Tag Archives: specs

marksmanship, specs

Initial Marksman Musings

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  • Extremely variable DPS. Anywhere from “Gosh, this I do this on the training dummies as Beast Master” to “HOLY MOTHER OF MEDIVH I ALMOST BROKE 5K”, all in the same raid.
  • Very possible to beat better-geared Survival hunters at the DPS race.  Cause I did it today in VoA25.
  • Is overall giving me slightly better numbers than Survival did. I don’t know why. I still don’t know what I did wrong when I was SV. o.O
  • Is fun.  Mwahaha.  Billions of cooldowns, plus toys like Rapid Fire + Readiness, and did I mention I hate re-applying Serpent Sting?  I hate it.  I dunno why.  If you are a Marksman you don’t have to.   Ever.  It’s bliss. Oh and I can strafe around again and I don’t have to worry about standing still anymore! /glee

Depending on how long you have been reading this blog and/or how attentive you’ve been, you may already know by now that Tawyn leveled Marksman until level, oh, 58 or so. Granted, I did it because I had no idea what talent points were and everybody told me “Go Marksman, go Marksman”, so I did. Pretty sure I had points in Improved Concussive Shot and everything. Anyways, I enjoyed it and I was used to it and I sort of always had a soft spot for it, and I imagine it’s partly because of that, that making the switch to Marksman isn’t nearly as hard as making the switch to Survival was. It feels rather natural and full-circle, in a way.

Honestly I have a confession to make; I have long wished for a viable Marks/Beast Master hybrid build. It just seems like the pinnacle of hunter-ness to me; taking a bunch of talents that augment both the hunter and pet equally. The idea of something like this really excited me back in WotLK Beta but I saw it tested a few times and it never lived up to a “pure” spec. And so, I don’t know if I will ever get my wish, so I am destined to bounce around between BM and MM, it seems.

In other news, I’m trying to decide which of mine/my friends’ “Alt Guilds” to stick my main in while I wait around for a new “Real Guild”. I’m torn between < The Ice Stone Has Melted > and < Slack Jawed Daffodils >, though the former has the larger vote on Twitter at the moment. Hrmmm.

marksmanship, specs

Marksman Week is Go For Launch

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I am now officially specced 7/57/7. All I’ve really had time to do so far is some dailies and a little bit of time on the training dummies to de-rustify my rotation.

Things I have noticed so far:

1.) The Marksman rotation feels like you are pressing more buttons despite the fact that in theory, Survival is the one pressing the most buttons. Probably because the Survival buttons tend to be on longer cooldowns.

2.) Questing is hilarious; my pet is better at holding aggro as an MM pet than an SV pet for some reason I can’t ascertain (or maybe it’s just my mind…), a Chimera + Aimed will kill almost all mobs (sometimes I don’t have time to even use Aimed), and Rapid Recuperation is like a dip into AotV without having to use AotV. I’ve had less downtime doing dailies as MM than as any other spec thus far. (Interestingly, Beast Master is the spec where kill-em-all quests take the longest amount of time to do– I’m not killing things nearly as fast and thus I am in Viper much more often.)

I’m actually sort of worried about this week not being a good week for this test; I work evenings Wednesday through Saturday this week which means I have… uh, just tonight and tomorrow to try to get into all the raids I want to test. And tonight is limited because there are already a few I am locked out of. >.> We’ll see how things go.

screenshots, specs, survival, Uncategorized

NOW We're Gettin' Somewhere

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Survival_OS

So that’s basically about, oh, 50-100 DPS more than I do as BM on 10man Patchwerk. I probably should’ve just snapshotted the Current Fight (I think it was on Overall) but hey, it was a nice number. And much more than I’ve normally been doing as Survival so far this week. (Even if the whole Twilight Torment thing from my pet kinda skewed the numbers. I had decent numbers on the other fights too, so it’s justified. /cough)

Mostly I’m surprised because I don’t feel like I changed my playstyle at all. I did wind up sucking it up and installing Quartz this morning, but I don’t think it had much of an effect, since overall my latency is pretty low and my FPS is pretty high. Very helpful for my moonkin, though. >.> 1900 DPS at level 75? Yes please. Aaaanyways, perhaps I just got the right mix of buffs, finally.

I feel like I am finally starting to get into the Survival groove. Maybe. At least, this was the first time I saw a bunch of mobs and thought “Oh! I should use Frost Trap for Lock and Load!” only to find out it was on cooldown because of Black Arrow. I’ll uh… remember next time. >.>

…Frost Trap is the one, right? <.<

specs, survival, Uncategorized

In Which Pike Needs To Learn to Play

28 Comments

So I am both pleased and somewhat befuddled to report that any Beast Master worth their salt could destroy me in DPS right now. Seriously, today, spec’d cookie-cutter Survival and using a cookie-cutter wolf, in both a 10man and a 25man VoA… I wound up a good 300-400 DPS short of what I’d do as Beast Master.

