Category Archives: Uncategorized

guides, hunter kindergarten, screenshots, Uncategorized

Aspect of the Viper and You

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Welcome, friends, to Hunter Kindergarten! Today’s topic: Aspect of the Viper.

First a little history lesson for your newer hunter types: You used to learn Aspect of the Viper at level 64, and it was a passive mana-regen that didn’t reduce your damage the way it does now– well, other than the fact that if you were in AotV, you certainly weren’t getting the RAP bonus from Aspect of the Hawk. Despite this, there were a lot of fights in Burning Crusade that were pretty mana-intensive and you’d see a lot of endgame hunters running around in AotV 99% of the time. Me? I was always a purist so I only used it in emergencies; staying in Hawk and living on mana pots, Elixirs of Major Mageblood and Mana Oil (RIP, my beloved Mana Oil *sniff*). But the point remains that Blizzard realized that hunters were pretty mana-inefficient, spending all their time in AotV, and missing out on the yummy RAP bonus from Hawk.

Enter Wrath of the Lich King and we have an all new Aspect of the Viper, and what’s more, we can learn it at Level 20:

wow_aspectofthevipertrain

^ Pike’s fourth hunter to hit the big two-oh. Back in the day Aspect of the Cheetah was the big thing you learned at 20, now I’m much more excited about Viper. Cause hunter gear with Intellect on it sorta doesn’t exist in the old world. /cough

So what’s the new Aspect of the Viper do? Simple. It slices the damage you deal roughly in half but gives you mana back at a pretty solid rate. Some of this mana you gain passively, but a lot of it you gain back per shot… as in, every time you shoot something, with either Auto Shot or a special shot, you get mana back. The damage penalty does not apply to your pet, but it does apply to things like Serpent Sting that you apply while under the effects of AotV.

When to use it:

–When you’re out of mana/nearly out of mana. This one’s a given. Happens a lot when you’re out leveling or solo’ing (no downtime!) or sometimes mid-fights in instances/raids with little or no mana replenishment from other classes/specs. Not a lot you can do about it in that case!

–Between pulls. Say you’re in a five-man. You pop into Hawk/Dragonhawk, do a pull, and oh look, you’re almost out of mana! Hop into Viper. Right as the next pull starts, go back into Dragonhawk. Now sometimes if you’re in a really good group the tank is just gonna be chain-pulling stuff left and right and you’ll still find yourself having to either stop and drink, or Viper during the fight, but overall I’ve still found Viper-between-pulls to be a good strategy and a very good habit to get into.

–When you’re briefly out-of-the-fight. When Gothik ports to the other side of the gate, Viper until he comes back. When you get the Grobbulus debuff and you have to run to the wall and you’re much too far away to do any shooting, Viper until you can get back (alternative strategy on this fight for Beast Masters in particular: if you’re pretty full on mana when this happens, use Aspect of the Beast instead, to maximize pet damage while you’re away.) When you’ve killed all the adds and are sitting around waiting for Noth to port back, use Viper. …yeah so those were all Naxx examples, but you get the picture. >.> Ah, here’s a non-Naxx one: In Utgarde Keep when the final boss dies for the first time before whats-her-name comes down and pulls an arise-my-champion on him, yeah, use Viper.

When not to use it:

–When you’re full on mana. This is a given, you don’t want that damage reduction to be on you. I know it’s easy to forget about it (I forgot alllll the time the first couple of weeks of 3.0.2) but once you’ve been playing with it for a while you start to remember it. There are addons out there that you can search for that will help remind you too.

–When you really really need to kill something fast. I’ve been in fights (usually five/ten-mans where there are less people to pick up the slack) where the DPS is really important and the Viper damage reduction gets really noticeable. In that case, if you run out of mana, it might be a good idea to use a mana pot rather than Viper. Remember now that you can only use one mana pot per fight so time it wisely. (Have I mentioned lately that I love being an Alchemist?)

