The Hunter Rise

How Could I Forget?

2009-09-01T04:14:00.000-07:00

Well it was inevitable, as soon as I posted that last post I remember a couple other things. Expect a few of these posts over the next few days as I remember other things.

- With Old Azeroth being torn asunder by Deathwing at the beginning of Cataclysm and the entire world being remade we will finally be able to fly in Old Azeroth, or is that New Azeroth? I don't know, but flying will be had.

- Guild changes. There will be a guild leveling system which will provide access to Guild talents. Experience is aquired via leveling and downing bosses as well as through other in game feats. Talents include things such as cheaper repairs, mass summons, and mass ressurection.

Out with the Old, in with the New

2009-09-01T03:08:00.000-07:00

So it has taken me a while to decide whether or not to write this post for a couple reasons. The first reason being I don't want to throw a bunch of information out there that could be considered Spoilers and upset people who don't want to know these things yet, so here is your warning, spoilers ahead. The second reason I have been undecided on this issue is that these are all just Blizzcon announcements for the upcoming expansion and thus, they are subject to change. However with those two warning out of the way I feel comfortable discussing the announced changes.

- No more mana for Hunters. This here is a big one. Instead of mana Blizzard plans on giving us Focus, which will act much like our pet's focus or a Rogue's energy, constantly regening over time. They also stated that they plan to make Steady Shot increase the regen rate, which could be helpful. There is also another way to increase regen, but I'll get to that further down the page. Now, I have had a lot of people ask me what I think about this change, but to be honest, I have no idea. I will need to try it out and get used to it before I know if I like it more or less than mana, but I am optimistic.

- No more consumable ammo. Another big one. So we are finally getting that pony that Ghostcrawler promised us before 3.1. I am assuming that this means that ammo will become a Relic item, much like Librams, Totems, Idols, and Sigils. Blizzard has yet to decide how we will be getting our new ammo, but Emblem vendor items and boss drops are on the table. I assume that engineers may still be able to make some lower level ones as well, but that is just an assumption on my part. As far as my thoughts on this go, I am kind of torn. While not having to enlist an engineer buddy to make me 20k ammo a week will be nice (I like to have a little extra), I also think back to how many times I have killed Maexxna without ever seeing the Torn Web Wrapping, and how many times (about 40) I had to do reg Trial of the Champion before my Banner of Victory finally dropped. In other words, the jury is still out on this one until they announce how ammo is obtained.

-No more ability ranks. Instead abilities will now scale with our level. I'm honestly not too excited about this, it will be a bit more convenient, but unless there are other changes related to this it's not that big of a change.

- Dramatic changes to all talent trees. Again, until they release more info about this I feel kind of indifferent, although once more is announced I am sure I will be excited.

- No more Attack Power on gear. this is one of many changes taking place to bring the total number of stats on gear down to a more managable number. With this change Hunters (along with Druids, Rogues, and Enh Shammys) will be getting 2AP for each point of Agi. This, along with the removal of Int from our gear can only mean good things.

- Haste will be useful! So I will admit, all throughout WotLK I have never cared about haste. Yes, I know that there is a soft cap that brings our Steady Shot down to match the GCD and that all Hunters should strive for that. Here's the thing though, whenever I am in a raid my Steady Shot is 1.5 (1.6 sec at the max) due to all the buffs being thrown around. However, haste will now be increasing the rate at which we regen our Focus, so I will finally be happy to see it on my gear.

- No more Armor Penetration. That's right. Armor pen is being removed. They stated that some classes may still have talents that increase armor pen, but there will no longer be any on gear. This is huge. While some people may complain that they will no longer be able to achieve the "top DPS MM rotation" sue to this change and the switch to focus (Yes I have seen people complaining about this), what they seem to forget is that this will be a new expansion. There will be new rotations, new abilities and in general it will be a new game. This change will be good, mark my words.

- New stat, Mastery. So not much has been said about this stat other than it will make you better at what you do. Some examples were shown, and I think I have a bit of a grasp on what this means. Depending on your spec Mastery will give you certain passive bonuses that benefit your chosen spec.

Not so Huntery changes

- No more Defense rating. All tanks will now have talents that make them uncritable. While it may seem easy enough to get defense capped as a tank now, I can't count the number of times I have had guildies put off equipping an upgrade because they will lose too much defense rating. It makes gearing as a tank a special kind of juggling act that nobody enjoys. Thankfully, blizzard has noticed.

- No more spellpower on gear. This stat will now come directly from Int. From my Priest's perspective this is great. It means that I will only need to worry about keeping my Int and Spirit high and I can make sure I have a very plentiful mana pool.

- No more Mp5. This will all be replaced with spirit. Also, all healers will now recieve an ability similar to meditation. Again, my priest is happy.

- Reforging. This will be a new aspect of crafting professions. It will allow you to reduce a stat on an item that and replace it with another that isn't already there. Until more info is released on this I am not sure what to make of it, but I imagine it will be good for replacing spirit with hit rating for casters, or other similar situations.

- Archaeology and Path of the Titans. Archaeology will be a new secondary profession, it has you searching the globe for relics (I think) and will help you unlock Path of the Titans. Not too much info has been released about these paths, but it will be a new form of progression at level 85.

- Speaking of which, the new level cap will be 85.

- Fishing is set to get some big changes, but that is all we know at the moment.

- Crafting may become easier as it will be possible to gain multiple skill points from items that take more mats to craft.

- Goblins for the Horde and Worgen for the Alliance. I plan on rolling one of each when the expansion launches as long as they expand the number of character slots per realm (Which they said is a possibility, fingers crossed).

That's about all of the big Cataclysm news I think. If I missed anything lt me know. One thing that does worry me is that with such big changes to the way our class works leveling may be interesting. Let me explain. My little baby Paladin (who will become a Tauren as soon as race change becomes available) has recently hit level 65. One thing I have noticed while playing in Outlands is that since the class was much different itemization-wise back in BC a lot of the gear that should be an upgrade for me is kind of horrible. Example - Heart Fire Warhammer. Two handed mace? Awesome. Strength and Stam? Awesome. Int, Spell power and Mp5? Not so awesome. As far as I can think of there is not a single class that would want this mace these days. What worried me is that a lot of Hunter gear has int on it. This is because we are currently a mana using class, however with these changes Hunters leveling through Outland and Northrend may be forced to use rogue leather due to the removal of mana. Although in the long run this is just a small downside.

Onto some changes that are coming a bit sooner, and by sooner I mean 3.3.

- Pets will scale with all stats. Great change, not much to say.

- Pets will be immune to some (maybe all) Boss AOEs in order to keep them from dying to things that a fairly competent player would be able to avoid. Again, great change, my wolf may finally be able to live through a phase of Mimiron.

And I'm Back

2009-08-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

So this is what happened. I got back from camping a few days ago and then took a couple days to recover for reasons which I won't go into here. Then, once things got back to normal I happened to notice that Blizzcon was starting the next day and so for the past couple days I have been caught up in the information overload that has come through from that.

But now I am presented with a problem. I have no idea what to post about. I mean I could talk about how we have finally gotten in our first few attempts at Gen. V in Ulduar 10. Or I could talk about how we actually managed to scrape together a semi-successful 25 man this week. I could get into a ToC and give you my impressions of that, or I could go into my thoughts on the news that just came out of Blizzcon.

See, now that Cataclysm has been announced my mind has shifted to expansion mode, especially given the drastic Hunter changes* that have been announced. At the same time however, we have no way of knowing what will actually make it. I think we can be fairly confident in the fact that the level cap will be 85 and that Azeroth will be redesigned. I think these are good things. But we really don't have that much info, I want to know more. I want details about the Path of the Titans and Archaeology. I also want to know when we get Race changes (which have now been confirmed) so I can switch my level 38 Paladin to a Tauren. I want to know if we will be getting more character slots so I can roll a Goblin and a Worgen or if I'll have to delete some toons to make room. I hope you can see what I mean by my mind being in expansion mode. It also doesn't help that I have never seen WoW from the Alliance perspective, and I always kind of planned to eventually level a toon on the Alliance side to check it out, but now I have a time limit. It's a rather generous one, but it's still a time limit.

Anyways I am throwing this out there in hopes that you guys understand if my upcoming posts are somewhat fragmented and full of Cataclysm talk.

* I was going to list the big changes right below this line, but then I got to the itemization chages and my head almost exploded when I realized exactly how much there is to address, from talent trees, to the Agi>AP change, to Ammo changes. Therefore I guess my next post will be a list of the announced changes, cause there's a lot to talk about.

BRB

2009-08-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I was planning to put up a post about this weeks trip into Ulduar, but last minute decisions mean that I will be going camping tonight and will not be back for a few days. Seeing as my ride just showed up I have to go, but expect some Ulduar news when I get back.

Is It Just Me?

2009-08-08T18:07:00.000-07:00

Okay so since the patch has anybody else noticed more Lock and Load procs? I understood that the re-introduction of the internal cooldown was likely there in order to better balance our DPS, but at the same time there was nothing in the patch notes about increasing its proc chance. Because of this I had assumed that they would take some time to judge how often it's proccing and then tweak it with hotfixes until they had it where they wanted. However aparently I didn't give them enough credit. It isn't quite to the point where I can count on them, but they seem to be happening a lot more often and while we may have had to sacrifice the possibility for it to chain proc, I think this is really the way to go. Although I could just be crazy and/or very lucky, anybody else getting the same results as I am?

Patch Day!

2009-08-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

Okay, so first off I want to appologize for the recent silence. Between some personal issues and, more recently, internet issues I have been unable to post in some time. However my internet just came back up a few minutes ago, and what better day than patch day? Now for a quick rundown of what I'll be doing on this hectic day that is Tuesday, maybe you'll get some ideas.

First and foremost is the epic gem issue. I have a few emblems here and there, but the bulk of my gems will be coming from the honor I have saved up. I had planned on getting all 3 of my 80s honor capped before today, but with my internet going down when it did I'll have to be happy with 1 of them honor capped and another at 30k or so. On top of that my Priest is all set to learn the new gem transmutes, although the 20 hour cooldown on those makes them more of a cruel joke than anything. I understand why they added it, but now it's pretty close to worthless. I still haven't decided what I'll be doing with my pathetically small amount of titanium, but I have a feeling that will depend on what the AH prices look like. Also, I am currently debating whether to wait a few days for everybody else to unload thier supply of gems so that when I sell mine I have less competition and will be able to worry about price wars a bit less.

On the Hunter front I am looking forward to using traps again. As a Survival Hunter I try and keep Black Arrow up as much as possible, and the change made to trap cooldowns means that I will not only be able to use my Frost and Freezing Traps again, but I will also be able to use my all time favorite trap, Snake Trap. I just find the concept of the trap fun and slightly ridiculous. So keep that in mind if you are on Altar of Storms and see a huge increase in the number of wandering poisonous snakes.

