The Ultimate WoW PVP Guide of Knowledge

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I Did NOT Make this guide! I Ripped it off of another site!


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The Ultimate WoW PVP Guide of Knowledge

Table of Contents

1. Arena Teams - How to Assemble a Dream Team
2. Arena Tips - Before the First Attack
3. Arena Tips - Opening Moves
4. Talent Specs And You
5. Race Bonuses - Horde
6. Race Bonuses - Alliance
7. Focus Targeting Part One
8. Focus Targeting Part Two
9. Pull and Pass - Advanced Hunter Techniques
10. Meta Gems for Melee

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1. Arena Teams - How to Assemble a Dream Team



Arena season 4 has now officially begun on all servers, and with it the new Brutal and Guardian PvP items are now available. The big twist this season however, is that team selling has truly been stamped out and most items now require a player to have a high enough personal rating to purchase them.


The quality of the items available however is extraordinarily high; high enough to match or exceed the power of loot obtained from heroic badges and so it is well worth players to look at entering the arena in order to gear up.


Most of the items available require a personal rating of 1700 and this should be an achievable goal for many players if you enter with a favorable team setup and a solid plan. Outlined here are some basic pointers in assembling your own arena team to help you hit that 1700 target.

Which Bracket?

The first question you should ask yourself is if you want to be playing 2v2, 3v3 or 5v5 arena. It is much easier to assemble a 2v2 team but your team setup is critical to success here and this bracket allows for few mistakes. 5v5 allows a much broader range of successful team setups since each player can compensate for their teammate’s weaknesses - but it can be a large hassle to schedule times when your whole team can play.


3v3 is a comfortable medium between each bracket being both relatively simple to organize a team and allowing a reasonable variety in class composition. If you are fairly new to the arena, I would highly recommend the 3v3 bracket to you.

Forming the Team

The first thing you need to keep in mind first and foremost when forming your team is each individual’s survivability since this will have a huge impact on your tactics.


As an example, having a subtlety rogue in your team allows you to play rather offensively since he is difficult to directly attack and highly mobile, as such he will require little healing which allows him to successfully partner with a DPS class stacked team or a more offensive hybrid healer such as a moonkin or shadow priest.


In contrast a warrior has little in the way of escape measures but hits like a freight train to compensate, if he went with a fully offensive team he could easily be burned down and as such a warrior is best accompanied by a healing teammate.


By keeping in mind the survivability of your teammates you can ensure that your team composition supports each other to counter your weaknesses rather than just compounding the problems.

Making a Plan

The second most important thing in arena is to have an overall plan as to what the team strategy is to win and select classes that will accomplish that. There are several highly successful strategies common place in the arena that will work well for newcomers.


The first basic strategy is a drain team, this relies on having mana draining abilities available and in order to accomplish this you require a hunter, priest or warlock present. The main idea is to have steady damage on the opposing team to wear them down while directly attacking the enemy healers’ mana. If you can make the enemy healers run out of mana before yours do then you can easily start killing off his team mates.


A similar strategy to this is a grind style team. These teams tend to have a high number of healers accompanied by a dps class whose damage does not ever “run dry” - usually a warrior. The goal here is to be so survivable that nobody in your team can easily be killed while slowly chipping away at the enemy team until something gives way, usually the enemy healers running out of mana.


The final basic strategy is the burst team. This style of team is very risky but can be quite effective due to its instant shock value. The trick is to take 3 dps classes that can dish out horrendous damage while supporting this with a high amount of crowd control and silences. What the plan entails is to hit one person as hard as you possibly can while stopping him from being healed.


The big risk however is that if your burst does not succeed then without a healer your team will gradually be picked off, as such it is vital to pick the correct target. Attacking someone who has an escape measure such as a paladins bubble or a mages iceblock will cause your attack to fail.
Attacking a class such as a warrior or shaman however yields a high success rate.


With these simple tips you should be able to construct a strong backbone to your arena team and be ready to dominate your way to that 1700 rating target.


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2. Arena Tips - Before the first attack


Now that you have created your arena team to give yourself a good chance of success, you are going to need a strong setup and basic plan, though this is only one small aspect of the battles within.

There are many steps and tactics that you can undertake to improve your teams’ chance of success before you are even engaged with your opponents; indeed many matches are won or lost by the preparation made right at the start.

Arena combat is highly competitive and so you must give yourself every possible advantage to be able to keep up; you can guarantee that your opponents will be utilizing every possible means they can get to improve their game play and so, you must do likewise.

The first thing to work on is improvements to your teams co-ordination and communication. To that end, one of the most important things to have for any serious arena team is voice communication.

