Hi all, sorry about the long delay between posts but RL and Cata got the better of me. So we’re into it. In fact were already at the first major patch in 4.0.6 which will bring some major changes to Hunters in general. I won’t go over those just yet as I haven’t even seen them live. One thing that I’m really enjoying is having to CC and kite again. Crowd Control on trash mobs is great. Kiting bosses for that last few percent when everyone else is down give a great deal of satisfaction when you see it drop.

There are a couple of things that drive me nuts though:

1. CC Order

OK trap launcher can be painful but gives us so much more flexibility for CC. One thing it doesn’t do well is allow you to CC mobs on the move. Especially if the pull was initiated by a Mage sheeping. You need to ensure that the correct CC order is followed and that is:

Sap > Trap > then the rest

The rogue can CC his mob and not pull. We essentially need a stationary target if Trap Launcher is going to work otherwise it’ll involve pulling a mob off the tank and waiting till your Trap comes off cooldown or using other types of CC (sting). For Mages, DK’s, Locks, Priests etc etc, their CC will pull the mob to them but they can also CC a mob while it’s moving. Just make life a little easier for everyone and let the rogue sap then let the hunter trap then do your CC.

2. FIRE STILL HOT!

You wouldn’t believe it but blizzard still like to have boss mechanics where they have bad stuff on the ground. GET OUT OF IT. If something comes shooting down from the sky, exploding up from the ground, whirling around, get out of the way, move, don’t stand where you are. If you stay there you deserve to die.

3. Mob Switching

If during a boss fight, adds spawn in either the form of a seed pod or something that will attack you straight away, switch tio that target and get rid of it ASAP. Don’t assume that everyone else will take care of it. The quicker it goes down the sooner you can get back on the boss.

That’s it till next time.

Happy Huntering

Furn

Ok people, the picture above is for those fellow hunters out there that are whinging, bleating, complaining, threatening to quit the game cause “blizzard fucked my class”. Booo Hooo I’m not topping the meters and I don’t know what to do.

You have got to be kidding. Go back to BC or even Vanilla. I heard the same shit back then as I am now. Get off your fucking high horse and work with it and get the best out of it. Do some theory crafting if you can remember what that is.

Seriously we see the same shit patch after patch after patch. DEAL WITH IT!!!

F

Ok ok I’ll go to the trainer and get this stuff sorted first….then I’ll sort my spec out ….. then my pet…..then this mastery stuff……oh and my glyphs………and my UI…….patch day really really really sucks.

So I decided to go Surv/BM cause I’ve been Surv for three years and I was BM before that (with a small MM stint in between).  I trained up and specced up like this:

Pretty basic really…read the talent…choose the talent.  After doing this I struggled through all the spell books and chose my shots again and keybound them.  Pretty much we have :

Kill Shot

Black Arrow

Explosive Shot

Seroent Sting

Steady Shot

Arcane Shot.

The new focus system (at level 80) requries that you fire Steady Shots to regain focus so essentially we have a shot rotation/priority that looks something like this:

SrS – BA – ES – SS – SS – KC – SS – ES

This is pretty basic and depends on CD’s etc but just depends if you get LnL procs and wether you get any other Focus back.  So it may not be spot on.  I was doing about 7.5k on the 83 Target Dummy using it but i did see myself focus starved sometimes depending when I used KC so I’ll have to work on that part.  It’s not a matter of just macroing it to every shot anymore.

Glyphs.  There are now three types of Glyphs:

Prime

Major

Minor

once you’ve learnt a Glyph you’ll never have to learn it again (just buy it once) then you just need to use powder purchased from the Inscription supplier to change your glyphs.  I chose the following (cause really there isn’t much choice if you schose a particular specd and want to do damage)

Primes : Explosive Shot, Kill Shot, Steady Shot (still checking SrS)

Major: Disengage, Detterrance, and whatever takes your fancy

Minor: Pack, Mend, Feign

The other major change is Mastery.  Depending on your spec it improves the damage of your main shot.  Eg for Surv it increases elemental damage (fire, shadow and nature) so gives a bonus to your ES, BA and SrS.  I was was over hit after the patch so changes all hit gear to Mastery.  Then I changed Haste to Mastery as well.  I’m still at 1.88 haste rating which I think is pretty good. Sitting at over 17% mastery at teh moment and you can tell the differnece in damage fromt eh upgrades.

Next stage is to do BM but that’s for another post.

F

Well I stepped into ICC for the first time since March to help out our 25man team. And boy was I rusty on the first fight. Lady Deathwhisper. I’ve never done her on HM before. Although the fight is still pretty easy you need to concentrate more on the ghosts. Of course I died to them thinking I was far enough away. Survived HM LOLSHIP and HM Suarfang easy enough doing reasonable DPS as Surv with old gear.

Also survived HM Rotface and Festergut. Died during HM Council but survived HM Blood Queen. Came back the next day and had wipe fests on HM Dreamwalker. Missing a few key personnel and I had to take the job of a melee on the supressors as well as MDing the Aboms and worms.

What I saw though was a complete lack of interest from people being there. Low DPS (12k at top 6k at bottom (and no it wasn’t me but one of the regular raiders)). Stupid mistakes. We have been in there for nearly a year now and I think people are just getting burnt out.

