All posts by Pike

blogs, links

Shout, Shout, Let it All Out

11 Comments

Just a couple of quick shout-outs in this post:

I figure most people know about Brajana’s “Needs More Stable Slots” charity drive by now but if not, you’d better check it out quick because there are only a few days left to help out fuzzy animals!

Mania, the editor of Petopia, is looking for info on how to improve Cunning Pets so we can deliver it to Ghostcrawler in one neat tidy package and he can stop saying he’s looked everywhere on the intarwebs and failed to find it. =P

Lastly, everyone should read this post by Rilgon about account security. It is very informative and easy-to-read, and even if you think you already know the ropes of account security, it’s worth a look as a refresher course. At the very least, you can go read one of the reasonings behind why yours truly flat-out refuses to use the terms “hack” or “hacker” when it comes to this sort of thing (the other reason being, hey, I come from a free software/open source background where it’s a positive word! =P Why yes, I am stubborn/elitist/an open source zealot/[insert your adjective here])

COMING UP NEXT: Either “My life with crabs” *cough* or rants about professions. I’m still undecided on which to write about next…

fun

Things I Suck At

21 Comments

1. PvP servers. All of my hordies reside on The Venture Co., an RP-PvP server, and they began there as an experiment to see if I could handle PvP servers. Two years later I have come to realize that I really can’t, at least not while keeping my sanity intact, but at this point I have too much invested in the server and all my characters there to really move or anything. And so, I log on, take a deep breath, have my spammable /hug macro at the ready, and head out into the scary world of red text above peoples’ names. I still suck at it though.

2. Saying goodbye to WoW blogs. Always a bittersweet moment for me, I’m happy to see people move on with their life but lately I’ve just been reeling at the growing realization that, in a way, I really feel like one of the last of the “old-school” WoW bloggers. I’m never quite sure what to make of it, other than I sort of feel like the pressure to deliver good content (and to keep-blogging-forever, to fill the void… oh dang, I see your ruse now, blogosphere! /shakes-fist) is continually rising. Anyways, go say farewell to Mr. Slow Wolf, now, and thank him for being one of the (very) few remaining Beast Master hunter bloggers. /salute

3. Not spoiling things. Sorry Twittersphere! D= Omen is good stuff though, I need people to ramble to about it when Mr. Pike isn’t around.

4. Survival. To every last one of you who tells me that they have spec’d Survival and seen some major DPS increase– yes, about 99.99% of you out there– you have my utmost respect for pulling that off. Watching me try to play Survival is like watching a bear try to do ballet, only not nearly as amusing, and in the end it usually just results in people crying.

5. Dealing with the heat. There is no air conditioning either at my apartment or at work. Anything over 75 degrees Fahrenheit is too hot for me (I’m a T-shirt-in-55-degrees kinda girl). This situation has made me seriously consider looking for new apartments, like Canary Wharf apartments. It’s been about 85-90 this past week. You can see my dilemma. /dies

6. Airman in Mega Man 2. Isn’t that supposed to be one of the easy levels? D=

7. Repressing my urge to send Trade Chat grumps Tasty Cupcakes in the mail and cheerily tell them to turn their frown upside down. Self-explanatory. (Admission: I’ve mostly stopped trying to repress this urge. Hilariousness ensues.)

8. Remembering to take out the trash. Oops? >.>

9. Making money in-game. Argent Tournament was fun until I got tired of people refusing to do Chillmaw with me unless I helped them do all the other AT quests with them as well, and honestly I just like to do my dailies solo as much as I can (that’s just how I roll), so… yeah. I’m currently in the middle of experimenting with this foreign “turn herbs-into-flasks’n’stuff for other people and not for me” strategy, but it’s slow going.

10. Making money IRL. /pokes the bank account, which is holding up a “Feed Me” sign

11. Zozo in Final Fantasy 6, but don’t we all?

12. Actually being on time for work. *checks watch* OH SHIZ *runs*

thoughts

Aspect of the Hunter Q&A! (Wall of Text Inc)

9 Comments

So I’ve had a lot of people on Twitter or even on my last post (which wasn’t even Q&A related!) ask me for my thoughts on the recent Hunter Q&A. Though at first I was sort of reluctant to do so, out of fear that maybe everybody and their grandma would have already blogged about it, I decided to go ahead and do it anyway. At the very least, you get to hear the thoughts of a casual raiding hunter who currently isn’t raiding and thus has to resort to playing her level 46 and level 76 hunters respectively, in the meantime. /cough

For the sake of length, I’m only going to be mentioning the aspects of the Q&A that interested me and/or I felt warranted some commentary from me. I apologize if your favorite part wasn’t mentioned. If you leave a comment asking for my thoughts on a certain thing, I would be glad to let you know my thoughts either in the comments, or in a future post. ^_^

We want to clean up some of the clunkiness that still exists around pet control (both the UI itself and what the pet does on the battlefield).

This is interesting, though to be honest what I am mostly looking forward to at this point is a revamp of the pet stats window that is a part of your character screen. I’d love to see my pet’s crit, haste, etc. Wouldn’t you?

