Monthly Archives: May 2009

specs, Uncategorized

IntroSPECtion

28 Comments

Recently there was a post at OutDPS! about dual specs and what different hunters do with theirs. While we obviously can’t do that “I have a heal spec and a tank spec!” (or tank/DPS, or heals/DPS) thing that I’ve seen the hybrids do, I still think that we as hunters have a lot of options.

I, personally, am spec’d my preferred Beast Master raid spec as a “main spec”… and Survival as an “off spec”. I originally went Survival as an off spec for one reason and one reason only: to make the sacrifice and be the Replenishment-bot if needed. As you may or may not have gathered, I do 10mans a lot more often than I do 25mans, and for some reason all my groups seem to lack Replenishment. While Replenishment has become rather less needed in the “old content” as my raid groups steadily improve, I still keep it around “just in case”, and because I volunteered to my guild that I would and, well, I stick to my word like that.

However, I have also come to realize that there are a few other handy reasons to have Survival as an off-spec. Firstly is utility. Although I’ve yet to encounter that glorious crowd control that I used to see all the time (ahhh… chain-trapping every pull in Heroic Mech because our beloved warrior tank could really only do one mob at a time… how I miss ye sometimes), there is at least one encounter where I still feel like I can drop everything and focus on the trapping: Gluth. Typically in my groups we have a Death Knight kite the zombies and it’s my job to back him up by making sure there is a Frost Trap on the grate at all times. With Survival’s reduction of cooldown time and longer trap duration, I really feel useful on this fight. I mean, yeah, I’m sure we’d be fine without the extra utility. But I like Survival being about traps ‘n stuff dangit! *waves cane* >.>

Secondly is the oft-tossed-around “Spec for Pet Unfriendly Fights” thing. Interestingly enough I very rarely switch to a non-BM spec for such fights. Heigan? I’m BM. Sarth? I’m BM. I find keeping my pet alive through those fights to be a fun and exciting challenge and I can usually pull it off… probably much to the chagrin of a lot of the other hunters that I group with!

There is currently one fight, though, that I tend to switch to Survival for pet-unfriendliness reasons on, and that fight is Kel’thuzad. It really depends on the group composition; if it’s a mostly ranged group then I usually won’t have an issue and I can stay BM. But if it’s a heavy melee group– as my current Naxx group tends to be– then I suck it up, respec, use Call Stabled Pet to pull out Perezvon the wolf and let him stand there and be the buffbot because he wouldn’t have a a shot at staying alive until near the end of the fight. It’s sad that he can’t join in the fun, but it’s sort of a necessary evil. Oh, and to tell the honest truth… I’m not sure on the specifics on why the survival rate of my pet on KT seems to directly correlate with whether we are a mostly ranged DPS or mostly melee DPS group. I think it has to do with either that jumping ice block thing or an increased rate of void zones that my pet is likely to eat. I should probably pay more attention to this kind of thing but hey, I’m a hunter. I just shoot stuff until it falls down.

So yeah, that’s the only fight that thus far I’ve felt compelled to swap specs for due to pet issues, though who knows how that will change if I ever get into Ulduar? I’ll keep you posted.

So there’s my reasons for dual-spec’ing what I dual-spec. Works out pretty well, I think. There are a ton of other possibilities I can think of, though…

PvE / PvP. A lot of people are doing this and it’s something I’d seriously consider if I was actually doing PvP these days… which I’m not. =/ Someday I will get back into it. And by “it” I mean battlegrounds… was never big into Arenas.

The Mana Conservative Spec / The Mana Intensive Spec. Similar to Replenishment and non-Replenishment but seriously sometimes I really wish I had my 53/11/7 spec without Invigoration… and then a 55/11/5 spec with 2/2 Invigoration that I could switch to if I was having mana issues but nobody else really was. Seriously, if you could tri-spec I’d probably do this. (Please tell me I am not the only one who is tempted by a dual-spec that is like… two talent points off from your main spec.)

The raid spec / The MY PET IS A CRAZY MAIN TANK spec. I see this a lot and it’s understandable. You raid on the weekdays and solo Onyxia (or just do a ton of quest-ish dailies) on the weekends. Sometimes I think it’d be fun but I can’t be bothered… I don’t do the solo Onyxia thing (though I’d love to try it sometime) and raid-BM works perfectly fine for dailies!