Another thing that my recent lack of internet has interfered with is my quest for a new flying mount. Currently I am flying around on the good old Bronze Drake, and have been for several months now. There was a time when a group of us were working towards the red proto drake, and several people in that group ended up with one, but to be honest I tagged along mainly just to help them out and only ever got about half the achievements done. However there are two mounts that I have wanted ever since I heard the words "Flying mounts" and I am finally going to get one. The first which is sadly still unavailable in game is the forsaken vampire bats. You see since I was playing with a friend for much of the early game, and since he had a mid level Undead Warlock we decided to quest in Silverpine sue to his familiarity with the area. Because of that I have always really wanted a giant bat of my own, in fact that was one of my first pets. However the second pet, the one that is becoming available (at least in a way that isn't completely ridiculous) is a Dragonhawk. I don't know why, but I have always wanted to fly around on one and actually have control. The only problem? I am 30 Champion seals short. So I will definitely be hitting up all of the available dailies as well as the new heroic in order to get my new flyer as soon as possible.

Speaking of that new 5 man dungeon, I will likely be spending a lot of time in there today and here's the sad part, a lot of that will be on normal. You see I have looked over the loot list on MMO Champion, and as it turns out the normal 5 man has a trinket that increases armor penetration rating by 84, and has a proc that is nearly identical to the Mirror of Truth. True it is only ilevel 200, so I still won't be able to get my Epic Achievement, but it beats my Incisor Fragment, and the 10 man Coliseum physical DPS trinket is loaded with expertise, a stat that is completely worthless to us Hunters. Of course that isn't the only reason I will be spending a lot of time there (or in all heroics for that matter). Since I have 3 80s (1DPS, 1 Healer, 1 Tank) I plan on being in as many heroics I can get in with my guildies, especially since my Tank and Healer need gear.

Well I guess I have rambled enough for this morning, and I appologize if it just seemed like I was going on and on, but it's patch day, and I'm excited. Oh and for those of you looking at the patch notes feeling sad that we didn't get much this time around, don't forget that as long as we are hit capped our pets are now hit and expertise capped as well, so at least there is a damage buff there.

Birthday Post

2009-07-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right, today is in fact my birthday. I am now 24 years old. Given that fact this post will be a quick one. Well that and the fact that I have been so busy lately I haven't been able to do much in game.

We were missing a few people in Ulduar this week so we didn't get as far as we normally do, and then on Wednesday we put together a 25 Naxx. The combination of the fun we had in Ulduar with an undergeared Priest healer (whom we geared a bit) and the headache I experienced on Wednesday night quicky reminded me why I prefer 10 mans to 25 mans. During the Naxx run I kept a stopwatch, and between starting the Military quarter and giving up on Thaddius (The second quarter of the night) due to people not being able to tell the difference between posotive and negative, we spent a total of 1 hour 15 minutes waiting on people to come back from being afk. So all in all I think we spent more time waiting on people than we did killing things.

The thing is if somebody is going afk in one of our 10 mans we can just have them step outside and keep right on going with a replacement. We have plenty of people who want in on our 10 man Ulduar runs, in fact we have enough for two of them. It just workd out so much better when we are able to move people in and out depending on who needs gear from what bosses and who needs to go afk. Sure it may lead to some people not getting in, but more often than not everybody who wants in gets to be there for at least a couple bosses.

In other news Clevername (that's my Priest) hit 80 a while ago, and I have been healing heroics* with him. The thing I have noticed is that DPS and, to a lesser extent, tanking are both pretty solid. When you begin a fight you know what you will be doing, you know the abilities you need to use and the order to use them in. As a healer every fight is an adventure. You never know exactly who is going to need to be healed, or for how much. It's much more reactive, but it is also a lot of fun.

*I also went in and tanked a Heroic CoS last night on my Death Knight. We weren't trying for timed at all, just trying to get a buddy of mine some gear and emblems. As it turned out we were only about 30-45 seconds short of getting to the boss in time. So now I know that I am actually capable of tanking a timed CoS. Of course we'll see if that is still the case after the 3.2 nerfs.

I'm Back

2009-07-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

Alright, so the wedding is over and everything went well but I am afraid that I have sustained an injury that may prevent me from posting here for a few days. Now you are probably asking what kind of injury could possibly prevent me from blogging, I took a bottle cap to the eye. That's right, during the reception a flying piece of metal stuck my eyeball.

Things are a bit blurry at the moment, but it seems to be healing rather quickly. It still hurts if I look at one thing for too long, and reading is proving to be much more challenging than it was meant to be. If it ends up where I am not posting for a while I may hand the reins of this off to Aras or Ikky while I heal up, or I may just sit down and spend all day writing a post a little at a time. Either way content is on its way.

I Found a Moment to Post...

2009-07-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

And here it is. With the Bachelor Party over and the wedding just two days away I find myself with a moment to catch my breath. The hectic week is almost over, of course I happened to learn that yet another friend wil be getting married in about a month, so I'll get to do it all again. Anyway I have a moment, and I decided I should use it post something. Unfortunately things have been a bit crazy so I don't exactly have anything specific to write about. Wait... let me check something.

Okay, I'm back. So I just checked the PYR and I find myself a bit worried. When the PTR first went up the T9 armor for all classes had some pretty bad set bonuses. Ours happened to be reducing the focus cost of our pet's ablilities by 50% for the 2 piece bonus and 5% increased critical strike chance for steady shot as our 4 piece bonus. Those both happen to be pretty bad bonuses for a few reasons. 1) I have never seen my pet run out of focus, ever. With 1 point in Go For The Throat he has enough focus to do whatever he wants. 2) 5% is a respectable amount of crit, but it applied to the shot most Hunter use the least which is how Blizzard wants it to be. They don't want us to Steady spam until things die (although they still need to do some work on this for BM Hunters, as they still don't have many options). 3) These would have been replacing the current T8 bonuses of 10% increased Serpent Sting damage and a 600 AP for 15 Seconds proc on Steady Shot. However at the time these became known I wasn't too worried about it, as I was faily certain they were placeholders, especially when the devs asked for feedback on them on the forums.

So a build or two ago they were changed to thier current state of:

2 piece bonus - "The damage done by your Serpent Sting ability can now be critical strikes."

4 piece bonus - "Each time you hit with a ranged attack, you have a chance to grant your pet 600attack power for 15 seconds."

For starters the 2 piece bonus is much better, especially since every Hunter should be using Serpent Sting. Much better than reducing the focus costs of our pets ablilties and on the surface the 4 piece bonus looks pretty good too. It definitely helps out the Beast Mastery Hunters more than the rest of us, but I am fine with that, that isn't the problem. The main problem with this bonus is the fact that our pets can die very easily, expecially on fights like Mimiron, and then the bonus is useless. It is possible that they could change the bonuses again, but that isn't looking very likely given that the last build went through with changes to some bonuses but not to ours. and maybe I am just overestimating just how often our pets die*, but that is my current worry with the Hunter 4 piece bonus as it is on the PTR.

*I seem to always remember the fights where my pet dies a lot. For example, one time on KT in Naxx I sent my pet in to attack at the beginning of phase 2. On his trip between me and Kel'Thuzad he happened to step on a Shadow Fissure just as it went away, killing him instantly. I then rezzed him, sent him back in and upon reaching KT another shadow fissure formed and once again my cat was dead. Maybe I just have bad luck.

Make Friends With a Rogue

2009-07-03T00:51:00.000-07:00

If you think back to the days when WotLK abilities were first being announced then you probably remember when a lot of Hunters got upset about the new Rogue ability Tricks of the Trade. The argument back then was that Hunters had Misdirect, and many felt that MD was a defining Hunter skill, making it unfair to give Rogues a similar and arguably, better, skill that was on a much shorter cooldown. Shortly after that the cooldown on MD was reduced to 30 seconds in order to match up with TotT which made a lot of Hunters feel better, but some were still upset.

Personally, I couldn't be more happy about Rogues having TotT. You see, I am pretty good friends with my guilds main Rogue, so much so that if he's around I'll pull out Felix instead of my wolf simply because it helps him get into his rotation much faster (He has even included Felix on his Mutilate DPS chart) and since he is accused of having what some in my guild call "Teh Leet DPS Haxx" it's always a good thing to help him out.

A lot of Hunters would disagree with me there. They would say that there is no reason to sacrifice my personal DPS by using an inferior pet. They would say that he can worry about setting up his own bleed effect. They would likely say that I get no benefit from helping my friend out. What they fail to see is that when you help out your Rogue buddy, he is likely to help you out as well.

The way it works is like this, I use my cat Felix so that he is able to get into his Hunger for Blood DPS right away. At the same time he throws Tricks up on me, increasing my damage by 15% for 6 seconds (10 if glyphed). Sure this gives me more threat to worry about, but since I have a (mostly) reliable aggro dump there really isn't a problem. I think it makes for some nice synergy between the two of us, usually leading to him on top of the DPS charts and me right there behind him. So if you have a Rogue in your guild that you know pretty well bring it up to them, even if you still use your wolf they will likely still be willing to throw TotT on you, especially since you are the best candidate for the spell.

Call of the Crusader

2009-07-02T03:21:00.000-07:00

So my without WoW to play today I ended up spending some time on various forums around the internet. Usually this is a bad idea, and this case was no different. I saw a few posts regarding the raid content in the upcoming patch, and I thinnk the major problem is that a lot of people don't see what is actually going on story wise with the new raid. I will now give you my view of things. Kepp in mind this is just how I am interpreting things that I have read/seen. Also keep in mind that there will likely be spoilers in this post, rather than putting a warning before each one I will just put this one here.

Our Battles So Far

Upon reaching our 80th season of battle we immediately took up arms againt Kel'Thuzad and his minions in Naxxramas. We fought bravely and put an end to the Dread Citadel. However, upon returning to Dalaran we heard news of Brann Bronzebeard's recent discoveries in Ulduar, and the evil that was contained within. As the good soldiers of the Horde/Aliiance that we are we quickly flew out to investigate what was going on, only to find ourselves confronted by not only the God of Death himself, but the keepers he had bended to his will. Once more we fought hard, knowing that our efforts and our efforts alone could be what saved the entire world of Azeroth. Tired and bloody we emerged from the ancient structure as the victors.

The Eye of the Storm (No, not the Battleground)

The Argent Crusade has seen our efforts, they have watched us battle our way through Northrend, inching ever closer to Icecrown Citadel. They have also seen us grow tired, and they know that entering the Citadel now would mean certain death. In an effort to increase moral and give the heroic adventurers time to rest up for the final battle they have decided to hold a tournament. The tournament is in place to give the heroes of Azeroth a place to wind down, and prepare for the final confrontaion. They have even included a place for the mighty adventurers to train and keep thier wits sharp.

This is how I see patch 3.2. Yes, the raid is small, and yes it is kind of a side step from the story progression thus far if you just look at the content. However when you look at the actual story of the raids you can see that it is not only a perfectly placed moral boster/recouperation strategy, but it is also the perfect lead in to Icecrown Citadel.