…heck, I do more DPS as a Beast Master in 10man Naxx than I did as a Survivalist in 25man VoA today. And I had a kitty druid and a bazillion other yummy things in VoA that I normally don’t have in Naxx.

Before you ask, yes I’ve read the Elitist Jerks threads, yes I’m using a glyph/spec/rotation setup I got from them, and yes, I am being very careful not to overwrite my Explosive Shot DoTs when Lock n’ Load procs.

My only theories are a.) the massive slowdown my computer likes to throw at me in 25mans (though that still doesn’t explain the performance I wasn’t exactly proud of in the 10man today), b.) my AP gems are coming back to haunt me (Edit: Now that I think about it, I think I have mostly +hit gems… so never mind >.>), c.) it takes more than a few days to figure out the nuances of this spec, or d.) I hacked the gibson and bent the rules of the game to my will so BM simply does more DPS when I play it.

*shifty eyes*

I’m glad I’ve set the rule on myself that I must stay my test specs for a full week though, or I woulda given up and respec’d by now. I will figure out these Survivalist Shenanigans if it’s the last thing I do.

In druid news, I healed ZA. Well, part of it. Eagle Boss can go die. x_x

(P.S. Just to clarify, you don’t have to worry about me turning into a superhardcore min/max style hunter. I am going pure cookie-cutter right now merely out of curiosity to see if I can figure out what the hype is about, so to speak. Once my curiosity is sated I can go back to things like, well, using my raptor <3)

specs, survival, Uncategorized

Survival SPECulation: Day Two

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So my second day of full Survival was not particularly exciting, although I was pleased to wake up and find all sorts of helpful hints and the like left in comments on my blog (and really has me wanting to make a “What hunter spec are you?” poll, just for curiosity’s sake, since it seems a good deal of you actually are not BM!)

I did enough dailies to learn that my pet can hold aggro just fine if I let him chew on the mob for five seconds or so before I open up. I’m just so used to BM where I can basically start shooting the second I send my pet in. (Now to be fair, I do usually have to be in Aspect of the Beast even as BM or else I’ll pull, but hey.) Once I figured this out, solo’ing became much better than it was yesterday especially because I never dipped below about 80% mana. Ever. My inner mana-starved Beast Master kinda wanted to cry about it, I’ll admit.

I got into a quick Heroic Azjol’Nerub, and then a Heroic Violet Hold later on. I kept Recount open and set to “Show Current Fight” for each. My reaction to the resulting numbers was extremely variable, bouncing anywhere between “Gosh, this isn’t nearly as good as my BM numbers” to “Why am I getting Patchwerk numbers in a five-man?” The vast majority of my reactions were firmly in the middle, though– the “I am doing about the same amount of DPS” camp. All it took, though, was a good solid string of crits to push me back closer to 10man Patchwerk territory.

I have discovered that where Beast Master is all about mobility with things like Kindred Spirits, Survival and Sniper Training lean much more towards stillness. It’s sort of a new style of playing that I’m still trying to get used to. See, I love running around while fighting. It’s especially bad on my druid because all I ever cast are HoTs so I’ll run circles around the boss, jumping frantically up and down and twirling around while I toss Lifeblooms and Wild Growths around. While I’m not quite to that point with my hunter (thanks to the whole you-gotta-stand-still-to-shoot-anyway thing), I still enjoy mobility and I strafe around a lot, so learning to suppress that has been kinda difficult.

The day ended with pounding away on training dummies. Again, the numbers I wound up with were extremely varied. At best, I was getting about 400 DPS more than I do as BM, and at worst, about 100 less. The majority of my experiments placed me about 150ish DPS more than BM with no outside buffs. Honestly I don’t know if that’s good or not; I have no idea how much this Fabled Big Survival DPS Increase is supposed to be. ANYWAYS, as far as I am aware, I am using the correct glyphs, spec, and shot priority– juggling my two DoTs (Black Arrow and Serpent Sting) and then Kill Shot -> Explosive Shot -> Aimed Shot -> Steady Shot, as well as having to shake things up with the occasional Lock & Load procs. The Survival rotation is rather complex, but I’m pretty sure I had it down. It really does feel like a Boomkin on Speed (I am allowed to say this because nobody wants Trees in Violet Hold, they all want Priests for some reason which I’ve yet to ascertain. So I’ve spent a lot of time in the chicken suit lately when I play my druid.)

Honestly the biggest thing I noticed from my tests was that I can do 180,000 damage before running out of mana as Beast Master, and 260,000 before running out of mana as Survival. Similar DPS, but huge difference in overall net damage done.

Regardless, I am only two days into the Grand Experiment, so we’ll see how things continue to go…

screenshots, specs, survival

Outwit. Outplay. Outspec.