We still want to make ammo more of a gear choice than a consumable. We’re not sure if this would be as simple as getting the 125 dps arrows to upgrade your 120 dps arrows, or if you would do things like swap between your fire and poison arrows… but that kind of thing is definitely on the table.

WTB Fire and Poison arrows. Like that’s not even me being reasonable and/or logical, that’s just an “OMGWANT.” Guys, have you ever played Ocarina of Time? Seriously!!

The problem with upgrading hunter ammo currently is how we work the progression. We don’t want to drop ammo on bosses for what I hope are obvious reasons so long as they are consumed. We need to have ammo improve as other gear improves, however, or the hunter overall starts to fall behind. Therefore there has to be some barrier that stops freshly leveled hunters from getting the best ammo while letting cutting-edge hunters procure it. In Burning Crusade, we handled this through a reputation grind, but it still wasn’t a very satisfying answer. In Wrath of the Lich King, we went with Engineer-crafted ammo and more recently changed the way ranged weapons scaled so that they would keep improving even if the ammo did not.

For 3.2 we lowered the cost of the ammo quite a bit — only 4 gold for a stack to manufacture. If you were paying 50 gold a night, that should drop to say 16 gold a night. Long-term this won’t be a problem because arrows won’t be consumed.

My ammo bag (Yes I still use my ammo bag *huggles it*) contains about two rows worth of the 1000-stacks of cheapie vendor bullets, and the rest is all Mammoth Cutters. I have an engineer friend that will send me free boxes of them on occasion, otherwise I’ll literally buy out the Auction House. Yeah, it’s pricey, but at least they last forever. I only use the Mammoth Cutters for raids or when I’m in a heroic with another good hunter (I get sooooo competitive around good hunters. I dunno if that’s good or bad.)

I’ll add that the melee attack issue for hunters themselves is something we keep discussing. While we are unlikely to go back to a melee-focused build for hunters, we might consider a model where hunters don’t run away most of the time but switch to melee attacks – perhaps even a single punishing attack on a cooldown before the hunter Disengaged or whatever. This would be one of those things that helped hunters feel more different than actual magic casters, and might make them care about melee weapons as more than stat sticks. Additional feedback from the community on this sort of thing would be appreciated.

I don’t really see what is wrong with us having a stat stick even for a physical-damage class. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but rogues and warriors have a “Stat-bow” or “stat-gun” right? Though, I sorta like the idea of having one hard-hitting melee attack pre-disengage. That sounds fun.

Q: Would we consider allowing auto-shoot to work while moving? If there aren’t plans for that specific change, is there anything in the works that will assist hunter dps in fights where a great deal of movement becomes necessary?

A: Moving should feel like a penalty. We don’t want ranged attackers constantly circle strafing FPS-style because it confers a defensive advantage without giving up an offensive one. Moving is supposed to be bad and how you handle it is a test of your skill.

Repressing my urge to run around is a difficult thing for me to do and is one of the reasons I love instant-casts and instant-cast-based classes (hai, resto druid) so much. But on the other hand, I do agree with the reasoning here, especially from a PvP standpoint. So yeah.

Q: Are there any long term plans to possibly removing the need for hunters to rely on a different resource system then mana?

A: I hate to do this to you, but this is a great BlizzCon question. For these Q&As, we’d like to keep the focus on each class’s current status and short-term plans, but at BlizzCon we’ll be happy to go into some more detail on our long-term vision for them.

What I’m about to say is going to cause a mass exodus from my blog, but ohwells:

I actually like hunters having mana right now, in endgame at least. (Leveling I will touch on in a moment.)

See, you know why I could never get into playing anything that relies on rage or energy or runic power? Because the whole experience is just my character saying “NOT ENOUGH ENERGY! I NEED MORE RAGE!!” over and over and over and me being frustrated because the button I want to click is grayed out. Sure, you have the comfort of knowing you’ll never “run out of mana”, but it’s not a big enough tradeoff for my extreme impatience.

I was one of the few people who liked the new Aspect of the Viper when they announced it in WotLK beta. I was one of the few people that defended it on the forums, and I got a lot of flak for it which is one of the reasons why I quit hanging out on the beta forums. It works nicely for me when you have a decent amount of mana replenishment going on, and I like it. /shrug

THAT SAID.

There are downsides. One downside is that if you lack outside mana replenishment, you feel like you are in Viper a lot, and it gets annoying. But to me, the biggest problem hunters have with mana right now BY FAR is leveling. Good luck finding old-world hunter gear with intellect on it, and good luck not being in AotV 75% of the time. My leveling hunters tote around stacks of mp5 food and mana oil and spec for ultimate mana efficiency at the cost of better talents and I’m still in Viper most of my time. Sure, we have no downtime, because we can still keep killing stuff while OOM or close to it. But you’re supposed to learn to enjoy your hunter partially because of those big numbers popping up on your screen. If you’re in Viper most of the time, it becomes silly. Not to mention stuff takes forever to kill.