Viper Bonuses:

There are a few things that can improve the performance you squeeze out of Aspect of the Viper. There is a talent in the Beast Master tree, Aspect Mastery, that reduces the damage penalty by 10%. This talent is a given for Beast Masters and several Marksman hunters choose to take it too. There is also a glyph, Glyph of Aspect of the Viper, that increases the amount of mana gained on attack by 10%. Finally, the four-piece hunter tier 7 set bonus will increase your ranged attack speed by 20% while you are in Viper. I can imagine all of these little bonuses combined would be quite delicious (although I no longer use the Viper glyph, myself).

In conclusion, Aspect of the Viper has definitely become an important part of playing a hunter. It’s something you’ll be juggling frequently with Hawk/Dragonhawk and it’s good to practice using it and learn when best to use it. I also really like the imagery; I visualize a viper storing up energy before it strikes at its prey. Fun times.

As always, if I made some horrible mistake or you have further ideas/thoughts on Aspect of the Viper, lemme know! I don’t work today so I’ll be sitting around in LFG looking for Heroics or OS25 I’m sure (so did I mention that I can totally survive Sarth now? Wash can too! More on that later, perhaps!)

alts, screenshots, thoughts, Uncategorized

When Mend Pet Isn't Enough…

50 Comments

treespotlightI’ve been sort of thinking a lot this morning about an interesting trend I’ve noticed; namely, the tendency of hunters to roll healer alts. I see it quite a bit on blogs; Gun Lovin’ Dwarf Chick has recently realized she is more of a Heals Lovin’ Draenei Chick and has decided to move fulltime to the Twisted Nether Blogcast, and just recently the Kitty Collector has become Addicted to Heals. These are just a few of the recent examples. Then I thought about how my little treedruid, made on a whim several months ago, seemingly running through the forests of Teldrassil only yesterday, is suddenly in Northrend, busily healing Utgarde Keep runs. Then, in typical Pike fashion, I started wondering why. Why are we hunters– often die-hard hunters, to greater or lesser degrees– drawn to healing?

First, I think it sort of stems from a desire to be useful. Us hunters are used to sitting in LFG for hours while people sit there spamming “need heals and tank and g2g”. To be fair, things seemed to have gotten a little better for us in WotLK, at least on my server (I’ve seen more than a few pleas for ranged DPS or even hunters in specific), but there’s still that deep-seated longing among many of us to play a class role that is in more demand.

That brings us to the next question though; why healing and not tanking?

These are my theories:

1.) It’s not melee. We’re hunters. We pride ourselves on staying as far away from the enemy as possible. My two-handed axe skill sat at 349/350 for months after I’d gotten Legacy out of Karazhan… and I was proud of it. Tanking involves going up to something and letting it hit you in the face. For many of us, especially those of us who started out in this game as a hunter, it’s uncomfortable and counter-intuitive. Healing is a lot more attractive in that regard.

2.) Buffs. I dunno about you guys but I was always really, really sad that I couldn’t really buff anyone as a hunter. Well, I could through things like Ferocious Inspiration, but I couldn’t run around Stormwind and buff people. So it’s no surprise that I’m super-buff happy on my druid. Sometimes before I log out I run around and buff as many people as I can with Mark of the Wild until my mana is nearly empty. I am always careful to buff hunter pets, and I always make sure that the pet has Thorns, and not the hunter (because come on, the pet is going to be the one getting hit!) I think all the times my pet has failed to received bufflove has really ingrained that one into me. So long as I am nearby, your pet is gettin’ buffed.

Now paladin and druid tanks can buff too, of course, but toss priests and Fortitude into the fray and heals have got an advantage here.

3.) …no, really, Mend Pet isn’t enough sometimes. Improved Mend Pet is a talent I couldn’t live without 2/2 in. In fact, remember how I leveled Marksman and switched to Beast Mastery around level 58 or so? IMP was one of the major reasons I stayed. I’m serious. I am super OCD about cleansing debuffs from my pet. Super OCD. Mend Pet was the first skill I actually started using a keybinding for, and while I now have keybinds for a good chunk of my abilities, alt+2 will always remain dear to my heart. And seriously, how many of you are as anal-retentive about Mend Pet as I am? I’m sure a good chunk of you are. How many of you draenei have a Mend Pet/Gift of the Naaru emergency macro? How many of you have been in a raid or instance, noticed that your target’s target’s health was dropping low, and instinctively spammed Mend Pet before remembering that, um, the tank is tanking, and not your pet? I know I’m guilty of that one rather frequently.

