Arena Addons List

[Course]

1. Quartz :

Quartz is a castbar that allows you to make all of the castbars in the game easier to comprehend at a glance. It also allows for PvE benefits with an estimated latency for each cast. Once you realize about where your latency is, you will stop cutting off casts early, and it can vastly improve your DPS. As far as this feature in Arenas, it has limited use, as it is not as accurate after getting pushback.

Quartz can be found at WowAce. Install as you would any other addon, copy it into your addons folder and load WoW. Once you get in game, you may want to cast some low rank of spell to locate all of the bars. /quartz will bring up the menu if you do not use DeuceCommander or something similar.

Once in game and the menu is open, the first screen is pretty much self explanatory, except for the mysterious samwise icon. It will turn off the icon display of his face when there is no icon. I keep it off, mainly because he looks a little creepy. Normally, the castbars will have an icon, so that you know what spell your opponent is casting, without even reading the text! This helps you to get information quickly, rather than reading whatever they are casting.

In the picture to the right, my castbar (Frostbolt) and my focus (Warlock casting SoC) are shown. These bars are bigger than the standard casting bar, which makes it easier to get information from at a glance. Quartz supports Shared Media, so the bar texture itself can be changed to almost anything you want. Each bar on your screen can be customized in many, many ways. You can see a list of all of the options for the player bar here. All of the standard things, color, size, position, ect can be adjusted. Some of the nicer options allow you to change the transparency, and where all of the text / icon appears, as well as the fonts. This casting bar can fit into almost any UI with a little effort.

Quartz has a module that allows for the timers on your own buffs, and your target's buffs to be displayed, but I do not use this feature, as there are other alternatives that do a much better job. However, this feature is pictured to the side. (Image stolen from WowAce Wiki). One of the more useful modules will show you how long is remaining until the current BG or Arena starts. This is a mirror of features in other addons, but is still nice to have right next to your casting bar. Another module will hook into your flight timers, and display a timer for that. A timer bar can be created that is similar in appearance to the time until game starts bar. I don't see many PvP uses for it, but I guess it can remind you to check on your food. The Tradeskill Merge option will take your casting bar for making a large number of items and combine it into one time. Each item has a castbar, and a fainter bar moves across as your finish the amount of items that you are making. Again, no PvP usefulness, but a nice feature to have in general.

The bar will change colors to let you know that your spell was interrupted, and will display the name of whatever stopped it if it was a spell, such as "Counterspell" or "Earth Shock". The bar will fade out and change to red after the cast is stopped. The castbar for yourself will change to gray when your target runs out of range of your spell, which can give you the information needed to stop and move closer at the beginning.

Bars can be displayed for yourself, your target, your focus target, and the "Mirror" bar, which is Breath, party invite timeouts, duel timeouts, ect.

At the end of your cast bar, there is a region that is red, which signifies your estimated latency when the spell was cast. This can be grossly wrong at times, so a measure of common sense is needed to use it correctly. After some use in PvE, you will have a feel for how accurate it is. I must caution you at this point, because using it in arenas to stop casts early when your latency is ~100-200ms can spell disaster. Sometimes you will end up canceling a spell early, and earning your team a loss. The use of the latency bar in arenas would be better utilized by people with very high latency.

The focus bar is likely the most useful part of this addon. It allows you to select an opposing team member in arena's, and see what they are casting without targeting them. For example, as a mage, I can watch the opposing team's paladin and see him casting his flash or holy light spells. When it comes down to a crucial time and I need to CS him but continue DPS on our target, I can press my macro at the right time to stop his heal. Without a focus castbar, you may miss the CS or get faked out. I utilize the focus bar with right click on a player name in Proxmio to set focuses throughout an arena match.

For non casters, there is some use in Quartz besides the watching your focus. Quartz has a GCD timer, as well as a swing timer. This timer allows you to run in and get hits in and then run away from the enemy. The swing timer works for Hunter's autoshot as well.

Quartz looks hot, and helps you in PvP and PvE. There is nothing that I don't like about it, and I suggest you give it a try over ECB or the default castbar.

2. Gladiator and Tattle :

Tattle is a small addon that integrates data from Armory into the game. The information can be used with Gladiator, and put into your tooltips. The information is collected every few weeks, and people do deep scans of battlegroups on request. Finding this data takes a little bit of extra work, but if you feel that knowing your opponents spec is a sizable advantage, then the effort is worth the reward. There is some tattle information in the WowAce forums, and some on other forums. Tattle can be found here.

After carefully reviewing both Gladiator and Proximo, I have found that Gladiator can be better in some situations, but the feedback from the author of Proximo is valuable as well. Gladiator is a better choice when your teammates are using different addons, and refuse to conform. Gladiator is also a good choice if you must have your opponents spec in your arena frames. Gladiator also allows a spell cast on left click, a small feature that is missing from Proximo. (I wouldn't have a use for it) Gladiator's announce to chat is a marginally useful feature, as most good teams have some kind of arena frame for all team members. I like proximo better for the constant updates and feedback from the developer. I also enjoy using Proximo for the Highlight Main Assist feature, because when and if a DPS target change must occur in 5v5, running a 4 DPS team it is very important to swap DPS quickly and not to spread DPS.

Either arena frame addon can be the right choice for you, depending on the situation.

3. Proximo, ArenaPoint, and the bonus :

In general, arena unit frames will give you the best performance if everyone on your team has them installed. This will allow their target's health and mana to be sent to you and update without you even targeting that person.

First up, Proximo. This addon can be found at WowAce and is developed by Grayhoof. Download the .zip and extract to your addon folders. When logging in make sure it is checked and you should be good to go. To get these frames setup the way you want outside of arenas, use /proximo test to show a test frame. You will get something that looks like the image to the right.

