Filed under: Blood Sport (Arena PvP)

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who focuses on making with the stabby and turning people into frogs.

Focus in PvP can have a few meanings. If you're tired, or a bit stressed out, it's something you can lose. Trust me on that! Your focus can also be the target you pick to burst down or of course your main objective -- and lastly and principally for this column, focus is a secondary target.

A secondary target? Didn't you just say it was the target you pick to burst down? Well, I may be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here, so bear with me. We all know how to select a target, I assume, but you can also have another target set in addition to your main target. Depending on your UI setup, this will appear in various places on your screen. Some UIs and addons are more customizable than others with regard to a focus target, and for all the screenshots in this post, I use a tailor-made edit of TukUI.

So a focus target is another target? Yup. Why would you need another target? Well, we'll get to that! Patience, young padawan. One basic use for focus includes doing Battlegrounds with friends. As long as you have the map set up to allow it, your map displays your focus target with a thick ring highlighting their position. If you head into a Battleground with a buddy, you might want to set them as a focus so you can see where they are and help them out!

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who has spent the past two weeks adding additional addons.

A while back in January, I wrote a guide to PvP addons and UI settings. This week's column will talk about a bunch of addons that aren't necessarily ones I'd recommend, so please, please head on over to the old column rather than just downloading everything on this page!

Don't want to read a whole other column? Well, all right, then. I'll sum it up really fast for you here, and then we'll get into the fun bit! What's the fun bit? Well, a bunch of people last week suggested new addons for me to try or for others to use, and a few have suggested others to me more recently -- so here's where I try them! How is that fun? Oh, shush. Trying new things is great! As long as they're legal.

At the time of writing the first piece, before starting my research for this one, my default addon set for Battlegrounds was:

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs.

One thing I'm asked fairly regularly is the following: What can I do to improve in Arena? My usual response is a slew of questions. First, how much resilience do you have? I've spoken about this in past articles, so I won't harp on about it here. The second question is simply do you practice? Again, as I've mentioned, practice makes perfect. That is really the most important thing you can do to make yourself a better player in the Arena, so take every opportunity. Even on my healers, I generally fly around on my non-PvP realm with PvP switched on. I'm not going to be able to kill anyone of my own level, but I might get some practice surviving!

But this week I'm looking to be a little more specific for you, and we're going to talk about some skills or gameplay styles or whatever you'd prefer to call them. If you can incorporate them into your gameplay, chances are you'll improve in Arena. Obviously, in order to incorporate them, what are you going to need to do? Practice, of course!

So, what first? Let's talk movement. Movement in PvP is much more subjective and situational than in PvE. It's not just a case of getting out of bad; positioning and movement can win and lose battles. If you're being chopped up by a paladin with a big sword, you want to be moving away; if you're being zapped by casters, you want to do your best to be using line of sight to your advantage.

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs.

Unless you've been living in the little cave on Darkmoon Island for the past few months (and frankly, if you have, well done -- that must be one awesome time machine!), you'll have heard about the impending expansion. I previously posted a short plea for WoW Insider readers to head over to Blizzard MVP Eldacar's thread asking for PvP feedback over on the official forums, and it got me thinking about what I would love to see from PvP in Mists of Pandaria.

Now, I'm excited about the upcoming changes that Blizzard is talking about; you've no doubt seen the information over on Battle.net. Resilience as a baseline stat sounds pretty great to me and will make PvP at lower-level brackets a bit more fun, but I'm curious to see how Blizzard's going to scale it within those brackets. If it scales with level, then a level 64 is going to have an even easier time beating up a level 60 and basically being a one-toon killing machine. And this won't serve to help PvP at lower levels at all, although it will make entry into max-level PvP a lot easier.

And the new Battlegrounds look interesting, the proposed Valley of Power BG especially, because the premise is pretty simple. I don't think overcomplicated Battlegrounds that require complex player-environment interaction are the most fun. I prefer simple maps that place the emphasis on, you know, killing the opposite faction. There's a term for that, I'm sure ... Oh, yeah. PvP!

But I'm thinking big, ladies and gentlemen, really big -- Azerothian-moon-on-a-stick big. Now, a brief disclaimer: This is fantasy from the deranged mind of an Englishwoman and certainly not a scoop of exciting early news. I'm just throwing this out there!

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who spends most of her time in Azeroth as a restoration shaman turning people into frogs.

While derided by some purists, addons are a very useful part of your gameplay. In my opinion, they're far from being something that only people who don't know how to play have to use. Addons can help you improve. It should be noted that at top-level Arena tournaments, teams have to play without addons, so if that is your eventual aim, bear that in mind and try to use them to learn rather than becoming dependent on them. I'm not the most technical of ladies, so what you won't find here is anything that needs coding skill or an intimate knowledge of .lua to edit. And, while basic UI modifications are often pretty straightforward, they can still help you enormously.

So for the PvPer, what would I recommend? First things first -- let's get involved in that interface screen. Go into the Interface menu by pressing Escape, click on Combat, and put a tick in that Class Colors in Nameplates box. Why? Well now, instead of uniform red nameplates hovering over your enemies' heads, you have class-colored ones. Remember how I was telling you about reacting to situations? Well, if you don't know who's trying to kill you, how can you react? If you don't have enemy nameplates at all, head to Names and fix that right now! And get your hands out of your pockets!