I’m sure several of us have been in those situations where we think “Ugh if only I’d had a little more heals.” I wonder if that perhaps influenced our healy-alt-tendencies at all.

4. Survival. Hunters are about survival. And not just the ones spec’d into it. All hunters, from a lore standpoint, are beast masters, marksmen, and survivalists. That’s why you have tabs for all three when you open up your spellbook. Your spec just determines which one your hunter sort of specializes in– hence the word “spec”. Hunters of all specs are about pulling all the stops to stay alive when the outlook is grim. Makes sense that some of us would want to expand a little and try our hand at being responsible for more than just our own survival.

So, those are my theories on why we see so many hunters-gone-heals– whether they’re a new main, or just a minor diversion like mine– running around.

…though I’d love to hear from the devil’s advocate hunters out there who hate healing and rolled tanks, or more DPS… or no alts at all…

Uncategorized

We Interrupt This Program

11 Comments

My apologies that this isn’t a real post, but I’ve got a couple things I’d like to address really quick!

Firstly, and I know I never thought I’d say this, but… I get a lot of blog-related e-mail these days. And it’s kind of hard for me to keep track of sometimes. Now before you think that this is me saying “don’t e-mail me”, it’s not. I love e-mail from you guys. But I think lately a lot of e-mail has slipped through the cracks; i.e., I’ve read it and forgotten to reply, or I’ve opened up a link you sent me in a tab and then my browser crashed and the link went byebye and I can’t find it… etc. So I guess what I’m trying to say is: if you e-mail me and don’t get a response, I’m very sorry, and it’s nothing personal. It’s hard for me to keep track of all my e-mail. I do read everything, I promise, and I do try to respond to everything but I’m 99% sure that hasn’t happened, so I wanted to explain why =P

I do encourage people to check out my FAQ before e-mailing me though, those questions there are called “Frequently Asked” questions for a reason! *nods* Scroll down to the bottom of the “About” page to see them. Again though, I do love getting e-mail. Just wanted to make that clear. >.>

Second matter of bloggy business, if you are on Livejournal and want to receive updates from this blog on your friends’ list instead of a feed reader, you can do so here. I’ve subscribed to it with my own Livejournal account to help me keep an eye on any comments that wind up being posted to the entries over there rather than over here. Cause I love your comments. <3 Third matter of bloggy business, I'm thinking more and more that I need to trim down my blogroll. I fear that it isn’t accomplishing anything because it’s so big and unwieldy and intimidating that none of the links get clicked anyway. See, lemme explain something. When I started this site, I had a strict policy of “If you link to me, I will link to you!” but this site has grown far beyond any expectations I ever had for it and it’s simply becoming unfeasible to link to everyone who links to me, as much as I would like to. Especially when you toss blogs that don’t link to me but that I like anyway into the list as well. So I think over the course of the next few days I’m going to try trimming it down as much as I can. This isn’t going to be easy for me to do because I appreciate all the talent out there in the blog world and I don’t want anyone to feel left out, but I unfortunately think it’s necessary at this point. This also means that new blogs you send me may not wind up on my blogroll right away. I’ll probably make another blog post later regarding more details on this blogroll cleanup once I sort of come to a plan on how I want to go about it.

Okay, sorry for the quick sidetrack, and we will return you to your regularly scheduled hunterness momentarily…

Uncategorized

The Fable of the Egotistical Death Knight

33 Comments

Prot paladin. Kitty druid. Holy priest. Your friendly neighborhood BM hunter.

And a Death Knight.