The in game voice chat is unfortunately not too great - often having problems with its volume being much too quiet even when set to its maximum output. The two voice chat applications generally used throughout any competitive game play worldwide are Team speak and Ventrillo.

By making sure your entire team is connected to a voice chat server and has working microphones you instantly boost your performance due to being able to watch each others backs far more efficiently.

For example, healers can call out when they are silenced allowing hybrids to provide emergency backup healing as needed, and the DPS classes can co-ordinate their attacks and crowd control with much more speed to put some serious pressure on the opposition.

The second means to boost your team co-ordination is so simple and yet missed by many players. Arena combat can get very hectic and your team can end up scattered leading to confusion as to where the rest of your team is at any one time. This can lead to players becoming isolated from support.

The solution is simple, assign everyone in your team a raid marker. This allows you to easily track exactly where your team mates are at any one time, even through walls; a vital piece of information to ensure that you don’t end up accidentally getting out of line of sight of your healers.

With team communication and co-ordination improved, the next step is to improve the information available to you about your enemy. A fairly standard arena management mod is Proximo ( Proximo | World of Warcraft Addons | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com ) and what this lovely little mod does is provide a target status box for every member of the opposing team that you can target them by. But more importantly it shows this information the second anyone in your team with Proximo targets an enemy player.

This allows you to very quickly know at the start of an arena match just what you are up against in order to form an effective plan. And if you don’t manage to target everyone in the opposing team then one of your teams stealth classes, if you have one, can go and “scout out” the other side with ease.

Be warned however that hunters have discovered a nasty way to bug out Proximo. When you target someone via Proximo it targets by name, and hunters have taken to naming their pets after team mates to mess up your targeting.

Now, fully prepared to dominate, it is time to prepare your attack!


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3. Arena Tips - Opening Moves


You should now be entering the arena with a strong team setup coupled with a sophisticated communications setup to enable your team to perform to its best.


But all that planning is for nothing if you cannot execute your attack in the right way, as with the preparations you make before attacking, the way in which you initiate your attack is vital to winning in the arena.


Should your team end up confused and scattered in the attack it is a fast road to a lost match, likewise should you be able to force confusion upon your enemy it can make your wins easier to obtain. The trick is to force the other team to play into your own hands and style; make them dance to your tune and victory is assured.


One basic and effective opening tactic is a rush, this favors high burst dps teams to take advantage of the confusion for an easy first kill. The plan is simple, hit the other team hard and from an unexpected angle before they have a chance to identify what composition they are against.


An example of an effective place to rush is Blades Edge, most teams generally line up at opposite ends of the bridge and spend some time scouting out the other team, an effective rush will instead mount up and ride to the opposing teams ramp up to the bridge to hit them in the side.

The big downside to a rush is that while the other team will not have time to scout you out, neither will you have time to identify an effective target to nuke and so it is easy to end up with your own team confused without proper leadership.


A second effective opening tactic, and my personal favorite is harassment. This generally relies on having dispell classes move forward and purge one or two of the enemy buffs before backing off again quickly. In this manner you can weaken the enemy without fully engaging them and try to make one of their members panic and charge you.


If harassing, remember to land an attack from a distance on warriors in order to put them in combat; this stops them from utilizing charge against you which is the most common way you will be chased down as a harasser.

You can also harass with mana drains such as viper sting and by utilizing low rank DoT spells which cost far more mana to be removed than they do to cast. Further harassment tactics extend to the killing of hunter and warlock pets; these are sometimes left on aggressive stance and will charge out when attacked, enabling them to be killed alone.


The third tactic involves mass AoE crowd control and is effective when combined with a slightly delayed rush. What it typically involves is a class such as a rogue sapping enemy healers or a mage polymorphing them before/as you charge in. This forces them to trinket in order to begin healing.


It is at this point that you hit the entire team with an AoE fear such as intimidating shout or howl of terror. The healers, having previously trinketed will now be out of control and likely to run out of line of sight of their team mates, causing chaos in the enemy’s organization.


This tactic does however rely on the other team being bunched up and you being the attacker.


The final opening tactic is the stealth hunt, if you know the other team has a stealth class, especially a rogue, then the chances are high that they will be sniffing around your team scouting you out. If you can catch them out with a low rank AoE to detect them or by utilizing the shadow sight gems then you force the other team to attack in order to rescue the stealth member.


This can lead to the opposition lacking organization in their attack making them much easier for you to dominate.


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4.Talent Specs And You

Talent specializations can be really confusing; especially to the relatively new player. Even for those of us who have been around a while, there doesn’t seem to be any right answer for “what’s the best build for _____?” So we’re going to talk about talents in general terms and then we’ll draw some conclusions.


