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Can you help me understand the benefint of ATG?

Moderator: MiRai

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August78

Posts: 23

Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2019 6:37 am

Post Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:33 am

Can you help me understand the benefint of ATG?

Hi. Noob here :) I am spending a lot of time wrapping my head around Isboxer and the logic behind it. One of the things I don't really understand is action target groups. One would think it is self-explanatory, but here is my issue:

Let's say I have a mixed team; 3 mages, 1 warrior and 1 priest. In theory, I understand the benefit if not sending the same action to all 5 since I want mages to do mage spells, warrior to do his thing etc, and not have everything into one giant soup. However, I only have 1 keyboard. When I play a single character I tend to use a lot of the keys on my keyboard to trigger spells and abilities. So what if I say that when I press the 3 key I only want to send that to the mages group. That only means that I cant bind anything to the 3 key on my warrior or priest since Isboxer wont send the 3 key to those windows. If I have anything on the 3-key on priest or warrior it will never recieve any input to trigger it (if I understand correctly).

The other way, which I think Mirai spoke about in one of his videos, is to leave gaps on the hotbar so that if I want the 3 key to only send out a mage spell, I wouldn't bind anything on the 3 key on the priest or warrior. That would leave gaps on their respective hotbars. Other than looking utidy and of course being unpractical if I decide to main that character, I cant really see the benefit of ATG.

I could just leave it at that, but something tells me I'm missing a broader picture, or maybe some practical tips on how to use ATG and keybindings effectively. Ie, do you guys tend to use modifiers like shift+numerical keys 1-9 that you dedicate to ATG that are not your main character?
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Wizeowel

Posts: 109

Joined: Mon Dec 10, 2018 11:13 am

Post Mon Sep 23, 2019 5:27 am

Re: Can you help me understand the benefint of ATG?

The broader picture is the ATGs is just a way to send mapped key actions to a select group.

Examples:

'Follower' if I press my follow key then it makes all toons in this ATG follow the main. (This is standard in the Pro system)
'Combat' if I press any dps key then each toon in this ATG does a dps action.
'Melee' these toons get a different interact-with-target action.
'Healer' these toons are added/removed from the 'combat' ATG depending if I have my mouse in the Grid2 area for healing
'Interrupter' if I press my interrupt key, it sends the counterspell/kick/pummel key one-by-one (using the round-robin option) choosing from toons in this group
'Decurse' 'Antidote' etc these ATGs allow me to round-robin cleansing of debuffs
'Polymorph' those toons with sheep or hex


"I cant bind anything to the 3 key on my warrior or priest since Isboxer wont send the 3 key to those windows".

Sure you can. I'm guessing you haven't discovered that you can send multiple keys?

Let's say you have your binds in game like this
warrior: 1=charge 2=bloodrage 3=battle shout 4=sunder 5=heroic strike
mage: 2=frostbolt 4=shoot (/castsequence !shoot, !shoot) 5=sheep
priest: 1=shield 2=renew 3=flash heal 4=shoot (/castsequence !shoot, !shoot)

So in your combat key map you could do this:
keybind 1 (pull): sends 1, 2 and 3 to warrior
keybind 2 (heal): sends 2 to priest
keybind ctrl-2 (urgent heal): sends 3 to priest
keybind 3 (regular dps): sends assist me to all others, sends 5 to warrior, 2 and 4 to mage, 4 to priest
keybind 4 (built threat, dps cautiously): sends assist me to all others, sends 4 to warrior, 4 to mage, 4 to priest
keybind 5 (cc): sends assist me to others in polymorph ATG, sends 5 to one (round robin) in polymorph ATG

Does that make sense?
Last edited by Wizeowel on Tue Sep 24, 2019 7:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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August78

Posts: 23

Joined: Fri Sep 20, 2019 6:37 am

Post Mon Sep 23, 2019 11:01 am

Re: Can you help me understand the benefint of ATG?

Yes I guess it does!
You wouldn't really use the hotkeys that are in the game, but instead would have to remember where you have what. The benefit being you can assign several hotkeys to 1 button. Ie, with the warrior keys, would you do that as a stepped hotkey in isboxer, or would you do it as several actions in one step?
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bob

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League of Extraordinary Multiboxers

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Joined: Sat Feb 15, 2014 11:14 am

Location: In the dining room, with the lead pipe.

Post Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:39 pm

Re: Can you help me understand the benefint of ATG?

ATG's are so you can put a friendly name on a group of characters. It also makes it not care which slot a character is in.

If you don't have ATG's, if you wanted to send a specific command to the characters in slots 2, 3 and 5, you'd need to set either 3 actions in the mapped key (one for each slot), or you can use a group target like (is2,is3,is5).
The problem now becomes if you have another character set, and the characters in slots in 2,3,5 you don't want to do this special command, but rather slots 1,3,4, you need a separate mapped key with either the 3 actions, or the one action with it's specific group target of (is1, is3, is4), and a method to switch that in instead of the other mapped key if you want to use the same hotkey, or have a second hotkey just for the second group.

OR, you could put the characters all in a named group like MySpecialGroup, and then, only one action is required in the mapped key, and we don't care which slot the character is in.


Another advantage of ATG's - a character can join/leave an ATG while your team is running. A character cannot join/leave a slot.
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Wizeowel

Posts: 109

Joined: Mon Dec 10, 2018 11:13 am

Post Tue Sep 24, 2019 8:55 am

Re: Can you help me understand the benefint of ATG?

August78 wrote:The benefit being you can assign several hotkeys to 1 button. Ie, with the warrior keys, would you do that as a stepped hotkey in isboxer, or would you do it as several actions in one step?


For warrior in retail, I send everything all at once, because retail has cooldowns on most warrior actions instead of rage costs, so anything pressed that is on cooldown is ignored and the next best available action is taken. In that case - even though the keys are sent all at once - ISBoxer does send them in order.

But in classic, you may want to try something more advanced. You can make steps limited by time, and block progress to the next step, and overall reset to starting step when you have not pressed the binding for a while. This way you can perhaps make a sequence that does charge and battle shout first for a while, and then changes to pressing sunder and heroic strike after a few seconds. It's just an example, obviously not optimal, but I'm just thinking of ways to save a keybind so your button pressing is simplified.

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