My proposition: Either somehow make Viper work better with leveling, or for the love of the Earthmother, give us more intellect. Seriously.

/endrant

Now for hunters specifically, we think the class is just too cooldown limited, which creates problems with haste. We’ve driven in that direction in order to give hunters a more interesting rotation, and to be fair, we feel like we’ve done that. But being cooldown limited isn’t necessarily a fun way for the class to play and we think it’s one of those things that makes hunters feel more like casters than like ranged-weapon users. (Hunters are casters in the sense that they’re ranged dps, but we still want the emphasis to be on the gun or bow.) More on this at BlizzCon, too.

The class feels too global cooldown limited to me at times; by the time I can dig into my rotation it often feels like your average mob is half dead already. That’d be cool if haste lowered the global cooldown for us. I dunno if that would be OP or not. That’s for Blizz to figure out, not me. (Can you tell I know nothing about theorycrafting? XD)

MudkipComputerGame

(breaking up the wall of text with a non-sequitur picture!)

Q: Beast Mastery falls behind Marksmanship and Survival in regards to DPS, especially when the pet dies, due to how much damage comes from the pet when specialized in the Beast Mastery talent tree. Do we have plans to bring the potential damage the Beast Mastery tree offers to be more on par with what’s currently possible with Survival and Marksmanship?

A: Ideally, we want Beast Mastery to be able to do competitive damage with Survival and Marksmanship. Realistically with dps classes, it’s a math problem, and one tree nearly always edges out the other ones in most situations. That doesn’t mean we stop trying, but it also means we have to be realistic about what it will take to really get the specs to within 1% dps of each other, which is sometimes the point I fear we’d need to hit.

The buffs to Catlike Reflexes and Wild Hunt were intended to boost Beast Mastery a little without causing every hunter in the game to swing back to Beast Mastery the way they all swung to Survival a few patches ago. We don’t necessarily like buffing Beast Mastery through the pet all the time. However, Beast Mastery also doesn’t have a signature attack like Chimera or Explosive Shot. At the same time, we don’t necessarily want to give them one because then Arcane Shot risks just vanishing from the hunter rotation. But, we can’t just buff Arcane Shot (unless it is very deep in Beast Mastery) because Survival and Marks use that too. See the problem? Ultimately the tree is supposed to be about pets, so we would rather make the pet easier to control and give the hunter ways to get the pet out of trouble so that they don’t face the profound dps loss of pet death. And even then, having a pet that is 50% or more of your dps is always going to have design problems, so we can’t go overboard. Beast Mastery and Demonology (and even the Unholy death knight) are going to be at a greater loss when their pet dies. That’s just the cost of having a more powerful pet.

I know not everyone here agrees with me, but it made me extremely happy to see that little phrase “We don’t necessarily like buffing Beast Mastery through the pet all the time.” Now don’t get me wrong, I love having my pet be 35%, 40% or so of my damage. I love when there is synergy between hunter and pet and we proc things that make one another stronger. But lately it feels like Blizz has just been buffing the pet and buffing the pet even more and hey guess what, we’re buffing the pet again!… and pretty soon we’re going to get up to that uncomfortable point where we were at the beginning of WotLK where my pet was doing 55% of our total DPS on Patchwerk and it just felt so very, very… “Well, I may as well sit here and read a book while my pet does the work.” Ya know? I want to see the Beast Master hunter get some love too. I want to see more things that the pet does give the hunter some sort of beneficial effect. That’s why I fell in love with the tree in the first place and I haven’t been seeing it lately and it’s left me a somewhat unsatisfied Beast Master.

It does also make me happy to see that Blizz is aware of BM needing a buff. That’s really all the reassurance I need. Yeah, it may take ’em a while to get around to it, but I’m in no rush.

We’d rather not have to come up with additional mechanics needed to heal pets or keep them alive. We’d rather just the pet didn’t die in situations where a player that can make intelligent choices wouldn’t have died.

Awesome idea, thanks Blizz <3 I would also like to add, I've been thinking lately it may not be a bad idea to just take Improved Revive Pet and Improved Mend Pet and make the effects of those baseline for all hunters and replace them with DPS talents in the BM tree. In my mind, every hunter of every spec should be making an equal amount of effort to keep their pet alive anyway. (Which is why I never use the “Beast Master is difficult to play because we have to have pet control” argument on this blog– I think all hunters have to have pet control. But maybe that’s just me.)

Hunters in the online community tend to focus a lot on overall PvE dps or overall PvP survival and not get too much into pet comparisons. Someone theorycrafts the best pet and then hunters just go and get it instead of discussing what the other pets would need to be more competitive. To be fair, there is some of that discussion, but it’s not always easy to find, and I have looked. It’s not super high priority given some of the other hunter design issues we’re looking at, but we do want pets to be a choice.

Translation: HAY GUYS LET’S TALK ABOUT THIS. No, I’m serious. Though it sorta surprises me that Ghostcrawler is having trouble finding this stuff online, I see people talk about it all the time. Perhaps our ol’ crab buddy is looking in all the wrong places.

