Hotkey setup is critical to a successful bard. While it is convenient for casters, to a bard it is a must. I will cover several pages of hotkeys that I use here. These are simply my ways of doing things. There are others that I have tried, but these have worked best for me.

It is possible to set up hotkeys that will twist for you, I advise against it. There are two reasons for this. One, if your song fizzles you are stuck until the hotkey cycle finishes. Two, it lessens your ability to change what songs you are singing.

One school of thought is to create simple macros that are two lines. The first line is /cast #. The second line is /stopsong.  This means instead of twisting 1122334411223344 you only have to twist 12341234.  Basically it cuts out half of your keystrokes.  I change my hotkeys around on the fly all the time though, so I simply hotkey the spell gems so I can easily see what songs are in what slot.

Also note that the advent of the custom user interfaces make some of the items I hotkey unneeded since you can add inventory and equipment slots to various windows. I’m use to my setup, so I keep my equipment slots hotkeyed like I’ve always had. Also, if you play EQ at a friend’s house or lose your UI, you can still function normally. I do use UI options for most of my instrument changing nowdays, but not always.

I keep one page of hotkeys for miscellaneous skills. These include things like forage, sneak, pick locks, etc. This page changes for whatever skill I happen to be working on as I attempted to max the miscellaneous skills that we really don’t use too much.

Just for reference, the songs used in the following hotkey pages are as follows. There is no specific reason for the song used. I simply used several of the lower level songs to help with familiarity.

Click on the buttons below or at the top of the page for the specific hotkey page you’d like to view.

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