Our story begins in once upon a time in Howling Fjord, in Heroic Utgarde Keep. We get off to a pretty good start; we survived an accidentally too-large-pull (pet tank + Distracting Shot/kiting right before your pet dies = ftw!) and I even got to do a little chain trapping, which I miss dearly by the way. The Death Knight pulled aggro and died fairly early on, but he was rez’d and we continued on our merry way.

We get down to the that big fiery forge thing and we dispose of the groups there and our pallytank stops and says “Okay. I want to make this clear right now. I need aggro so I can get mana. So stop pulling aggro. Okay?”

Hmm. He did not specify who this instruction was directed to, but I woulda noticed if I’d had aggro other than purposefully (kiting/trapping/etc.) cause I would have feigned, and I hadn’t so far. And I really didn’t think it was the kitty because his DPS was, uh, less than stellar. So that left…

…our friend the Death Knight, who said nothing, although the fact that he’d been the only one who had died so far was some pretty incriminating evidence. Regardless, we continued on for a bit. Death Knight spoke up to voice his discontent about how slow we were going. To be honest, while we weren’t blazing along, I didn’t think we were going particularly slow either– I say this as someone who has run Heroic UK more times than I care to even try to count. Still, none of us said anything, and we made our way onward.

Downed the first boss without issue. Death Knight “accidentally” greeded the blue the rest of us passed on, despite the fact that he couldn’t shard it. Still, meh, no big deal. I’ve heard some people say that on their home server everyone greeds and on mine everyone passes and it causes confusion to server newbies, so yeah, no biggie. ‘s just vendor trash. We were about halfway to the second boss fight when Mr. DK decided once again, and a little louder and more obnoxiously this time, to point out that the group was slow.

Pallytank paused. “You want to tank it?”

Death Knight responded “with pleasure” or something similar, proceeding to make some remark on how good his tanking was.

Pallytank calmly sits down to drink.

Death Knight pulls.

Ten seconds later the priest is dead. Cause, um, everything had been on top of him. Instead of Death Knight.

No one really said a word although it was pretty clear what had just taken place. Pallytank calmly gets up from his drink and rez’s the priest.

And this is when Death Knight starts demanding that Pallytank pass him lead. “Give me lead please.”

No response. Pallytank starts to pull again and the four of us start doing our jobs. Mr. DK is standing back, still protesting and crying for lead. “C’mon, just for two seconds.”

“Why, so you can kick me?” asked Pallytank.

And then DK snaps. He says something about how much our group sucks and how stupid we all are (Pallytank in particular.) Then he leaves the group and hearths away.

Easily four-manned the rest of the heroic.

The Moral of the Story Is: Complain not about things if you can’t do any better yourself. Cause it’s gonna be reeeeally embarrassing if you fail, and you’ll probably wind up leaving the group and missing out on free badges. *nods sagely*

The End.

/bow

screenshots, shot rotation, Uncategorized

Arcane Shot (And Pets) Never Faileth

10 Comments

I would like to present to you some DPS breakdowns that I took a screenshot of after a recent… memorable Heroic UK PuG (if enough people are interested, I’ll post the story about it. Hint: I think I’ll call it “The Fable of the Egotistical Death Knight.”)

Here’s the whole damage report… yes, after the entire run, which means rotations and the like aren’t gonna be super perfect:

shotbreakdown2

And now a breakdown of my shots. I would like to point out that this was a largely Multishot-free run due to lack of Replenishment and some other factors:

shotbreakdown1

“Why are you showing us this, Pike?”

Couple of reasons.

First Reason: Look how much damage your pet is doing. I have consistently found that ever since 3.0.9, my pet will come close to 50% but not quite surpass it. Still, that’s a lot.

Now, this is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, keep him alive (dur) and secondly, if you have to, kindly (kindly!) remind your resident paladins to give him Might* if they forget. That alone is a huge DPS boost. You shouldn’t have to worry about most other buffs unless said buffers are passing out the K-Mart versions. That includes if your pet died and you had to rez him. In my experience, 95% of people will fail to re-buff your pet after said pet rez (or will do their groupwide buff before you’ve rez’d your pet). I always hate having to point it out to people because it makes me feel like a whiner of some sort, but really, it’s that important to your DPS and thus to the group, so don’t be afraid to ask for those buffs for your pet. While we are on the subject, I always go out of my way to thank people who specifically remember to buff my pet after a rez. ’cause said people are rare. (If you are a buffing class and fall under said rare category, you have my undying affection and love as of… now.)