40 Comments

I’m playing a game with myself. It’s called, “Pike is actually going to learn to play the other two hunter specs”.

Yes that’s right. Don’t panic. See, I’m sure we all know by now that I’ve been primarily a Beast Master hunter up until this point. This is so largely for two reasons; firstly, it really is my favorite hunter spec (don’t get me wrong), and secondly, well… this seems to have unofficially become a BM hunter site and I figured you guys would appreciate it. /blush

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the other specs or secretly long to learn to play them well. I mean, seriously, anytime I’ve ever spec’d SV or MM recently has resulted in a DPS loss, which simply isn’t logical and means I am playing them incorrectly. So I figured… now’s as good a time as any to figure them out!

WoW_RespecExperiment

The Rules:
1.) Must play one spec for one week. No temporary respecs or spec-swapping allowed.
2.) With said spec, must do at some dailies, a few heroics, and at least one raid (preferably a Naxx clear, but something like OS or VoA will work if necessary) and report back to the blog.
3.) Must not talk about Fight Club
4.) No matter how much he begs, never, ever feed your pet after midnight.

Okay, so the last two rules are a joke, but ya know.

Anyways, with said rules in place, I swapped over to Survival (figured I’d start with it since it’s my dual spec so I’m already glyphed for it) and headed off to the Argent Tournament.

The first thing I noticed was that I pulled aggro on Chillmaw within about half a second and Feign Death failed to work so I wound up Deterrence tanking him. 1200 dps on that fight. Oh yeah, off to a dandy start. /cough (Oh, and how the two Death Knights in the group failed to grab aggro from me throughout the entire fight… I will never know.)

The second thing I noticed was that when fighting the Scourge mobs for that one “kill 15 Scourge” daily, it was impossible for my pet to hold aggro beyond more than a second.

The third thing I noticed was that Misdirection extended one second of pet aggro to about two seconds of pet aggro.

The fourth thing I noticed was that Growl was off and Cower was on. Derp. Swapped those around.

The fifth thing I noticed was that with Growl safely on, my pet still couldn’t hold aggro more than a second or two without Misdirection.

The sixth thing I noticed was that mana issues while solo’ing were pretty much gone.

The seventh thing I noticed was that my traps were always on cooldown when I wanted to use them (Black Arrow’s fault).

The eighth thing I noticed was that it was near-impossible to do a proper Survival rotation on random level 79 non-elite mobs, because they were all dead after an Explosive and a Steady or two. Eventually I just abandoned using Serpent Sting and Black Arrow entirely because I didn’t need ’em. And lastly,

The ninth thing I noticed was how empty I felt when I realized that suddenly, I was just another Survival hunter with a wolf in a sea of Survival hunters with wolves. Now you’re probably thinking “Pike, you dork, you were totally a BM hunter with a cat and then a BM hunter with a windserpent in Burning Crusade.” And it’s true… I was. But somehow it feels different now and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I differentiated myself back then by refusing to use the Steady Shot macro so I still felt fundamentally unique. Back then, I got my kicks from out-DPSing macro-using hunters with my manual rotation in the same way that today I get my kicks from out-DPSing cookie-cutter specs. Or, perhaps it’s because I was naive back then and automatically assumed that everyone was having as much fun with Beast Mastery as I was. I dunno exactly, but whatever the reason, being like everyone else bugs me now in a way it didn’t before.

Anyways, I am now bound into using Survival until next Sunday evening, though, so we’ll see how things go. I am actually very excited for this project and looking forward to getting a nice glimpse into other worlds of hunteryness! ^_^

beast mastery, guides, hunter kindergarten, specs, Uncategorized

Go Forth, Young Beast Master, And Level

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I get a lot of Google hits from people looking for a good Beast Master leveling spec. Probably because it’s a topic I’ve written about a lot. The reason I’ve written about it so much? Because for the past six months or so, every time a new patch has come out, I’ve had to come up with a new leveling spec. Yeah. (Oh, and let’s not forget the part where I’m leveling a million hunters. /cough)

I’m relatively certain things are at least… decently set in place now though, and it’s not like leveling specs are a super big deal anyways, so here‘s what I currently recommend:

hunterlevelingspec

Now remember, the best leveling spec is the one that works best for you. This isn’t really something that you min/max. Also, this spec isn’t designed to make your pet a supercrazy tank. If you’re looking for that, then I heartily recommend checking out Big Red Rhino!

