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Focus and Macros: The key skills you need for 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!
Totem Talk: How to use macros to maximize your enhancement utility
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. On Saturdays, Josh Myers tackles the hard questions about enhancement. Can we tank? Can we DPS with a two-hander? How does one shoot web? The answer to the first two is "no," and I have no idea about the third. When I first started playing during The Burning Crusade, I had no idea what a macro was. I'd love to pretend that this was because World of Warcraft was simpler back then and that a good player could get away with never using a macro. Unfortunately, that isn't the case; I just wasn't a very good player in my shaman's youth. The truth is that macros are something that any serious raider or PvPer should never be without. They fulfill a variety of roles, from cast sequence shock macros saving you some bar space to using your Feral Spirits' Bash ability on a focused healer to interrupt their Tranquility cast. In a raiding game where the ability to interrupt a target you're not DPSing is a huge asset, learning to manage your abilities through macros is a huge benefit for you and for your raid group (as well as for your arena team).
WoW Rookie: Keep your key targets in focus
New around here? We've got your back! See all our collected tips, tricks and how-to's for new players in the WoW Rookie Guide. Better keep an eye on that guy: the furbolg you're escorting through the crowd, the off tank you're in charge of healing, the add you're supposed to keep locked down ... The problem is, you also need to click over here to -- argh, lost him in the crush! Now you'll have to tab ba -- whoops, passed him again! OK, start stabbing with the mouse ... If this sounds anything like the chaotic chatter in your brain during a typical encounter, you need more than mere help; you need a focus target. A focus target is a secondary target that helps you keep track of an additional unit other than your current target. Essentially, it's a second target that you can set and unset at will. Focus targets are a great way of keeping track of an escort mob you need to locate in a crowd, an NPC you need to crowd control, a key healing assignment ... Once you set a focus target, it's right there on your screen. You can freely change your main target and turn your attention elsewhere while still being able to monitor your focus target's health, mana and casting bars. You can also create macros that let you apply spells and abilities to your focus target with a single press of a button.
New focus frame, threatmeter, quest sharing in the PTR UI
The PTR for 3.0.2 went up over the weekend, and there were a few fun UI tweaks in the patch notes worth mentioning again here -- stuff that far down in those long, long notes usually gets overlooked in favor of all the class changes above it, so let's throw the spotlight on what the new UI will offer.First of all, as previously mentioned, both the new calendar and pets systems are in the game, along with that spiffy new achievements system. But there's more new stuff -- while focus is already usable on the live realms, Blizzard is implementing "a focus frame key" -- like a shift key that will let you target your focus target just for a spell's cast instead of switching back and forth all the time. And there is now an "aggro warning" in the game -- the first traces of Blizzard's official threatmeter we've known was coming for a while.Sharing quests is easier on the PTR -- you can now share quests with party members at any distance, and even in raids, just by linking the quest into party chat. And one of the biggest small changes in the game will help out raid leaders and healers wanting to avoid the "PvPlague": players will get a timer showing when their PvP flag is set to drop. Small UI changes like this often go unnoticed in the patch notes in favor of the much more discussed class nerfs and buffs, but they go a long way towards making the game a lot more fun to play.
Macro Anatomy: Polymorphing with the Focus Target
Using your focus target has been the topic of much discussion in the past few days here at WoW Insider. Mike mentioned his interest in using macros to utilize the focus functionality built into the default UI. Tekkub's Control Freak was profiled, which basically automates the process of using crowd control abilities through the use of macros.WoW Insider reader Aaron provided a very good macro for those of you wanting to make use of your focus target to maintain Polymorph on a focus target.Here's the macro, ready to be copied and pasted into your macro interface:#show Polymorph/clearfocus [modifier:shift]/focus [target=focus,noexists]; [target=focus,dead]/clearfocus [target=focus,help]/stopcasting/cast [target=focus,exists,harm] Polymorph; PolymorphCome on back after the break for an explanation of what this macro does.