And yes, I also find it amusing that my pet and I have a different “most attacked” target. =P

Second Reason: Arcane Shot. I fired 186 Steadies and 113 Arcanes throughout the course of the instance, and despite that fairly sizable discrepancy in the number of shots and the fact that I’m using the glyphed Steady (10% more damage), Arcane Shot still was really closing the gap there. What this means is that it’s very important to fire off your Arcane Shot when it’s up; it’s an instant cast and you can use it while moving so it’s basically free damage. In fact, really the only shot that I think should have priority over it is Kill Shot.

Why do I keep pounding this into everyone’s heads, you’re probably wondering by now. Well, it’s because I’ve been running into a few BM hunters in instances who are still doing nothing but Steady. And they could be doing a lot better!

Third Reason: Mostly I just wanted to show what a good shot breakdown will probably look like for you as a Current-gen Beast Master. Gone are the days of having one shot doing as much (or more) damage as Auto Shot. Your Auto Shot is going to be sitting pretty at about 40%ish of your hunter-half’s total damage, because you have other shots to play with now that will be comprising the rest of that damage. And personally, I really, really like this change.

In closing: I am not a theorycrafter, and this is not a theorycrafting blog. I don’t know if I’ve said that before or not, but it bears saying again if I have. Sometimes I get comments or e-mails asking for more in-depth math and here’s the thing: I’m down with some math every now and again but I usually don’t dig into it. Most of my playstyle comes from observation, field testing, and common sense. My “numbers” posts are not meant to blow the Elitist Jerks folks out of the water, rather, they are here to spark inspiration in your head and possibly give you some new ideas to play around with or new things to think about. As always, feel free to take my post and add numbers to it on your own and do your own testing. I would be very flattered if you did that, in fact. But above all, remember that hunters are for fun! ^_^

—

* I’m pretty okay with Kings too if the warriors really want it, since your pet gets whatever the warriors get. Hey, it’s better than nothin’!

addons, screenshots, ui, Uncategorized

UI de Pike

18 Comments

Inspired by Anea over at Holy Discipline, I am here to post about my UI. I haven’t really done a post like this since I was like level 55 because I figure this blog is largely a screenshot dump anyway so I’m sure you’ve all seen it by now. But hey, this gives me an excuse to talk about addons, right? And I get a lot of comments asking about mine sometimes, so why not!

wow_pikesui1

Startin’ from the top:

Ah, X-Perl. Sometimes I go and try to replace it with something different and then I cry and run back to X-Perl. X-Perl is the unit frames mod that you see there, making you and everyone in your party all 3-D and purdy and in general just looking a lot better than the default thing. It also comes with approximately fifty million options to play around with. It’s kinda buggy and bulky at times but I still secretly love it, meaning this is one o’ those “I wish I could quit you!” addons that I’m sure a lot of us have.

Now let’s hop over and take a look at the lovely Drake-Mounted Crossbow in my bags which I recently traded in for the sexiest gun since Wolfslayer *drools*:

See how it’s giving me a “Stat Summary”, that’s RatingBuster and I couldn’t live without it. I mean really. Makes gear choices a lot easier to calculate out on the fly. Remember though that you have to tweak the options to take things like gems and enchants into account (I’ve certainly wound up with a few false “upgrades” because those options were unchecked) , and obviously this addon isn’t gonna be the answer to all your gear upgrade problems. You’re still going to have to mentally think about stuff like sidegrades and the like. Still, lovely addon.

(Also, looking at that screenshot now, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take scopes into account. Just a heads-up.)

And below that, you see Auctioneer. Would you guys believe I actually went Auctioneer-less for a while? No really, there was a month or two right after WotLK launched where I decided I didn’t like the new Auctioneer and auctioned all my stuff manually. I am a Neopets restocking veteran, I figured, I didn’t need no silly pricing addon.

