It’s been seventeen months since I last made a post about addons so another one is probably overdue! Several addons I used to use have since been discontinued, so here’s a quick review of some PVP mods that can help in arenas and battlegrounds.

Battleground Addons

PvPness & Deadly Boss Mods

As well being the best named mod I’ve seen, PvPness gives you easily readable objective timers, health reports on SotA/IoC gates, and FC information. The only complaint I have about this addon is that it lacks arena timers for Shadow Sight and the countdown to the gates opening.

Despite primarily being a raiding addon, Deadly Boss Mods has PVP modules that will display objective timers in Battlegrounds. DBM lacks the gate health reports given by PvPness, but if you have DBM installed for raiding purposes you might want to use it for PVP as well.

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REFlex Battleground Historian

REFlex won’t directly help you during games, but it does offer the most detailed reporting tools I’ve seen so far. If screens of detailed stats and match reports rock your boat, give this addon a try.

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SaySapped

A very lightweight addon that simply does a “/say Sapped” whenever a rogue saps you. I find this pretty useful in pug BGs – the DK you’re guarding a flag with is probably staring blankly at his screen and drooling, rather than keeping an eye on his team mates.

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BG Defender

BG Defender gives you a small movable window with buttons to announce the number of incoming enemies at the base you’re defending. There are also buttons to call for help or announce the base you’re defending is safe. Fingers crossed you’re not the only one in the BG who reads /bg chat!

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Arena Specific Addons

Gladius

When the Proximo addon died, it was Gladius that filled the void left in our hearts. Gladius adds enemy unitframes in arenas which will keep track of trinket timers, CC duration, diminishing returns and will even report enemy specs and warn you when enemy players start to drink. This addon is still being updated for Cataclysm (DRs don’t seem accurate and spec detection is a little….. suspect at times), but with almost 5000 downloads a day I’m confident there’ll be enough feedback to iron out any persistent bugs.

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General Addons

Wintergrasper Advanced

This mod adds a small frame to your screen which tracks timers for both Wintergrasp and Tol Barad. You don’t have to be lvl85 for it work (great for when you’re levelling an alt) and it also shows the timers during dungeons and battlegrounds.

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Spell Alerter

Spell Alerter is a useful addon that provides cast warnings for enemy players. This is pretty useful in BGs and 3v3/5v5 games since it shows incoming spells from players who you don’t have focused or targeted. The message produced takes the format ” [spell icon] ENEMY –> ENEMY TARGET” but this can be altered to give the spellname as well (great if you never realised that the Chaos Bolt icon seems to look a bit like a turtle vomiting – well, to me it does).

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IceHUD

One thing about WoW that always irritated me was how the unit frames were positioned at the top of the screen. A lot of serious PVPers move the frames to the middle of the screen (I’ll link the macro later), but unless you’re playing by MLG rules, you can use a unitframe or HUD addon instead. There are several addons that offer this functionality, but I’ve found IceHUD to be the most configurable/stable HUD addon out there.

IceHUD does need a bit of time spent configuring it, but it provides several class specific bars that you might want to turn on (Rupture/SnD timers). You can also add custom bars that track enemy buffs.

Until I got used to seeing the Combat Readiness buff on enemy rogues, I had a bar setup that would appear as soon as they popped it. By default it puts health bars on the left and mana bars on the right of your screen, but I prefer to configure it to show my bars on one side and my targets bars on the left.

In the screenshot above, the bars on the left show my health and energy, with the bars on the showing target HP, target mana and a cast bar. If I had turned those two combo points into a SnD, a bar would have appeared to the left of my HP bar, but I forgot…

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XPerl & ag_Unitframes

If you prefer the tradional layout of the Blizzard unitframes to a HUD, XPerl or ag_Unitframes may be worth considering. Both offer a high level of customization and can replace target, focus, party and raid frames.

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Parrot & MSBT

MSBT is a replacement for the ingame scrolling combat text. It is much more configurable and shows a small icon for each non auto-attack that you make or receive. Damage you receive is shown on the left hand side and any of your spells that come off cooldown are posted to the middle of the screen.

Parrot is a good alternative to MSBT and also offers a Trigger-system to show warnings on certain enemy actions (such as Combat Readiness or Icebound Fortitude). If you’re new to PVP or the rogue class, this addon will definitely help until you’re used to constantly checking your targets buffs, but careful you don’t end up relying on it too much.

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SnowfallKeyPress & Speedy Actions

Instead of having a spell cast when you remove your finger from the key, these addons will cause your ability to cast as soon as the key is pressed. It won’t noticably increase your DPS, but it may help you to kick spells with fast cast times.

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Bartender4 & Dominos

If you do nothing except PVP, the default Blizzard UI gives you enough space on your bars for all your spells/macros. If you also like to PVE (or have a penchant for mounts/pets/emotes) you may find yourself running out of space. These addons give you full control of your bars and enable you to display more than the standard five. Bartender4 also emulates the functionality of SnowfallKeyPress.

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OmniCC

OmniCC is an addon that adds text to item/spell/ability icons that are on cooldown to indicate when they’ll be ready for use. When your team mates ask how long it will be until you can blind, “15 seconds, stop nagging me” is a much better answer than “Soon©”.

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Ketho CombatLog

Ketho gives you useful combatlog info in your chat window. I only really use this for keeping track of my Destructive Shadowspirit Diamond spell reflects, but the addon does have several other uses.

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Misc

Vanas KoS

Vanas KoS is a kill-on-site notifier that lets you track specific enemy players. Once a player is being tracked, this addon will warn you whenever they are detected in combat-log range. You can add a note to the player, so keeping track of old scores that need settling has never been easier.

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Cyanide Poison Reminder

Yes, I know I go on about it a lot, but CPR is a small addon that can be configured to warn you several minutes before your poisons run out. Useful for forgetful, sleepy and drunk rogues.

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Petleash

I’m not sure why, but I’ve always thought non-combat pets were pretty cool. Not only does Petleash randomly summon a pet whenever it detects you don’t have one, it also dismisses your pet automatically when you enter stealth. How cool is that!
If you’re paranoid about it bugging out during matches, you can even disable it during BGs/arenas. Silly, but fun.

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Leatrix Latency Fix

Not an addon as such, this program improves your connection to the game servers. A full explanation is given here.

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There are two more addons I’d like to include, but neither of them are stable at the moment. Sapper Enhanced and Kickalicious should both report interrupts/saps to party chat – as soon as they’re working properly I’ll add them to this post.


Let me know if you’re using any other PVP addons that you find useful and I’ll update the post accordingly!


*Edit* I wanted to throw in a picture from Dark Legacy Comics, but I’m not sure how Keydar feels about other people using his rather excellent work – here’s a link instead http://darklegacycomics.com/56.htm

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