Every character has three talent tabs. Each one of these tabs has around 20-25 buttons. Each of these buttons represents an active or passive skill for your character. You are given 1 point for every level starting at 2 points for level 10, for a total of 61 points to spend in these talent trees. Where you put those points will make a huge difference in how you should play your character. With virtually unlimited variations to choose from it can be really tough to choose how to spend your talent points. We’ll help shed a little light on that right now.


It all boils down to this: how do you like to play? That one factor should be the ultimate decision-maker for you when it comes to choosing your talent tree, as well as how you allocate the individual points. Do you prefer healing or fighting? Do you like crowd control or a ton of DPS? Ranged attacks or melee? Once you get to know your character and class, you’ll have a much better idea how it all fits together.


In my opinion there are really only two ways to go to get the very most out of any build. This may be a little controversial, but here goes. You should either go all-in on a single tree and super-specialize with 41+ points, or go 30/31 in two trees. It really depends on what the people you play with need you to contribute to regular instance runs, PVP battles, or raid groups. Let’s look at those two options.


In order to really have the best heals or be a fabulous tank, you simply must go at least to 41 points in those trees. If your guild needs an uber tank, you’re going to have to really go for it, or decide to let someone else play that role. For maximum healing, the 41st point is usually a “can’t live without skill.” Do a little looking on wowhead and Thottbot as well as a google search and see what build others are using in that tree. Alakhazam has a list at that shows the breakdowns of what its members use at Allakhazam.com: World of Warcraft you can see from this list most druids (2.43%) use a 0/0/61 build for restoration. This just proves my point that in order to do one tree well, you’re going to spend nearly all of your points there. This list is terrific because it lets you look at what hundreds of other players are choosing.


Another great resource for looking at builds if you are not an expert already is the WoW Wikki site. On the Class page here: Class - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft there is a window on the right side of the screen where you can get very detailed information and comments on how thousands of other people play that class, the builds they use, and which builds are better suited for PVE, PVP and raids.


Now that you’ve seen the first theory, let’s take a peek at another one that might make you even more valuable overall, primarily for DPS classes and builds. On this page: Guide: Hunter Talent DPS Analysis for v1.7 :: World of Warcraft :: Allakhazam.com someone was doing an analysis of hunter DPS builds, and the end result was fascinating. In almost every case the builds with a 30/31 allocation did the most damage. This happened because of talent synergies. While those who played Blizzard’s other blockbuster, Diablo 2 are familiar with the term, it’s not used directly in WoW, but that doesn’t keep it from happening.


On this page we see that a 0/21/30 build was almost identical in DPS to a 0/31/20 build (this is a very old post on Allakhazam before the expansion so bear with me). Blizzard does a great job of trying to balance their games so that players never overpower each other, and that no single build ever lasts if it thoroughly outshines all the others. This leads to parity and variety, so that all players become fairly equal, and players can play the same toon in a variety of styles depending on the situation.


So you might experiment with a 31/30 build. From my testing it always turns out that any two trees end up with talent synergies in the 20 point level, meaning they make each other stronger. The hard part about this build is choosing the 61st point. There will be one really great skill in all three trees you’ll have to choose from with that last point. It can be a really tough choice to make, because it will have a great effect on your play style.


Hunters, for example can go with BM/MM with the last point in either bestial wrath (big red kitty) or true shot aura. If he goes MM/Survival he’ll have to choose between true shot aura and Wyvern Sting, and for BM/Surv the choice will be bestial wrath or Wyvern. All three of those skills are useful; it will just depend on how that player wants to play. I’ve said before that very few hunters go survival tree, not even 1%. But I’ve also seen a survival hunter make all the difference in a high level run with great dps because his crit chance was around 29% with lethal shots, mortal shots and lightening reflexes. He would put on rapid fire and crit almost every 1.5 seconds to the tune of 1,400 to 1,800; it was insane. Plus he could chain trap like crazy, and put a mob to sleep before the fight ever began with wyvern sting. That means from one toon you got double the CC.


That’s what you get from a 30/31 build, versatility. You can do three or four things really well for your group and not be pigeonholed into just one thing. A 31/30 build is going to be primarily used for DPS builds, while a 41+ specialization may be more for healers and tanks. A good raid group needs both kinds: the super-specialized and the versatile. I think maybe I’ll do something really weird and go 30 beast mastery/31 survival just for kicks with my next hunter and see how it goes. Put a rogue to sleep for a bit and then let my cat go frenzy on them. No more stealth for you Mr. rogue, and enjoy the dots!