Q: Due to the number of abilities available to hunters, many level 80 players have expressed concerns in regards to placing all necessary abilities on their action bars. Are there any improvements coming that will assist hunters with this particular issue?

A: We recognize this as a problem. We need to get more buttons off of the bar. We made some progress with streamlining say tracking and aspects, but we’re not there yet.

An aspects bar, maybe up by our pet bar, would be cool.

Q: Additionally, do we plan to expand upon the number of pet action bar slots? Due to the current number of slots available for pets, hunters frequently have to swap pet abilities in and out of their spell/ability book.

A: Yes, we definitely want to do this. The whole pet bar needs a little work. There are still some bugs relating to which abilities can be moved on or off the bar and whether they default to autocast or not. We want the bar to work much more like character action bars.

Sounds good to me.

Q: Do we have plans to increase the number of stable slots available to hunters?

A: Obviously we increased it a lot in Wrath of the Lich King. We want to try and keep the pet as some kind of decision — they aren’t supposed to be like mounts or titles where you just collect as many as you want. We expanded the size so that players could have say a Tenacity pet for soloing and a Ferocity pet for raiding, but we don’t want every hunter to have every family available here. Now one potential problem are the Spirit Beasts, which are collected by hunters and not trivial to replace. We have also discussed expanding the Spirit Beast concept to have rare skins of other pet families (that otherwise don’t convey a combat bonus). If we do that, we’d probably have to expand the stable slots.

We’ve also considered a model where the hunter doesn’t even need a stable and can work more like a warlock where they can just summon their pets whenever they want — with the remote stable ability from the dual-spec feature, we’re pretty close to that already. If we went this route then maybe the stable could just become pet storage in the same way your bank has all those Invader’s Scourgestones and Zul’Gurub bijous that you don’t use often but can’t bear to part with.

I am on two minds with this. On the one hand, I like the general idea of having a limited number of stable slots. That way, not every hunter has every pet in the game. On the other hand… well, lemme put it this way. You know how many hunters I have? You know how many times I STILL agonize about my lack of stable space across all my hunters? Yeah.

My own little suggestion and solution for this would be to make it so you still have your five stable slots, but then you could re-obtain any pet you had previously released via the Stable Master. Hey, they say they help you find lost pets and companions, right? =P You would have to release one of your current pets to make room in your stable for it, but then you would get your previously-released pet back at whatever level it was when you released it. I’d give this service some sort of slowly-increasing fee akin to talent point re-spec’ing just so it doesn’t become an extended stable slot and you’d still have to put some thought into it. And you couldn’t access any of said released pets mid-raid via Call Stabled Pet. So you’d have your five pets “at the ready” and then any of your past pets you could get from the Stable Master for a cost. That way, the hunters who spent forever taming Loque only to never use him in a raid, would feel better about releasing him, knowing they could get him again without having to do the camping thing again.

I dunno, it seems fair to me.

And that’s that! Like I said, these are just my thoughts on the matter. No doubt most people disagree with at least one or two things I said, and that’s fine. I’m in somewhat of a unique position right now, and on top of that, we all have our own differing thoughts on the state of the game, and it’s good to have those differing opinions.

And with that Wall of Text, Pike is out!

beast mastery

WTB Raccoon Shot, PST

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raccoon1This was originally going to be a commentary on the recent Blizzard Hunter Q&A, however two things occurred to me: 1.) I’m going to work in 25 minutes, which clearly isn’t time for an adequate post on the subject, and 2.) MMO-Champion has since updated with some interesting Beast Master tidbits from Blizzard. So I’m going to write about that latter thing instead (I’m still intending on writing a Q&A commentary, though, since I feel like I’ve got some unique things to say about it– look for it this weekend or on Monday.)

Anyway, let’s take a look at this latest news:

Arcane Shot and Beast Mastery
Yeah that was my point. The solutions are:

1) Give BM a signature shot and try to give Arcane a situational use.
2) Buff Arcane so deep in BM that nobody else will get that talent.
3) Accept that BM needs to be buffed in ways other than shots.

There are good points and bad points to each tree having a signature shot. A bad point is that it makes e.g. set bonuses hard because you can’t boost things like Explosive Shot easily. A good point is the trees feel a little more different rather than just swapping Explosive Shot for Raccoon Shot if you were BM.

Arcane Shot and Beast Mastery (#2)
If we buff the holy heck out of Arcane, then every Survival hunter just shoots Arcane and won’t take Explosive Shot. Since a lot of the Survival tree is designed to prop up Explosive Shot, we think this would a bad thing. Hence, we have to be very careful about how much we buff Arcane. If we do it in a very deep BM talent, then it’s probably safe. If we do it baseline or through a glyph or an upper talent, then we might get into problems. By contrast, buffing Explosive or Chimera is pretty safe because no other hunter can ever use those shots. BM doesn’t have a “this is BM only” attack to buff, unless it applies to the pet.

[…]

As I have said a couple of times now, a very deep BM talent to buff Arcane Shot might work. Otherwise, most of the BM damage is tied up in the pet or at least the pet being alive. Perhaps BM could benefit from a totally new mechanic, even it wasn’t a signature shot, so that we would have more knobs to turn when we needed to buff BM (and only BM).

