Tooltip Delays Drive Me Crazy

Update: An automated version of this feature has been added to the premium UI. Check it out in [this post], about halfway down.

Tooltips in EverQuest II come in two basic varieties: "plain old" text tooltips and complex tooltips.

A plain old tooltip:

A complex hotbar tooltip:

There are settings in Options for how long to wait before showing both types:

For combat, I can't stand the big spell tooltips popping up all over the hotbars while I'm fighting, so I set the delay very long for that. Most of the time I'd rather not see any tooltips at all during combat. But when I'm comparing loot or dealing with those insufferable Overseer rewards, I like for all tooltips to pop right up with no delay.

If you'd like to have a little more control over your tooltips and you don't want to rummage around in the Options window, you might try the solution I've used for quite a while. Even though it uses up some hotbar slots, to me it's worth the cost. I end up hitting the macros at least a couple of times per game session.

There doesn't seem to be a good place to put these commands anywhere in the UI permanently (the Options window is off-limits) so the hotbar method seems like the best overall solution for now.

It uses up three hotkey slots (I can get away with two slots on certain characters) for long, normal and short tooltip delays. Each macro contains two commands: one line for plain and one for complex (hotkey) tooltips. Click the image at the top of this post to see the three icons I use and their macro commands. Nothing fancy here. The commands are:

(Long delay):
cl_tooltip_delay 100
cl_hotkey_tooltip_delay 100

(Medium delay):
cl_tooltip_delay 30
cl_hotkey_tooltip_delay 30

(Short delay):
cl_tooltip_delay 1
cl_hotkey_tooltip_delay 1

A while back I was chatting with another player about the issue, and he made an interesting suggestion: why not make the tooltip delays adjust automatically to a longer delay when you are in combat, then go back to a short delay when combat ends. It's entirely possible to code something like this. I tabled the idea at the time as being too complex, but the more I think about it, the more I'm warming up to it as an option. What do you think?

Update: This feature has been added to the premium UI. Check it out in [this post], about halfway down.

And one last note: if you have your tooltip delays set very long, you can override the delay and show the tooltip immediately by pressing [Ctrl].