Just some random thoughts…
— The hunter obsession shows no signs of slowing down. Lunapike is level 66 (Kill Command, come to me my precious), Althalor is level 31. I’ve sort of re-adopted another level 12 hunter I had lying around who I hadn’t played in so long that her pet had 126% experience because of the turnover from the pet leveling speed increase. Which happened a loooong time ago.
It’s sort of funny how much I genuinely try to get into other classes and how much I fail miserably; balance/resto druid is my best attempt and I’ve actually gotten her to level 42 but I can only stand playing her for short amounts of time before I have to run to the comfort of my hunters. I do still plan on getting her to 70 and going healy… someday. Because I have found that I enjoy healing, but I dislike DPSing as anything other than a hunter, and unfortunately there is a lot of DPS involved in the leveling process.
— Thinking I’m definitely gonna experiment around with the various updated hunter talent trees in WotLK (seriously, did you see the Explosive Shot in Scarlet Monastery YouTube movie?) although I have a hard time imagining permanently spec’ing something other than Beast Mastery– simply because I love the hunter/pet symbiosis so much. I have tried a few times now to level a survival hunter (call me crazy?); it always falls through because one of my favorite parts of leveling a hunter is watching my pet slowly get stronger and stronger. Definitely glad to see the other trees getting some expansion love though; it’s about time.
— I love all the e-mail questions/comments you guys send me, and please don’t stop sending ’em, but I feel I should stress that if I do not get to you within a couple days, it’s nothing personal, I’m just rather busy with lifestuff right now! I read everything though.
— I headed out to Blasted Lands the other day and did a bunch of DPS tests. Now I know testing my DPS against a level 57 mob is not as accurate as testing it against a raid boss, there are a ton of differences and factors involved, but I wanted to have a somewhat controlled environment with set conditions (“I will do science to it!”) and still get my pet in on the action which isn’t exactly possible with, say, Dr. Boom.
The results of my experiment? I do as much DPS hand-weaving a 1:1 rotation as I do spamming a 1:1 rotation macro. I know, crazy, right? I surprised myself and tested it multiple times with the same results– I was getting about 1050 DPS whether I manually weaved or macro-spammed. As you can guess, this makes me incredibly happy, because now my stubbornness when it comes to hand-weaving is justified! /dance =P
Of course, I also experimented with a 3:2 macro, which bumped my DPS up to about 1125, a huge increase, but left me with zero mana in a matter of seconds. So that macro was banished away to a hidden location for emergencies. I still like hand-weaving my own shots. I am just that psychotic. I have been getting some e-mails lately about macros and different Beast Master rotations. I want to come right out and say I am not the expert on shot rotation macros but I think it is a “Hunter Kindergarten”-style post which I will probably look into writing up because there seems to be a lot of interest on the subject.
Well, that’ll do it for today’s Random Post. Have a good day, people!
Oh, and for the record, these were the macros I was using in my test:
Macro’d 1:1 Auto/Steady:
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/castsequence reset=3 !Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();
Macro’d 3:2 Steady/Auto:
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast !Auto Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();
Obsession is universal, irregardless of what class you may play. I’m a devout priestaphiliac (I think that I coined that term, thank you very much!) with four priests beyond 60, another four in the wings, and three on Feathermoon US alone. I’d like to think that it’s because of the old adage of sticking with what you like, but I really enjoy learning more about the class and there’s always something new and exciting going on.
Random post day, whee! And I think that many of we (us?) hunters would prefer to maximize our performance without having to rely on a macro. It’s very feasible with the 1:1 macro, but much more difficult when you’re looking at 3:2. It’s part of the reason why I’ve always been interested in going Survival; being able to do something between weaving two types of shots and two stings really intrigues me.
I hand-weaved my 1:1 for a long time. And when I did a test on Dr. Boom, there really wasn’t a huge difference, I did almost exactly the same DPS with either method – the thing that made me switch to the spammable macro finally, is the fact that in most raid encounters, you can’t just sit there watching or listening for cues/cast bars and timing perfectly. There’s a lot of movement and with a spammable macro, your concentration can be more on the encounter than your timing. That is what made the difference for me! Just thought I’d throw that out there. 🙂
@ Brajana – Indeed, that is a good point, I know I haven’t experienced many raid encounters (SSC is the farthest I’ve ever gone)– I guess with me, when I am using the macro, I tend to “tune out” everything else if that makes sense… I become so concentrated on clicking that button as fast as I can that it’s actually harder for me to be adaptable with the macro.
Plus, I worry about it breaking CC– it has done that to me a few times before– not sure how, but it has. I’m probably using it wrong somehow.
I’m slowly coming to gripes with my love of hunters. I mean, I love my two priests, but…I LOVE my 4?…5? …Hunters! (Soon to be 6?….)
Dax
Im a Hand weaver as well. Must come from the many games of halo. It just seems more hunterish and skill based to me then spaming a macro but each to there own. Use what you like.