This section will be devoted to random rambling on User Interface configuration and occasionally general PvP tips. I may have audio narrations, or just simply text. I may even convert text sections into audio narrations. For now, comments are welcome here.

• Macro Abuse
• My Approach to PvP
• Why you should at least own a copy of counter-strike
• Rebinding Your Windows Keyboard - outside the game
• Cliche, but watching PvP videos actually does help

Macro Abuse

I see a lot of people looking to use macros to save keybind space. However, there is a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this. In some instances, it can be very useful to use a macro to save a keybind - some macros are very versatile and can work all the time. For instance, as a rogue a

/cast [stealth] Ambush; Backstab

macro is awesome for saving a button, because it will always cast Ambush from stealth, and default to Backstab if you're not in stealth. This practice becomes less relevant when using a macro with a modifier key simply to use a different ability. Why use

/cast [mod:shift] Icelance; Frostbolt

and bind it to "5" when you could simply bind Frostbolt to "5" and Icelance to "shift+5"? There is less room for messing up, and you can't "accidentally" make the macro stop working by binding something else to shift+5 without obviously realizing it. Worse still is the practice of using macro "hack" fixes to do things you can't do thoroughly with macros. A common case of this is trying to use a macro to get around a cooldown by having something to the extent of

/castsequence Iceblock, Cold Snap, Iceblock

It's not reliable. My general opinion is that if a macro will not work every time you need it in exactly the way you want it to, you shouldn't be using that macro, or you shouldn't be using a macro there to condense keybinding space. Simply tough it up, have two separate binds, and maybe grease the wheels with an alert or trigger addon (MSBT, Power Auras, Parrot, etc) to help you know which bind to use in which situation.

My Approach to PvP

General tips? General tips are easy, but the real question is how
helpful they will be.

So here goes. First, I don't know everything - I made a lot of mistakes all the time. That's the first point. You will always make mistakes. One of the best thoughts on PvP - really competitive play in all forms, is

"PVP is a matter of overcoming your own weaknesses while exploiting the weaknesses of others. If you suck, it's because you can't comprehend the previous sentence." - Pulborn

This brings me to my biggest point, the first part of that first sentence in the quote - overcoming your weaknesses. Finding your mistakes.

You really should be going into any PvP situation (BGs, Arenas, getting pounded by Greenranger in the world on Detheroc (ouch >.<)) with the intention of finding out what you're doing wrong. That doesn't mean you should put too much focus on your faults during the game, but you HAVE to keep it in the back of your mind. If you finish lose a game and you don't know why, you've gained nothing. If you lose a game and end up blaming the other team's "OPness," you've gained nothing. Even if you WIN a game and don't know what you could have improved, you've gained nothing. So always try to find out what things you're doing wrong during PvP. They could be huge, general problems - needlessly burning cooldowns, not properly using LoS, failing to communicate properly with your teammate, etc. Once you start fixing those, you'll have to look for the smaller things - not laying down polymorph DRs correctly, not being explosive enough, not maximizing burst DPS (icy veins popped with a trinket?).

So then the question really becomes how do you find mistakes, and how do you go about fixing them? Fixing them tends to be the easy part. Once you find something that's wrong and you can figure out what a better course of action would be (either by yourself or asking someone), it's relatively easy to fix it. Finding problems becomes the more difficult task.

• The first way is to just wake up and pay attention while you're playing.
• The second, and probably more important, is to ask your teammates what you could have done better after each game. Other people tend to be better critics of your flaws. Your own memories might get clouded, or you might overlook problems that have become habit.
• One way I found to work really well is to record your own gameplay and play it back. I bought a full version of FRAPS for the specific purpose of recording my own gameplay to fix mistakes. I've found countless of errors by watching my own actions during Arena.
• If you have an idea of what you might be doing wrong in a tactics sense (pursuing things around LoS, target switching, burning down druids, etc), you would be well advised to ask someone in detail on specific issues. For instance, if your CCs don't seem to be sticking well enough in 3v3 to keep alive vrs a dual healer / warrior team, it might be comp-specific. You might have to just burn a lot of useless peels, or do a better job of saving CCs.

