…I say that’s a big falsehood! =D
Five of us who had done Karazhan together “back in the day” got together and went in and it was… so much fun. Favorite raid instance, always and forevah. <3 We hope to do "alt runs" in the future, where we pull together some 80s and some 70ish alts and nab said alts some gear. That would make my druid happy because so much caster leather dropped today that it was silly. Speaking of which...
/grin!
Buff food for us hunters is pretty self-explanitory. We like food that gives us Attack Power or Crit or Agility, or possibly even Hit or Haste, depending on our gear, spec, and circumstance. Don’t forget, though, that our pets can get buff food too:
Currently, as far as I am aware, there are three foods in the game that will buff your pet. These are they:
Sporeling Snacks: An Outlands recipe available from Sporeggar rep, this food will give your pet 20 stamina and 20 spirit for 30 minutes. Requires level 55 to use.
Kibler’s Bits: An Outlands recipe from the Shattrath cooking daily, this food used to give your pet 20 strength and 20 spirit for 30 minutes– now it has been revamped and gives your pet 30 strength and 30 stamina for one hour. Requires level 55 to use.
Spiced Mammoth Treats: A Northrend recipe from the Dalaran cooking daily, this food has the exact same effect as Kibler’s Bits: gives your pet 30 strength and 30 stamina for one hour. Requires level 70 to use.
Now by looking at these three foods, it’s pretty clear that our poor old Sporeling Snacks have been outclassed. It doesn’t last nearly as long as the others and the stats are subpar. Still useful for leveling through Outlands if you happen to snag the recipe and mats, but even then, not really worth reaching for.
The other two, though, are your pets’ new best friends in raids or heroics!
Most cooks find that the Kibler’s Bits are much easier to make due to the easier-to-obtain ingredients. Me, I don’t have the recipe for either so I stalk the AH for both of them. They tend to be pricey when they pop up (though I can occasionally find Kibler’s Bits for quite a steal– I’ve bought a full stack of 20 for 3 gold) but the benefits they provide are pretty nice: a DPS boost and a survivability boost for your pet.
Plus, c’mon, he’s just so happy when you give him a treat!
So don’t forget to bring some with you alongside your hunter buff food: your pet will thank you. Oh, and also remember that the food doesn’t work like normal “pet food”… you don’t use the Feed Pet command to feed him. Rather, you “use” it like you would a food for yourself.
And no, I don’t know why an Outlands recipe and Northrend recipe with a usable-level discrepency are exactly the same either. I sort of suspect this may randomly change in a future patch, but hey, who knows?
In closing, I was a “caster tank” on Four Horsemen today. It was really fun, and I got a shiny new sword. *swings it around and hums contentedly as her pets dash for cover*
They say every piece of loot has a story behind it, whether it be an exciting tale or a more mundane one. Let me tell you my latest story then…
I am sure most of you know by now that due to scheduling difficulties, I PuG a good portion of my raids. And PuGs are like that proverbial box of chocolates– you never quite know what you are going to get.
So I was sitting around in LFG last night, watching with a rather unamused expression as nobody seemed to be running Naxx. Finally, after several long minutes of running in circles around Stormwind, a glimmer of hope: “LF1DPS for a partially-cleared Naxx.”
Now one of the side effects of my PuGging tendencies is that I have seen most of the starter bosses of Naxx a dozen times, it’s just the last few that I have yet to see. (In my experience, the main thing that prevents most PuGs from getting to those last bosses isn’t so much issues with the group performance, so much as people having to leave and constantly having to stop and find more people, which drags raids on for far too long and makes them end early.) Anyways, I was 100% okay with not downing all the bosses as long as there was a small chance I would maybe get to see the bosses I’ve yet to see, so I tossed the person a quick whisper, and after being informed “Yay, you win!” I was invited to the raid.
