Twelve Buttons, One Thumb
The mouse was never the hard part
Every MMO-mouse guide starts with remapping software. For this job that is a detour. The client binds only MOUSEBUTTON4 and MOUSEBUTTON5; the other eighteen buttons are invisible to it, and those two stop working while the cursor is over a unit frame. So a thumb grid has to impersonate a keyboard — and this one already does. Out of the box the twelve side buttons send 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =, which is exactly WoW's default binding for Action Bar 1, slots 1 through 12.
The whole plumbing. Two keyboard HID interfaces and one mouse interface show up for this device in hidutil; the thumb grid is the keyboard half.
The button map
Which spell on which button is the only real decision, and it is the one I had no business inventing. Esfand reads his vanilla paladin bar out loud in Training Streamers to Play WoW, slot by slot, to a streamer who is setting up a Naga: auto attack on 1, Seal of Command on 2, Hammer of Justice on 3, Seal of Righteousness on 4, and so on. Drop that order onto the mouse's twelve default keys and his bar becomes your thumb.
The map. Green is Esfand's choice of spell in Esfand's position; amber is a slot I had to change, with the original spell named in small type.
The four slots Forever forced me to change
Forever is not Classic Era. It runs on the modern client, and two of its class changes land directly on this bar.
| Slot | Esfand (vanilla) | Forever | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Auto Attack | Holy Strike, macro'd with /startattack | Keeps his habit — 1 starts the fight — on the ability Forever added for exactly that job |
| 6 | Mount | Judgement | Judgement no longer consumes the seal, so it is pressed every 10 seconds. Vanilla ret barely judged. The mount arrives at 40 and moves to a clicked bar |
| 11 | Blessing of Sacrifice | Blessing of Protection | Sacrifice is not available to an Alliance paladin at 30; he named both spells in the same breath anyway |
| 12 | PvP trinket | Lay on Hands | No trinket while levelling; his "get out of trouble" slot becomes the 20-minute emergency heal |
One more change is not a slot but a rank. Esfand runs rank 1 Seal of Command on purpose: in Classic the proc scales off weapon damage, not spell rank, so the cheap rank gives the same proc for less mana. Forever's October 1 beta notes say ranks far below your level get a reduced chance to trigger class abilities and talents — so the trick that made rank 1 free is exactly what the new rules tax. Use max rank.
The second layer, which is mine
Esfand says "everything in my second bar is Shift-whatever, or it's mouse buttons" and never reads out what he keeps there. So the Shift layer below is my arrangement, not a copy, and it is labelled that way in the file. It follows the same physical positions: hold Shift, press the same button, get the same grid one state over.
The Shift layer. Seals and auras are state you set before a pull, so they do not need to live under the thumb; that is the whole reason they are here rather than on the base layer.
What I got wrong, twice
The first layout was mine: most-used abilities on the bottom rows, grouped by job, three modifier layers deep. It read like a system and it was unusable, because I had assumed the bottom row of a thumb grid is the easy one. It is not. Players consistently describe buttons 1 to 6 — the top two rows — as the easy half, buttons 7 to 9 as awkward for many hands, and 10 to 12 as the place for rare things. I had the grid upside down and a three-layer scheme nobody could hold in their head.
The second layout followed community conventions but was still my arrangement. James asked the question that ended the argument: did you copy this from a human or make it up? Made it up. So the third version does the obviously correct thing — find someone who plays this class well, read out their bar, and change only what the game forces you to change.
Setting it up
Fifteen minutes, one piece of software you already have, none that you need.
- Check the mouse is stock. Open TextEdit and press all twelve side buttons. They should type
1234567890-=. If Synapse has remapped the onboard profile, press the profile button on the base until it is back on the default. - Make the bar look like the grid. Edit Mode → Action Bar 1 → Rows: 4. That turns a 1×12 strip into a 3-wide, 4-tall block that matches the thumb plate. Put it bottom-right, where the eye already is.
- Add the second layer. Edit Mode → Action Bar 2 → Rows: 4, beside bar 1. Then Options → Keybindings → Action Bar 2 → hold Shift and press each physical mouse button, which records
Shift+1throughShift+=. - Fill the slots from the map above. Slot numbers are the keys, so "Seal of Command on 2" means slot 2 of Action Bar 1.
- Make the one macro that matters. Holy Strike on 1, with
/startattackin front of it, reproduces the thing Esfand's slot 1 was actually for: starting the swing without a separate button.
#showtooltip Holy Strike
/startattack
/cast Holy StrikeLeave the mouse's own buttons alone. The only remap worth considering later is numpad keys, and only if the keyboard's number row turns out to be in the way; on a keyboard with no numpad, that is a free namespace of twelve unused keys. It also costs a Karabiner rule and a device-scoped match, which is more moving parts than a levelling paladin needs in week one.
The clock this has to fit
The practical consequence: there is one evening of beta left to learn four buttons, then eleven days with no game at all, then a ten-minute rebuild at launch because the beta's saved bindings belong to a folder that will not be the launch folder.
The state of it
Action Bar 1 is Esfand's, adjusted where Forever moved the ground. Action Bar 2 is mine and labelled as such. The mouse runs on its own firmware, which means the whole thing survives a fresh macOS install, a second machine, and any future Razer software bug — and the only thing to relearn after a break is which row your thumb is on.
Related: Milo in Azeroth, on what actually works when an AI watches this game instead of playing it.