A lesson has been learned after curator yesterday, there is a reason that respeccing your pet is so cheap, sometimes it needs to be done. I have Faloranu with a standard 2 ranks in all resistances, but against curator and his melee smashing adds it really isn't enough, I was having to keep mend pet up almost permanently, even occasionally bandage her!
Now skipping our several failed tries and just looking at the successful attempt, Faloranu (renamed to Garfield) took 61,501 arcane damage, I personally took 12,493, so my pet is taking almost 5 times the damage that I am in this fight! That also means it takes 25 mend pet casts to keep her alive, at base mana cost thats 7500 mana, more than a full bar for me!, however should she die I lose 121 dps, not a nice prospect.. Well fortunately I had a very kind healer who chucked her the odd heal early on in the fight, later on things did get on top of her and alas Faloranu died about a minute before the fight was over. I healed here a mere 29,925 health, which cost me around 3500 mana, still quite costly.
So the trick shall be to respec her and give her a nice big chink of arcane resistance, looking over a 2 hour report which featured a Curator kill and clearing all of the trash to chess and completing that too she took 124,057 arcane damage! the next highest was fire, a mere 8,477. For the low price of 5 silver I can respec her to be an arcane tanking machine, hugely saving me mana on mend pets which I can then turn into more damage, meaning easier boss kills and more loots for everyone!
How to decide how to spec your pet without wasing precious training points? Check out this page on petopia, lots of different pet talent calculators for you to enjoy!
After giving up on going to a tempest keep instance for the last 1000 Sha'tar rep I needed I decided to sort myself out, since no-one wanted to go to Arcatraz, Botanica or Mechanaar I decided to go and kill some spider or other. After a few easy quests I got myself 1000 reputation and the recipe for alchemist stone was mine.So having crafted it I have to decide which trinket to give up in exchange of using this one, I was using the Abacus of violent odds and bladefists breadth beforehand, one of them simple has to go. But I had to work out which. Many people might suggest cheeky's spreadsheet for such things, personally I've never used that, I like doing the calculations myself.
So I set up 3 outfits on itemrack, one with Bladefists breadth and alchemist stone, one with abacus of violent odds and alchemists stone and finally a control outfit, with bladefists breadth and abacus of violent odds. On each one I checked the paper dolls dps. Of course this is inaccurate it fails to take in account for crits, and as a survivalists crits are my bread and butter, so how to include those?
Well I know my crit rating, in each set, so I took my dps, divided it by 100, then multiplied it by the chance that I wouldn't crit, thats my non-crit dps, then I took the dps again, divided by 100 and multiplied by the chance that I would crit. However thats not my crit dps, I then needed to divide by 100 again and then multiply by 230 to get my crit dps, the reason for this: crits do double damage (hence the 200) and 5/5 mortal shots adds another 30% to crit damage, hence the extra 30.
So the results:
Control outfit
Non-crit dps
186.659
Crit dps
175.3543
Total dps
362.0133
Abacus + stone
Non-crit dps
189.5031
Crit dps
172.03287
Total dps
361.53597
Stone + bladefist
Non-crit dps
182.5245
Crit dps
175.66365
Total dps
358.18815
So the best choice appears to be the combination of Abacus and the stone, giving me extra mana, health, better potion effeciency and a higher expose weakness, for the cost of 0.5 dps.
I didn't look at the useable effects of the trinkets though, which is probably a flaw in my calculations, however I can do that quickly...
With the abacus+stone combo, when used the abacus increases my raw dps to 323.4, thats 231.8778 non crit and 210.50106 crit dps for a total of 442.37886.
With the Bladefist + stone combo, when used the stone increases my raw dps to 289.2 (think we have a winner allready) thats 203.886 non crit and 196.2222 crit dps for a total of 400.1082 dps. Ah, but the bladefist lasts an extra 5 seconds, well lets compare the dps gains then multiply by duration shall we?
Bladefist is giving me an extra 41.9 dps when used, for 15 seconds so 628.5 damage roughly, Abacus is giving me 80.84 dps when used, for 10 seconds, so roughly 808.4 damage, once again the abacus is the winner! So goodbye you trinket I've had form level 60... you did me a great service all these months, but its time to move on!