Then one day I reinstalled it, figured out how to work the new Auctioneer, realized that I really really like it now, and it’s been good times since. <3 And finally we go down to the bottom of my screenshot and we see StellarBars. I love StellarBars. No having to worry about moving your action bars around, no having to worry about logging in and seeing like twenty extra random action bars filling up your screen, no having to worry about re-doing your keybindings… no, this is the pure and simple Blizz action bars but prettier and with some nice stylization options. I combined mine with ButtonFacade for maximum prettiness. Sure, I can play without StellarBars, but it sucks. I had to play without it for a couple days after this latest patch cause it was broken for me; I actually went and told the SB guy about my problem and he had it fixed in a new version literally the next day. So much love <3 Moving on to combat! wow_pikesui3

The scrolling combat text? Is SCT and SCT-D. I like this a lot better than the built-in game version because it tells you which shot is doing what and I find that immeasurably useful. For example, I can see how my Steady Shot crit in that screenshot for 1865, but I can also /chuckle inwardly because I know that I’ve seen Arcane Shot crits that go well over 4000. Very handy, and the numbers don’t bounce all over the place like they do with the Blizz version. You can customize it a lot too, to display the numbers where you want to and change the colors around. The written [Cobra Strikes] proc you see there is also a part of SCT/SCT-D. I do know there are better scrolling combat text addons out there by this point that are more frequently updated, but I’m happy with the old standby for now.

Up by my map is Omen, I don’t leave home without it, and neither should you. /cough

And straight down from there is Recount, the obligate damage meter. I usually don’t have my damage meter open and visible even when running things; I display it briefly after bossfights to see how I did, or when I’m pounding away at the training dummies. It’s a good tool for testing and troubleshooting.

And now moving on to the addons that I have but weren’t visible in those screenshots…

Deadly Boss Mods: when I was raiding in Burning Crusade I somehow wound up with the unofficial title of “Deadly Boss Mods Person, Give Me Assist Please” and even though I think I’m not the only one in our group who has it these days, I still have it just in case it’s needed. Basically it tosses up warnings and the like during raids and it can be handy for a lot of people. Now we just need to get it to draw a frickin’ line on the ground on Heigan and I’ll be all set.

CensusPlus: Take a census of your server and upload it to WarcraftRealms. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing.

And finally, the Addon Graveyard, of addons I used at one point and no longer do. RIP…

FuBar. I really like FuBar, I do. But 75% of the FuBar plugins that I used quit working with 3.0.2 and never updated themselves, and in my latest reinstall it was borking my minimap somehow, so I canned it entirely. Maybe someday in the future I’ll look into it again.

MyRoleplay: I like what RP addons do, not just cause you can see details about other peoples’ characters, but cause it’s an easy way to see who else roleplays. It got to a point, though, where 1.) it was hogging up all my chat channels, 2.) I don’t actively roleplay enough (I’m more of a mental roleplayer), and 3.) not enough people on my server even use the thing. So it got booted. Again, I’m more than willing to look into an RP addon someday in the future, if I ever feel the need or urge for one.

Gatherer: Displays on your map where you’ve found various herbs/mining nodes/etc. in the past. Semi-handy but in the end I’m enough of an herbalist junkie at this point that I know where everything is anyway. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, if you want Briarthorn, go live in Silverpine Forest. Trust me.

Lightheaded: It takes about three seconds to alt+tab and use the WoWHead search bar on my Firefox. In the end, it wasn’t worth it for me to take up extra memory to be able to do that in game. Your mileage may vary!

Well, that’ll do it. If you’ve got questions/comments/discussion, lemme hear ’em!

beast mastery, raiding, Uncategorized

BM is Raid Worthy.

12 Comments

I did a good portion of 10-man Naxx today. I was overall satisfied with my performance considering my relatively non-spectacular gear level and the fact that I spent approximately 33.3% of the boss fights face down in the dirt because apparently it’s not just Heigan that I completely fail at. (Hey, I actually survived three of those green lava waves this time! Three! That’s… um… that’s good right? Right? Bueller?)

