the list of options available. For me, I am choosing Hotbar 1 since that's the hotbar with most of my boxing keybinds. You can find a screen shot of the EQ Options I am describing below.

Look towards the bottom of the screen shot that is above and you'll notice two binds towards the bottom 'Ctrl NPAD .' as well as 'Ctrl NPAD 3'. When I press Ctrl NPAD 3 it swaps my Hotbar to Hot button page 2 which contains a different set of abilities than Hot button page 1. Then, once I am ready to swap back to page 1 I press Ctrl NPAD ..

If you don't understand how this would be useful or what the purpose of doing this is, let me lay out one or two hypothetical situations where doing this would be a great boon to you. Note: This is the only way I know how to teach people boxing with only Isboxer to utilize debuffs on their characters. Those using Mq2 won't have to worry about this in order to utilize their character's debuffs but Isboxers will have to setup their hotbars like this on a few characters to get the full potential out of their classes.

 

Hypothetical Situation 1: You've got a Shaman on your team and you want to use his slows.

On Hot button page 1 you'll setup your shaman with my Heal Macros and Target Macros which are built entirely for healing and targeting the tank. Then you'll want to do what I said above to allow him to switch to an entirely different hotbar. You'll then want to set that hotbar up with macros that assist the tank and instead of heal they cast Slows/Other Debuffs.

I recommend you put the Slow and other debuffs on your DPS hotbuttons. When you swap to this hotbar and you spam your DPS buttons you'll also slow and debuff the enemy this way.

 

Hypothetical Situation 2: You want to effectively play a Wizard & change your rotation during Burns and After Burns

Another use for hotbar swapping is for classes that benefit from using different spells or abilities during burns and after burns. Wizards are a great example of this. During burns I normally go with a three Ethereal rotation, Ice ethereal the ethereal that can proc other spells as well as the Fire ethereal. After burns I swap to a more mana conservative line up. To keep the same hotkeys for both spell line ups what I do is swap between Hotbutton pages.

In order to make these keybinds work in game you'll also need to go and make them into Key Maps using Isboxer. Keep in mind that you do not want to make the hotbar swaps universal. What I mean by this is do not make all your character's swap hotbars at the same time as that'll just mess everything up. Hotbar swapping is highly specific and only done on a class by class basis. If you have all your character's swapping hotbars at the same time it'll add in an endless amount of confusion.