Here is a compilation of some useful sites and addons for those learning about PvP. While addons are not necessary to be the best (the tournaments for the very elite even prohibit addons!), they can be great training wheels for teaching yourself to pinpoint targets, deal with CC and learn awareness of objectives. As with anything, practice will help you improve, and reading up on the topic will also help you learn the more intricate details of PvP!

She bravely ran away away…

Websites:
The following websites offer useful information about PvP combat, gearing, strategies and so on.

http://www.arenajunkies.com/ – Great overall PvP resource. While this site does have a paid member option, you can still get a ton of info as a free user. Macro libraries, spec and gearing discussions, active forums with lots of combat strategies and discussion.

http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php – This site is more focused on PvE, but it is still a very high quality resource, especially for information about min/maxxing, spec/gemming, rotations, and theorycrafting.

http://wow.joystiq.com/category/blood-sport/ – WoWInsider’s PvP sections offer great information, especially for those new to PvP. This site has a more casual focus, although the older articles (http://wow.joystiq.com/bloggers/c-christian-moore/) have some good breakdowns of more advanced tactics.

Add-ons:
The following add-ons are super helpful for PvP!

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/healers-have-to-die – “Healers have to die!” is an excellent BG addon, especially for DPS. The addon will identify who healers are and clearly mark them in your UI for easy burning/CC.

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/battlegroundtargets – “Battleground Targets” helps you pick out enemies, find weaker targets, pinpoint healers and see how many teammates are focusing a target. Very vital for DPS to have!

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/losecontrol – “Lose Control” is a great, lightweight addon for CC. Blizzard copied this addon in 5.1 with the CC splash text, but lose control is much smaller and has a clear graphical display over your character cycling down how long a CC on you will last. Far less obtrusive than the default UI and it’s easy to see, at a glance, how long you’ll be stuck.

http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/gladius – “Gladius” is the number one arena addon. It replaces the default arena UI and includes a lot of customizable display options to show things like trinket use, CC duration and alerts for drinking and rezzes being cast. You can also setup the frames to have actions cast with various mouse button clicks (eg bind right click to a spell).

http://www.deadlybossmods.com/ – “Deadly Boss Mods” is something people might think of right off the bat for PvE and raiding, but there is also a great module inbuilt for battleground PvP! With this addon, you can see who is holding each flag for maps like Warsong Gulch and Twin Peaks, and you will see countdown timers for how long a node will take to cap or how long until a match is won.

All was quiet on the Hordish front…

Community:
If you are fanatic about PvP and want more ways to group with people, check out these options:

http://www.openraid.us – This site uses the battletag system to let people group up cross-realm. There is a realtime chat (like IRC) for pugging groups, as well as scheduled events you can sign up for, as well as forums. There are also public mumble servers available for free use.

http://battlemasters.org/ – Similar to openraid, Battlemasters is run by a highly-ranked PvPer, Eldacar, and provides players with a chat tool/IRC to quickly form groups across realms using battletags. There are also blog posts discussing PvP, forums and a free vent/mumble servers available for use.

http://solidice.com/oqueue/ – oQueue is an innovative merging of community and addon. The addon links you up to a large network of other users and allows you to queue, in game, for cross-realm BG groups and RBG matchups. Be sure to watch the tutorials on the website or join the facebook group if you have any trouble figuring out how it works.

Please feel free to reply here with your own suggestions for addons and websites, and I will add them in to the original post!!!

Happy murdering!

Anyone who’s run a battleground in WoW in Mists knows what the current PvP environment is like: CC, some CC, and, oh….a lil bit of CC. The forums are erupting with comments about this, with many of the suggestions basically just stating “kill CC! No more CC!”

I agree with the spirit of these posts, but I think most of the suggestions would only be a band-aid and we wouldn’t see much difference in the gameplay once trinket goes onto CD. The underlying aim with CC is to slow down combat and hinder the enemy’s abilities. However, nearly all the CCs we are seeing are hard CCs, which means complete loss of control of the character, as Most classes/races only have trinket or a friendly dispeller as their escape from CC.

The recent changes to dispelling also contribute to this feeling of too much CC – before, there were various TYPES of dispells and while you could, in theory, spam them, dispell protection and the GCD became limiting factors in how much dispelling you could effectively do.

I mean, technically, this is CC. Kinda.

IMHO, we can achieve a PvP experience that is less a game of whack-a-mole for interrupts and spikey health bars, if the focus shifts to hindering ABILITIES without also fully hindering characters. Instead of just giving each class several abilities to toss an enemy aside for 8 seconds, and one generic dispell which clears everything, give us back a more complex game.

– Rework CCs from straight stuns/fears/etc into specific hindering spells. Disarm is an existing good example of this – you don’t lose complete functionality with disarm, but your effectiveness drops. Build in new options to slow casting speed, curse people with stupidity (ie, a debuff to lower spellpower) or temporarily cut through their armor/stamina. These things already exist in the game, to an extent (think: sunder armor), so enhancing the array of effects like this shouldn’t be too drastic a difference.

– Bring back variable dispell options and enhance the experience. Let healers have choices on what they are dispelling (instead of a blanket cure-all) by giving us multiple skills for various debuffs. I liked being able to choose to cure diseases while sidestepping the vampiric touch dispell fear – I don’t have that option anymore, and I feel more robotic and mindless because of it.

This is the worst type of CC.

– Coupled with the above, consider letting us dispell specific spells in macros, or give us school-dispells. Build in a few seconds of protection/increased resistance FROM THAT SCHOOL after a spell is dispelled. This is not insanely overpowered, but it prevents excessive stacking while also rewarding smart gameplay. It’s the same concept of knowing when to fear a rogue – you gauge when they are going to use cloak and wait for a clear window.

– Build in more pre-planned effects. Lightwell, for example, is great for when you know you might be trained. You can click it while stunned and enemies can always target it and quickly burst it down if they notice that you are using that to stay alive (on that note, bring back spammable clicking – I hate that I have to clear the hot to reclick it now). More effects like this can provide a pvp experience that rewards situational awareness. Monks already have this built in with the concept of statues. Give more classes the ability to lay down objects we can interact with/passively benefit from – this way, target priority becomes more complex than just “hit the healers.”

– Give each class an escape artist talent for LARGE GROUPS only. Make it flavored for the class, and have the effects be unique, but give us another form of escape from hard CC provided we are being hit by 3+ people (or maybe have been hit by 3 CCs in a row?). This would primarily effect battlegrounds and 5 person arenas, which is where we need the largest break. Potential examples could be something like a berserking rage for warriors, letting them temporarily throw off CC and increase movement speed for 5 seconds, or protection from above for priests, letting them ascend out of enemy grasp and giving a crit chance to the next spell. These spells would ONLY activate when the target is being hit by a certain number of people (or has maybe been through a certain number of CCs in a row).

I really do think that PvP can be made more complex and tactical if the focus shifts from CC-spam and into intelligent debuffing. Again, many of these skills are already in the game and many PvE encounters utilize the concept of hindering debuffs. Working them – and intelligent dispelling – into PvP could really enrich the gameplay, while also getting us away from this mess of too many CC options that we currently have.