Arena Historian

This is a very detailed addon that stores a lot of information about every game you play. As you can see from the screenshot below, it’s packed full of features and lets you create very specific searches, even down to your performance on individual maps.

ArenaLog3

While this doesn’t produce the detailed reports that Arena Historian does, it’s pretty light-weight. It doesn’t record the specs used by your opponents, just the class. However it does have a couple of nice features, such as being able to easily produce a summary of the last games you played (“/arenalog history 2v2 20″ for example).

Both tools are useful in their own way, you may even wish to run the two addons side-by-side. While you may initially think “oh, I know what I struggle against”, it can be quite surprising to find that certain setups are dominating you without you realising. Looking through the reports before making this post, I realised that we’ve gone 0-5 against Rogue/Shaman/Spriest without even realising it. I guess that’s one setup we really need to work on our tactics for

As I’ve talked about previously, if you’re having random lag or high latency try running through a proxy.There’s more information about that here. I’m down to 70ms now in arenas – compared to 250ms it’s ~very~ noticable (a good test is to use Fan of Knives and check the delay between the keypress and the animation/sound happening).

Once you’ve got your connection running as smooth as possible, it’s worth trying out a very useful addon called SnowfallKeyPress. By default, when you press a key you have a spell bound to, nothing happens until you release your finger off the key. This addon changes that, so as soon as you press a key the action takes place. We’re not talking about massive time savings here, but hey, every little helps!

Sorry updates have been a little slack the last two weeks, struggling to move house and do everything else at the same time! I’ll be posting strats for dealing with Paladins very shortly though, and also more about the changes to Master Poisoner that have just gone live.

The addon has been heavily worked on by Yoyosan who has tidied up the code and added much more functionality (such as greater control over warnings and a fantastic list of sound effects). Nice one!

#1 Gladius

Oh my freaking god, what a useful addon. This addon creates new unit frames for when you enter an arena. The frames show CC timers, trinket timers, and much more, all configured through the interface (/gladius ui). The addon also monitors trinket usage/cooldowns and enemy buffs (such as food/water), and gives messages to party chat, raid chat or raid warning indicating what is happening. Having a message pop up in the middle of the screen showing that the other team’s druid has sat down to drink really makes up for my lack of general observation. Use /gladius hide once you have positioned it to begin with, otherwise the examples frames won’t go away

#2 SpellAlerter

A really useful addon that gives you casting warnings for nearby enemies. Nice to have in arenas as you get to see what your non-targeted/non-focused opponents are doing. By default the warning message takes the format of ” [spell icon] ENEMY –> ENEMY TARGET” but this can be changed in the options to display the full name of the spell being cast (good if you never realised that the icon for Chaos Bolt looks like a turtle being sick).

#3 Natur Enemy Castbars

This addon is a bit overwhelming when you first install it, but after a bit of configuration you can get it to do exactly what you want. Some of the functionality overlaps with SpellAlerter so tbh I don’t use this to its full potential, but rather use it to give timers for my target’s buffs. Natur will let you track enemy cooldowns, casts, buffs etc. You can split the display bars into separate groups showing different information at different areas of the screen. Top addon!

#4 Icehud

One of the things I didn’t like about WoW when I first started playing was having to keep looking up at the top left corner of the screen to see how much health my target and I had. This becomes more of a problem the bigger your screen, but IceHUD can fix the problem quite well by placing a HUD in the middle of the screen, letting you check health/mana etc without taking your eyes off the action. There are several other addons that do similar things, but I’ve found IceHUD to be the most configurable/stable HUD addon out there.
This addon does need a bit of time spent on it setting it up, but it’s worth the couple of minutes you spent. it provides several class specific bars that you might want to turn on (HFB/Slice’n'Dice timers). The example below shows bars for my health, energy, and S’n'D on the left, and my target’s health on the right (along with debuffs I have applied). The pale yellow part of the S’nD timer bar shows what the timer would be refreshed to if I used a S’n'D with the combo points I had at that moment (combo points are displayed in the middle).

#5 Mik Scrolling Battle Text

This addon (shown above on the right side of the image) 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.

#6 Cutup

A collection of addons, which provide simple timer bars for HfB, S’n'D, poisons and rupture. Might make a nice alternative to IceHUD if you don’t want to use a HUD-type interface. This addon also lets you auto-pickpocket and blocks rogue specific error messages from annoying you, such as “Not enough energy” or “Ability is not ready yet”.

#7 Arenalog3

Keeps a record of all the arena games you’ve played in each bracket, and displays stats for each one. Useful for seeing what teams you need to work on tactics for, and lets you see just how bad your losing streak really is!

#8 Dominos

Replacement actionbars – you can really go to town customising the layout of your screen with this addon. You can adjust the number of bars that are visible, as well as their size, number of columns or transparency. Keybindings are a piece of cake to setup – activite keybinding mode, then mouse-over the button and press the key you want to be bound to it. I have all my bars shrank down and displayed in a box as below.

#9 AG UnitFrames

Fully customisable unit frames, though I only really use it as it lets me hide the default player/target frames. Very customisable with plenty of features.

#10 Cyanide Poison Reminder

I’ve only really included this to make it a proper “top ten” list, but it’s an addon I wrote which gives warnings when your poisons are close to running out.

Below is my current UI – I use Sunn Viewport Art to cover the bottom section of the screen, and Sexymap to change the style/position of the map (yes I know I have the map setup in a very un-sexy way – there are some fantastic visual effects for the map that you can use, but I prefer the plain square to save space).

When you put it together it looks a bit like this (click to open in a new tab/window);

OhNoesQueues

*** UPDATE ***
Another nice little addon is OhNoesQueues. It removes the Battleground description window from the battleground frame and replaces it with icons showing how many of each Battleground Mark you have. Left-clicking these icons will queue your whole party/raid if you are the leader, or queue you alone otherwise.

Hats off to Curse.com for not blocking the project in the first place. I dream of a day when five alliance all simultaneously /insult a DK in a battleground, just cause he chose to cast Icebound Fortitude. Childish I know, but it kept me sane and smiling!

More info and download link on the curse site.

Features include;
PVP Trinket status
CC timers
Target-of-target display

Also announces the following events to party/RW (not turned on by default);
Trinket announcement – announces when the trinket is used/is ready again.
Drinking announecment – announces when an enemy has started to drink.
Enemies on low health – announces enemies that are about to die, you can set the percentage yourself. *

Gladius can be downloaded from http://curse.com

* Bold text because, embarrasingly, I didn’t realise Gladius did this until I started watching live feeds from AJ. Maybe others aren’t aware either? Hmm…

Download page (via wowace.com)