Friday, October 29, 2010

Feeding Your Stable

After all the quality of life improvements hunters have gotten lately, one thing that still bugs me is pet food. Even with the Mend Pet glyph, I like to carry food for my pets.  It's a quicker way to make them happy after a wipe, and I like the newish Feed Pet animation.
Pet food was a pain in the ass before patch 4.0, and it's worse now.  With four pets with us at all times, we can wind-up with a lot of different kinds of food for them.  It really mitigates some of the bag slots we gained when we got rid of our arrows!  I decided to spend a little time at Petopia and see how I could streamline this food situation while still having everything I need for my suite of buff pets.  I'm talking about the essential SV pets (no exotics):  cat, wolf, raptor, bear, hyena, sporebat, tallstrider, ravager, and wind serpent.  Of these nine families, six of them will eat meat so that's your #1 pet food.  You can feed the remaining three with bread or cheese, so pick one of those.  If you have another pet, like your favorite tanking pet, see if it will eat either of those.  For example, Murdoc, the gorilla I have had since 2005, eats bread, so that will be my second stack of pet food.  Food for 10 different pets fit into only 2 slots!  Not too shabby.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

The new hit cap

Reliable sources are reporting a new hit cap of 246.  Make that 216 if you're a Dranei like me.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

So...focus.

I was only able to stay awake for about an hour by the time I got patched last night so I can't report much.  I hit the target dummy for a few chaotic "rotations," but everyone on my server was doing the same thing so there was no good data to be gotten from it.  I didn't see the huge drop in DPS that armor pen MM guys are seeing, which kinda makes sense.  I am way too used to the old GCD, and getting used to one second is going to take some time for me.  My DJ mental metronome is currently off.

There are lots of reports of a bigger hit cap. Some are saying we want 246 hit rating right now.  I'll try to confirm this asap, but keep it in mind as you gem and reforge!

I need to clock a lot more play time this weekend before I'll have anything else to report.  I can't seem to summon all four of my pets right now, so that's my first bug priority.

Last thing: Everyone relax.  This is my third expansion, and this is a normal situation.  Class balances will be off for a while, maybe until December.  Bugs will need to be chased.  You can predict what you want about balance at 85, Blizz, or whatever, but we just don't know.  It was only 2 years ago that we all wondered what the hell Armor Pen is, right?  Nobody, including the devs, predicted what would happen with the ArP scaling, right?  We are in uncharted territory, but we have good company.  The devs and the hunter community will sort it all out.  Find a way to have fun, or save yourself some money every month.  It will get better.
Except maybe Multi-Shot.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

I'm a Damn Space Goat

My guild decided to rejoin the Alliance after spending the last few months trying out the Horde.  I was happy to go back to Allies, but I ended-up doing something totally unexpected: I made my hunter a Draenei.  I don't like the way they look or talk, and I'm positive they smell bad.  I'm not a jewelcrafter and can barely find my way around the Exodar.  I don't own any crystals and have never seen empirical evidence that they can heal me.  I chose Space Goat for one reason-the extra 1% to hit.  
Right now, that bonus is useless to me.  I'm actually over the hit cap a bit, but a little after work reforging will fix that.  When it comes to melting bosses at level 85, I predict that the hit bonus I have will be huge.  

See, in Cataclysm there is no single hit cap.  There is a cap for each raid tier, obviously getting higher as you progress.  In other words, you're gonna need more hit rating for tier 12 than for 11.  To be hit capped on Deathwing, we're all gonna need a crap ton of hit rating so this seemed like a better choice than the other Alliance racial bonuses.  Shadowmeld is similar enough to Camouflage for PvP.  I thought a lot about being a Dwarf again, but the 1% crit only applies to a third of our weapon options.  I'll reap the benefit of my hit bonus regardless of what I'm using, and it will hopefully give me just a little more flexibility with regard to gems and enchants.  It's really too bad the bonus won't apply to my guildies anymore, since we all need to chase these new tiered hit caps.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Patch Day!