What it means: Blizzard is aware of Beast Mastery needing a buff, preferably through more buttons to press. I know they are being wary on this though; one thing they mentioned in the Q&A is that one of the reasons Beast Mastery has a more simplified rotation is to allow you to have more leeway to focus on pet control on difficult fights. They were quite wary about Beast Masters having to juggle both a complex rotation, and having to keep your pet alive on Sarth or something.

My thoughts? We can easily fit another shot in there without getting “too complex”.

Honestly my mind is literally stuffed full with ideas on ways they could do this or otherwise buff Beast Mastery deep in the tree, but since I don’t work for Blizzard, we’ll just have to see how things go. My thoughts on a potential “Raccoon Shot” (we’ll play along here) though?

I think it’s fair to say we want to differentiate it from Explosive Shot and Chimera Shot, because we like the different talent trees being unique. My initial thought is to attach a Black Arrow-like effect to it: you toss up your “Raccoon Shot” which does some damage on hit, and also has an effect for a short period of time afterwards; damage increase, extra armor penetration, increases the critical strike damage bonus from all attacks you make on the target– that kind of thing. If we really wanted to get snazzy we could make it affect the pet as well. You could name the ability after a Poison Dart Frog or something. That’s pretty Beast Master-y, right?

My only concern on that is that it becomes too similar to Black Arrow which, again, sort of nullifies some of the uniqueness between trees. Black Arrow is a pretty signature Survival move, there is really nothing that feels like it in any of the other trees right now. But, it seems like a viable idea to me.

raccoon2

Blizzard’s other idea was just to drop the idea of a “Raccoon Shot” all together (which somewhat saddens me *pets the Fuzzy Theoretical Raccoon*) and simply really buff Arcane Shot deep in the Beast Mastery tree. They have already sort of done this via the new Ferocious Inspiration, but it’s clearly not enough of a buff. If they were to go this route, I think we’d have to forego a flat damage increase and go with something more interesting. Reducing the cooldown actually seems fairly reasonable to me. Perhaps we could attach it to Longevity. Or maybe all your Arcane Shots are guaranteed to be critical hits while under the effect of the Beast Within (That would get you three guaranteed Arcane Shot crits right there.) I dunno, these are all just general ideas I’m tossing out, but you get the picture!

The most exciting part, though, was the mention that “Perhaps BM could benefit from a totally new mechanic, even it wasn’t a signature shot, so that we would have more knobs to turn when we needed to buff BM (and only BM).” I am having trouble envisioning a new interesting hunter mechanic that isn’t pets, shots, and traps, but I would love to hear some ideas on this, because it could potentially be very cool. Dontcha think?

Overall I’m excited to see what the future may hold for Beast Mastery, though I’m trying not to get my hopes up about getting all these neat changes before the next expansion. Better to be pleasently surprised than disappointed I say! Beast Masters really are in a good position at the moment; through the course of World of Warcraft’s history we have gone from being pretty useless to being pretty awesome (albeit via Steady Shot spam), to being sort of middle-of-the-road but with some stuff to do. All they need now is to give us a little more stuff to do, to boost us into what I see as an ideal position for us.

I’m not in any rush right now; I’ve been playing a lot of my babyhunters while Tawyn takes a vacation in Stormwind and makes millions of flasks and potions to sell every few days. Time to sit back and see what happens.

And let’s hope Blizz throws in a free raccoon, cause they’re cute.

Raccoon-285

fun, Uncategorized

Top Ten Hunter Abilities I Use At Work

27 Comments

For those who are not in the know, I am a Real Life Beast Master. No, really! See, I work at a pet store, and specifically in the section of the store that actually deals with animals. So if you were to visit my store, you wouldn’t find me stocking the shelves or manning the cash register. No, I’d be the short girl with dark hair walking around fishing out individual comet goldfish for the overly picky discerning customer, chasing loose crickets, feeding animals and cleaning cages, probably with a sleepy chameleon perched on her shoulder.

Yes, mine is a unique position in that I can actually pick out several abilities and talents from my class in World of Warcraft and remark that I use them near-daily. Observe…

1. Beast Lore: What do hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, rats, mice, chinchillas, parakeets, cockatiels, conures, finches, canaries, bearded dragons, leopard geckos, anoles, water dragons, chameleons, turtles, tortoises, uromastyx, frogs, toads, snakes, crested geckos, and over a hundred species of freshwater fish have in common?

I can tell you what they all eat and how often, what sort of habitat each needs, and who can live with who.

Of course, I didn’t know all of that naturally, oh no. This job has the steepest learning curve I’ve ever climbed. Fortunately, you get to a point where you learn that certain animals are like certain other animals and make assumptions on their behavior that are relatively accurate. This is especially true with fish: most large tetras act one way, most small tetras another, et al. And once you figure out where a certain reptile’s natural habitat is (forest, desert, rainforest, etc.) it’s pretty easy to build them up a good habitat. Of course, if you get a completely new animal in, it’s off to the books to figure it out. Beast Lore, indeed!