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5. Race Bonuses - Horde

Lucky for us Horde players, the Horde racial bonuses are better than Alliance; especially for PVP. That’s why Horde seems to win AV like 80-90% of the time. They are just a little harder to kill than alliance. Alliance makes up for lack of individual strength in sheer numbers. I guess they just reproduce faster (have you seen the troll females – kinda scary).


The Horde racial bonuses only whiff a couple of times, and even then, not too terribly badly. If you can get over the rough edges, horde characters are a little stronger than their alliance counterparts. The one and only exception to this is that it’s a little hard to beat a night elf rogue. Other than that, Horde usually has a better stat setup on one race or another. Let’s check it out.


Orcs - Orcs have the best base attribute points so you can really hardly go wrong with them for any of the five choices. Combine that with the fact that these four bonuses have something for all five class choices and it boils down to this: when in doubt - you won’t be wrong choosing an orc.


> Enrage - increases damage while lowering healing taken. If you get in a bind or want to get a leg up, enrage is nice to use. Combine this with increased pet damage and beastial wrath and orc hunters have the biggest, maddest kitties around.
> Resistant to stun affects. Great against those pesky night elf rogues.
> Pet damage increased - +5% for both hunters and warlocks. This can turn into a serious dps buff if you spec to take full advantage of it.
> Axe skill increased - nice little bonus for those who like those cleaver type weapons.


Undead - can be a little gross, but completely annoying to alliance players. Let’s see why:


> Will of the Forsaken – makes the undead immune to sleep, charm and fear affects. You can even use this after you’ve been affected. I really stinks to not be able to fear or sleep these guys, or have them wake up ½ second after you do.
> Consume corpses to regain health. They don’t even need to carry around food – just eat what you kill.
> Underwater breathing increased 300% - now that’s a big increase, can save you quite a bit in underwater breathing potions.
> Shadow resist – minor, but not a total waste.


Tauren - These brutes lend themselves to tank duty and are just the best at close range melee fighting.


> Stomp - stuns nearby opponents. All warriors have a skill similar to this in Thunder Clap, but a Tauren gets another skill that works just as well. It can be really hard to overcome.
> Maximum health increased - 5% can be a gob of hit points in the right gear and the right buffs. Tank city.
> Herbalism skill +15 - at last a decent increase to a non-combat skill.
> +10 Nature resistance – not too shabby.


Troll - these fellows have two really good bonuses, and excel at both PVP and PVE.


> Berserk - 10%-30% increased attack and casting speed. 10% speed increase if you are above 50% or so life, 30% increase below 25%, this can make all the difference in a PVP battle. It stinks to be just ahead of a troll shaman and then he goes berserk and waxes you.
> Increased regeneration - life regained at 10% faster rate than other races. This even happens in battle. So it’s almost as good as the Tauren bonus to maximum health. For prot warriors, go Tauren, DPS guys may consider a Troll.
> Increased damage vs. beasts – Nice buff for PVE grinding and questing.
> Throwing and bow weapons +5 - again, not horrid for a hunter.


Blood elves - I’m not too sure about the blood elf bonuses. They are either pretty good, or the worst in the Horde. I’m leaning toward worst – but let’s look at them and you can judge for yourself.


> +10 to enchanting – again with the profession increase, not as good as tauren, better than most.
> Mana Tap - Drain mana from opponents – it would be great if it added the mana to your pool (it doesn’t) or if it drained enough mana to hinder the other person’s casting (not even close). This does set up a way to get some emergency mana when used with the silence skill arcane torrent.
> Arcane Torrent – The silence skill stops casting for a whopping 2 seconds. That’s not very long. If you have built up charges from drain mana, it returns some to you when you use this skill. This is what I mean – this is either a really great couple of sills, or not worth much. Seems to become less valuable as you level. Can provide you with one strategic spell interrupt per PVP battle however.
> +5 to all magic resistances – now we’re talking. Not a big resistance pool, but at least it’s resist all.
So now you can see why some people say that Horde are just better characters. They have better racial bonuses. When you get into comparing them according to attributes, it widens the gap even further. By taking both bonuses and attributes into account you can see why I choose an orc hunter for BM spec and a troll hunter for anything else. Trolls have 5 more base points in agility than Orcs.


Granted, the attribute stuff will sort of even itself out in the end, but things like +5% are much bigger – things like the Tauren max life pool. At the end of the day, if you really know what you are doing, you can play any class from any race and do well with them. But by the same token, someone who really knows what they are doing can be brutal with the right class and race combined.