The Final Confrontation

As the members of the Horde and Alliance cheer on, watching member of thier faction topple all foes thrown at them, a chilling wind sweeps through the Coliseum. Tired of watching the proceedings from afar Arthas appears and springs his trap. The heroes of the Horde/Alliance soon find themselves plummeting into a cavern located beneath the Coliseum, and find thier real final challenge to be none other than Anub'arak.

This is where the story picks back up from the "pit stop" that is the tournament to the real final goal of Wrath. It seem to me that Arthas has decided to get in the first attack, and that this attack will most definitely force the Argent Crusade's hand. They must attack, there is no more time to wait, the Lich King must be defeated.

I have seen a post or two from people dissapoited that Anub'arak is the final boss of this raid instead of a boss in Icecrown Citadel, but I have to say that this makes sense. Arthas has reanimated one of his generals and sent him on a very important mission. It is Arthas' plan to have Anub'arak deal a blow to the Horde/Alliance forces in order to not only get the first attack in, but ultimately lower moral even more than it was before the tournament.

Anyway those are my two cents on the story of patch 3.2, I could be wrong, but I don't find the patch dissapointing at all, you just have to see it from the right perspective. You have to remember that within the confines of story you didn't gon into Naxx every week and kill KT over and over, and you aren't going into Ulduar over and over to farm gear. Instead the heroes go in once and destroy the evil within, each raid bringing them a step closer to Icecrown. While it could be argued that Ulduar brought us no closer to Icecrown it still makes sense because after Brann got in a more dangerous, more immediate threat was looming, and had to be dealt with if the heroes were to live long enough to venture into Icecrown.

* A quick note on the T9 gear, as I have been seeing some more posts about this with complaints about the look. The reason that all gear of the same armor class (Cloth, Leather, Mail, Plate) looks similar is because this is a tournament, the AC is building an army, and a big part of building an army is ensuring that your troops look the same. This also has to do with why the Alliance and Horde sets will look different, since the Alliance army wouldn't want to look like the Horde army. Much like the content itself, the T9 gear is set up the way it is for the sake of the story, which is what this upcoming patch is all about, story.

Random Post is Random

2009-06-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

The first thing I would like to say is that there is a good reason behind me not posting recently. You see I wanted to leave my previous post at the top for a good while, so that more people could potentially see it. It also doesn't help that there hasn't been much news lately, and that I haven't been asked any questions lately. At any rate this post will likely be all over the place, so don't say I didn't warn you.

Hunter Stuff

In PTR news it appears we have a new Spirit Beast on the horizon, this time of the blue frostworg variety. I am glad to see a Spirit Beast that has a model other than a cat coming being introduced. It's not that I have something against the cats, but I enjoy the variety of pets in the game, so more models is always good.

As for gear on the PTR, I got to wear some T9 around, along with one of the badge trinkets and I was at over 400 hit, so if you have been having trouble with your hit rating on live there may be some relief on the way. On the other hand if you find yourself over the cap your stuggle may continue.

Speaking of gear, it seems that we get one of the best T9 names for our set with Windrunner. I really like this choice as I have always been a big fan of the Banshee Queen, although it does seem that Hunters are the only class that shares a name between Alliance and Horde (Sylvanas for Horde and Alleria for Alliance) but at least we aren't VanCleef, sorry Rogues. It also appears that while the Alliance and Horde sets will look different we may be sharing gear models with our mail wearing friends, although this hasn't been confrimed.

One last thing about the PTR. In the next few days I plan on finding a nice secluded place to practice chain trapping with the new trap changes. I'll report what I find once I get enough testing in.

Alt Business

So my Priest finally hit 80 two days ago. I haven't yet run much with him, but I have picked up a few pieces of crafter gear as well as some vendored rep gear. That brings my number of 80s up to 3, with Goatcheese being the next in line. I thought about leveling my Paladin more seriously, but Goatcheese has been sitting at 71 for a long time and has been passed by two characters, so I think it's about time.

On the gold front I am making quite a bit of progress, but I may end up blowing a bunch of it on my Priest's flying (flying, epic flying, cold weather flying and a mount) if I don't get at least honored with the Sons of Hodir Soon. The amount of time it takes to even just look for everfrost chips is ridiculous on the loaned wind rider, but I guess that is because I am spoiled by my two characters with epic flying. Wish me luck on holding out till 3.2.

The Bad News

As it stands currently my WoW time runs out in about 18 hours. Since I don't get paid until Friday at the earliest I will be without WoW for at least a few days. Normally this wouldn't be so bad, as it would give me plenty of time on the test realm and I would be able to relay my impressions to you. However my best friend will be in town Saturday and will be staying until his wedding on the 11th so I will likely be busy until the 12th. If things go quiet until then that is the reason, now you know.

Emblem Changes

2009-06-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

Alright, so I have been reading a lot of forum posts lately (I know, bad idea) about the upcoming changes to the Emblem system and I figure now is a good time to put my thoughts out there. In order for that to happen I have to explain a bit about my background as a player.

I began actually playing World of Warcraft shortly after the launch of BC. For those of you who say that means my opinion doesn't matter, you are wrong get over it. I played pretty casually with my friends, and it took me a little under a year to hit 70 due to some breaks in playtime and just leveling slowly. If you think that this makes my opinion invalid then you are once again wrong, get over it. Given that I first became a fresh 70 about a year after BC was launched I probably have a much different view from many of the people who are arguing about the emblem changes. In fact, my opinion probably matters more than thiers because I was one of the people that this change is aimed towards.

There are basically two reasons that Blizzard has decided to make this change. The first reason is to get people back into heroics again. There is a reason for this, because I can honestly tell you that I just ran my first heroic in months, and that was just to help a guildie get his Bronze Drake. In the current state of the game there is really no reason to run heroics once you have the gear you need. That takes a lot of content that Blizzard spent a long time developing and leaves it mostly barren. While they may be doing this to the Vanilla content and BC content those are both years old, and not months old.

The second reason is that Blizzard believes that everybody should get a chance to see the content that they are creating. This is where my BC experience comes in. So after spending a year leveling to 70 guess where I spent the vast majority of my time. Battlegrounds. Guess how many of the BC raids I went to. One Karazhan, and that's just cause my ex-girlfriend got me in on the run, I went twice and downed a total of three bosses*.

You see, I didn't spend all my time in BGs cause I liked them, I was there because there was no other way for me to move up from my leveling gear. You see after a year of the Burning Crusade's lifecycle nobody was running normal dungeons, it just didn't happen. This meant that I had no way to get the gear required to run heroics, or should I say to get accepted to heroic groups. The problem was that most of the players had moved onto bigger and better raids, leaving the old content, especially the normal dungeons, a wasteland.

Now here we are in Wrath of the Lich King, and we have moved onto bigger and better raids. We laugh at the thought of heroics as we run circles around the well in Dalaran. But what about those people who are just now hitting 80? Given the fact that Heroic requirements are much less strict than they were in BC a fresh 80 can find thier way into a group here and there, too bad there aren't that many groups. And how exactly is the fresh 80 supposed to get gear to get into a Naxx run if they can't find a group for heroics?

The answer is this emblem change. With the "older" 80s returning to heroics in order to get Emblems of Conquest to finish up thier Ulduar gear many more groups will be in need of people, thus giving the fresh 80s a chance to get into a group and get gear, especially since they will likely be the only one rolling on it. Sure they might be getting Emblems of Conquest while they are at it, but let's be honest, do you really think somebody who just hit 80 is going to run enough heroics to completely gear themselves out in Ulduar level gear? And if the answer to that is yes, isn't that the type of driven, dedicated person you want in your raids?

Overall what this change does is it gives people a reason to go back and do heroics, which in turn gives those fresh 80s people to run with so that they have the opportunity to go through the progression. That's what Blizzard wants, for everybody to have an opportunity to experience the content. Without this change those players who just hit 80 will not be able to move forward. No matter how you view this change, or how you view the "casual" vs "hardcore" debate, there is no denying that would be unfair to those players.

Now I have a couple points I want to direct at those who vehemently oppose this change.

1) How exactly does this change hurt you? Is blizzard taking away your personal gear or your personal emblems and handing them out? Will this change strip you of your sense of accomplishment? Seriously, to all the "hardcore" out there who for some reason despise ths change, this does not effect you. This change is not about you, stop being selfish and let others enjoy the game and enjoy the content. It's kind of a "you do your thing, I'll so mine" situation.

2) Don't worry, the "bads" won't be in your raids. Do you people who make this argument ever stop and think about how long it would take the people that you consider "bad" to actually get geared out from the vendors? Yeah, maybe you can sit down and run every heroic and get a piece of gear in a coupe days. But the ones you are afriad of, the (I hate to use this word) casuals, they won't be doing that. They will probably run 1 or 2 heroics a day. So that's what? 1 piece of gear a week? Stop worrying about them infiltraing your raids. You're being paranoid, don't.

3) Have you ever stopped to think about how this may end up helping you? Have you ever been in a guild that at the time had exaclty the number of tanks needed for the content you were running, then suddenly one leaves. I have, it sucks. It's pretty bad to go from Ulduar back to Naxx 10 just so that you can gear up another tank so you can get back to the content you should already be running. Especially when nobody else needs anything, so nobody really wants to go. Now you won't have to worry about it. If you're guild is in Ulduar 25 gear, and you suddenly need to gear a new tank you can buckle down and run heroics, gearing the out rather quickly betweenn the heroic drops and the emblem gear. Sure a Naxx25, might still be in order, but that's better than a months worth of Naxx 25.

4) Even if they are buying it with Emblems they still earned the gear. So I could log on right now, throw together an OS run, and I guarantee you that somebody would walk out with a piece of gear they really needed. OS takes what? 30 minutes? Imagine the amount of time people will have to put in to be able to afford the gear available. For 19 emblems they can purchase an Amulet. 19 emblems. Let that sink in for a minute. That's at least 4 heroics, around 4 hours of work to get that little amulet. So how exactly did the person who got an upgrade in OS deserve it more? I can auto shot my way through an OS run and walk out with an upgrade. With only 5 people in a heroic it's kind of important they they pay attention for those 4 hours.

- This post will be edited and updated if I think of anything else. I know there is more, but I am very tired at the moment.

*Just to give you an idea of how little content I experienced in BC this is the list of instances I remember running. While leveling I ran Ramp, BF, SV, UB and Shadow Labs. At 70 I ran... Durnholde once, BM once, Arcatraz once, and Botanica most of the way through (If you were a member of the group I was in I appologize, as my internet went out just before the last boss). To this day I still haven't seen about half of the BC instances.

Picture Time

2009-06-24T22:40:00.000-07:00

Here is what it looks like when I am in combat and do not have the Sniper Training buff:

This is what it looks like when I do have the buff, notice the timer at the bottom:

This is my L&L aura, with a timer of it's own:

And this is what it looks like when Chunkchunk is ready to drop some hurtin' bombs, Sniper Training up, L&L procced:

*The timer on those are random numbers since I just used the test button to show the effect of the auras.

