Hi All,
I’m Sollaira, a disc priest who’s not that good but got a lot better this season.
Tickix did a disc priest guide recently that was amazing and generally covered talents/gear/playstyle, and in this post I’ll be going over ui/addons/keybinds which is important as well, and hopefully useful for most specs.
If you have any questions about anything in this guide, or disc playstyle in general, happy to discuss/elaborate. Comp-wise I can speak to jungle/rmp/mage-lock-disc/arcane-ww-disc.
Brief end of ssn shoutout to q partners:
Numbing/Innerverse y’all as chill as they come, we didn’t get R1 but this last week we held our own vs. teams that used to steamroll us. Couldn’t be more proud. Disc/WW/Arcane looks broken into SL.
Gratz to Tonald/Ezgame on R1, Playing mage/lock/disc was fun, glad you finally found a pally.
Baziz, Shinobi, Injured/Louix, Novarra, Biss, Figure, y’all insane.
@Klarheit, thanks for teaching me to play good. @Everyone who offered moral support after seeing clips of him raging, thanks for keeping me sane, especially Dilly who legit got on his alt mage to q until 2am out of sympathy.
Why am I writing this:
I got a lot better this season at the game. Before I’d hit 2.4 and timed 15’s, now I got to 3.2 and timed 25’s. Much of that progression was due to keybinds/ui/addon optimizations which isn’t often talked about, and so I thought I could be helpful on this even though I’m not a top tier player.
- Keybinds
It’s important to be able to press your abilities in all relevant combinations, both while standing still and moving.
Everyone knows the basics, shorter cds closer to your baseline hand position, longer cds farther out, however I still see people using wasd to move/turn and q/e to strafe.
I have exactly 2 movement keybinds: a/s to strafe left/right. And I use my mouse right click to turn the camera, and hold down left click to move forward.
Then, I use q/w for casting abilities because I know I’ll never be pressing a/s while using them (for disc that’s smite and shadow mend) [use verticlaly higher keys for your other casting abilities if you have them], and all of my instants/channels are handled by my index finger and are mapped to keys to the right.
This allows me to execute literally every possible movement/ability use combination without having any directionality bias (i.e. only being able to cast ability A while strafing left, but it being awkard to do it while strafing right).
- Targeting
Some people have a lot of keybinds, and 3 macros per spell (arena or party 1-2-3).
I’ve found it to be a lot more efficient to have one keybind per spell, and then use a mouse with at least six buttons for target party-1-2-3 and arena-1-2-3.
This is especially useful for disc priests, being the spec that switches targets the most in arena.
- Addons/UI
A lot of top notch players have really clean ui’s, because they know what’s going on and have gotten a lot of reps into their playstyle. They might also have many alts, so simply don’t have the time to customize it.
For people new to the arena who have the time, I very much recommend figuring out exactly what information you need to inform your play, and customizing addons to notify you of only that.
3.1 General UI setup:
First, reduce the size of your screen until it’s wide enough that you can look at both the left and right sides without moving your eyes too much or at all.
After you do this, you’ll be able to process everything at once, but you won’t be able to use your peripheral vision to notice people moving in the arena as well as you could, so try making the window a little (20% works for me) wider.
Then, move your ui elements to the very edges, and make them fairly large, so you can see what’s going on in the match in the middle of the screen without getting tunneled on your addons/keybinds.
Most people put their ui elements 20% of the way towards the center from the left or right edges, and play with a wider screen than they can process at once.
3.2. Addons:
I will go over:
- Gladiatorlossa
- Tell Me When
- SArena
- GladiusEx
- OmniCD
- Omnibar
- Diminish DR Tracker
- LoseControl
- VuhDo
Your audio input is generally underused in the game. You can only look at one thing at a time, but you can hear multiple and audio gets registered much quicker by your brain.
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Gladiatorlossa calls out any cc/offensives your enemy team uses. Most people say this addon is a crutch, and is distracting. This is true if you just cast shadow word: death every time you hear ‘Polymorph’. Don’t do that. You can filter it down to only announce the spells you want to hear, and reduce the volume. For example, it calls out when a paladin casts divine favor so I can purge it if I want to, and gives me an instant notification of a warlock casts dark soul. That’s the best crutch there is. I would start with the default settings except turn off any spammable CC (fear, polymorph) so you end up getting 3-10 notifications per minute.
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TellMeWhen is a small ‘make-your-own weakauras’ addon that is highly customizeable. For any ability you have on a <15 sec cd that you want to know exactly when it’s up, it can play a beep of a different frequency and light up the edges of the icon so you both get a peripheral vision notification and a non-distracting sound notification that can get processed by your subconscious.
It can also notify you whenever someone casts an ability or a debuff is applied, which is very useful for broken pve trinkets. For example, I have a tell me when module that plays one sound whenever a drest or claw is used, and a different sound if a claw or maledict debuff is applied to me.
The biggest niche value I’ve gotten out of it is a sound based notification when a hunter casts freezing trap so I can death it instantly, as long as I have five yards or more from him so the travel time is at least .1 seconds. -
SArena/Gladius is for enemy ui. I prefer SArena as it’s more customizeable as far as seeing enemy cast bars goes.
GladiusEx is an addon that is based on Gladius that has two things I really, really like. First, it shows all of enemy ability cooldowns. Second, it shows the class icon of who the enemy is targeting. As a healer I find the latter extremely useful, because when both dps suddenly switch targets it helps predict who they’re switching to even if no dmg/abilities have been used yet.
I disable everything in GladiusEx except the enemy cd/target modules, and put it next to my SArena. -
OmniCD tracks your party members cd’s, and unlike Arena Team Tracker can track cooldowns changing due to frost dk/ineffable truth/etc.
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Omnibar is for tracking enemy CD’s, similar to GladiusEx’s module. I use it for tracking enemy kicks, and look at GladiusEx for everything else.
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LoseControl tell you when you’re CC’d.
Diminish DR Tracker tells you how long until you can get CC’d again off diminishing returns. This is super, super useful especially vs teams like mage/lock. Good players use focus macros so you can’t tell who they’re casting fear/poly on. Tracking your teammate’s remaining time on DR allows you to narrow down the options by elimination if multiple people are in line of sight of the caster. Also good for keeping track of Rogue’s kidney goes. -
VuhDo is a maximally customizeable raid frame. There’s a lot of debuffs/buffs to keep track of, and you can setup your frames to literally only show the specific debuffs you want to see, and play different sounds for each of them, which I’ve done for every ability I care about in the game. So instead of seeing a row of 10 dots and buffs, I at most see 1 or 2 debuffs per player at a time. I like it a lot, but it takes up a lot of time to setup.
Finally, if you really want to get better, record your games (OBS Studio is great) and review them. Every few seconds, ask yourself what is going on in the match, remember if you were aware of it and if so why not, and figure out if you could have reacted better. At the end, regardless of who wins, go through what cooldowns were not available and then analyze whether or not they were used correctly at the time.
That’s it for me, feel free to ask any questions.
Thanks to everyone in the pvp community for having such a generous and constructive attitude.
Thanks to blizz for making such a fun game, am hyped for SL.