They summoned me in. Right in front of Four Horsemen. Not a problem, Four Horsemen is one of those fights I have pretty much nailed by now in terms of strategy and I actually rather enjoy the fight. I looked around at the people I was raiding with, almost all of them were in the same guild. They had a camaraderie to them and seemed to just be having a good old time. Good, gooood, I thought. Shouldn’t be too painful.
The raid leader began explaining the fight via a strategy that sounded unusual to me, but I was up for it. We got into position, and pulled.
…I’m really not sure how to describe how bad the subsequent wipes were. They were racecars careening off of tracks and exploding in a mess of fire and metal on a wall somewhere. They were people slipping at the top of the stairs while holding a bowl of soup and tumbling all the way down, making a huge mess. They were wipes on a fantastic scale. Every time we started again, we would try a different strategy, eventually settling on “burn down Thane”.
…have you ever seen the debuff on one of the Four Horsemen go up to six? Yeah, I didn’t know it could get that high either.
I pulled up Recount for the first time after the third or fourth wipe. I was the only member of the raid doing above 2k DPS. My pet alone was outDPSing someone. And that was when I looked around at these people I was raiding with. They were in blues and maybe a heroic epic or two. This was their first night in Naxxramas. And yet there was something about them, something that I couldn’t pin down…
We tried again, and again. As always, everything ended up in some sort of spectacular wipefest. We had to have a repair break and after yet another wipe the resto druid, who was not in the guild and had been pulled in as a PuG not long after me, began to despair over Ventrilo. “I get online and hope to get into a Naxx group tonight and we’re not even going to down Four Horsemen!” It wasn’t even a complaint or an insult or anything, just a pure sheer cry of sadness and frustration. Inwardly I found myself agreeing with him. And yet…
I thought I saw something out of the corner of my mind’s eye. My subconscious looked up and saw him there; the Deity of WoW Karma, a creature just as powerful and pervasive in this World of Warcraft as Elune, if not moreso. He was giggling at me, and there in my mind he painted a picture…
…a picture of a young group of friends all in one guild, sitting in Deadwind Pass trying to fill up our first ever Karazhan group. All of us excited and so full of hope. We pulled in a few unsuspecting PuGs, and told them right before we went in that we’d never done this before. We downed Attumen, we downed Moroes, and then we hit this wall with Maiden. Couldn’t down her. Pulled the plug on the raid having only downed two bosses. One of the PuGs was really frustrated with us. “You’re all terrible, you’ll never down Maiden!”
And yet we did, the next time we went. And every time we went we got a little farther and every time we went we had one or two PuGs with us.
There were the two people who did Curator with us. We had no idea what we were doing. Sparks were everywhere and we wiped and wiped and wiped. Patiently those two people told us what to do, over and over, until finally we downed that thing.
There was the priest who fell in with our little group and raided with us solidly for about a month, coaching us through Shade of Aran and Illhoof before one day saying goodbye to us and going off to make his own raiding group.
WoW Karma showed me all of this; the memories vivid in my mind. Suddenly a voice from Ventrilo shook me out of my reverie. One of the people in this guild.
“Don’t say that. We will down Four Horsemen. We will,” she said, her voice firm.
There was no room in that voice for uncertainty. I believed her.
We marched back in there for the… seventh, eighth?… time, and we did it. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because that’s how many people in the group hadn’t done it yet and we had to do it that many times for everyone to finally get it (for those of you who don’t know, Naxx bosses are largely “gimmick-based”… most of them have some trick to them that you have to “get”.) It was long and it was strenuous and there were six debuffs on us at one or two points but somehow the tanks tanked through it and the healers healed through it and the DPS was DPS’ing their quest-blue-clad hearts out and I felt like Wash and I had never before DPS’d harder in our life trying to pick up the slack, and we downed Four Horsemen.
We opened the chest; out tumbled some shoulders for me. I won the roll for them with some exorbitantly high number that I didn’t need to roll because I was the only one who wanted them anyway, which meant that I had officially wasted my one good roll for the week. I made a comment on this and was met with good-natured giggles from Vent.
