Hey guys, Librarian Husky here. Today, It’s Shadowland season three. If your interface doesn’t look like the command center of a spaceship, then you are doing something wrong. Luckily for you, skullcap has you covered, and today we will be going over all the essential add-ons you need for the arena.
The essentials
Some of you could use a crash course. There are five add-ons that everyone should be using, no matter what. I don’t care if you are a challenger or rank one. These are the essentials:
- Gladius / sArena OmniBar.
- OmniCD.
- WeakAuras.
- BigDebuffs.
This has been around for over a decade, and that’s for a good reason. The ability to track enemy hp mana and trinkets is really powerful. Especially now, since players have access to the new echoing resolve PVP medallion, this dramatically changes how matchups are played, but more on that later.
Aside from this, tracking CDs is essential in Shadowlands and not just for comps like RPM. Not every composition in the game pretty much plays like a setup-based comp. You need to be tracking enemy CD stuns to know when your setups are ready. Blowing your control and damaging a target on the dr can completely ruin the kill.
Omnibar
Next up, Omnibar once again. This has been around for a while, and if you haven’t been using it. Okay, maybe that was a bit harsh. Omnibar is essential because cooldowns are central to how every arena game is played. It doesn’t matter if you play healer or DPS. Knowing what CDs the enemy team has and whether or not interrupts are available is massively important. We highly recommend utilizing the ability to make multiple bars.
Have one or two dedicated to cooldowns only, with another dedicated to interrupts. Be sure you’re going through each class individually, filtering out minor cooldowns to only track the biggest and most important CDs on the enemy team. Otherwise, you will wind up like Rocky in our Road to Glad series. Who had an Omnibar disaster. that we had to fix up immediately. Helping him out on his push to gladiator.
Once you have your Omnibar setup, we highly recommend getting an Omni cd. This add-on tracks party cooldowns, which is important for a normally organized arena but also for any form of solo queue. Without communication, keeping track of your team’s cooldowns is nearly impossible. Like before, ensure you’re filtering CDs on a class-by-class basis. You don’t need to track every ability your teammates have. Just important things like major defensive and offensive cooldowns.
List of essential add-ons for 9.2
Next up on our list of essential add-ons for 9.2 we have weak auras. Love it or hate it, you need to be playing with this add-on, no questions asked. It’s like the Steroids of WoW arena. If everyone is using it, then it’s technically not cheating. You might want to add a weak aura to track the cosmic gladiator’s resonator this season. And speaking of important 9.2 updates, be sure to get the newest version of big debuffs. This add-on will display important buffs and debuffs on different unit frames across your UI. The echoing resolve trinket is so game-changing.
Add-on
This add-on makes it way easier to see when enemy players have the buff helping you avoid situations where you might accidentally stun into an immunity. And with holy priests being so popular in season 3. it will do the same for holy ward, letting you know when you will have to play around with the buff, but outside of this meta defining abilities in 9.2, big debuffs are still immensely important for all players who want to take arena seriously. as a healer it can let when your partners are stuck in important ccs for quick dispels.
DPS
The same applies to DPS. Big debuffs make it much easier to see when your healer is stuck in cc, which makes it essential for solo queue environments where communication is minimal or non-existent. We will cover some other potentially game-breaking add-ons in just a bit. But just as a recap, make sure you have the latest versions of Gladius Omnibar’s weak cd auras and big debuffs. And be sure to modify them by revisiting some of our previous add-on guides.
Other important arena add-ons
So you have the essentials. What more do you need in season 3. the first is derangement shield meters. They need to rename that immediately. In any case, this add-on might be worth checking out if you have any absorption effect on your team, like life cocoon or Blazing Barrier, but also if you have the new Aegis trinket equipped. It will display a texture over you or your party’s health bars, indicating how much absorption they currently have. This can be pretty useful as a healer since. It will display when your teammates are actually in danger, irrespective of their current hp.