As Promised

2009-06-24T22:34:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it's coming in a bit late, but what with the PTR going live yesterday I found my hands full with downloading, installing, transferring and rolling a level 1 Tauren to check out the new Zeppelin because my characters hadn't copied yet. Anyway my premades are up now, so I can tell you that the new Druid forms are beautiful, but my actual characters haven't been copied over yet, so I find myself with free time. What did I choose to do with my free time you ask? Well I logged in and dug into my Power Auras and managed to get some good results. the first thing I did was made an aura for Sniper Training. I figured that I definitely wanted to know when I had to stand still in order to get the buff, so I did this:

What this does is that whenever I am in combat and missing Sniper Training a white ring will surround my character and pulse, which tells me as the player that I need to stand still. But after I made that and tried in out I realized that it would not suffice. You see a big part of Sniper training is knowing when it is okay to move while the buff is active, but once I have Sniper Training this white ring simply goes away, and I have nothing (other than looking at the buff itself) to tell me when I can move and when I can't unless I lose the buff again. This was less than optimal so I opened Power Auras back up and creater the following:

Now when the Sniper Training buff is active Chunkchunk is surrounded by a slightly larger red ring of doom. While this tells me that I will be doing more damage while shooting things in the face until they die, it still doesn't help me with knowing when to move. However, in the bottom half there, if you click on the Timer tab you can set up a timer that shows how long the buff has left. This timer is also pretty customizable, so I put it at the bottom of the ring. Now all I have to do is remember that once it gets to 6 seconds remaining I need to stop moving, and I should be golden (I'm not sure if there is a better way to set up the timer, if any of you know of one please let me know). So having successfully set up the add on for Sniper Training I decided to finally put it to use for Lock and Load:

Pretty simple, a red skull and crossbones will now pop up above my head when Lock and Load procs, instantly informing me that it's time to shoot things harder. Now, possibly due to the way I am posting this (Picasa) or possible for some other reason, I am only able to put so many pictures in one post. So in a few minutes I will be uploading what the auras actually look like on Chunkchunk.

Interesting Question

2009-06-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

So I was just checking out my referrals and I stumbles upon an interesting one from google. Now for this one I am not going to go into a Q&A session for it, as it deserves an entire post.

There are a lot of hunters that use the power auras add-on, and this particular query pertained to the use of that add-on for Sniper Training. Tomorrow I am going to look into setting this up, and once I get it up and functional I will report back here, as this could be a lot of help for Survivial DPS. I already have it set up for my mana levels and AotV, but not for L&L procs so it may take me a couple tries to get it set up right, but I will discuss it further once I have it ready.

Soon to be 80

2009-06-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

The rolling restarts just happened, and so I decided it was definitely time to post, and since I spent almost the entire day on him, I would like you all to meet my Priest, Clevername.

You see, the reason that I was playing on Clevername all day was because I did the Midsummer stuff last year on Chunkchunk, and until things are reset (which just happened) he cann't get his tiitle for the event as he cannot get enough blossoms to purchase the clothing for the pole dance. Clevername on the other hand just got his first title, and while it isn't my favorite title in the game, it's the only one he has.
As an added bonus, going around to all those fire took my Priest from level 76 to 77. Which means that in all likelyhood he will be my 3rd 80. However I am somewhat reluctant to get him there this week for two reasons. Number 1) I have been leveling with a good RL friend of mine, and I was already a bit ahead of him and I don't want to leave him stranded alone at 75 while he is enjoying a road trip to Vegas. Number 2) I have this fear that as soon as he hits 80 my guild will insta-gear him and I'll spend more time in Ulduar on him than on Chunkchunk.

On the other hand there are solutions to both of these problems. For the first one all I would have to do is start leveling my Rouge with my friend, which is probably a great idea as I could use the motivation to level him since he is the herbalist that feeds Clevername's Alchemy (which is at 437 is believe) and it's kind of hard to farm high level northrend herbs on a 71 if you haven't tried it.

The solution to problem two is a bit more straightforward in that I'll try to just say no. This will probably work as well, however on those nights when we are short a healer and I'm the only option saying no just won't work. At any rate my I will end up getting Clever to 80 sometime in the next week or two, so we'll see what happens then. As for his other profession I went with Tailoring, which I almost have maxed, and I am really excited to make myself a flying carpet. However tonight I made a deal with myself that I will not purchase flying on my Priest until I have 15k gold or until 3.2 goes live, whichever comes first. I am currently sitting at around 9k (I ay later regret saying that, as most of my readers are guildies, lol) which means that once 3.2 goes live I'll likely be kicking myself for not waiting and saving the 400 gold.

In other news Chunkchunk recently got lucky with some of Shoulders off of 10 man Auriaya and also got lucky when his T8.5 Leggings dropped and he was the only Hunter in the party. So things are definitely shaping up on that front. Given that the guild is now up to Mimiron as the final keeper I think things may start moving along somewhat quickly in the coming weeks, which is good news with 3.2 looming somewhere out there on the horizon. Speaking of which there are some changes happening that I want to go over at some point. I know I already went over the Hunter changes, but these ones apply to everybody, and are pretty big so keep an eye out for that.

For those of you who don't like the alt posts, have no fear, only one more left to do, and it will be a quick one. Oh, and for those of you wondering, I leveled Clevername as Shadow from 1-75 but recently switched to Disc and am having loads of fun with Penance which has inspired another post topic, but I need to flesh that one out a bit.

Change is Coming

2009-06-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

So a guildmate of mine insisted that I make maple syrup the subject of todays post, but I thought I would go the route of announced 3.2 changes instead. So without further ado, here they are paraphrased from MMO-Champion:

- Aspect of the Cheetah will now be trainable at level 16

This is a product of the upcoming mount changes, and while it doesn't effect me per se, I'm sure it will be a welcome change to anybody who starts a new Hunter after patch 3.2 goes live.

- Deterrence will have a new visual spell effect

I don't think this will be that big of a deal, but it may help notify others in raids when I Deterrence tank when something goes wrong. For example if a taunt fails and the boss is heading for the healers.

- The time that Traps exist has been reduced from 1 minute to 30 seconds.

I am not happy about this change (But I do understand the reasoning behind it, see the next change). Won't be that big of a deal most of the time, but it could make for close calls when attempting to chain trap a mob. Maybe it will be something that I won't really notice too much, sonce I am never asked to trap anyways, but who knows, it could lead to bad things some day.

- Traps now have 3 seperat cooldown timers, 1 for fire (Immo, Explosive, and Black Arrow), 1 for Frost (Freezing and Frost), and 1 for Nature (Snake Trap). A Hunter may have 1 of each category placed at a time.

Completely the opposite of the change above. I cannot tell you how happy I am about this change. Hunters have been asking for this for a long time and it may finally happen. This also explains the change in the time that traps will exist. So overall I am happy about the trap changes.

Talent Changes

Beast Mastery

-Catlike Reflexes now reduces the cooldown of Kill Command by 10/20/30 Seconds.

Since I play as Survival I am not too up on Beast Master builds, but for raiding this talent does not seem very attractive in its current form given that the pet will be attacking from behind and thus won't need to dodge. However with this new added perk it may be worth picking up just for the 30 seconds off the Kill Command cooldown, doubling the amount of times you would use it during a fight.

Survival

- Etrapment no longer works with Immolation and Explosive traps

The way I see it this change is purely for PvP reasons, as I don't know of a single PvE spec that picks this up. In that light it does make sense, although I am unsure why Snake Trap is not included in this, as the change was likely to prevent players from laying out three different traps and effectively snaring thier opponent for a full 12 seconds, which seems to be an eternity in Arenas. The way it seems to be at this point you could still have this trigger off of both a frost trap and subsequently a snake trap, snaring them for a total of 8 seconds, not to mention the slowing effect from both the Frost Trap and the Snake Trap's crippling poison. I wouldn't be surprised to see this changed.

- Lock and Load now has a 22 second cooldown and will not be obtained from Frost trap when the target is immune to snaring effects.

So we are back to a cooldown on our Lock and Load. I really hope they look over this change and increase it's chance to proc from Black Arrow. I was okay when it had a higher chance to proc off Serpent Sting, but had a cooldown. I'm okay with it as it is now with a low chance but no cooldown. But I must say that I am less than pleased with the prospect of having a cooldown coupled with a low chance to proc off of an ability with less than 100% uptime. I really hope that this changes between now and the release of 3.2

Pets

- Roar of Sacrifice being redesigned, again. Can once again be used on any friendly player, but now makes them immune to critical strikes. The Hunter' Pet takes 20% of the damage taken by that player. Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.

Okay, now I won't really pretend to even use this ability, but I do have a feeling that this may be a PvP oriented change. I could be completely wrong on that, but tanks are already immune to critical strikes, and using this on a healer in a raid wouldn't exactly save thier life. Maybe it is targetted towards 5 man groups, but still I don't see much PvE usefullness here. For PvP I can see this possibly saving a partner who has left themselves open to attack, but I don't PvP often, so I don't think I am qualified to say exactly how useful this ability actually is.

Misc. Hunter Changes

- Pet's now Recieve 40% of thier master's Resilience and Pet hit and expertise now scale with thier master's.

PvPers have been asking for the resilience for thier pets for a long time, and I ahppy to see that the devs have finally realized how important this is. As for the seconds part I am overjoyed to see that expertise was included as this means my pet can no longer be dodged or parried (although he can't be parried anyway, since he is always behind his target).

-Replenishment now restores 1% over 5 seconds rather than .25% every second for 15 seconds.

At first this seems life a huge nerf, but after doing the math it isn't quite as bad as it seems. Don't get me wrong, it is still a nerf just not a huge one. in it's current form Replenishment should give back 3.75% of your maximum mana over 15 seconds, or 1.25% over 5 seconds. So theroitcally it isn't that bad, but we will have to wait to see what it means in practice.

-Silencing shot will now also apply a 3 second interrupt to NPCs in order to make it more versatile against NPCs immune to silence effects.

This will help out Marksmanship during fight such as KT where interupts are important, but really a small cahnge overall (That may come back to haunt me, but I am saying it anyway).

And that seems to be all of the announced changes for now. Some of them are good, some of them not so good, and some of them make me go, "meh." I hope to see more ammo changes added to that list soon though, as we were initially told we would have something great, only to be given more bag space. While I do enjoy what has happened so far with ammo, I still expect them to continue improving in that department.

Stick around, as sometime today or possibly tomorrow I will be finishing up the Alt posts I started on before, and soon after will come the story of my guild and the events that lead us to where we are now (8/14 in Ulduar 10 Man). Of course if more changes are announced those will be scattered in as well along with anything else that comes to mind (tossing around a few more tips for Ulduar).

Wait... Did He Just Do That?