However, when I level my hunters, I like to take a basic Beast Master DPS spec and tweak it a bit to add some extra pet survivability and talents that decrease downtime, while still maintaining enough DPS talents to allow me to perform reasonably well in an instance situation. When I level a hunter, I usually do a lot of solo quests and then sprinkle some instances into the mix… so my leveling spec is designed for that. We focus on pet survivability: Endurance Training, Thick Hide, 2/2 Improved Mend Pet– I have recently discovered that my pet can survive on Heigan with 1/2 Imp Mend Pet, but I’d still go 2/2 for leveling– and Spirit Bond at the cost of some DPS-oriented talents that we can do without while solo’ing. I have also opted for Invigoration over Cobra Strikes: I figure you won’t be critting all that much when you’re still leveling, but your pet will because his crit is based off of talents instead of gear, so Invigoration will help to decrease your overall downtime. (Not like we have a whole lot of downtime with Aspect of the Viper, but hey. Low-level hunters are the biggest mana hogs I’ve ever seen. x_x) Oh, and 2/2 Go for the Throat rather than 1/2. While 1/2 may be more than enough in an end-game situation (especially combined with Bestial Discipline), but as previously mentioned your crit probably isn’t all that hot while leveling, so go for 2/2.

Remember: You can level pretty much however you want to. I say this as someone who has leveled a druid to 70 as pure-resto. >.> Hunters obviously have it a little easier than that. When I leveled Tawyn from 70 to 80, I stayed with a purely DPS-oriented spec because I was in instances a lot (and because I’m a stubborn huntard) and I did just fine when I was out solo’ing. But I almost always give my lowbie hunters some variation of the above “leveling spec” and it’s worked out well.

So go ye forth and level!

specs, Uncategorized

IntroSPECtion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you guys dual-spec?

specs

Fiftythree-Eleven-Seven

41 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, my friends, is just how I roll.

respec, specs

More 3.1 Beast Mastery Dee Pee Ess Musings

20 Comments

I have really been trying to get in a lot of “DPS testing” so I can get a feel for how Beast Mastery is doing these days. The training dummies and I have become good friends, and I’ve even sometimes just sic’d Wash on the training dummies and sat there for minutes at a time watching him go (this is actually what inspired me to take a point out of Improved Mend Pet and stick it in Frenzy, pushing me back up to 4/5. It just wasn’t proc’ing enough to satisfy me as 3/5. Granted, that doesn’t take raid buffs and Cobra Strikes and the like into account, but it was bothering me.)

PuG’d a 10man VoA; the other hunter was a Marksman hunter who seemed to know what he was doing, and had a wolf (the hot new pet in town!) I am pleased to report that we were one-two on the meters, neck-and-neck, both of us doing somewhere in the ballpark of 3800 DPS on the new boss. On the trash pulls Wash and I were consistently well over 4000. In mostly Naxx10/heroics/rep gear. This rather satisfied my own curiosity regarding the viability of 3.1 Beast Master in your average raid situation.

Then something interesting happened. I was invited to a late night Naxx10 which I chose to attend (yes I know, this was my “break week”… yeeeah). There was another hunter there who was better geared than I and clearly knew what he was doing, and ya know what?

He was spec’d 53/11/7.

That’s right. I was in raid with another Beast Master. An Elitist Jerks approved spec, too, and one that I’d tried before but didn’t really like.

I might have to try it again, however, since he and his wolf roflstomped me on the meters… okay, mostly only on Loatheb. Oh my goodness did he roflstomp me on Loatheb. I blame his 3/3 Cobra Strikes when he had the spore buff, while I’m currently sitting at 1/3. We were pretty close on the other bosses though, and I was ahead a time or two. We didn’t hit Patchwerk, unfortunately (too many people decided to mysteriously disconnect about halfway through the raid)… I would have been curious to see those numbers.

Oh, another interesting thing about that hunter, he didn’t use Multishot. At all. Whereas I weave it into my rotation whenever it’s up. It might be a mana conservation thing because I’ve always had good luck with using Multishot, and I like using it because it gives us more to do. Still, I may have to look into that.

It’s still “Wash and me” by the way, although I’ve tamed a wolf to try it out, but since the wolf lacks a focus dump move I wonder if the new Furious Howl would be worth it for us Beast Masters. Reports in the aforementioned Elitist Jerks thread (which is a very good thread by the way) are putting wolves second to Devilsaurs, with raptors in third. So, we’ll have to see. I still maintain that you should strike a balance between finding a pet that is good to use in your situation, and finding a pet that you like and are attached to. In my humble opinion, that is just a part of reaching the Grand Pinnacle of Hunteriness.

Okay! I apologize for potentially boring my lovely non-raiding readers with babbles about numbers. However, there is a lot of curiosity for this type of thing right now if my site’s Google hits are to be believed, so I figured I’d share my musings with the hungry masses. You will be redirected shortly to typical Pike stories and guides. For now, for lack of anything else to say, have a picture I made for my guild a year or so back:

Medieval Curator

If you guess what it is without looking at the alt text, you get a cookie =P

(Thank you, Historic Tale Construction Kit!)