Is BM the ultimate zomg highest DPS hunter spec? No, go Survival.

Is BM gonna do good on pet-unfriendly fights? Not so much. Not only does our flat pet DPS go away but all our pet buffs and benefits go away too.

Is BM as super overpowered as it was before? Oh heck no; my Patchwerk performance has been eviscerated literally by over a thousand DPS (though to be fair, my DPS was always higher on 25man, so it’s a skewed comparison)… but despite that large difference, I was still second place in the meters for that fight.

The point of this post is to answer a Google search that hit my blog the other day. That search term was literally “Is there any hope for BM hunters?”

Yes.

If you are weaving non-Steadies into your rotation, keeping Serpent Sting up, and you and your pet are decently spec’d and glyphed, there is no reason why you as a Beast Master should ever be shut out of your average everyday raid or heroic. If you’re in Nihilum or Death & Taxes or something then maybe it’s different but for the most part, you as a well-played BM hunter are valuable to a group. You provide a lot of DPS, you provide an excellent buff in the form of Ferocious Inspiration, you provide solid AoE and you have Viper for overly intensive fights.

Oh and you’re just plain fun to play, natch.

So yes, Virginia, there is hope.

And with that said I’m going to go back to sobbing in the corner while Heigan points and laughs. What a meaniehead. Not all of us did Mousercise when we were kids, not all of us are as coordinated as he is. /sob

guides, hunter kindergarten, shot rotation, Uncategorized

Booster Shots

19 Comments

Cause they boost your damage. Eh? Eh?

Okay, cutting to the chase because I just had this blog post almost finished when Firefox decided to eat it for breakfast so I’m starting from scratch. Let’s take a look at some of the shots available in your Beast Master repertoire:

Steady Shot: Once exulted on high as your best friend, now your filler shot that you press when nothing else is available. You’ll still be using it a lot, though, and you’ll want to boost its damage up from “abysmal” to “mediocre” as much as possible, so keep a Glyph of Steady Shot on you. For great justice. And yes, this means you’ll be keeping Serpent Sting up. Anyways, when you can, you’ll be wanting to stick to Shots That Aren’t Steady Shot™ as much as possible…

Arcane Shot: Your new bestest buddy, you’re going to want to use Arcane Shot as soon as the cooldown is up. Ferocious Inspiration and Improved Arcane Shot are both mandatory talents– as if FI’s super-buff wasn’t awesome before, this talent now also increases your damage with Arcane Shot. Combine that with IAS and get ready to /giggle at your Arcane Shot crits, especially after Mirror of Truth procs.

Multi-Shot: I’ve had good luck with this one on the Training Dummies, it’s a reasonable damage boost that isn’t Steady Shot. This is one of those situational ones, though. You may not want to use it if you’re having mana issues (are solo or in a group without Replenishment); and you don’t want to use it when there’s CC about or there’s a chance you might hit (and aggro) another mob with it. I know CC and aggro and all that is kind of a non-issue right now but I feel that this is a piece of hunter lore that we should remember in case it becomes important in the future. Don’t Multi-Shot CC.

Aimed Shot: Most Beast Masters don’t take this unless they dabble heavily in PvP, and I don’t blame them– the damage increase is small these days and the mana cost is pretty prohibitive. Still, it’s a Shot That Isn’t Steady Shot™, and I find myself wondering if it would be worth it on a DPS dump fight (like Patchwerk) with lotsa mana Replenishment going on. I haven’t tested this one myself but I’d be curious to know if anyone else has and what they think.

Kill Shot: Use it when you can! Now that the cooldown is a lot shorter than it was before, you’ll probably be able to use this more than once on most boss fights. Take advantage of that fact!

And moving on…

What is my Shot Rotation, Pike?: At this point I don’t know if it’s a true shot rotation as much as a shot priority.

1.) Is Serpent Sting up? If yes, go to the next step. If no or it is about to run out, apply Serpent Sting and go to the next step.