2009-06-15T06:42:00.000-07:00

Today I am going to tell you a little story about an event that happened a couple weeks ago in Ulduar. We had just down Kologarn for the first time and most of us knew what was in store for the next boss and were ready to add her to the list of downed bosses. We very well could have too, if it hadn't been for what happened next.

As we decended the stairs we noticed two mobs that stood between us and the Crazy Cat Lady (After butchering the name hundreds of times this has officially become her new name). I forget the name of these mobs, but we quickly gathered ourselves and began discussing strategy. Mind you, while we had taken some time to look at some of the boss fight we would be involved in none of us had really looked into the trash of Ulduar.

After a few minutes we came to the conclusion that we would likely have to kill both or the other would respawn much like the trash in front of Ignis' section. We also came to the conclusion that we should probably seperate them, as the first trash after the Deconstructor has done a number on us the first time we saw them and failed to do so. Other than that, we figured we could handle whatever they had to throw at us. That was mistake number 1.

So we engaged them and the tanks got some room between them. After a few seconds our target began casting and soon enough a large blue ball of light began moving from one to the other. "That can't be good," said a voice over vent as we continued to burn down Skull. That was mistake number 2.

Upon reaching X the blue ball of light disappeared, and soon the mob was dropping novas on the tank left and right. As yet another blue ball began making its way between the two mobs, this time from X to Skull another voice came over vent, "Burn Skull, burn Skull now. Okay, Skull is down, DPS X." That was mistake number 3.

You see, one thing we hadn't taken into account is that these mobs might need to die at about the same time. So as we all turned to face X we noticed that he had reached down into his pocket and found himself a buff. The following was heard on Vent.

"Wait a minute... Did... did he just Bloodlust?"

"Yes, yes he did"

That mob then proceeded to kick the Bear that was tanking him in the face, soon followed by the other tank, then the healers, and finally the DPS. We learned a lot that night. We learned that those particular mobs need to be pretty far apart, but not too far. We learned that if you see a ball of light floating between two mobs it should become your primary target. We learned that those particulars mobs need to die at around the same time. However, quite possibly the most important thing we learned that night is that those mobs have Bloodlust, and they know how to use it.

*For those of you in my audience who might happen to play Alliance, Bloodlust=Heroism.

An Interesting Statistic

2009-06-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

The other day I was talking to a guildie on vent while looking through my Acheivements. After a few minutes I switched over to the Statistics page and eventually found myself looking at this:

This may be one of the most mind boggling screenshots ever, let me explain. You see while I do enjoy battlegrounds from time to time, I really dopn't PvP that much on Chunkchunk. A friend and I made a 2v2 team way back in the middle of BC and played all of 10 games, and I have never been on a 3v3 or a 5v5. So why do I have honorable kills in 2v2 and 5v5? Has anybody else out there had this happen on there acheivements tab? Does anybody have any ideas why this occured?

The Little Pally that Could

2009-06-07T20:15:00.000-07:00

I had a hard time deciding which character to profile next, but since this guy hit a pretty important milestone earlier today I figured I would go with him. Meet Conri:

First and foremost I would like to comment on this guy's name. According to my resources* Conri is Irish Gaelic for 'Wolf King.' Since I am Irish and thought that was pretty cool as far as names went that is what he got. Maybe it isn't exactly the best name for a Paladin, but I like it.

Now, as far as the milestone that he just hit? That would be level 30 which means that Conri just got his first mount, which is pretty funny considering that he has been able to Disenchant items up to level 63 since he hit level 23, which was several months ago. As far as his second profession goes I didn't go with the traditional Enchanting/Tailoring and instead I recently picked up Blacksmithing for him. This may seem odd, but I do have a max level Miner to help him out.

Other than that there isn't much to say about him, he is currently questing in Hillsbrad Foothills, but that can be a pain as I am on a PvP server and he is almost out of quests there. On the brightside one of my guildies has been getting runs through Scarlet Monestary lately, and I have been fortunate to tag a long on some of them.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that Conri is not currently in the same guild as Chunkchunk because he has his own guild and bank tab, perfect for storing all the enchanting mats he has stored up for when he hits level 35.

*My resources consisted of the internet and naming sites, so it may in fact be wrong.

The Lonely Rogue

2009-06-07T19:45:00.000-07:00

Okay, so as I promised last night I have taken some screenshots and it it time for you to meet a few of the characters that I currently play in World of Warcraft. I have decided to do this one character at a time so that the post isn't incredibly long, so first up on the list is Goatcheese:

Goatcheese is my level 71 Undead Rogue. He was the first character I ever rolled and I started playing him again about a month before Wrath hit. I was able to get him to about level 45 and then since that time I have slowly leveled him to the point where he is now. For a short time he was the sugar daddy for Chunkchunk as well as my alts since his Herbalism/Inscription combo allowed me to sell a few nobles cards.

Currently the Goat man sits in Borean Tundra wearing his XP shoulders. He is about halfway done with the quests there and some day will eventually make it to 80. He is currently specced Combat, but if i find some daggers in my adventures I will probably switch him over to Assassination, if I can part with Killing Spree that is.

As for the name, well I will just say that it may be ridiculous, but it does hold some significance for me. Also, on the scale of ridiculous names he is pretty low on the list compared to some of my other characters.

And as for an update, I think I may do 2-3 of these at once, most likely 2 since they aren't that long but at the same time I don't just want to dump 5 posts or so on you at once.

I Hate to Swarm You Guys But...

2009-06-07T05:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, last one for tonight/this morning, I promise. I was just taking a look at my hit counter and the referring URLs to this site and noticed some things.

First and foremost, to those of you coming from Pike's Blog, welcome. Thank's for taking the time to check out my little corner of the Hunter Blogging Community. Take a look around, I don't have many posts yet, but with time that will change.

Second I took a look at some of the hits that i got from google, and since I feel bad that these people were looking for answers that I didn't have here I will now try to infer what thier question was from their search and then answer said question.

First up

Google Search: Aspect of the wild Heigan Hunter

Possible Question: Will Aspect of the Wild reduce the Nature damage during the dance phase of the Heigan encounter?

Answer: I believe that it does help during the encounter, but not to a huge degree. The aspect that really shines during the dance phase is Aspect of the Viper. Since you will be doing very little DPS during the dance you don't really have to worry about the damage penalty and while the passive mana regen from Viper may not be amazing it is still very helpful in keeping you from running out of mana during the DPS phases.

Second Question

Google Search: Does KT Frost Blast have AOE in 10 man

Possible Question: This one is actually pretty obvious.

Answer: Pretty simple answer as well. Yes, the Frost Blast that KT does has an AOE that will make it chain to nearby players on 10 man as well as 25 man.

Last Question

Google Search: Crit chance for Naxx Hunter

Possible Question: Hmm, there are a few possibilities here. Could be what crit chance a Hunter has going into Naxx, or possibly what crit chance a Hunter should have in Naxx gear.

Answer: I guess I'll start by giving you my situation. I checked earlier today, and my gear is comprised of all ilevel 213 (Naxx 25) except six pieces. Those six pieces are:

My gloves and bracers, which are both from 10 man Ulduar (Both ilevel 219)

My trinkets, one of which is the Incisor Fragment from Heroic DTK and the heroic emblem trinket (Both of which are ilevel 200).

My weapons, Envoy of Mortality and Journey's End (Both from 25 man KT and both ilevel 226)

So I am fairly well geared for the content I am currently running and my crit chance is around 35%, possibly closer to 36%. This could be better, as I do have a coule odd gems that need replaced and my trinkets could definetely use an upgrade.

Since I have had most of this gear for a while I am going to have to guess here, as I don't remember my crit percentage when I was 10 man Naxx geared or when starting Naxx. I am thinking that around 29-31% sounds about right for Naxx 10 gear, and probably around 26% when starting Naxx. But remember, this is mostly guesswork and rough estimates, and this can vary depending on your spec.

Okay, other thank that last one I think this went rather well so I may do this again in the future. If any of you have have more precise/accurate numbers for that last one leave them in the comments or send me an email and I will post them and, obviously, give you credit.

Another Post? Already?

2009-06-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

So after that post I headed over to check out what Pike had posted during my time without internet and as it turns out she too has posted a Hunter's Guide to Naxx. Definitely worth checking out, she brings up a few points that I didn't and in case you were looking for that Gluth video I mentioned earlier she has posted a link to it. She also went more in depth on Heigan and linked to her video for the fight in case my "advice" wasn't sufficient. Also, her guide does come from the BM perspective, and while mostly the same there are a few Pet specific things I likely didn't mention. Anyway you should go read it, as it's always good to get multiple points of view on things.

And just in case you think you don't need to read another guide to Naxx I will tell you this, there is one tip she gave for Anub'rekhan that literally blew my mind. So what are you still doing here?

Ugh, the Hits Keep Coming

2009-06-07T04:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, so after a little over a week without internet I am finally back, but this will be a fairly quick post, mainly letting you all know what posts I am currently planning. But first, a story.

Way back in the day I had a good friend of mine who would bring his laptop over and play WoW with me while we drank and watched TV. Since we started our characters around the same time, had similar class schedules and our apartments were seperated by only two sliding glass doors and a balcony we pretty much leveled together from level 1 to 70. Somewhere around level 60 we decided to find a group for Ramparts. Luckily my friend played a Prot Pally, so we were set on a tank and quickly found 2 Priests and a Shaman to group with.

Well wouldn't you know that just across the bridge at the entrance things got a little rough and by the time everything was dead the only ones left standing were the Shadow Priest and me. So We both began to recover and once he had the mana he began the rezzing process. Now, as it turned out, this particular Priest had leveled all the way to 61 or so without picking up anything other than the first rank of the holy spells available to him.

This always stuck me as odd, but maybe that's because when I go to the trainer I train every available skill and only stop to look at something if it's new. Yes this is why I have throwing weapons available, although you can take solace in the fact that it is still at 1/400 (Until I get bored some day and go back to visit Dr. Boom). But why would this shadow Priest do that? Was it to save gold? I know that for the first 8 levels or so it can be a bit of a challenge to train up, but after that you pretty much have to buy gear on the AH every level to not be able to afford training. At any rate when I remembered this the other day I had a quiet laugh to myself before realizing that it brings up a very good point.

I have seen Hunters (And there are likely similar posts from other classes) posting on forums that claim to have low DPS, and are trying to figure out the root cause of the problem. The one thing that I have almost never seen asked that really should be the first thing people ask when trying to help is, "Have you shecked with your trainer." You see, while you learn abilities like Explosive shot from talents you must visit a trainer to learn the higher ranks of these abilities. Believe me, this situation happens more often than you would think, and here is why.

With all the changes that have happened to Hunters since November a lot of people who were already 80 have switched to Survival. However, since they are already 80 they never need to visit the trainer to learn new abilities and the thought of ranking up thier brand new skills simply slips thier mind. So remember, if you are switching to a spec that you haven't used in some time make sure to visit you friendly neighborhood Hunter trainer and rank up those talented skills. And just in case you were wondering, no this didn't happen to me, as I leveled as Survival. And now for the preview of upcoming posts.