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6. Race Bonuses - Alliance

This may not be a great article for those of you out there who prefer style over functionality. If you really just build your toons to look cool, then this is completely worthless information to you. Me, I like to study up on things and see what really works. I am also pretty practical when it comes to the bird in the hand is better than the two in the bush stuff. That may be a touch archaic for some of you so let’s just move on.


Each race in WoW has a small set of bonus traits that lend themselves to a greater or lesser degree of usefulness during game play. We’re going to look at each race and the bonuses involved and draw a few conclusions.


Some bonuses lend themselves to certain classes, and others help in play style. Sometimes you just don’t have a choice. Like if you want to be a horde druid – you’re getting a Tauren and that’s all there is to it. But in the cases where you do have a choice, it can actually make a fair amount of difference in your character in the earlier parts of the game.


Racial bunuses have a tendency to balance out for the most part by level 70. You’re still going to see mostly Tauren Main Tanks, but most races can do a great job of playing the classes available to them.


Certain classes match up well with certain racial bonuses. Undead have the highest base spirit in the game, just like night elves have the highest agility. That’s why you see so many night elf rogues. Every race but the Dranei can make rogues, but you will see more night elf and gnome rogues than human and dwarf. Why? The bonuses to agility for night elves and the escape artist bonus for gnomes lends itself to playing a rogue. That’s also why you see so many gnome casters – gnomes get a boost to intellect higher than any other race.


So let’s look at the useful, and sometimes NOT so useful racial attributes for the different races and how they might match your particular play style preferences when it comes time to try out a shiny new toon.


Humans – We’ll start there since I happen to be one. Humans have one racial trait that makes them great priests, increased spirit, the rest are just ok.


> Humans have increased stealth detection. The vast majority of WoW players consider this completely worthless, because it basically is.
> Humans have higher stats for spirit than the other alliance races, therefore a lot of human priests.
> Humans get an extra 25% reputation when turning in quests – kinda cool but it still won’t get you exalted with gnomeregan that much faster so you can ride the giant turbo chicken mounts.
> +5 to sword and mace skill – not too bad if you plan to specialize in one of those


Dwarves – these poor guys don’t seem to have a single bonus that’s truly useful, unless you consider being a paladin a bonus.


> Stone form - greatly increases defense for a short period of time. It’s ok, but won’t save your life very often.
> +5 gun skill - not bad for a hunter if you don’t mind the loss of agility from being a dwarf in the first place.
> Frost resistance - not a big enough bonus to count for much in PVP and very few mobs use frost attacks in PVE
> Treasure finding - I never really got anything “leet” out of a chest anyway, plus most chests aren’t exactly hidden. Not very useful.


Night elves - may have the second-best racial bonuses on the Alliance side, but they are still mostly best for hunters and rogues.

> Shadow meld - a bit like stealth, only you can’t move. If you stealth and shadow meld you are virtually undetectable.
> Dodge bonus - very helpful for hunters and rogues who have attacks that come after dodges and a good bit of their defense rating is based on not getting hit in the first place.
> Wisp form when dead - increases movement speed when you die. It can be nice to have a little reduction in your corpse run time, but dieing still stinks.
> Nature resistance - again, not enough resistance to be a big deal.


Gnomes - gnomes come in behind night elves for helpful bonuses, but I just can’t get used to having to swim where others walk; -10 points for pure shortness.


> Escape artist - can avoid speed altering affects. This is great for melee classes, but with their relatively high agility, is probably best suited for rogues of this race.
> +5 intelligence - nice for the mage or warlock
> Arcane resistance - same story, third chapter.
> +5 engineering skill - was a complete waste before expansion and it’s not a big deal now, but can help a tiny amount when leveling engineering skills.
Dranei - this race really doesn’t have a completely useless bonus, even though the resistance to shadow is small. Best bonuses on the alliance side.
> Jewel crafting skill increased +5 – ok so this isn’t great.
> Gift of the Naaru – heal yourself or others. This heal-over-time spell is a great little life saver for anyone. Best Alliance bonus by far
> Increase chance to hit – this also affects party members with both melee and spells. It’s not a huge increase, but it is one more buff and every little bit counts.
> Shadow resistance - maybe the most useful resist, but not enough to save your bacon.


This is just the racial bonuses, and does not take into account the stats each race starts with. For a list of racial stats you can check out Race - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft.


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7. Focus Targeting - Part One



Have you ever wished you could keep your eye on two targets at once with no hassle whatsoever? The good news is that you can! The bad news however, is that to be able to do so can be rather complex if you don’t know how to set it up.


Within the basic functions of WoW is a feature called focus targeting which allows you to assign yourself a second target separate from your normal one; this second target will be locked and unable to change until you specifically tell it to.