To move the box, press alt and drag it with the left mouse button. Right click on the title bar to bring up the menu. You can choose the colors of the background, mana bars, and bars that show which player you are selecting. Under frame, you can choose the font size, font face, the width of the window, the height of the bars, the texture (Provided you have the SharedMedia addon), the scale, and turn off the title bar. This allows for your to place the unit frame box anywhere in your UI, and make it fit in pretty well.


The Misc menu allows you to keep syncing enabled (Helps to disable it if someone has an old version). The right click function is a nice part of this addon, as you can set it to cast a spell, or focus the player, which I find very helpful when reviewing their team at the start of a match. This layout of the enemies allows you to look at the overall situation without tabbing back and forth through them and their totems, pets, ect. I have not really tested party targeting, but I assume it shows you what your party's members have targeted currently. Highlighting the Main Assist works wonders in letting you know who to attack, just set the person that calls targets in your group as the Main Assist. This will help to keep your DPS focused and not spread out.

The low health warning can be output to your SCT, which will pop up for everyone when someone should be spikeable. Not to mention the whole opposing team's health is being updated whenever someone targets them.

These frames fit well into anyone's UI and allows your team to manage where the DPS is going, who can be killed quickly, and how their healer's mana is doing. The right click on focus helps as well, as binding the /focus macro to a key and pressing that requires you to target them first. Watching a focus castbar and having your CS your focus macro setup will allow you to CC healers while DPSing more efficiently.
The smaller addon that I want to talk about today will help save alt tabbing out of the game to convert your rating to points. Rather than an in game calculator, it will show you how many points you will get for each team. This addon is called ArenaPointer and is hosted on WowAce. A simple download, unzip, and copy to addons will do, there is nothing to configure for this addon, just enjoy it!

4. Pitbull :

I have to warn you now, Pitbull has a good bit of configuring to do, so if you want something that you can load and use in a few clicks, go ahead with AG_UF. It has most of the functionality, but is less flexible. I also recommend that you have SharedMedia for different textures.

Once you load your game, you will see a nice stack of frames on top of each other. Go ahead and left click to drag them apart for now. The main Pitbull menu can be brought up by right clicking the minimap icon. The menu pictured is mine after setup, the fresh menu is somewhat larger. I will go through the settings that are not 100% clear.

The first item on the menu is Global Settings.

• Auras- In this menu, you can enable or disable the timer spirals. This is a shading on auras on the unit frames that shows the duration, somewhat like what Blizzard added in a recent patch. Cooldown text can also be displayed in the icon, but it is somewhat hard to read. I turn that off.
• Colors - You can change colors for just about everything here.
• Font - If you have SharedMedia installed, you can choose any font you want for all of the frames
• Range Checking - This allows you to see if you are in range of any spell, or in range of all spells (direct damage, not AoE) for a mob. The unitframe fades out depending on your distance.

The Hide Blizzard Frames menu allows you to turn off things that Pitbull can replace, you shouldn't have to change this from the default.

The modules menu allows toggling of the different modules. Mouse over each for a description.

Import layouts allows for you to add someones layout, there is a good thread over on the WowAce forums.

The All Units menu allows you to change options for every frame, so should be used carefully. Under it, you can change just about any aspect of the bars, coloring HP by class, faction, ect, bar fading, which icons to show, almost anything. Each bar also has a similar menu with more options specific to that bar, such as texts.

The biggest PvP uses of Pitbull comes with the focus frame, possibly the focus's target, and party targets. The focus frame allows you to see HP/MP of the person you are supposed to be watching, and easily switch back to them. Party targets allow your team to watch and see who is not on the right target, and call for a correction. This allows the person calling targets to make sure that any switch is made effectively.

The auras module is useful in showing the duration of buffs/debuffs, and some basic filtering. You can hide debuffs that cannot be cured by you, so that there is less clutter, or show them all. You can change the size of the debuffs to make them easier to see on your UI.

As far as the PvE part of Pitbull, the party frames are very customizable, and the raid frames take some work to make good looking. Thankfully there are some raid frame layouts in the thread that I previously linked.

Some of the common problems that people have after switching to Pitbull are overlooking important settings. There are some important options dealing with raid / party frames under the respective menus, such as showing party frames in raid, showing 5 man raid as party, ect. Make sure not to overlook those little things. Another problem that people have is making things line up right. If you change the spacing in the Party menu, you should change it for party pets and party targets as well.

[bobzombie]

Very nice, it's good to see some pvp things being brought up. +rep

[shadowbladex]

+rep for the bigness.

[heymyname]

ROFL i love you sig shadow

[newplay]

cool...sweet

[Khalts]

wall of text crits u for 12345666. Nice, i must get the castbar :}

[Course]

Will be updating this thread at every patch for updates.
Will be also adding new arena addons when they comes out.

[Darkjokerr]

Might wanna add Arena Ignore to that list, it keeps track of who you have already faced and tells you before the match starts if its them again. (can grab it at wowinterface)

[Xrn]

x-perl>pitbull atm - pitbull is bugging sometimes (what i noticed)

[doveer]

great post.

[chaud]

Hi there, I am the author of this article. I originally posted it on PvPscene.
They can be viewed, properly formatted at

Quartz
Gladiator and Tattle
Proximo, ArenaPointer, and the bonus
Pitbull

I would appreciate if you linked to the original source, as I put my time and effort into writing these guides.
Thanks.

[meraz9000]

Hi there, I am the author of this article. I originally posted it on PvPscene.
They can be viewed, properly formatted at

Quartz
Gladiator and Tattle
Proximo, ArenaPointer, and the bonus
Pitbull

I would appreciate if you linked to the original source, as I put my time and effort into writing these guides.
Thanks.

lol..Owned

[Sence]

Thanks im going to dl those soon.