Ok, tomorrow we switch to focus!  Actually, a lot more than that is changing, but it's hard to get past the whole focus thing.  Here's the SV build I'm gonna try out first.  I make no claims as to DPS, focus regen, or anything really.  I have not been in beta or on the ptr.  My thinking behind this build is:
1. I want all the CC I can get (even though I might not really need it until December, practice is good.  It's been years since I got my chain-trap on).
2.  I want to try and compensate for the AoE loss due to the death of Volley.  Yeah, go shoot-off your last Volley.  Like now.  I only went for one point in Serpent Spread.  When was the last time you saw trash live for nine seconds?
3.  I want all the focus savers I can get.  This is to get used to the system as a whole and compensate for not having Cobra Shot until level 81.  See, the whole system is balanced around SV hunters weaving Cobra Shots in to regain focus and refresh Serpent Sting.  Tomorrow we'll be able to regen focus with Steady Shot, but each Serpent Sting refresh will cost focus.  It could be tough until we get Cobra at 81.
I threw my extra points into DPS increasers.  Who cares right now?  The testing is just beginning and we're all OP for the current content anyway.  Go have fun out there before you're gettign owned in the level 85 heroics.
Make sure you hit up the hunter trainer too.  We have a few new things to get, such as Mastery.
Next up on the agenda for me tomorrow is a bunch of taming.  My stable is full right now, but tomorrow I get a bunch of new slots.  Here's a great rundown of what the raiding hunter will want to have tamed.  You should go ahead and add that blog to your reader.  Trust me.
Then I'm gonna reforge some gear and add Mastery to it.  I just gotta play with that stat a bit.
You can also buy a bunch of glyphs and the dust for changing them.  That isn't really high on my list and I'm trying to get a guildie to hook me up.
I doubt there will be any theorycrafting tomorrow, but it's on the way.  They actually found a way to improve Explosive Shots-they finally made the arrows free:)

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

More changes

If you went through the trouble of taming The Beast in UBRS, props.  Bad news however.  Cata will remove UBRS as a raid, which means The Beast will no longer have the smexy Boss ?? tag you trained him to have.  He will appear to others just like any other red Core Hound.  Sorry.
So, if you're planning on taming a Corehound ( I'm currently on the fence about it) so you can pretend to be a shammy for 30 seconds, no need to go through the trouble.  Of course, you can always just tell everyone where you tamed him.  Personally, if I sell-out to BM for the good of the raid I won't go through the trouble.  I prefeer green to red anyway.

Monday, October 4, 2010

64 Days

So, we got the big news this morning that we have a release date.  I figured I'd run down what I'm doing with the time left.

I've been enjoying some extreme soloing in ZG and MC to finish-off some reputations.  ZG has a much higher priority since it's going away.  As a troll I'd love to have the whole hunter set from there.  Mandikor's Sting was my very first epic ever.

Clearing-out the bank.  Gold is always valuable and I sure won't need mana pots anymore.

Filling-up the bank.  Stacks of fish feast mats, for example.  I should be able to skill-up 10 points right out of the gate AND use the end product!

Pets...This should really be it's own post but what the hell.  I'm gonna have to level a handful of pets for the various raid buffs they provide.  Overall, I'm pretty excited about the new pet system but I do have a few sour grapes about the implementation.  Why did wasps not keep their armor debuff?  Hey Blizz, no need to reinvent the wheel ok?  The armor debuff was GTG, and now I have a level 80 pet that's weak for PvE and the need to level a raptor up to get a buff I already had!  So, gotta get a raptor.  Like every other hunter in the world I have a wolf, so my crit buff is covered.  I'll grab a ravager for the increased physical damage buff as well.  I'm glad I can bring so many buffs to the group, but none of these pets are getting me excited.  The guy I'm really curious and excited about is....the wind serpent.
That's right, the wind serpent.  The wind serpent's buff increases magical damage.  You know, things like explosive shot, serpent sting, and black arrow.  I have a hunch that this will be the new wolf for SV hunters.  Not in the sense that we will all have one, but in that it may be the best pet to increase personal DPS.  Combine the increase to magic damage with our mastery and now we're straight blowin' stuff up!  In theory anyway. You can also get the magic buff from the dragonhawk family, if you're into the whole Drenei look.

The Manifesto

Another hunter blog?  Seriously? ANOTHER one?
Seriously.  Why you ask?  Well, I keep finding that I've got hunter stuff to say.  Sometimes I may ramble.  In these chaotic times of new trees, focus, and impending doom from below I may even rant once or twice.  I'll try not to.
I've been SV since Vanilla.  I used to put so many points in the SV tree that a guildie once called me "lol survival."  Seriously, that was one fucked-up spec.  Hey I was new:)
The point is I have been and always will be a Survival hunter.  There was a SHORT dark period where I did the BC BM button mash to keep my raid spot. Let us never speak of it again.
Back in the vanilla days people said SV was stupid and not viable for raiding.  Love going out to my BM homies-you guys have had a tough two years. I called BS on that and did my best to melt some faces, with mixed results.  When I ate some fail it wasn't because I was SV, it was because I'm a mediocre WoW player.
Whatever I may lack in uber I compensate for with zeal.  I love WoW, hunters, and SV.  I'll try to use this blog, and any other appropriate venue, to celebrate and defend the SV spec.  Why SV?  Our bullets EXPLODE.