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();

I don’t use a LOT of macros, but there are in fact some that I couldn’t live without. Here they are…

Hunter’s Mark/Pet Attack:

/petattack
/cast Hunter’s Mark

Puts Hunter’s Mark on something, and sends your pet in to attack. My pet and I are never attacking something without Hunter’s Mark on it, unless I have a reason to be (trying to take on two things at once, etc.)

Pull Shot:

/cast [nomodifier] Arcane Shot(Rank 4); [modifier:ctrl] Distracting Shot
/stopcasting

Hitting the button by itself fires off a mid-rank Arcane Shot; holding Control down fires off a max-rank Distracting Shot. After either one, you stop casting, so as to not break your own trap. The first one is useful for pulling things to where you want them to be while out solo’ing or questing; the second one I use in raids/instances, just to be sure.

Tank Assist:

/assist [tank’s name here]

Useful in five-mans and some raids to figure out what the tank is targeting. Note that the tank won’t always be targeting what you should be attacking, so use with caution!

“The” Infamous Macro:

/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/cast Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()

Basic 1:1 Auto/Steady Macro. Not as DPS-heavy as a more flexible 3:2 macro, but also not a mana-eater like that one would be. I very rarely use this macro (we’ve had the talk about how I think it’s boring, right?) and it’s here mostly in case of emergency (for example: massive lag spikes during a boss fight which makes manual weaving impossible)

Not hunter related but…

Action Bar Lock/Unlock:

/run LOCK_ACTIONBAR = (LOCK_ACTIONBAR == “0”) and “1” or “0”

Locks and unlocks the action bar with a button click. I keep the action bar locked 99% of the time (I haaaaaaaate randomly pulling something off of the bar in the middle of PvP/a boss fight), but sometimes you wanna move stuff around, so that’s what this is for!

And, yep, that’s it for my hunter-related macros. I also have several “fun” macros such as my Mount macro (uses Flying Mount in Outlands, and Normal Mount in Azeroth) and my random mini-pet macro (have I mentioned my bag space issues? Now you know why). But I figured I’d try to keep this post as hunter-related as I can.

What sorts of huntery (or even non-huntery) macros are your favorites?