2. Feed Pet: We have dozens of different types of pet food as well as things like crickets, worms, and yes, frozen mice at our disposal. Gotta know who eats what! Needless to say this is done twice a day, every day.

3. Mend Pet: No matter how well you care for an animal, there is always the chance that it will get sick. Hamsters in particular have a tendency to contract diarrhea, or as we call it in the parlance, “wet-tail”. You will occasionally see other ailments as well, or certain critters (mice mostly, those are brutal little guys) will beat each other up. Fortunately, with the help of a few different specialist vets in the area, we are usually able to nurse them back to full health. Applying salves and creams to wounds and rashes or giving (very) reluctant critters a drop of medicine out of a syringe is something I’ve had to master the art of.

4. Wing Clip: Parakeets are the most common recipient of this IRL hunter ability, and it has to be done just right; clip the wings too short and you risk injuring the bird, but leave them too long and the bird can still fly.

It may sound silly or strange, but every time I have to do it, I can’t help but really feel the responsibility I have as a “Real Life Beast Master”. By clipping a bird’s wings, you are taking away possibly their most precious commodity: flight. You have to hope that what you are giving them in exchange– a chance to form a friendship and bond with a future owner– is worth the price.

5. Tame Beast: A conure is a type of small parrot. They are very intelligent, and when they first come to our store, they are inevitably very wild and afraid of people. However, if you spend a little time with them every day, they warm up to people really fast. Magic, or Tame Beast? You decide!

6. Distracting Shot: Aforementioned conures like to be really loud and noisy if you are anywhere in the vicinity, because they want attention. The trick to keeping your eardrums intact while you do work in their area is to give them something shiny to play with, such as keys. Presto! All’s quiet again. Gotta love a good distraction.

7. Bestial Wrath: Okay, okay, so this isn’t something I use personally. But have you ever seen an angry hamster? Have you? If not, you don’t want to see one. Especially those Dwarf Hamsters. *shudder* Believe me, I encounter this one a lot.

8. Animal Handler: Learning the fine art of picking up a Dwarf Hamster (remember what I said about them earlier) and not having your finger instantly demolished takes a lot of practice. Always good to have two points in this talent for my job, I say…

9. Cobra Strikes: I sometimes have customers comment on my fearlessness around snakes. The truth is, I am rather fond of snakes, and aside from the smell of warm preservative (love the smell of formaldehyde in the morning…? Not really x_x) , feeding snakes is one of my favorite things to do at work. You wiggle a mouse in front of their face with a pair of tongs and they sit there and watch it and watch it and watch it and then they STRIKE! when you least expect it. You have to learn to let go of the mouse right away so they can gulp it down. A lot of fun to watch, if you ask me. I try to apply a similar technique when catching birds with a net. I’m apparently pretty good at it.

10. Readiness: Because you never know when an anole is going to leap out of the cage when you have it open and you’ll have to make a dive for it (literally).

As you can see, “being a hunter” and “going to work” are pretty dang similar for me. Unfortunately, my hunter has a few things that my real-life persona doesn’t, and here are the top three in my book:

1. Improved Tracking: So far in my pet-store-career I’ve personally lost a Crocodile Gecko and a Chinese Water Dragon, both of which leapt out of their cages, landed on my face, and proceeded to disappear. What I wouldn’t give for a better way to find the tricky lil’ buggers.

2. The Beast Within: For the more pesky customers, since they do come in once in a while. I actually have access to this one but I must keep it leashed in the name of a paycheck.

3. Feign Death: For the days when I’m just not feelin’ it. “Hey guys, I can’t come into work today, I’m dead.”

Really though, other than the oh-so-sucky retail schedule and the whole having-to-deal-with-too-many-people thing, I rather enjoy my job. It’s fun and interesting, the days fly by, and hey, who else gets to say that they are, in a roundabout sort of way, still playing WoW while at work?

Beast Master in real life? You better believe it!

beast mastery, endgame, guides, hunter kindergarten, raiding, screenshots, Uncategorized

So You Want to Raid as a Beast Master Hunter

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I recently had a comment left asking a question similar to “Is Beast Mastery viable in a casual ten-man Naxx raid?”

The answer is yes, yes, and very yes.

Because I did it once a week for a good few months, and heck, this was before pets had Wild Hunt and Shark Attack available– good ol’ post-nerfs but pre-3.1 Beast Mastery. (Then my Naxx group disintegrated and scientists are still baffled about it. True story.)

Anyways, I would hit 3800 or so on Patchwerk and slightly less on other bosses (Loatheb being the exception of course). Occasionally some rogue would pop out of nowhere and get 4000 and snag “First Place on Recount” from me but I can’t recall ever being worse than second.

If that isn’t viable enough for a “causal ten-man Naxx”, then I dunno what is!