This was followed by wiping on gargoyles and the longest Noth the Plaguebringer battle of all time, and then everyone conveniently deciding to be tired and ready to call it when we were at Heigan’s doorstep (a tad disappointing, I had FRAPS ready and everything so I could try to make a “Teach Your Pet To Dance” movie.)
And so I sat there with sort of a confused look on my face, clutching my new shoulders and my lone two badges, still a little bewildered at what had just transpired.
“I’ve added you to my friends’ list,” said one of the guild members. One who had giggled at my terribly dorky jokes I tend to make in raids. I glanced up at WoW Karma. He nodded at me. I nodded back.
“Thank you,” I said, “And thanks for the group!” and then I took my two badges and my clear conscience, and hearthstoned away.
The three “forgotten” professions.
Okay, maybe not forgotten per se, especially with all these achievements and titles all over the place now, but they’re sort of the three we don’t think about often. You know the ones I’m talking about: First Aid, Cooking, and Fishing.
Anyways, I was thinking today about my relationship with them and how it seems to be somewhat interesting. Observe…
First Aid: I love First Aid. I don’t know why. It’s basically the first thing I train on any new character I make and I level it up to max as quick as I can. I went to WTA and did a course on first aid that helped me learn alot. Heck, I have a level 69 full-blown restoration druid and she has a high first aid skill. Perhaps I’m psycho, or perhaps it’s me being smart in a roundabout way because I have a tendency to tote around a full feral set with her and kitty things on my rare excursions outside of instances, and bandaids allow me to stay in form. Regardless, it’s true, my resto druid is also a first aid freak.
I love when you get about halfway through First Aid and you have to go do the Triage quest. At first it was the most frustrating quest in the world but having done it several times by now I’ve learned to really like it. Plus, it makes me all giggly that they call you “Doctor”. I wish Doctor was an actual earnable title. Then I could go around either informing people that it wasn’t Lupus, or freaking out when people ask me to do stuff because “I’m a doctor, not a hunter!” Er… something like that. /cough
Cooking: I have a love/hate relationship with cooking. I like the general idea and the process, but the problem tends to be that cooking mats go for an arm and a leg on the auction house and I’m too lazy to go farm them. In that sense, it’s not at all like First Aid where cloth just sort of comes to you as you go along.
My main, Tawyn, is at a decent enough cooking level– she can make various moderate-level stat food like Wyrm Delight although I don’t really go out of the way to level her cooking. None of my other alts have gotten anywhere near that point; poor Lunapike is still puttering along with the food that restores like 552 of your health and gives you 4 spirit. She did get a Savory Deviate Delight recipe as a random drop when she was but a wee young taureness in the Barrens so she can make that, so that’s at least impressive!
Fishing: I have a confession to make, I actually don’t hate fishing. In fact, I find it rather relaxing if it’s done in conjunction with something else (the other day we had a Standup-Comedy-bot running in the guild Ventrilo and I was fishing while listening to that). However even then I’ve never gone above about 200ish in fishing. Lunapike is my character with that honor for some weird reason, while Tawyn is still floating around 155 or something. I keep telling myself that one of these days I’m going to sit down and powerlevel fishing because I want the minipets you can get, I want to be able to fish up Dalaran coins, and I want to be able to sell all the fish I get, but the fishing leveling process just goes so slowly that it hasn’t happened yet.
Now for a hunter, all of these professions are useful to have at a decent level. First Aid because there are many times when it’s nice to have it as a backup heal, Cooking so you can make your own stat food, and Fishing to power the cooking (and it used to be to feed your pet, as well, but I hardly have to worry about that these days. Though have you noticed that owls can eat fish now? About time, I say. I always wondered why they couldn’t pre-WotLK.) But none are really super-super-mandatory though I’d advice one to at least get First Aid. For me, the secondary professions are really mostly about having another mini-goal to work on while waiting for something else to happen. And because I love having goals in this game, even mini-goals, I’m rather content with that!