Next, you need to try to work this mindset of fixing mistakes into your teammates as well. You cannot do well in Arenas with out a good partner. That doesn't necessarily mean you should drop your current partner, but if your teammates are refusing to learn, or try to fix things they're doing wrong, there's little chance you can improve. That doesn't mean you should become a know-it-all asshole and constantly nag your teammates, but you should show genuine concern when they do things seriously wrong. If they acknowledge it, that's good. If they don't and keep doing the same thing wrong, then you should start to show some real frustration. Actually, long story short, that's why I quit the game - no practical room for improvement. Eventually you'll reach a limit where the amount of time & effort you'd need to devote to getting better outweights any personal or team benefit.

And I'll leave you with a good read on Arena theory.
http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/The-TR/Under-Pressure-Arena-Theory

Why you should at least own a copy of Counter-Strike

Not necessarily counter-strike, but any FPS. Why? Because WoW Arena players end up needing reflexes, whether they like it or not. Playing an FPS will just be more hours of getting used to moving an avatar around with WASD controls and killing things. Some of the same basic strategies of PvP apply - Engage your enemy when he's not expecting it, preferrably from behind, Don't engage a huge group of guys when you can't win, Don't do the same thing over and over again if your opponent is expecting it. I suck at FPS (really, really, really bad), but it's still reasonably helpful for Arena play.

Also, if you're a clicker and need to figure out how to stop keyboard turning, getting mauled to death in an FPS for a few hours will set you right as rain... with some more bullet holes.

Rebinding Your Windows Keyboard - outside the game

You may find yourself never using Capslock (No, CAPSLOCK is not cruise control for cool) or the Windows key (don't you hate it when you accidentally hit that and the start menu pops up?). If you NEVER use these keys (really, you shouldn't be, they're horrible keys), you can actually re-map these keys. For instance, you could make CAPSLOCK be another ALT key, and WINDOWS be another SHIFT key.

This brings up the relevant point of: CAPSLOCK is positionally much better than ALT. So why not rebind it? In Linux & Mac, it's much easier (I'm not going to go into it, you can google it pretty easily though). On a Windows keyboard, it involves editing the registry. This may or may not be a daunting task for you - please DO NOT edit your registry without backing up your system, unless you know what you're doing. Messing with your registry can SERIOUSLY fuck up your computer - not to mention the registry change we'll be doing here could accidentally re-map a different key if you so much as enter in one faulty bit.

If you want, you can google for a program to do this for you (google something like "remap windows key"), but I prefer to do it straight through the registry. If you feel like you need to know how to do it through the registry, feel free to comment here and I can expand, otherwise simply check out a program like Sharp Keys to remap your keyboard.

Cliche, but watching PvP videos actually does help

My biggest grief with the World of Warcraft PvP system: it's not the fact that there's huge RNG problems, class imbalance (and as a mage in TBC, it did kinda suck), or a sense of being dwarfed by the overwhelming PvE influence in WoW. My biggest problem with WoW's arenas is there is no way to spectate games. If you look at any FPS e-sport, you can spectate games. If you look around hard enough, you can spectate some decently top end matches, or at the very least find people who are playing at a level higher than yours. Without a way to spectate Arena games in WoW, players lack the ability to see regular play by top end players live, to see exactly what they do. I've resigned myself to the fact that spectating will never happen - it's actually one of the top three reasons I no longer play WoW (other two being TIME and not getting any better).

Still though, the next best thing is to watch PvP videos. Some are good, some are bad, but almost all of them will show you at least something useful. The best ones to watch are videos with minimal editing AND voice communication, like Celex's Duelists Going for Glad video in mid S3. If you can see all the little tricks that top end players do AND hear what they're saying to each other while they're doing it, you've captured 90% of the essence of top end PvP in a video. Now obviously, it won't make you a stellar player just by watching PvP videos, but if you can find a few good ones, you really can learn a lot of stuff.