On its own this feature would not be too useful. But with the use of a few simple macros you can set up custom spell buttons that will affect your focus target, rather than your normal target; this is where focus targeting starts to shine.


So why would you go through the effort of setting up focus targeting for yourself? Here is a short list of what can be achieved with a little careful configuration :-


> Be able to heal a friend without having to target them.
> Be able to quickly crowd control an opponent without switching targets.
> Be able to keep an eye on enemy healers in PvP for well timed spell interrupts.
> Be able to attack two mobs in melee with little effort for much better multi-mob aggro generation.
> And many more uses besides.


Hopefully that will have grabbed your attention, so how do you go about configuring focus targeting? The first thing you need to do is create a macro button to assign your current target as your focus target.


Log into the game and then go into the options menu. There is a button labeled macros on the main menu, press that to open up your macro window. From here create a new macro; select whichever icon you desire and name it “Focus.”


In the bottom window of the macro frame you can add the macro program, in this case it is just a simple case of typing in:


/focus


that’s it, nothing more, nothing less. And it should look something like this:





Now drag your new button from the macro window in to a free slot on your UI, when you press your new button it will assign your current target as your focus target.


The next step is to create a spell macro that will cast your ability at your focus target rather than your current target. Again, go into the macro window and create a new macro with a name and icon of your choice.


When adding the macro program this time type:


/cast [target=focus] spellname


now this can be tricky depending on the spell as the spell rank data needs to be entered as well, luckily there is an easy way to get it right. When entering the spell name, rather than typing it in, shift-click on the icon within your spell book that you wish to cast.


By shift-clicking the icon, its spell name and its rank is automatically placed into your macro for you, assuming both windows are open.


Now drag this new icon into a usable interface position and get ready to try it out. First off target anything, then press your first macro to assign it as your focus; next, target something else and then press your second macro.

The spell should now cast at your focus target despite you having something completely different as your main target!


Feel free to experiment with creating new macros for whichever spells you would find most useful and in part 2 I shall show you how you can expand upon the focus targeting feature with some custom UI mods to take full advantage of it.


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8. Focus Targeting - Part Two


In part one of this guide on focus targeting I explained the basics of how you can utilize focus targeting to direct your spells and abilities towards a second target, specially selected by you.


There are however some limitations in the default UI that prevent you from fully exploiting the potential of focus targeting; the main limitation being a complete lack of visual representation as to the status of your focus target. Unfortunately, you do not even get confirmation as to what your focus target is.


To rectify this matter we need to delve into the world of interface modification; and more specifically you require what is known as a unit frame mod. Personally I use X-Perl.


Interface addons can be found on any good interface site such as World of Warcraft AddOns Downloads Forums News Blogs Guides Videos Screenshots | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com and are simple to install.


To install, simply download the addon you want and extract it into the addons section of the interface folder in your World of Warcraft folder.
Once you have the addon installed you will find that when you log into the game, all status bars for yourself, your party and your targets have changed.


Before you start playing with your addons settings and getting things to make them look how you want; assign yourself a focus target as a test by using the macro you made in part 1 of this article.


What you should find is that you now get a full status bar for your focus target as well as one for your normal target, you will also find that no matter how much you try, you cannot make the focus target status bar disappear unless you move out of the targeting range of your focus target.
There are times however, when you do want to de-select your focus target; and doing so is simple. Go into your macro window as shown in part 1 and create a new macro with the following text.


/clearfocus


what this new macro will allow you to do is de-select your focus target.
So what has adding a status bar for your focus target actually achieved?


> You now get visual confirmation as to what your focus target is.
> You can now see a cast bar for your focus target which is invaluable for well timed spell interrupts.
> You can see what buffs and debuffs are on your focus target along with duration left which lets you know when crowd control spells and the like need renewing.
> You can keep an eye on your focus targets health and mana status.
Once you have finished setting up your unit frames how you like, there is one final thing that can be done to improve the functionality of your focus targeting, and that involves utilizing a bar mod such as Trinity bars.


What a bar mod allows you to do is have many more buttons available on screen compared to the standard UI as well as drag them around to where you want them.


Some addons such as Trinity bars also give you the option of setting the target of any button you create; this allows you to setup a bank of buttons that will only ever have your focus target as their target.


The beauty of this is that you will no longer have to write macros out for every spell you want to use, instead, you can just drag them straight into the right slot.


Furthermore, since the spell slot has your focus target as its target, it will also take the focus target as the point of reference for showing a blanked out icon if an ability is out of range, combined with the information from your unit frame addon, you have a vast horde of information as to the status of your focus target.


As an extra bonus, buttons that are set to only target your focus target will not show on screen until you actually have a focus target, dramatically reducing screen clutter for a nice clean UI.