2.) Is Arcane Shot’s cooldown up and ready to go? If yes, use Arcane Shot. If no, go to the next step.

3.) Use Steady Shot.

Basically every time you are ready to fire a shot you are going to mentally ask yourself those three questions and go from there. If you’re going to be using Multi-Shot and/or Aimed Shot, insert them appropriately between Arcane Shot and Steady Shot. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it looks– you’ll be watching cooldowns and managing your pet, yes, and it can be a little difficult at times if you stink at multitasking like I do, but you’ll get it. Oh, and when I say mentally asking yourself those three questions– you don’t have to, uh, literally do that. But you get the picture, right?

In closing this might be sorta semi-offtopic but I’ve been seeing a lot of comments left lately on some blogs I read that involve people of various specs talking about how their shot rotation/cooldown-watching/whatever is bigger and as such their spec is “harder” and hence, superior. May or may not be followed by quoting Ghostcrawler. And it all kind of bugs me because it’s twisting the complexity of hunters down into one oversimplification and assumption.

Here’s my own take on this, and you’re free to (respecfully!) disagree if you wish of course, but this is my opinion– shot rotation alone does not equal skill. Pressng more buttons does not make you a better hunter. Having more cooldowns does not make you a better hunter.

Being able to trap indefinitely, kite indefinitely, spec your pet best for whatever job he is doing, not break crowd control, know what shots to use and when, know what gems/enchants/stats you want, know when to bend those gems/enchants/stats rules, popping your “big” cooldowns at the right times, know to listen to the raid leader when he or she says “melee do this” cause you have to apply that to your pet… all of this combined with being able to pull off your shot rotation, regardless of spec, is what defines a skilled hunter to me. You can’t base skill or difficulty level off of one aspect of the class alone, especially when said definition of “difficulty level” is so dependent on opinion and an individual’s strengths and weaknesses.

And while we’re on the subject, let me also point out that you don’t have to be a traditionally “skilled” raiding hunter to earn my respect; if you’re having fun with the class you’ve got my respect. Period. Hunters are for fun!

That’s all for today, and remember:

i_question

Test everything and come to your own conclusions! Don’t take my word for it (or any other blogger’s)– we’re a guide, not a rulebook. ^_^

(P.S. I promise this ramble wasn’t directed at any blogs that I read. Much <3 to you all)

screenshots, Uncategorized

Top Fifteen Screenshots I Found While Waiting for WoW to Reinstall

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(I opted not to provide annotations for all of these, because I like how a lot of them look alone, without commentary. However, many of them do indeed have a story or two behind them, so feel free to ask about any that you are curious about…)

Attempting to two-man part of Molten Core with a “certain someone” in WotLK Beta…

wow_diremaultree

Directly after a disaster Karazhan raid. We went a lil’ crazy.

wow_lunapikeagainstnightsky2

garrius This was a few weeks before WotLK. Great guy with limited playtime; I did Scholo with him at least once.

wow_eretosthenesthegnome

wow_attackoftheblimps A good friend and I visually “duped” the paper zeppelins and they followed us wherever we went. Even if we flew. You can see them between the trees there, coming closer…

treesaredeadly

Probably my all-time favorite screenshot; me, my friends, and Dire Maul. This was my desktop wallpaper on my Windows partition for several months.

I’m currently re-installing WoW from scratch thanks to a complete computer overhaul and some WoW-folder-savings mishaps. I was feelin’ kinda burned out from the game lately, I won’t deny it, but sometimes, old screenshots do wonders to remind you why you play it… don’t you think?

Uncategorized

Old Banner Plus Color Equals…

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New site banner! Basically I just took the old one and had one of my sisters color it in with color pencils. Then I had one of my other sisters and my brother help me use Photoshop to snazz it up (would you guys call me crazy if I told you today was the first day I have ever used Photoshop? For real. I use GIMP, baby. But the computer here has Photoshop instead, so!)

Anyways, I rather like this one because it combines the old “Hunter Kindergarten” motif of notebook paper and a scribbled sketch, with some color. I think it turned out well. Hopefully you guys like it too!