…A spec you just plain like / Another spec you just plain like. Absolutely nothing wrong with this! It’s fun to be able to swap specs just because you’re feeling like something different that day.

Spec you are testing / Another spec you are testing. Then swap between them on the training dummies. I’ve actually been tempted to do this sometimes, with specs that are a single talent point different from each other. But in the end I’m too miserly with my gold to actually do it. >.>

In the end, I really do find dual-specs to be a welcome addition to my repertoire– yes, even as a hunter.

How do you guys dual-spec?

screenshots

And Piggy Makes Three

10 Comments

With Tawyn’s acquisition of Mr. Wiggles yesterday, she now possesses all three of the “old-world” Children’s Week minipets– Speedy being her first and Whiskers being her second. Because Childrens’ Week was the first ever in-game holiday I experienced (seriously, I was about level… 16?), this means I’ve officially headed into my third year of playing World of Warcraft.

wow_turtleonmybed

For those of you who have been playing a lot longer than I have, that’s probably nothing, but for me it’s sort of a “wow… crazy” moment, that I have now played for two full years and am headed into my third. Two years ago I was on my last week of university courses ever and I opted to install the demo version of the game knowing I could now safely play it without having to worry about being distracted from homework and various super-important projects. I rolled up Tawyn, the teal-haired hunter, who was supposed to be a tauren except that the person who got me into the game was Alliance so I had to follow suit. Two years later she is (perhaps astonishingly?) still very much my main, and I’ve made some of my current best friends in-game and become some sort of blogger. Weird, huh?

Happy birthday, Tawyn! And thanks to all my readers for letting my share my WoW experiences with you guys. <3

specs

Fiftythree-Eleven-Seven

41 Comments

I had a comment in my last post asking what the current “on paper” best Beast Master raiding spec is.

Now as a forewarning, I do not have access to all these pretty spreadsheets everyone else uses. I’m on Linux, so no Excel for me. And the Open Office versions lack a lot of functionality. =P

That said, I have been lurking the Beast Master threads on Elitist Jerks, and the one spec that keeps coming up is 53/11/7 or some very similar variant (such as swapping out Improved Mend Pet for Spirit Bond– no real difference on your DPS).

I was extremely wary about this at first. Give up 5/5 Mortal Shots and a point in Go for the Throat? I mean, I’d swapped out Improved Arcane Shot for Improved Tracking a while back, having been sold on it based on my own testing, but was Survival Instincts really that worth it? The Mortal Shots change was the one that scared me the most, although eventually I managed to talk myself into it with the logic that my pet was 50% of my damage (which Mortal Shots doesn’t effect) and my Auto Shot is 50% of my personal damage (which Mortal Shots doesn’t effect) and my crit hovers around 30% so that’s 70% of special shots that Mortal Shots doesn’t effect… and etc. So, while I resisted for a while, I recently made the plunge.

My ten-man Naxx a few days back with my new spec went very well, and then yesterday I got into a 25man OS.

4922 DPS on one of the drakes. Using Wash the raptor, and 53/11/7.

For you guys that are in diehard raiding guilds and are in 25man gear, that’s probably not a big deal. For Pike who still considers 10man Naxx to be challenging and fun and is toting around a couple blues, it’s a big deal.

The other two hunters had 4800 and 4300 respectively; they were both Survival and outgeared me. To be fair, the 4800 guy was usually a smidge ahead of me on all the other fights. But no, this fight was mine, all mine, and it was glorious.

More importantly I was sold on the spec. Survival Instincts? Makes me crit more, and when I crit more, Cobra Strikes procs more, and when Cobra Strikes procs more, Wash’s Savage Rend crits more and his damage is increased by 10%. That thing was critting left and right and it was awesome. Not only that, but I was keeping a careful eye on Wash’s focus, and I never saw him focus starved. Not once. 1/2 Go for the Throat + Bestial Discipline for great justice!

My recommendation: give 53/11/7 a whirl and see what you think! Afterall, it’s only as good as it works for you. Though I think you will have a good experience with it.