And that is all there is to know about focus targeting. Have fun dominating two targets at once!


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9. Pull and Pass - Advanced Hunter Techniques


Nanny nanny boo boo -


I don’t know if kids still use the same annoying little chants to taunt each other that we used when I was a nooblet in real life. But the one that sticks out for this lesson is: “I’m rubber; you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!” Boy I hated that one. But it’s very appropriate for the technique we’re going to talk about today. The pull and pass.


Last time we talked about using all of your skills all of the time. But there are certain cases where some skills are just not that useful outside of instances. Even worse, there is not a reason to use them in most instances until you get to the really hard ones. Beginning with Steamvaults, Shattered Halls and Shadow Labyrinth, the mob pulls are beginning to come in groups of 4-6. And those teams are well-balanced just like your group. If one of those elites, or even worse - two or three, get locked on your healer, you can pretty much just start hustling toward the entrance so your corpse run will be shorter.


Most of the time, a healer can do something like bubble (for priests), and run around for a bit and heal himself while the rest of the team goes full DPS on one or two mobs. He can kite guys around and survive for a while. But the elites in the end game instances hit so hard and you simply cannot get them off your back once they lock on, especially as a healer. So the best you can hope for is that you can keep the party healed long enough in spirit form so that they finish off a couple of them and make the next pull easier. But talk about a long night. One or two wipes in an instance is a good run, One or two wipes every one or two pulls blows.


Hunters have gotten a bad rap in groups because many other players think: they don’t (most of the time) do the serious DPS of a mage or Warlock (and locks have off-tank pets too), they can’t tank a murloc, are useless unless they are in range (except those 7 players who went survival spec) so they spend a great deal of time just running around like an idiot, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure you’ve heard these and more. If you have decent skills as a hunter you know that these statements may be true about many hunters, but not AL hunters. But the thing is: 25-30% of the toons on just about every server are hunters. Why? Because they solo so well. For the casual gamer, getting a holy priest to level 70 is about as fun as having your wisdom teeth removed. But hunters can do just about anything without having to have much help.


You can be the exception to the rule for those people who don’t really like hunters on instance runs. You paid attention to me in the last article when I told you to use all of your skills so you have all your hot buttons ready to go. Let’s cover how every priest in the game will be your new best friend when you do this a few times for them. Paladins and Shaman aren’t nearly as squishy as their cloth compatriot, but they will appreciate it just as much.


I call it a pull and pass. It can be a little tricky, but not if you know where all your buttons are and pay attention to what’s going on. We are in a big fight and you see a mob going to take a big chunk out of your healer. Here’s what you do:


1. Fire Distracting Shot - As soon as you see your healer has drawn aggro (btw, this IS hunter duty, to pull agro off of healers and to take down trash add mobs) Nail it with distracting shot to get them locked on you.


2. Use Scatter Shot/Concussive Shot - If you have specialized in Marksmanship and can use scatter shot to slow them down or even stop them altogether - if they disorient, they will drop agro on you and your pet can pick it up. If you are Beast Mastery, concussive shot.


3. By this time one of two things will have happened: the mob is now ready to pick on someone else, or someone else is picking on him.


4. If he has already been drawn to another party member, you can go back to nuking down the mark you were on in the first place - OR - use misdirection.


5. Misdirect - Hit your misdirection hotkey and then click your tank. Blast away at your target with the three biggest damage shots you have and he will go back where he needs to be.


So you pull the agro off of your healer and pass it back to your tank. A different kind of crowd control, with a hunter, you gotta love it. And that’s just one of our hunter crowd control tips. Misdirection may be the most underused skill hunters have, and I have never seen many hunters use distracting shot well because they don’t want the agro either. Most marksman hunters will use scatter shot because it saves their own bacon, but don’t know how to pass agro once they pull it. If all else fails, Feign Death and let the mob naturally wander off to someone else. You and your healer are still standing. Hunters have another great way to manage agro we’ll talk about another time.


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10. Meta Gems for Melee


Melee classes have a large variety of meta gems to choose from that are highly effective in any given situation. But it does raise the question as to which meta gem is right for your melee class?


There are two factors to take into account when picking the right meta gem for you, the first is its requirements of other color gems, the second is how well it fits with your class mechanics, below is in-depth information behind the melee based meta gems to make that choice easier.


Brutal Earthstorm Diamond - +3 Melee damage + chance to stun

Requires 2 of each gem


The stun chance on this meta gem is 1% and does not have a cooldown, it does however cause diminishing returns on other stun procs such as mace spec for warriors and rogues and as such most classes with passive stun procs from talents or weaponry choose to pass over this gem.