I’ts sad to see. The 25 man raid team is lead by a great group of guys who always give 110% and they are let down by others who are just going through the motions wondering when raid time is over.  And hoping if we actually manage to down this boss what loot can I get.

I think alot of guilds are going through the same issues at the moment. How the hell do you keep people motivated until the expansion comes out especially when you still have HM LK to go?

Unfortunately I don’t think theres a good answer.

F

Well unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks, you’d know that there is going to be a major overhaul of the talent trees.  Talents removed (mainly the passive ones) and the number of points we can allocate has been reduced to 41.  You get locked into a tree for the first 31 points etc etc etc.

If you want to have a look at what the new talents look like head on over to WoWTal and have a play with the new trees.

First thoughts……….so many talents so few points.  The Survival tree feels bloated full of PvE talents that you would want to get.  I had trouble getting under the 36 talent points in that tree.  Time will tell I guess, it is still early days and many many things will still change.

Furn

Well this is absolutely amazing. Not only becuase of the acheivement but also becuase a RL gave a BM hunter a shot at doing it.

Sindragosa solo pet tanked

Head on over to Warcraft Hunters Union to the write up by Arthemystia. An awesome acheivement. Gratz and well done.

F

I have retired from raiding. Not because I don’t like it anymore but because I want to spend more time with my family. One thing that was constantly brought up during raids was to be situationaly aware on what was happening around you. Avoid this, don’t stand in that, target this mob, kite that one. To that end I have to say that raiding is learnt over a long period of time. Experiencing everything that you should and shouldn’t do.

With the new LFG system and the way that levelling is currently easy street at the moment, I can tell you that we are not making any new raiders. I was running AK on my tankadin and we were at the first couple of mobs that drop the void zones on the ground……the big black things that reduce your health if you stand in them. Group consisted of healer and three melee with me being the tank. First group, three deaths. Second group, three deaths. Third and final group…….three deaths. Then finally a comment…..WTF was that? These are players wearing BoA gear so I’m pretty sure that they have run this place before. How can you not see something big and black then think that it’s normal and ok to stand in…..then continue to stand in it when your health goes down?

If you’ve not raided before then the idea of all these dungeons is that you learn how to deal with certain situations and adjust your play accordingly. This will then lead onto more difficult encounters and finally onto raids. Take Sarth 3d for instance. You have added mobs, walls to avoid, void zones on the ground and a void to go in and out of. Another is General in Uld. He spits out the big purply things that reduce your health and do bad juju. Same as the mobs leading to the final boss in AN, they do exactly the same yet I have never….ever seen anyone move from them. All of these things have some form of duplication in other instances. I think that we are just so overpowered for the current instances that we power through most of those and miss out on what the game designers originally wanted us to experience.

Maybe I’m just being and elitest wanker but I think the future of the game at a serious raiding level is in a bit of trouble.

Furn

Big Red Kitty

Is he coming back? Can only hope so.

Furn

The story begins with me levelling a Pally Tank. It is sersioulsy fun. I have been really enjoying running instances and thankfully have only had a couple of missed pulls (sometimes my own fault but also sometimes others). This is where I realised that there are alot more Huntards in the world than hunters. It’s all well and good to say “But it’s only lvl 46 were not exactly raiding”. Well that may be the case but if your being an idiot all the way to 80 it makes it a bit difficult to change your stripes suddenly becuase you have another 9 or 24 people beside you.

Things that you should do when levelling in an instance to make yourself look like a pro hunter:

1. Use Feign Death and use it often.

2. Don’t pull aggro. If you do see point 1.

3. Focus target the Tank and either use an assist macro or just attack his target. If you don’t you’ll fail rule two meaning you need to use rule 1.

4. Control your pet. Know that Fluffy or Snuggles can sometimes have a mind of his own. Place him on passive and send him in manually ather than attacking everything.

5. For the love of god turn off auto attack. Theres nothing worse than tanking a huge amount of mobs, with both the healer and tank running out of mana then seeing an arrow fly over your shoulder pulling the next group of mobs with “Oops, my bad” in pchat.

6. Stay behind the tank. If you want to lead from the front, roll a tank. Your a hunter stay away from the big nasty mobs at the front.

7. If you fail Rule 2 and then stuff up rule 1 or it gets resisted, run towards the tank. There is nothing more frustrating than watching a Hunter run off into the distance with a mob beating on him.

8. Avoid tab targetting as you’ll end up pulling mobs you don’t mean to kind of like rule 5.

9. Know what gear your after and for the love of god Strength and Expertise are not Hunter stats!

10. When you get MD use it every pull and CD. It prevents breaking of rule 2, having to use rule 1, and having to use Rule 7

That is all.

Furn

OK. So I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out what to write next. I was thinking hunters stats. You know the sort of thing…1agil = 1AP and blah blah crit etc. But alot of it has already been done. I was also thinking that I would try and update this blog daily…but that’s not going to happen so I’m looking at updating weekly. Even still I think it’s going to be a struggle to find things to blog about.

Don’t get me wrong I’ve got a alot of things I can write about but I don’t think they’re that interesting. Things like what gems to use, what chants, best specs etc. But most of these things can already be found at the sites listed in my blogroll.

So I’m going to open it up to you guys as to what I write about. This could be a problem as I only have a few readers at the moment. But we’ll see how it goes.

So over to you…..what do you want to read about?

Furn