Now some of you are no doubt scratching your heads and wondering why the heck I am trying to maximize BM DPS when SV is still all the rage despite the fact that the difference is much smaller now (and may become even smaller if the 3.1.2 Lock and Load change is a nerf and not a wording fix.) If you are wondering that, you will probably have to continue wondering it and just smile and nod, because my head is kind of an odd creature when it comes to this and chances are if you don’t really understand it now, nothing I can say would change that! Suffice to say that I’m the girl who very happily raided Karazhan for eight months back in BC and is very merrily raiding Naxx now, with little to no motivation to raid anything harder, who would rather have minipets over gear and would rather see her screen filled up with an amalgamation of both hunter and pet crits than be the top of the DPS every time… who still likes to see herself performing well in Recount.

That, my friends, is just how I roll.

guides, hunter kindergarten, pets

Pet Specs: 3.1 Beast Master Edition

24 Comments

Pet specs have been shaken up a bit with the advent of 3.1, so let’s talk about how you will ideally spec your three types of pets. First up, pet specs for us Beast Masters (I’ll cover you non-extra-talent-points folks in a later post!)

Ferocity:

ferocitypetspec20points

You will probably want your Ferocity pet’s talent tree to look like this. This scoops up everything you need to ensure your pet is the instrument of your vengeance in your average raid or heroic. Of course, there are adjustments you can make if you are solo’ing or leveling and would rather pick up, say, the stamina or healy-type talents. But honestly, Heart of the Phoenix never once worked for me anyway, so I didn’t really have a problem with ditching it… >.>

Cunning:

cunningpetspec20points

Your cunning pet is a very versatile creature who can be used in a variety of situations, and as such I consider his talent tree to be the most flexible in terms of talents that you do/don’t want to take. I have found that this works very well from a solo’ing or questing standpoint. I know Cunning pets are often overlooked these days but honestly, equipped with things like Owl’s Focus, Feeding Frenzy, Wolverine Bite and Roar of Recovery (now with a shorter cooldown), they are not to be underestimated. Try one out and see what you think.

Tenacity:

tenacitypetspec20points

With Thunderstomp no longer Gorilla-exclusive and some great new tanky–talents, the Tenacity changes were really great. I have found this to be a very good pet-tanking build. You purposefully bypass some of the typical “DPS” talents in favor of making your pet able to take it, if not dish it out. There is some flexibility here if you’re not a big fan of Last Stand and would rather put the Avoidance+Last Stand points somewhere else, although I’ve found it to be quite a lifesaver in multiple tricky situations, myself… I wouldn’t go without it.

Welp, there ya have it. Toss me your questions and comments, and the “non-Beast Master edition” is coming up soon!

fun, movies

This Is What I'm Doing With My Film Degree

20 Comments

Before you ask…

– The song is called “Bucket!” and I wrote it. A 100%-Pike creation I made in 2003 when screwing around with a program that was then called FruityLoops. The original movie of this that I made used the songs “I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash and “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers but YouTube threw copyright notices in my face and disabled the music, so in protest I am using an original song that I’ve been sitting on for years, waiting for a good time to use it. I think it works well.

– Yes I know there’s easier methods to get this achievement. Not nearly so fun though!

– See the big shadows on the ground starting at 3:38? There are supposed to be buildings there. And people wonder why I eat flame walls… *mutters*

screenshots

It Was Worth Every. Last. Mark.

12 Comments

tawynmechanostrider

I had like 75 of each Mark of Honor laying around collecting dust in my currency tab, and mechanostriders are basically the best mount in the game, so yeah.

The bunny ears? A leftover from my Aspect of the Hare proc, of course.

***

So if everything goes according to schedule, I have a Naxx raid tonight. This is good, because I haven’t been to a raid in a few weeks and I am getting reeeeeally antsy. I am loving the Argent Tournament which I just started doing these past few days– it’s way more fun than I was expecting, and I am addicted to jousting (I’ve got to a point where if I’m lucky, I can get the other guy down to 0% health in about fifteen seconds)– but yeah. I wants me some raid action. *twitch*

By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, you probably won’t be getting any Ulduar posts from me anytime soon. I do not have the raiding group or schedule for it, and I’m probably not geared for it anyway. >.> It’s okay though, there are plenty of other good bloggers talkin’ away about it, so it’s not like you’re completely out of luck! I’ll still be here if you want some non-Ulduar chatting.

*bounds around on Mechanostrider*