As you probably know I have a few alts lying around, and while I have made mention of them here and there I would like to officially iintroduce some of them to you. Yes, this is primarily a Hunter blog, but I think you all might be interested in what else I play.

I am still trying to think of a way to properly explain Gluth kiting in detail, as I think it is very important for a Hunter to know how to do it. I could link to the video posted a while ago on Less QQ, More PewPew, however that kind of feels like cheating to me. Unfortunately I don't really know how to take videos myself, and I don't think screenshots would cut it.

There will be more hunter tips from Ulduar coming, as well as progress updates on how my guild is progressing. As for right now, the guild was able to go in while my internet was down and they took out the Crazy Cat Lady along with Thorim, which means we are on to Tier 8 bosses. I hear they also had some solid attempts on Hodir, so things are going pretty well. Keep in mind this is all 10 man content, since we are still working on rebuilding after everything that has happened.

Speaking of which, at some point I would like to fully explain the situation with my guild. Boiled down to the basics it amounts to the guild taking some large hits and us having to hit the reset button. Again, not strictly Hunter material, but I think there are a lot of people out there who either have been there before, are going through it now, or will go through it sometime and it may help to hear what we have done.

Also, once we have Ulduar cleared and all bosses down I will likely do a Hunter's Guide to Ulduar much like I did with Naxx, but we still have some bosses to go on that front.

Those are just a few of the posts I am planning at the moment, but remember if you have any questions or ideas about something that should be covered feel free to email me or leave a comment. Also, several of my guildmates are currently leveling Hunter alts (Cause we are just that awesome) and coming to me with questions so i will be posting here whenever they bring up something I think is important. Seriously, you should have heard the awe in thier voice the first time they used Explosive Shot. Anyway, that's all for now, I guess this wasn't such a quick post after all.

*One last thing, if any of you have emailed me recently and I haven't responded please resend the email as it may have ended up in my junk folder. Normally I do a daily scan to make sure this doesn't happen, but with my internet being down I was unable to do so and my junk folder is now packed to the brim with no hope of salvaging anything in there. (Just being cautious since I have had many emails end up in junk folders that didn't belong there, my beta key for Wrath being one of them.)

A Quick Tip

2009-05-30T21:17:00.000-07:00

So it's been a weeks since my last update, but don't worry, I am still here and have several posts in the works. However for right now I want to give you guys a helpful tip if you are heading into Ulduar and a fight with XT-002 Deconstructor is in the works.

Watch out for Gravity Bombs. While this may seem fairly obvious it can be tricky at times, and I actually died to Gravity Bomb 2 times during 1 fight this week. We did 1 shot him, but it still opened my eyes to something new about the encounter. Let me explain.

You know how when you go in against Thaddius your pet doesn't have to worry about polarity at all, and is free to DPS while everybody around him runs in circles and stacks up? Well against Deconstructor your pet isn't quite that free to go about his business. I haven't seen Felix himself get the Gravity Bomb debuff, so I don't think that is a problem, but when you have the debuff disaster can strike.

The problem is that when you pet is on passive he/she will return to your side between the regular phases and the heart phases. So what happened Thursday night was after burning the heart down a bit I switched to adds and left my pet attacking on the heart. When the phase ended and Deconstructor went back to his usual bombs and tantrums Felix returned to my side as I finished taking care of some adds. Unfortunately I was given the Gravity Bomb, and as I turned back to DPS the boss and sent my pet in I found out the hard way that Felix was too close. The Gravity Bomb went off, and Felix the Cat flew through the air towards me, killing me instantly.

Thats right, I was killed by my flying cat. Anyway a few moments later I recieved a Battle Rez and quickly resumed DPS, only to catch another poorly timed Gravity Bomb, and once again feel the pain of death by cat.

So a word of advice for all of you, look out for those Gravity Bombs because it affects your pet too.

The Birth of a Hunter

2009-05-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

About three and a half ago a good friend of mine and I were hanging out in my apartment watching television. This friend had recently moved back onto campus after living in the apartment next mine for a year and had found that since the school's policies were somewhat strict he was unable to have people over and drink at his place. During a commercial he reached down into his backpack and pulled out a box, he then handed it to me and told me I should play World of Warcraft with him, so that he would know he wasn't drinking alone.

Now up until this point I had played a total of about twenty minutes of Everquest and hated it. I lumped WoW in with it as something not worth my time. But who was I to deny a friend in need, so I agreed to install the game and try it out. The next day, once the installation was finished and the game had patched he came back over to help me out. I started up the game and he booted up his laptop. I had looked over the game manual and decided that I wanted to play try a Rogue out, so he told me which races could be Rogues. After looking through them for a bit I decided that the only one that really looked like a Rogue to me was the Forsaken, especially since any of the Alliance races was out of the question.

Somewhere around level 7 thing began to fall apart. As we worked our way through a quest, killing members of the Scarlet Crusade along the way, my computer shut down. I turned to my friend and looked at his laptop screen as my little Rogue began walking backwards, aggroing mob after mob. My friend tried desperately to kill them and keep me alive while I restarted my computer and logged back in. By the time I was successful my Rogue was dead.

After laughing about the sight of my character slowly walking backwards into each and every mob he came across for a while I rezzed and we were back on our way. Until it happened again that is. As it turned out the computer I had at the time didn't have the video capabilities to run the game and so it looked as if there would be no WoW for me.

That changed about 6 months later when, after getting a student loan, I purchased a new computer and installed the game on it. A couple more of my friends had just started playing as well, so I was eager to get into Azeroth. However, for some reason I didn't want to play the Rogue that I had made, I wanted something big, something strong, and there it was in front of me... A Tauren, and after looking through my options for a bit I decided on a Tauren Hunter. And that is how Chunkchunk was born. I guess when I think about it now I should be thankful that my old computer couldn't handle the game, otherwise I may have never made Chunkchunk, and my first max level character would have been named Goatcheese. Instead I have Chunkchunk in Ulduar, my Death Knight Mascervezas at 80 doing heroics and dailies, and poor little Goatcheese sits at 71, tasked with herb gathering and glyph making.

Adventures in Ulduar

2009-05-21T06:06:00.000-07:00

You know, no matter how many times we wipe while learning different fights in Ulduar it all becomes worth it when we one shot one of them to get a first kill. (That's me on his forehead holding the big gun, just in case you didn't know.)

Not to mention the fact that our Paladin tank got to replace his Crusader's Square Pauldrons with a brand new set of Shoulderguards of the Solemn Watch. So it was a good night all around.

Also you may notice that I have begun to use pictures, and if you check the previous entry you can now see Felix in all his glory. Some of you may laugh as I stumble my way through this, but I have to keep telling myself, "baby steps."

Pet Utility

2009-05-19T07:56:00.000-07:00

So over at Aspect of the Hare, Pike just updated with some answers to some pretty valid Hunter questions. After reading through it I realized that I have been wanting to comment on one part in particular for some time.

"But Pike, I love my Spirit Beast/Cat/etc.”! Good! Please keep using the pet you love. Cats and Spirit Beasts are still quite viable, they just aren’t in the current “top three” on paper. But “on paper” is just that, on paper, and in my humble opinion it’s not as important as raiding with a pet you have had since level 10, or took forever to find, or just love dearly.

(I can't seem to get blockquotes to work.)

You see this point really struck a cord with me for a couple reasons. Meet Felix:

Felix is my cat. He is almost always with me. I do dailies with him, run circles around Dalaran with him, and yes I even raid with him. Now this means a couple things. First, the last time I checked Felix was bringing a pretty impressive DPS number on his own, in fact that is how he got his raiding spot with me.

The second thing to remember is my guild has a few very good Rogues. One in particular is extremely well geared. The man cried when I mentioned I may try out a wolf after 3.1. Why is this? Well if we look at my little rogue buddy we see that he is specced for Hunger For Blood. Then if we hop over and take a look at Felix we see that just like every other cat, his special ability is Rake. Since Felix is usually the second to attack a boss, second only to the tank, that means that the target will immediately have a bleed effect on it*. What that means is my little Rogue buddy gets to use his favorite opener instead of Garrote and it also means that they are able to get into the swing of thier rotation/priority list much faster, increasing thier DPS and in some situations that of the entire raid.

So when you go about picking your pet I agree completely with Pike about choosing a pet that you like, but you should also know that some of the pets that don't make the "top three" can alkso bring utility to your fellow raiders or party members.

*Yes this is also a bonus of taking a Raptor to a raid, as they also apply a bleed effect to the target.

A Hunter's Guide to Naxxramas Part 3

2009-05-12T05:57:00.000-07:00

Almost done...

Sapphiron

Wear your frost resist gear if you have it. I know everybody says you don't need it, but it helps out the healers, and unless you are going for the Achievement there is no reason not to. Make sure you are mindful of the frost rain in this fight, as it does a pretty good bit of damage and also slows you, which can be a killer if Sapphiron's air phase in about to happen. That's because during the air phase of this fight two (three on heroic) people will be frozen in ice blocks and once they are frozen everybody will need to stand behind them in order to be out of line of sight of Sapphiron's Ice Bomb, which will instantly kill any player not behind an ice block. However this does not mean to immediately run behind the first ice block you see, as the block itself does AoE damage when it lands. So I guess the best advice is to bunch up, but spread out. I know, doesn't make much sense, but that's the best way to put it. Other than that the fight is just DPSing for us Hunters.

Kel'Thuzad

You remeber how I said Gluth was almost my least favorite part of Naxx, well phase 1 of this fight beats it. If you want to know why then log on and make an alt and get him to a mail box. Now get on your Hunter and mail that alt a gold or two. Once you have done that log back onto the alt, collect the gold, log out, and delete the charatcer. That is phase one of the Kel'Thuzad fight, especially if you have to buy Ultrasafe Bullet Machines. However, first things first, dismiss your pet, or at least put him on passive and leave him at your side. Throughout phase 1 you will be standing in a green circle shooting things. Your responsibilities are the skelletons and the banshees. If the skelletons reach your group they do pretty hefty AoE attack, and if the banshees reach the group they do a knockback that proceeds to make somebody pull half the room and wipe the group. Kill them all. Do not worry about the abominations, your melee friends will take care of them. After several minutes of loading gold into your gun and using it to blast things Kel'Thuzad will become active and the real fight begins.

10 Man

Really simple. Stay at least 10 yards from everybody. The reason for this is twofold. First you have to deal with Frost Blast, which will deal 104% of your maximum health in damage over 4 seconds and will chain to nearby players. The second reason is that Kel'Thuzad will occasionally cast Detonate Mana on a player which will, after 5 seconds, deal AoE damage to all nearby players based upon your maximum mana. Okay, so you are at least 10 yards away from everybody? Good, now you have to watch out for Shadow Fissure, which will instantly kill any play inside of them after 3 seconds. Alright, so you are away from everybody and avoiding Shadow Fissures? Nice. Now all you have to do is DPS until about 45%. Once Kel'Thuzad reaches 45% he will spawn two adds and it may be your responsibilty to Misdirect one or both of them onto your offtank. Once that is done it's right back to DPSing. Congratulations and good luck on Helm of the Lost Protector and Nerubian Conquerer.