WoW_PatchwerkShotBreakdownEdit

Of course, Beast Mastery is kinda touchy. Because it does the lowest DPS currently of all three hunter specs, it can be difficult to coax DPS out of it. Here is my advice to you:

Spec:

Have a viable spec. By viable I don’t mean “zomg most top DPS evar, no exceptions!” so much as a spec that isn’t just darts thrown at your talent tree. Back when I first began doing weekly Naxx runs, I was 53/18/0 and I did very well. I respec’d to 53/11/7 and did better, and I’m currently running with 54/12/5 which does the highest spreadsheet DPS in a 25man at the cost of slightly lower DPS in five-mans, as compared to 53/11/7. Both would get you roughly similar numbers in a ten-man. All of these three specs are good, as are specs that are very similar. See which one works best for you.

WoW_Arachnophobia

Glyphs/Rotation:

These go hand in hand together especially for us Beast Masters. You want at least Glyph of Bestial Wrath and Glyph of Steady Shot. Once you have these, your rotation is Bestial Wrath (when available) -> Kill Shot (when available) -> Arcane Shot -> Multishot -> Serpent Sting (when it needs to be refreshed) -> Steady Shot. Use Kill Command and Rapid Fire when they are up, as well. Kill Command works especially nicely in conjunction with Bestial Wrath.

A quick word on Multishot: I used to tell people to only use it when you have mana replenishment, however, I’ve been playing around with Zeherah’s Hunter DPS Analyzer (I am in love with it) and discovered that you should always use Multishot when you can.

I also used aforementioned website to try talenting into Aimed Shot, snagging the Glyph of Aimed Shot, and using that in place of Multishot. While the resulting numbers weren’t bad per se, they were still a fairly moderate DPS loss as opposed to spec’ing something like 53/11/7 and just using Multishot. So, that is that!

You will notice that I haven’t mentioned a must-have third glyph; you have a couple options here. Kill Shot, Hawk, and Serpent Sting are all viable ones. I get the best results with Serpent Sting myself: less having to refresh Serpent Sting, more time to do other shots!

WoW_TawynGoesRawr

Pet:

I still say you should use what you love when it comes to pets ^_^ however, Devilsaurs are the proven top DPS pet for Beast Masters at the moment. Raptors and Wolves are fairly close behind; I think Raptors edge ahead of Wolves a bit. Cats, Moths, Spirit Beasts, etc. aren’t bad options either, although they aren’t in the “Top Three”.

The important thing when it comes to pets is to have them spec’d for pewpew!

Following these simple steps will have you more than ready to conquer Naxx10 with a Big Red Pet. How viable is it for other, bigger raids, you may ask? Well, I’ve done OS25, VoA25, and a good portion of Naxx25 as BM and performed rather nicely. You may not be #1 on damage but you will be pulling your weight. As for Ulduar, well, I’ve no idea how you’d do in there, although there are some Beast Master hunters on my blogroll who are in Ulduar and are doing very well. There’s also a thread on Mania’s Forums dedicated to studying Beast Master DPS in Ulduar.

Oh, and did I mention this screenshot of the EU first kill of Yogg-Saron with no keepers? Notice the devilsaur in the picture and the little Ferocious Inspiration icon in the corner? It made me very happy to see that. To be fair, from what I understand, it’s largely because the mechanics of the fight favor DoTs, and your pet is essentially a very large DoT. Still, it’s proof that there is a time and place for Beast Mastery even among the best of the best.

In closing: If you wanna be a Beast Master, be a Beast Master. Most of us aren’t in the hardest of the hardcore raiding guilds and we can get away with it quite nicely! Bestial Wrath away, my friends.

WoW_KTAfter

classes, thoughts

Where In The World Is…

30 Comments

(The correct continuation of the title, by the way, is “Carmen Sandiego” said in a deep Rockapella voice. This shall not be disputed.)

One of the things that has been on the ol’ mind lately is the popularity or lack thereof of various specs and classes. Not so much in a QQ sense even, but in a “Man, where did all those [insert spec] here go? I kinda miss having one in my raid” sense.

These mysterious endangered species specs vary from server to server and even from personal experience to personal experience but here, I’ll tell you mine, class by class…

Death Knight:
I actually see all three DK specs fairly evenly represented. Unholy is probably ahead by a smidge. It’s the pet, I tell ya, people love ’em (more on this later).

Druid:
This is what inspired me to write this post. Where the heck are all the feral druids? I can’t even remember when the last time I had a bear tank was. The other druid specs are doing quite well. Trees are arguably the healer I see most these days (though not by a large margin… but I would put them in front), and I probably group with more boomkin than mages. Cats are seen frequently in lower level dungeons, and by the same token, bears are seen relatively frequently at low levels too because it’s easy for a leveling kitty to just step in.

But at endgame? Where are all you lovely fuzzy teddybears with a yummy 5% crit bonus hiding? My hunters miss you dearly. Seriously, let’s say I get into a VoA. “We need one more tank,” someone says. “Invite [so-and-so]”, says someone else. /who So-and-so. 40% chance it’s a paladin, 40% chance it’s a death knight, 15% chance it’s a warrior, and 5% chance it’s a bear. Why? I dunno. Ghostcrawler keeps saying they’re OP, how does he know if no one is playing them? =P

It is my hope that with the next patch and the improved forms, more people will be inspired to take Feral for a spin. I miss bear tanks.