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:
^ 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!)
I’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…
(Makin’ it better: Wash didn’t die until literally the last ten seconds of the fight. <3) (Oh, and alternate title for the post: "Hell Has Frozen Over")
First person to make sense of it gets a cookie.
…or one.
This was first said by a wise man (er, Vulcan), and it’s something I’ve found myself thinking a lot about lately. See, my guild and in-game group of friends has begun raiding ten-mans on a semi-regular basis, and more often than not, I’ve found myself left out on the sidelines. Why? Simple. The best times for everyone to raid do not mesh well with my annoyingly unpredictable work schedule. Is this anyone’s fault? No, it’s not. It’s just how things have worked out.
Now I’m not gonna deny that it’s hard to think about it for too long. It’s hard to press that Decline button on the calendar when a raid invite full of people you love hanging out with pops up in your face. It’s hard to know that your friends and guild are doing progression and having fun without you. It’s hard to know that your one guaranteed day off from work is a bad day for most of your guildies to raid, and it’s even harder to know that work has recently swooped down and taken even that day away from you (that last one is one of the many reasons why I’ve been looking for a new job, but job-hunting is a lot harder these days than it has been in the past.) It all makes you feel sad and helpless.
However, my goal throughout all of this is to suck it up and show as little disappointment as possible, because I don’t want to spoil it for the people that I care about who are able to raid. I keep telling myself that maybe the job hunt will be better this month and maybe it won’t be too much longer before I have a better schedule and will be able to join in the fun.
Most importantly, I remind myself that making this kind of sacrifice is just a part of friendship (irony involving our guild name not intended).
I have a lot of minipets (65 or so by now?), but there are two that are particularly special to me:
I got this Brown Prairie Dog after spending a solid couple hours screwing around with my friends, we ran all over Azeroth goofing off and in the end someone popped over to Hordeside and bought us all Prairie Dog Whistles to remember the event by.
And this is the Black Tabby Cat, which is only obtainable by Horde (although it can then be sold to Alliance via the Neutral Auction House)… it has a very low drop rate and some of my guildies sat a Horde alt by the spawns that drop it and camped for it for weeks and when they got it, gave it to me, instead of selling it for the 2000g it goes for on my server.
So I remind myself that I don’t necessarily need to raid to have that friendship, that bond with the people I play with who I care about. And because I care about them I’m not gonna drop them for a better-fitting guild, nor am I going to make too much of a fuss when they raid without me because that’s when it works best for everyone else.
So, tonight, when I get home from work and everyone is already in Naxx, I think I’m just going to geek around with my Linux. But I’ll be ready on the bench– just in case.
And it came to pass that Pike was no longer allowed to cry about druids flying all over the place and grabbing herbs while she had to keep dismounting and remounting. Because now, she can finally join in the fun. Bwahaha.
Yes, my druid is now level 68. It officially makes her “Northrend level”, which is sort of intimidating, because Tawyn and Lunapike were both 70 when they headed in. And all dressed up in level 70 blues/purples. Oh, and they were both hunters, aka Solo Class Extraordinaire. Now I maintain that leveling a resto druid is easier than a lot of people say (HoTs + Bear Form anyone?) but it is slower and despite the heals, there are fewer tricks in your bag for getting out of sticky situations. Fortunately, seeing as according to my achievements I did a grand total of 25 non-instance-related quests in Outlands (an average of 2.5 quests per level… yes, that is really all I did), it means that in Northrend I might be able to get away with doing basically what I did in Outlands: instances, instances, instances, aaaaaand instances, and maybe a random Kara run if I get lucky (OHMAHGAH I WOULD LOVE THAT, you guys don’t even know). But yeah, especially since I have some friends and guildies who have characters sitting around at level 70 or thereabouts and would love some heals… instances are in the cards, I think!
So yeah, that post wasn’t hunter related. Sowwy. =( I have some Hunter Kindergarten stuff in the works. No, really!