Diminish
Another important add-on to check out is Diminish. Most of the time, you are simply paying attention to enemy CCDs. If you want to do your setup, wait and see when diminishing returns have fully faded on the enemy team, and then do your 3-2-1 setup. What diminished allows you to do is track the CCDs that are currently affecting your own character. This means you can see when you or your team is vulnerable to the 321 cc setup of your opponents.
Knowing this information can allow you to perform some skilled preemptive plays like pre-using an important defensive cooldown before stun land or by pre-kiting to avoid the setup entirely. Since RMP doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, this add-on is just another technology to help you adapt to the Shadowlands 321 meta. Speaking of add-ons to make setups more manageable. You might want to check out the buff overlay. Just like some of the other add-ons on this list, the buff overlay is perfect for solo play.
Most important buffs
It will display some of the most important buffs on your party members directly in the center of their frame. What this means is that you will be able to make more informed decisions by knowing when your teammates are truly in danger. If they have a massive defensive buff on them like a bubble or Ice Block, you might not need to peel, or instead, it might make you look for mass to spell and Shattering throw to Disrupt. In any case, this is a useful add-on for any solo queue enthusiast this season. Last up. We have Jack’s party cast bars. Which displays your party members cast bars next to their unit frames.
This should be self-explanatory, but before you say I don’t really need that, think about how much information that can actually tell you. Want to see if your partner is going for an important cc cast or big heal? Just look at their cast frames. Once again, this is simply perfect for any solo queue experience. Less communication requires more visual information.
Quality of life add-ons
Let’s wrap things up by going over some add-ons that make your life easier. These won’t make you immediately great at PvP, but they can help fix some issues. Over the past few expansions, Blizzard has removed a lot of iconic and important things from the game. Intercept Deep Freeze and even the entire city of Darnassus, but one thing that makes absolutely no sense is the removal of several important interface options. That’s the exact problem that advanced interface options try to solve.
WoW’s files
Many settings that were removed from modification are still in Wows files, but they need to be modified through scripts or in-text documents. Instead of having to manually type in scripts like you’re using 1990s sims hacks. You can search through hidden game variables and modify them directly in the add-on. One of the most important settings to change is custom lag tolerance, especially if you play on higher latency.
An add-on you might want to consider is called disabled loss of control. This helps solve one huge interface issue that you personally might have experienced without knowing. Every time you get put in the CC effect, your entire action bar will be on cooldown. When you are CC’d, you generally can’t use any of your abilities, but unfortunately, this makes some cooldowns harder to track. If you take a CC right as a key, the ability is about to come off cooldown.
Trinket info
You might have been tricked into thinking that it will be available the moment you press your trinket. This add-on simply removes the appearance of every ability being on cd when you are stuck in crowd control. Only shows the cooldown timers over single abilities that are actually on cooldown. Kind of confusing, we know, but this should cause you to make better decisions in the arena. Last up. We have details. Once again, this add-on is pretty complicated on its surface, and we might need to make a full-length guide showing you how to use it. Most of the time, it’s used for copying purposes.
Like making your team feel better after dying to a 90k demon bolt, but its utility is way more complex. If you are new to a class, details can help you diagnose key mistakes in your DPS or healing rotation. Did you lose a mirror match to someone who did way more healing or damage than you? Details can help you figure out why. You can use it to compare your global usage to other players. See if they used an ability more or less than you did.
Own rotation
So you can begin to correct your own rotation. This even works with interrupts. Want to know why you lost to see if you or your partners are doing a good job interrupting important casts? Outside of that, it can be used to gauge whether or not an ability or talent is actually impactful in your rotation.
By looking at your full damage Breakdown, you can see how much each spell or talent is actually contributing to your overall throughput. Additionally, you can track buff uptime, even for trinkets, to give you a full breakdown of how often you have important ability procs. Thank you for checking my short but an informative guide. Please don’t hesitate to visit our WoW Retail Guides page. My name is Librarian Husky; cya on the next page.