Hunter:
I’m sure most of the readers of my blog know this one goes without saying. Survival is currently eating the biggest piece of the cake by far in my groups. Interestingly there seem to be roughly similar (though much smaller) numbers of Marksmanship and Beast Master. I sorta think it’s cause I’m on an RP server. We’re more likely to get the people who think about their character when they think about their spec, hence, more people staying BM. On the same token, I swear I am the only hunter on the dang server without a Spirit Beast in the stable.

Mage:
Okay. What I am about to tell you is going to blow your mind.

…

…

I raid with Frost mages more than both of the other specs combined.

It’s actually gotten to the point where I wonder what it’s like to raid with a non-Frost mage.

I think it’s the water elemental. Like I said, people love them pets.

Or maybe it’s because the poor frost mages are in the same boat with me, the Beast Mastery hunter, so all we do is PuG stuff. Who knows!

Paladin:
Paladins are living the high life right now, I swear. They’re so ubiquitous that being in a group without at least one is a surreal experience. “…where’s Might? Where’s Kings? Didn’t they come default with Heroics? Is this a bad dream?”

I see paladins of all three specs quite frequently, although I see Prot and Ret slightly more than Holy. Probably because they synergize together better so everyone dualspecs to those. Although, the Prot/Holy types who are good with both specs? They are to be feared. For being the most useful person in the world. Seriously.

Priest:
I see priests pretty evenly represented. Shadow priests are in vogue right now mostly because the good ones are Gods of Recount. Disc is still sorta that crazy spec that no one understands so they’re lagging behind Holy a bit, but I’ve seen them in my groups too.

My priest knowledge is roughly comparable to my knowledge of higher mathematics (“Oooh look guys, I can make my caluclator say “Hello”), so moving on…

Rogue:
I know nothing about the rogue specs. Like, Subtlety is for sneaking around I guess? I couldn’t tell ya who is what by playstyle though. Fortunately I’ve configured my XPerl to show me someone’s spec when I target them. As such, I have cleverly deduced that Assassination was all the rage at the beginning of WotLK, but since then the pendulum has largely swung back around to Combat, at least from what I’ve seen. Subtlety is pretty much extinct although you still see the random Sub rogue while leveling.

Did I mention I know nothing about rogues? I know nothing about rogues. The class is a completely foreign concept to me.

Shaman:
I have no idea where all the resto shamans are hiding, because I know they’re there.. I sorta think they all got scooped up by raid guilds the second they materialized in the game world because I never see any in PuGs, but I always see them standing around in Ironforge (never Stormwind) with super fancy gear and usually an Amani War Bear and a Hand of A’dal title. Hence my hypothesis.

Anyways, Elemental/Enhancement representation seems to be pretty even, with Enhancement gaining the edge in lower levels and Elemental gaining it at higher ones. I like shamans. I could never get into playing them, but I like having them in my group. *pets them*

Warlocks:
You’d think I’d know more about warlocks seeing as my boyfriend plays one and writes about them on WoW Insider. But I really don’t. All I know is that there are approximately 1395802462 times as many Demonology warlocks as any other spec, and I blame the Felguard. (See? It’s that pet thing again like I was telling you about.)

Sometimes I’m in a group with an Affliction or Destruction warlock that isn’t my boyfriend. It freaks me out. “Wait, you mean warlocks that aren’t my boyfriend use their imp/felpuppy? /boggle”

Warlocks in general are kind of an endangered species, which saddens me, because the world could always use more in-instance summoning stones, don’t you think? >.>

Warriors:
I am convinced that 99% of the world’s prot warriors either rerolled Death Knight, or respec’d to DPS. Yes, I have no idea where our tanky warrior friends went. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for prot warriors, they just looked like they were working so hard in Burning Crusade– no idea if they still have to work hard or not, but the soft spot remains. I’d like to see more of them just for that.

This one time I saw a Fury warrior dual-wielding Legacy and something else. I was kinda jealous. The End.

And that, as they say… is that.

This has been a Pike Incorporated Presentation. One’s experiences with various classes and specs may vary. Some restrictions may apply.

Uncategorized

Return of the Avatar Contest

9 Comments

Just a friendly reminder that the Sitemeter hits counter on my site is a few days shy of hitting 300,000 and, as in the past, a custom cartoony avatar of your character is up for grabs for anyone who can send me a screenshot of it reading the number on the nose (or the closest number in the event that no one snags the actual one).

The winners’ avatars will be free of charge and will be added to the queue behind a couple of commissioned ones I am working on at the moment.

Speaking of commissioned avatars, if you have “ordered” an avatar through me, be sure to check your e-mail frequently– occasionally I’ll send someone an e-mail alerting them that their avatar is ready and then not hear back from them for quite some time! Not that it’s particularly urgent or anything, and of course I understand that you are busy, heck, we all know how bad I am with keeping up with my e-mail. But, I figured I’d mention it. /nod