Firstly, thanks for all of your continued kind comments! I received a lot of requests for more hunter kindergarten posts and guides for lower-level hunters. Well you’ve come to the right place: ask and ye shall receive! I’ll be working on more Hunter Kindergarten guides shortly.
Lemme tell you a little about today, though. I got home from work, logged onto WoW, and noticed I had a mail waiting for me from Blizzard Customer Service. Excitedly I ran to the mailbox, eager for my boots, and found… two badges. Just those. And a letter from Blizzard that seemed to be closing up the whole issue.
They also had an e-mail address, though, telling me I could e-mail them if I had any further requests, so I quickly fired off an e-mail to them telling them about my boots and how I saw them and couldn’t get them, and could they pretty please get them to me?
After that, though, I was in sort of a low rut of a mood, stressing about my boots and all. So I went and did some Sunwell dailies and then went to the new badge loot vendor and decided to take a close look at the badge stuff because to be truthful all I’d really paid attention to before was the Choco-Bow.
But today I saw this and immediately began drooling. And it cost 100 badges. I had more than enough.
And I wavered. I was suffering from No Boots Syndrome and I needed something to lift my spirits and ohhhh that chestpiece is about a million times better than my current auction house blue which I’ve been wearing since about ten minutes after I hit level 70.
But the bow that I’d been wanting forever…
But now I have this rifle which is still pretty darn good and which just plain looks sexy…
And I hit this horrible crossroads where I couldn’t make up my mind and I didn’t know whether I wanted to spend 100 hard-earned badges only to later decide I’d made a terrible mistake and would rather have the bow or something, and then have to earn 100 more badges.
So I decided to do something I’d never really done before and consult The Spreadsheet. Most of you probably know what I’m talking about. Basically a hunter sat down and coded up this ridiculously complex and awesome spreadsheet where you can insert all your stats and it will cook up your DPS and your shot rotation and you can sit around and fiddle with stuff to your heart’s content and decide what is optimum for you.
I’ve never really used The Spreadsheet before; I tried it once before and got confused and quit. (I get confused easily. >.>) But this time, armed with Drotara’s guide, I plugged in all my stuff by hand (the Open Office version, which is the only version I can use on Linux, does not let you import info from the Armory) and did some research.
Turns out that by either getting the Choco-Bow and keeping my current chestpiece, or getting the new chestpiece and keeping my current gun… I get almost the same exact DPS increase. I think the bow gets me a very slight edge (less than 1 DPS). Either way I do gain about 18 DPS. The super interesting part was that with the bow, I’m the one getting most of the DPS increase, whereas with the chestpiece, a lot of the DPS increase will come from the pet. So I suppose it’s really a choice of whether I’d like to have more of a pet-DPS increase or focus on the hunter-DPS increase. And also a choice of whether I’d rather spend 100 or 150 badges to obtain roughly the same increase. And a choice of whether I’d cheat on my rifle (my preciousssss) with a Choco-Bow.
Leanin’ towards the chestpiece but I don’t want to make any major decisions right now. Especially because I sort of wonder if the haste rating is going to make things harder on my hand-woven shot rotations. So for now…
I will have patience and will think about this some more.
And I will wait for my boots.
/twitch
I am glad you were able to find the guide useful. If there’s one thing to remember is that badges are easy to come by. I always try to get the big things out of the way personally, and then the smaller things seem easier. Like 150 badges now, and I can 100 badges, 33% less, and get a BP. Good luck on the boots! 😀
My guess at this point is they figured to give those boots to another member that went to Chess Event with ya but hopefully they still give it to you.
I personally bought the pants Leggings of the Pursuit (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=34914) as I’ve had the Beast Lord leggings for a long while. My plan is next to get that chest piece as I’m now way over what hit cap I need and the Breastplate of Rapid Striking hit rating is more then expendable now. Those leggings brought up my dps by over 10 dps and added 1% more crit with how I gemmed it. I kept meaning to check my pet’s dps but when I thought about I was already raid buffed which doesn’t give me an accurate measure. I’d like to think my pet reached 170 dps unbuffed.
Good luck with getting those boots.
I found doing the children’s week quests was a good way to break from the normal grind.
You could ask the kids their opinions – they say the darnedest things
I’m a bow hunter, WoW wise. I love the bows in the game. That said, the one gun I want is the Wolfslayer. I’d say keep that gun and get the chestpiece.
The wolf slayer is an excellent BM bow, but you will be keeping the choco-bow until Wrath as it’s best in game for BM hunters (all other better bows are 3s).
I would say if you already have a crit scope on your wolf slayer, get the chest piece as the wolf slayer will already be very good. If you haven’t gotten the crit scope then get the choco-bow and buy yourself a crit scope, there will be a pretty solid change in dps then.
As for hand weaving your shots, 26 haste won’t push your shots below your current 1.9s shot time with wolf slayer. Blizzard calculates speed to 4 decimal places on the server thought so your current shot speed on the server is actually 1.93s or so. So the haste will actually bring you closer to the 1.9s you would see on say quartz. It isn’t enough of a speed increase to throw off your shot rotation though, unless your having trouble fitting steady shots in already.
The benefit of having the dps boost coming from your pet is higher dps with no additional threat from you. It does require pet micromanagement, but it definitely has it’s benefit.
Pretty sad that your education had to come from someone as petty, rude, and soulless as Drotara.
go with the chest piece.
the gun is cooler looking than the PO’d chicken x-bow
dps increase from pet = no increase in your personal threat
also, think about the cursory stats that’ld go up, mana & etc.