25 Man

Everything I said up there, it applies here too. The major changes are that he will now spawn 4 adds instead of two and you have a new ability to deal with, Chains of Kel'Thuzad. This new ability is quite dangerous, and unless it is handled effectively it can and will wipe the raid. Chains of Kel'Thuzad is a Mind Control that effects up to 3 players and resets threat on Kel'Thuzad. This makes it dangerous on several levels. First since it wipes threat Kel'Thuzad may target a different player, but to be honest (unless that player is you, and if it is stop DPS and FD) it is the tanks job to deal with it, as they need to re-establish aggro. The second reason it is dangerous is that for 20 seconds up to 3 of your raid members will be trying to kill your other raid member or possibly heal KT. It is at this point that the priority of everybody in the raid shifts to CCing the mind controlled players. If you are survival Freezing trap is likely out as an option due to Black arrow sharing a cooldown, however if the CD is up, or about to come up, send a Freezing Arrow to the feet of a mind controlled player. If you are not survival your trap cooldown is probably up, so you should be quicker to deal with this. Another good tool for this is Wyvern sting if you have it, as it will give players with better CC options time to put them to use. As a side note, I have tried preemptively deploying a trap at my own feet to try and CC myself, it does not work. Also, the mind controls can and will happen several times over the course of the fight. Once you have all that down KT should fall. Since this is 25 man, and the fight is much harder, the rewards are much better. Good luck on Crown of the Lost Protector, Drape of the Deadly Foe, Journey's End, and Envoy of Mortality.

And that is it for Naxx. I know, three long posts all pretty much at once, I'll try and make sure I don't do that very often, but the idea hit me so I ran with it. Also I may put up a couple posts over the next couple days regarding gear to be on the lookout for while you are in the Dread Citadel.

A Hunter's Guide to Naxxramas Part 2

2009-05-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

Military, Construct, and possibly Frost. Go go go!

Instructor Razuvious

For the most part your job in this fight is to DPS Razuvious until he is dead. Pretty straight forward. There are other things going on, and you will hear talk about mind controls and off tanking adds and such, but most Hunters just ignore that stuff. I say "most" because this is a fight where I quite often end up doing some crazy things and saving lives. You see, as a Hunter I spend a lot of time hanging out in the back with the healers. And you may not know this, but the healers are pretty cool people. One of things that our healer friends have to deal with is that they are fairly squishy, especially with a guy like Razuvious running at them and the tanks pre-occupied with the adds. This tends to be exactly what happens what a mind control breaks, so what do you do? Do you stand and watch as Razuvious smashes in your little buddy's face? No, you do what is quite possibly the last thing you would want to do in such a situation, you Distracting Shot. That's right, I said it. Now instead of heading for your squishy little healer friend Instructor Razuvious is coming for you and he means business. This is when you hit your Deterence and Razuvious angrily swings away, unable to hit you. The priest regains his/her mind control and the day is saved. Yes, its a very specific situation, but be ready for it, cause one day it will happen, and it could mean the difference between a boss down and a wipe.

Gothik the Harvester

Very simple fight. You will either be put on the living side or the dead side. If you are put on the living side you kill things and make them dead. If you are put on the dead side you kill things and make them... deader? Anyways, after many waves Gothik will join the fight and, if you made it this far, you will kill him.

The Four Horsemen

There are several different ways to do this fight, so I suggest listening to your raid leader on this one. However, if you are asked to go into the back I have some advice.

1. If you are Survival or Marksmanship but have BM as your Dual Spec, switch to BM.

2. No matter your spec pull out your tank pet if you have one.

3. Put your pet's growl on autocast, yes that's right, turn growl on.

4. Keep mend pet up at all times.

5. Communicate and know when switches will occur.

Even if you follow all of this your pet may still die, try and rez it. The key to being in the back is to make sure that the boss you are on has somebody in range at all times. Your pet is basically acting as a damage shield for you, helping the healers as you can help keep him up. Make sure to bring your pet with you when you switch, as failing to do so will lead to its immediate death.

Military Quarter Trash

Watch out for the spectral weapons after Razuvious, I have seen many groups wipe to these as the staves have a nasty AoE, target them first. Other than that most of the trash in this wing is Deathknights and there is one important thing for you to know about them. Some of them have Bone Armor, which absorbs all damage. What you need to do is open up your spell book and go to the Marksmanship tab. Find your Tranquilizing Shot and dust it off. This will remove their Bone Armor.

Patchwerk

Go nuts. Seriously, throw everything you have at this guy and keep from pulling aggro. Nothing you have to worry about here. Have fun.

Grobbulus

Fairly easy fight once you know it. Grobb will be tanked around the room. Your job is to DPS him and avoid standing in the clouds he leaves behind. From time to time slimes will spawn and the off tank will likely grab them, take them out quick and then get back to the big man. Throughout the fight random raid member will receive the debuff "Mutating Injection." If you receive this debuff run behind Grobbulus to a space between clouds and wait until the debuff wears off. This causes you to drop a cloud of your own, so quickly run back to the middle of the room and resume DPS.

Gluth

Ahh Gluth, almost my least favorite part of Naxxramas. I can guarantee that at some point you will be asked to kite for Gluth. Once you learn how it's done it isn't that bad, but man is it boring. Basically all you want to do is drop down and lay a Frost Trap at the edge of the grate in front of you. Then, as the Zombie Chow spawn you get their attention and drag them through your trap. Don't forget to drop a new trap when the CD is up. Then, after a little while Gluth will decimate and everybody will kill the zombies. Then the whole thing starts again. In 25 man it gets a little more hectic, as zombie chow will spawn from all three grates, but if everything is done right it should still be fairly simple, especially if you have a person covering each grate. (Yes I will probably go into more detail on Gluth Kiting in the future, but this is supposed to be a quick guide.

Thaddius

At the beginning of this fight there are two platforms, you will be assigned to one of them. Before I get started I will say this; put your pet away, dismiss fluffy. I know there are probably other way around this, but this seems to be the easiest. Now that your pet is gone wiat for the tank to engage whichever mob you are standing in front of. Let your tank build up a healthy supply of aggro and then unload. Every so often the tanks will be thrown, but you don't have to worry about that so much. As you fight the monstrosity in front of you be sure to keep an eye on the health of the other one, as they need to go down at the same time. Once this has been accomplished run forward and jump onto the platform with Thaddius. Do not miss the jump. Once there, summon your pet and head for the very center of the platform. Thaddius will become active and shortly after he has been engaged he will cast Polarity Shift. Pay attention to you debuffs. You will need to run to one side or the other. If you get a negative charge, run to the left, if you get a posotive charge move to the right. Then, begin DPS. Don't worry about your pet, they won't get a charge so they can't kill anybody. Now, pay attention to your debuffs some more, since Thaddius will cast Polarity Shift throughout the encounter, but be careful, as your polarity may not change. From there it is just a question of coordination and reflexes. Also, try to stand fairly close so that everybody's charges on your side stack, increasing damage output.

Construct Quarter Trash

The second big room in this quarter is full of slimes, it is advised that somebody get thier attention and then bottlenck them in the doorway, allowing ranged classes to AoE them down. Also, these slimes and the big ones in the first large room will respawn until Grobb is down (At least I know the big ones will) so anybody who dies should be rezzed or summoned by a Warlock. The flesh giants after Gluth should be pulled into Gluth's room, and watch out for shades in the hallway. As a final note, you will die on frogger. Maybe not the first time, maybe not everytime, but sometime you will.

Okay, those two quarters ended up being fairly long, and there is a bit to say about the Frost Quarter/Frostwyrm Lair, so I will post that as soon as I clean up the previous post and get it written.

A Hunter's Guide to Naxxramas Part 1

2009-05-12T04:20:00.001-07:00

I know there are plenty of guides out there for the Naxxramas bosses, and most of them are pretty comprehensive, this is not one of them. This is the quick and dirty guide to what you the Hunter will be doing in Naxx. I won't be going into too much detail, that will be saved for later posts. Also, this is all just from my personal experience.

Anub'Rekhan

On 10 man you will be DPSing until a Crypt Guard joins the fight, then Misdirect the Crypt Guard onto the off tank if needed and DPS it down before switching back to Anub. There will also be small Corpse Scarabs that will need to be AoE'd down every once in a while. 25 man is basically the same except the fight begins with two Crypt Guards already present, so Misdirecting may be more important here.

Grand Widow Faerlina

I have done this fight several different ways. On 10 man you will basically just need to DPS down the Grand Widow, possibly switching to a different mark if it is called out in order to dispell her enrage. On 25 man it has almost always been different for me. Sometimes we burn down the two adds that have nothing to do with the frenzy then switch to the boss. Sometimes we burn down all the adds and then our tank just kites Grand Widow through the enrage until she dies. Most likely You will need to burn down the two Naxxramas Followers and then switch to Grand Widow, no need to worry about attacking the Worshipers as the dispell in 25 man will be done by priests via Mind Control. One important thing to watch out for is Rain of Fire, if you are in it move, welcome to raiding.

Maexxna

Okay, this is the first fight that you will likely have a specific job for. During this fight Maexxna will randomly throw people onto the wall and place them in a Web Wrap. There is a good chance that it will be your job to free them. Luckily, if you have DBM or Bigwigs installed, it's not too tough to do. But don't confuse her Web Wrap ability with Web Spray. During Web Spray everybody will be incapacitated for 6 second, nothing you can do about it. Also this job, unlike Gluth kiting, does not keep you from DPSing away at the boss, you just have to be a little more attentive.

Arachnid Quarter Trash

Nothing too special that you need to be worried about. Lots of AoE packs. Watch out for shades.

Noth the Plaguebringer

Two alternating phases, very simple. Phase 1, DPS Noth, give him everything you've got. Phase 2, kill the adds while he is on the balcony. Rinse, repeat. You might want to make sure you are killing the adds in the correct order, but thats pretty simple, when applicable kill the casters first.

Heigan the Unclean

If you have never survived the Heigan dance then there is a simple 4 step method to surviving this fight. I could instruct you to go watch one of the many videos, but I find that this method works better.

Step 1: Begin the fight.

Step 2: Die pathetically.

Step 3: Watch closely as everybody else lives.

Step 4: Return the next week and survive like a pro.

That is honestly how I did it, and it is probably the best way to learn the fight. After a couple weeks practice you won't be able to believe you used to die. (However if you have bad latency you may only be able to get to step 3.)

Loatheb

You know how normally you have that little Omen thing that tells you how much threat you have? Well it is pretty much useless on this fight. Move with the ranged packs to get the buff from the spores. This buff increases your crit chance by 50% and reduces threat generated to 0.

