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3 skills to improve your Arena performance
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.
The Art of War(craft): Keybinding your way to winning form
Zach only has one key bound on his keyboard: the I WIN button. Welcome to WoW Insider's weekly PvP column, The Art of War(craft), focusing on good, old-fashioned PvP. Last week, we discussed a few pointers on how to continue your winning ways on the battlefield. We talked about how your machine and connection will help give you a competitive edge, and we also briefly touched on how other playstyle improvements such as macros and keybindings will contribute to your game. Keybinding, quite simply, is using your keyboard keys (or mouse buttons) to activate your spells and abilities, as opposed to clicking on them with your cursor. If there is any bad habit at all that you need to break, it's clicking. It's an even graver gaming sin than keyboard turning. In fact, learning how to keybind can effectively prevent you from keyboard turning. By default, the game has set the W, A, S, D keys as forward, turn left, backward and turn right, respectively. Keyboard turning means you use the A and D keys (or any keyboard keys set to rotate) to change direction. You can easily remedy this by unbinding the A and D keys and binding them to the strafe buttons instead. Head on to the game menu by pressing the Esc key (instead of clicking on the computer icon on your bar -- isn't that much faster?) and going to the Key Bindings section. You'll see that World of Warcraft actually allows for two different sets of keys or instructions for movement and other game commands. In most cases, you'll only really need one set.
The Light and How to Swing It: How to keybind your holy paladin
Every Sunday, Chase Christian of The Light and How to Swing It invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. This week, we discuss the proper way to set up keybindings for your holy paladin. I was in a raid a few nights ago with a newer holy paladin healing alongside me. We were fighting Blood Queen Lana'thel, and a friendly shadow priest blessed me with a Fear Ward. As soon as the AoE fear phase came, I was immediately pressing my Cleanse macro to save the healers. I managed to dispel 3 of the fears in 4 seconds, including the other paladin. After the fight, he asked me how I was able to click on his unit frame and click Cleanse before the fear was over. He had no idea that you could cast a spell on someone without them targeted. I've talked about holy paladin addons before, and touched on the importance of using mouseovers to minimize your reaction times. It's true that addons can improve your performance and that they're important in squeezing every last drop of healing out of your paladin. However, there's something even more basic that needs to be in place first-- keybindings. No matter how fast a player is at clicking, it's simply impossible have the same reaction times as a player who is using their keyboard to activate their abilities. In addition, having your spells bound to the keyboard will make your addons and macros even more potent, as you'll be able to combine the two for the optimum healing setup.
WoW Rookie: Thanks for the memories
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide. There's nothing quite like your first time through Azeroth. Capture those memories by snapping screenshots (pictures of what's on your screen) in game as you explore, level, discover, plummet, laugh, triumph, fail ... All the moments that make life within the World of Warcraft so utterly bewitching. Screenshot basics Take a screenshot by hitting the Print Screen button on your PC or Command+Shift+3 on your Mac. You can set a more convenient key binding in game in your Game Menu; hit Key Bindings and scroll down to Miscellaneous Functions. Screenshots get stored in the World of Warcraft folder on your computer. Look for the folder called Screenshots. Screenshots used to be saved as big, unwieldy TGAs, but now you'll find them in convenient .jpg format.
Advanced screenshotting techniques and tips
This discussion over on WoW Ladies has me thinking that we probably need to do a post on something I don't think we've ever covered before: screenshotting. Sure, they're everywhere -- almost everybody sees tons of screenshots every single day, and occasionally, you can even win some real-life loot for taking one. But I don't know that we've ever actually covered the mechanics of how to take one. So let's do that now. First and foremost, taking a screenshot is usually bound to your "Print Screen" key -- whenever you're playing the game, just hit that key on your keyboard, and a screenshot (in JPG format -- it used to be saved in TGA, but Blizzard changed that a while ago) will show up in the /Screenshots folder inside the World of Warcraft installation on your hard drive. Of course, on a Mac keyboard, there is no Print Screen button, so I have mine bound to the "Home" button instead -- you can rebind it to whatever you want in the options menu. And that's just the basics -- it gets more complicated from there.