The main advantage of this meta gem is its base 3 melee damage increase, however it needs to be said that this damage increase does not scale with your weapon speed. As such the damage boost is best for classes with a very fast attack rate, the best being a feral druid in cat form for who this meta gem adds an effective 42 attack power.


If you use slow weapons however, give this meta gem a pass unless you really want the stun proc.


Enigmatic Skyfire Diamond - +12 Critical strike rating +5% Snare and Root resist

Requires more red gems than yellow


Normally a crit based gem would be passed over in PvP due to resilience but due to this gems special effect it suddenly becomes much more viable. The snare and root resist effect stacks with the surefooted enchant along with any talented snare and root resists such as a rogues fleet footed talent.
With snare and root resists stacked up from multiple sources you become much more mobile and in PvP it can mean the difference between catching your target to finish them off or being stuck in a frost nova eating shatter combos.


The requirements for this metagem are equally simple to meet if you do not favour yellow gems.


Eternal Earthstorm Diamond - +12 Defense rating +10% Shield block value

Requires 2 blue gems and one yellow


Strictly a tanking gem for prot paladins and warriors, the gem requirements are defensivly orientated and so easy to meet for a tank and the increase in block value scales well with your equipment to make it the best option for shield using tanks.


On top of the extra mitigation provided, the higher block value will also increase the damage output of a warriors shield slams to increase his threat capacity.


Powerful Earthstorm Diamond - 18 Stamina + 5% Stun resist

Requires 3 blue gems


A defensive based PvP gem; the requirements end up taking away from your offensive capability however the stun resist can be worth it if you have other ways of boosting it up.


5% Stun resist alone is almost a non factor in PvP, throw on the orc racial stun resist however and things quickly become a different matter, add on top any stun resist talents your class may have and you quickly become a rogues worst nightmare.


The conditions to fully exploit this gem are rather specific, but if you can then the rewards for doing so are well worth it. If not, then it is just a glorified stamina gem and not the best use of your meta slot.


Relentless Earthstorm Diamond - 12 Agility + 3% Critical damage

Requires 2 of each gem


The best offensive melee gem going for PvE, this scales well as your kit and crit rate improve. Not quite as effective in PvP situations however due to the effect of resilience.


This gem also makes a good tanking meta choice for a druid both for threat generation and proccing improved leader of the pack for self heals.
The main drawback to this gem is its requirements which can detract from your offensive capabilities but for PvE the bonus to your critical damage more than makes up for this loss.


Swift Skyfire Diamond - 24 Attack power + Minor run speed increase

Requires 2 yellow and one red gem


This gem is mostly used by those who want a surefooted enchant but do not wish to lose out on a run speed increase for catching their opponents in PvP if they do not have a talented movement speed increase.


The requirements are simple to meet and it provides a solid damage boost making this a safe choice, though unless you specifically want both the surefooted enchant and a boost to your run speed there are likely better meta gems for you.


Thundering Skyfire Diamond - Chance to increase attack speed

Requires 2 of each gem


The proc from this gem provides 240 haste rating for 6 seconds with a cool-down of 40 seconds. For most situations a Relentless Earthstorm Diamond will provide you a higher dps increase due to the lack of an internal cool-down.


That said there is one situation in which this gem excels, and that is for a blood elf retribution paladin using seal of blood, a class for whom haste is key. For any other melee dps class there are better options available.



Hopefully this guide will help you both at playing WoW and at owning in PvP



You just got owned with a wall of text!!!

[blw123]

lol no lie nice guide though

[Scarmaker]

"
> Humans have increased stealth detection. The vast majority of WoW players consider this completely worthless, because it basically is. "

The vast majority seems to think its OP not worthless...



If you post which site you got it from +rep.

[fjums]

I found a simular guide on the site
http://www. d 3 s c e n e .com/forum/wow-guides/19566-ultimate-pvp-guide-knowledge.html

but the one who posted it says "source unknown"

[manowarlock]

fjums... he said at the very top of the guie it was a copy paste.... L2Read

[laren]

fjums... he said at the very top of the guie it was a copy paste.... L2Read

this is clear to all. He's just trying to find the source to give credit

BTW @ aboone:

Some comment to the guide...

It's good, and good sense for the seasons to come too.

The racial part denotes the writer is horde side. Racials for alliance are misunderstood and undervalued.

thanks 4 sharing

+2 rep :wave:

[Yazuak]

" >Humans have increased stealth detection. The vast majority of WoW players consider this completely worthless, because it basically is. "

The vast majority seems to think its OP not worthless...

Bah i was going to say that but you beat me to it. Perception FTW