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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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).

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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©”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Leatrix Latency Fix

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

If you are looking at reworking your bindings, there are a couple of basic tricks that can help you come up with an efficient and comfortable layout. You may be doing this already, but hey it might be of use to someone!

Firstly, you obviously want to keep your important abilities bound to easily reachable keys/combinations. Assuming a normal sized keyboard and a lack of mutant/pianist hands, ’6′ through to ‘=’ are pretty hard to accurately hit unless you take your fingers off WASD. For PVE that’s fine, but unless you’re fighting in TB you’ll need to rebind them to other keys. If you play with your little finger (or thumb) sitting near the shift-key, you’ll be able to hit shift-modified keys as easy as an unmodified key – I don’t find left-ctrl as comfortable to use, but it’s still reachable.

Secondly, if you haven’t done this already, it’s a big help to bind reply/re-whisper to a different key (I use ‘T’/'shift+T’). ‘R’ is too easy to hit in combat – if you accidentally hit it you can really mess things up (a’la Dark Legacy Comics). I also use ‘shfit+C’ instead of ‘C’ for my character pane, but bringing that up accidentaly isn’t nearly as deadly as whispering somebody with 1112wwwwwwa.

Thirdly, I find it helps to try and keep some continuity with the keys, especially when trying out a new layout. For example, I use ’2′ and ’3′ for my finishers. In Subtlety spec, ’2′ = rupture, ‘shift+2′ = SnD, ’3′ = eviscerate and shift+3 = recuperate. When switching to Assassination, rupture/snd/recuperate remain the same, but ’3′ changes from envenom to eviscerate with the previously unused ctrl+3 becoming eviscerate. Similarly, ‘E’ is used for my combo generators and ‘Q’ for interupts. Out of stealth, ‘E’ is backstab/muti, shift+E is hemo and ‘Q’ is kick. While stealthed, ‘E’ becomes ambush and ‘Q’ becomes garrote.

If you’ve rerolled as a rogue, it would make sense to try and replicate the keys on your other characters. Hitting ` makes my rogue vanish, my DK lichborne + /target self (for the OP coil spam), my mage iceblock and my hunter feign death. It’s all about muscle memory – when things suddenly go wrong you don’t want to have to think about where your panic button is.

There are some abilities that don’t need to be used in PVP, but if you need them on your bars for PVE it’s worth getting Bartender4, or a similar bar addon. This will give you several extra bars to drag non-essential abilities onto. Bartender4 also replicates the functionality of the SnowfallKeypress addon, but more on that later.

If you have extra buttons on your mouse you might not be able to bind them from within WoW. My Logitech 518 (awesome mouse!) has 5 extra buttons that aren’t recognised ingame, but they can be remapped through the mouse software to wierd combos like ‘alt+[‘. This will let you use them within WoW and also let you modify them with shift/ctrl.

I was asked about the bindings I use in Cata – I’m not on a PC with WoW on it at the moment but I’m 99% sure this list covers everything! Here’s a picture of the keys as well – blue indicates there’s no modifier, green means it’s also used with Shift and red means it’s used with both Shift and Ctrl modifiers.


I’m currently using a UK keyboard, so have the ‘\’ and ‘z’ keys underneath the ‘a’ key. The last US keyboard I used had a large shift key under the caps-lock, which meant a little bit of rebinding keys was in order.

To use stealth I hit shift+spacebar – once stealthed, shift+spacebar becomes distract. Another basic trick is to bind ‘A’ and ‘D’ to strafe left/right. I have ‘shift+A’ and ‘shift+D’ set to rotate, so I can still fly around one handed if I’m eating.
I know a rogue who has ‘S’ unbound – it’s a nice way of breaking the habit of backpedaling, but there should be enough easy-to-reach keys on the keyboard to bind actions to without needing to do this.

Lastly, I always try and keep blind off the keyboard – shift+V for trinket, mouse thumb button for blind. This lets you hit both simultaneously without having to create a trinket/blind macro.

When put together, it looks a little something like this -screenshot.

Please post if you have any more tips/tricks for keybindings!

It’s quite a small addon that doesn’t really do anything fancy, other than pop up warnings every minute when your poisons have expired or are close to running out. It’s fairly customizable, and thanks to great feedback from users, doesn’t produce warnings in inns/cities or while you’re using flight points.

CPR can be downloaded from www.wowinterface.com, www.curse.com, or the rather excellent Curse Addon Client.

**UPDATE**

Thanks to help from Asaye-Bloodhoof(EU), CPR will now only warn about missing poisons ~IF~ you have a thrown weapon equipped. I’ve turned the feature on by default, but it can be disabled with ‘/cypr thoff’.

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)