Plague Quarter Trash

There are a few things to be aware of here. The gargoyles at the beginning of this wing have a nasty debuff that is applied to everybody in your raid, so it may be helpful to switch to Aspect of the Wild if no other similar buffs are being used. Those same gargoyles also have the abilit to heal themselves, so once you see them begin to cast stoneskin burn them as fast as you can. This wing is also home to one of my favorite hallways in the game which lies between Noth and Heigan. make sure your raid kills everything in here. We once had 3 Inevitable Defeat drop in this hallway in one 25 man run. The last bit of warning for Plague wing trash is for after Heigan. That particular hallway is a gauntlet, which means you run as fast as you can and hope everybody lives, and if they don't you hope you have a Warlock and they live. Seriously.

Part 2 of this short guide will be coming as soon as I write it. I decided to split it up since even though its a quick guide it is still getting rather long, and the other wings have a little more to them for the most part.

The Beast That is Armor Penetration

2009-05-12T03:52:00.001-07:00

Okay, so this may be a somewhat cheap post, but Drotara over at Less QQ, More PewPew recently posted a rather lengthy and math heavy article about armor penetration that I suggest every Hunter read. Even if you don't quite get the math it is worth checking out here.

Posts Incoming. No really

2009-05-12T03:25:00.001-07:00

Okay, so things just keep getting hectic in both my real life and in the World of Warcraft. Recently several officers and core raiders from my guild have transferred servers. They did so for a combination of reasons, not the least of which were the higher population on the new server and the different time zone, and I wish them well.

I on the other hand am lacking in funds, so I was unable to make the transfer, along with a couple of the other officers and the majority of the guild. This leaves us all in sort of a state of limbo and many of us have trickled over into a friend's guild while we figure out what is going on.

There were two things that happened as a result. The first thing was that I was able to get my Deathknight tank to level 80. You haven't met him yet, but you will eventually. The second thing that happened was what I really found amazing. The people who stayed on the server took in the situation, studied thier options and from the rubble found an opportunity. So tonight, at about 3 A.M. server time a 10 man Ulduar run was hastily thrown together in order to, "Kill Flame Leviathon and see if we can get anything else done."

Flame Leviathon - 1 Shot, but that was to be expected.

XT-002 Deconstructor - 1st attempt, oh so close. 2nd attempt, Deconstructor down.

Razorscale - 1st attempt, 20%. 2nd attempt, 22% or so. 3rd attempt, I'll admit it, I wasn't fast enough with the harpoons. 4th attempt, Razorscale down.

Now, this may not seem very impressive to some people, but let me elaborate a little bit here. One tank had never stepped foot into Ulduar prior to tonight raid, and the other was there for the second time. Out of the 10 people in the raid group only 3 of us had been present for our previous downings of both Deconstructor and Razorscale.

If it still doesn't seem that great, consider that of the people who tranferred we lost our main tank, 2 of our top DPS, and one of our top healers. Not to mention that we had also left another top DPS recently. So this was a fairly new group, some of them still needing to get some gear out of Naxx, and we were able to down those three bosses fairly quickly tonight. Needless to say I am immensely proud of the group, both for downing the bosses and for taking in the news that many of the leaders of our group had left and rising to the challenge. It has refreshed those of us who had felt lost over the past couple weeks, not sure of what to do.

More posts on the way, especially with tomorrow being Tuesday.

Sniper Training

2009-05-05T18:43:00.000-07:00

I would like to appologize for the lack of posts recently, things have gotten kind of crazy on several levels. However, what better way to remedy the situation than to make a post?

Today I would like to talk to a buff/talent that should be near and dear to every Survival Hunter's heart, Sniper Training. Now the first thing that this talent does is it increases the critical strike chance of your Kill Shot by 15%. That in itself is almost reason enough to take this talent, as I have personally see crits as high as 15k from kill shot in Naxx and more of those can never hurt.

The second part of this talent is where things get really interesting though. Up until patch 3.1 this talent increased damage done when we were standing over 31 yards away from our target. This was nice for some fights, however it was useless in many fights that require us to stand much closer than that such as Thaddius. This changed with 3.1, and not only is this portion of the talent useful on all fights, but it can also make you think more about movement and postitioning.

What the new version does is rather simple, however it adds a new depth to a Hunter's gameplay during fights where movement is necessary. After standing still for 6 second all damage done via Steady Shot, Explosive Shot, Aimed Shot, and Black Arrow is increased by 6% for 15 seconds. Now, the ultimate goal is to have Sniper Training up at all times, while still being safe in regards to where you are standing. The key to doing this is to pay attention to the buff, and no when it's okay to move, and when it isn't. Since the buff lasts 15 seconds, and only requires you to stand still for 6 seconds we are given about 9 seconds of wiggle room in which we can move around as much as we want.

Since we can't control when movement is necessary, due to things like Flame Walls and Void Zones, we have to accept that from time to time Sniper Training will fall off, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of the buff and the time it has remaining. Now if you will excuse me, I think I'm going to see if I can get Power Auras set up to show Sniper Training.

Choosing a Spec

2009-04-29T02:23:00.000-07:00

So there is a lot of discussion about which spec to choose as a Hunter. At least there used to be, and hopefully the debate still continues for some. Post-3.0.2 Beast Mastery was far and away the spec of choice for Hunters and with good reason... It was overpowered with lower level gear. There was talk at the time about how it didn't scale as well with better gear as the other two Hunter specs and so in the end it evened out. Whether this was true or not I'm not sure, as the nerf bat was brought in shortly after I hit 80. But I will admit here and now that for a short time before 3.0.8 I was specced BM, and it felt dirty.

You see I had leveled from around 40 ish to 70 as Marksman, and then later, when Wrath hit I leveled to 80 as Survival. Yes I know it's strange way to do things, but I'm a wierd guy. Anyways, shortly after I hit 80, after running regular Halls of Lightning repeatedly to help a firend get a trinket (If you are a tank you feel my pain and know exactly which trinket I'm talking about), I was called upon by my guild. You see I had been recruited at 70 specifically because I was a friend of an officer (aforementioned tank) and because they were in dire need of ranged Deeps in Naxx. So after only a day or so at 80 I was dragged into 10 man Naxx, quest greens and all. Knowing that they needed me to be there, and knowing that my gear was rather atrocious I recalled everything I had read over the previous weeks and specced BM. While I didn't top the charts, I still found myself in the top 3 or so DPS throughout the night. But like I said, I felt very dirty, only able to continue for the good of the guild.*

The reason I say it made me feel dirty is because I thoroughly agree with Pike and many of the other bloggers I read. I don't think a person should just spec for optimal DPS, I believe that they should spec according to what they like to play. So it made me feel dirty raiding as BM, even though it helped me skip pretty much the entire heroics phase of gearing, because BM simply isn't me.

Now, as Bill Cosby once said, "I told you that story so I could tell you this one." I currently raid as Survival, in fact I believe my build is just the Aimed Shot variant of the current top DPS cookie cutter spec. Am I proud of that? Not really. Do I care that many of the other Hunters I see have the same spec as me? Only in the fact that it usually means no TSA (Trueshot Aura) or FI (Ferocius Inspiration). The reason I play as Survival is because I have grown to love the tree. I love the synergy of it all. I love the way that my talents and procs works together to make fights interesting, especially the recent changes with things like Black Arrow and Sniper Trianing (Which I have yet to master).

Now this isn't to say that the other trees don't have the synergy as well. Many of the Marksmanship talents work together to create a similar experience, and there was a short time where I tried it out. While I did enjoy learning a new way to play and definitely enjoyed only applying Serpent Sting once a fight, in the end it really wasn't for me.

As for Beast Master, well... You see I have this Gorilla, and he is an idiot. And I have this Dragonhawk, also an idiot. Then there is Felix, my raiding pet, my cat... you guessed it, massive idiot. You see BM has a lot of that same synergy and is very engaging, but my pets like to stand in void zones and shadow fissues, and when your pet makes up half your damage that leads to bad things. Admittedly that is really my fault, and for all the BM enthusiasts out there I will one day work on caring about my pet enough to learn these things and give BM another try, but for right now I am just having too much fun with Survival.

That's what it is though. And I guess that is my whole point to this rambling nonsense you see before you. Play what is fun for you. Don't listen to me, don't listen to anybody. Try out all the specs and find what works for you, find what you have the most fun playing. Because after all, it's just a game, and aren't games supposed to be about having fun?

*Some context - At the time the guild was low on members and those that were raiding were all stepping into Naxx for the first time with heroic blues. On the funny and ironic side of things we found ourselves one shotting the bosses that other guilds had problems with, but struggling with the ones everybody else treated as loot pinatas, I'm looking at you Grobulous.

** Also, I mean no disrespect to anybody by anything in this post. It just occured to me that the first paragraph and such could be taken in a bad way and that is not how I intended it.

Hello and Welcome

2009-04-28T19:21:00.000-07:00

Stay a while and listen. Wait no, that's not it. It seems too many years of Diablo 2 have engraved that phrase into my mind. At any rate I would like to use this post to officially welcome everybody to The Hunter Rise.

I guess I should start off by letting everybody reading know who I am. My main is Chunkchunk, a level 80 Tauren Hunter. If the name of the blog didn't make sense before, it should now. Now, before I start getting comments about how Tauren make terribad Hunters I will say this; I don't care. I happen to enjoy the look of my character, and would not change his race even if I were given the option. That isn't to say that I don't like the other races, but Chunkchunk is a Tauren and it fits him.

As for the purpose of this blog, I'm not really sure. I don't claim to be the best Hunter out there, so that's out. And I'm not really into RP, so I guess that's out as well. I guess the reason I find myself here is because I want to help. Yes, I know that there are many blogs out there to help new players and veterans alike. And yes, I know that there are even many that are hunter specific. However, I also know that every once in a while a question will pop into my head, and after hours of reading I am unable to find an answer. The thing is, this isn't the fault of the current bloggers. It isn't anybody's fault. When it comes to the World of Warcraft, and even a "small" subset such as the Hunter class, there is a vast amount of knowldge out there, and only so many people to try and gather that knowledge and make sense of it. Personally, I think with as much as I have learned from the community, that I should try and help shoulder the weight of all the information.

One way I want to do this, and something that I consider to be very important to the kind of atmosphere I would like to have around here, is through Q&A. Now I know from reading other blogs that I may be opening the largest can of worms imaginable when I write this, but if anybody sends me a question about Hunters or anything else World of Warcraft related, I will try to answer it to the best of my ability and post it for the readers to see as well, anonomously of course.

Other than that, I guess there is not much to say. You may have to put up with ranting every once in a while, or a post here and there about one of my alts, possibly even some profession posts. But, for the most part, this is a place for Hunter information and discussions. And now, it's Ulduar time.

P.S. This page doesn't currently have any bells and whistles, and I'm not sure if/when I'll be adding some. If you have suggestions feel free to email me, but be warned that I may ask for help in setting them up if it gets too complicated.