My guild might not be the most experienced, we might not be the most skilled, nor the most geared but we do have one thing going for us, we are all a stubborn as stubborn can be. Many other guilds would have given up on a 4 hour kara run with only 1 boss kill, but not us! Its really quite amazing, we get the usual level of people saying things like "we can't do this" but then the other 9 just go out of their way to prove that person wrong!
So here, I have some WWS reports for y'all here is our maiden of virtue kill, first try first kill, and to be honest I'm shocked at my dps on that fight! I am Io and Faloranu has been renamed Snooper, quite surprised there was so little damage coming from lightning breaths on that fight actually, I also seemed to have a slightly lower than expected crit rate, I have 29% unbuffed, so add BoK, agility elixirs and agility food it should be around 35%. I also managed to miss an arcane shot *sigh* need to boost by hit rating back up to max soon.
Diemos died mid fight, so I won't complain about his dps here, though his pet (renamed Hobbes) only did melee attacks, I know he has a cat, but yet I see no claws *or* kill commands! Hobbes did 26 melee attacks and took just over 5k holy damage, My pet did 91 swings and took 16,000 holy damage, I have a feeling a certain someone was not healing their pet, there can be no worse crime! Except perhaps misdirecting raid bosses onto healers, but hey at least that is funny!
I wish I had the class knowledge to point out the flaws in Empi and Areal's dps I don't really think anyone should be doing under 60k damage on maiden, especially Empi who is being hit by maidens aoe and therefore not getting the 6 second stuns. Virgo was our paladin tank, so Empi definably needs to get above him if he wants to keep raiding!
Next we have one of our curator tries, we got him to 59% after the first evocation, unfortunately just afterwards Sifr died from the adds aoe, we lost our second best dpser, and slowly the adds began to increase in number and pick the rest of us off. you might note the lack of arcane shots from me here... I thought the adds were immune to arcane shot until I hit it by accident once and noticed it splash up on my scrolling combat text.
On the bright side my pet's lightning breaths were more noticeable on this fight, once again our rogue and warlock fell behind on the damage meters, however we still had a good try at it, once again we had 2 healers, and once again we died because of lack of healing, swapping our rogue for a healer would make a great difference to our survivability while a minimal difference to our damage done.
We are taking a day of today and going back Sunday, with a bit of luck we'll push into the second half of Karazhan and get our guilds first piece of Tier 4 gear! Even if not we can kill 4 bosses in Karazhan already, not bad for our second week.
There was a post on the BRK forums, asking which is the largest pet you can tame, before taming. It doesn't matter how much it shrinks afterwards, its all a matter of how big it is before! Well I origionally said the black spider on the Draenei starting zone, but I think I may have found one to tromp that: Scalewing serpents, a windserpent no less, who you can see here compared to my wyvern is slightly on the large side!
So people, you have your mission, find a larger tameable beast!
Well theres a lot to talk about today, explorations of the new patch 2.4 areas, I did most of the dailies, tried Magisters Terrace (though not all of it) we also had 3 kills in Karazhan, meaning we are past opera now (what a difference having the attunement lifted made!) and I also said hello to an old friend!
So 2.4 areads first, well... theres a *lot* of good lore here, and its a rolling storyline, the shattered sun offensive begins having only taken one building and a small amount of land near the docks, they then send you on quests to reclaim the first building, which will enable us to teleport from shattrah (more of a boon for the alliance than the horde, the horde can teleport to silvermoon, then fly up, takes very little time, the alliance have to go from ironforge, half a continent away!). Theres an Aldor who very happily gives you petty insults if your on the scryer side of the fence, despite being in a town filled with, wretched, hostile blood elves and demons galore!
This picture set me off... theres a blood elf right next to this draenei, and yet the draenei is the dragonhawk master, aldor and scryers are meant to be begrudgingly working together, why hand over control of our precious mounts to the aldor, much less to a Dreanei who is, technically, part of the alliance!
The next subject? well lets put it this way: shes back baby! I gave in a re-tamed a Silithid scorpid from the barrens! letting my old scorpid loose intot he wild, but not before taking a picture for scale purposes. She started at level 22, and is allready 32, I'm killing the naga near Sporegarr so I can do the quest for sporegarr rep at the same time, I would like the mini sporebat pet!
Heres the picture to check the scaleing rate form a level 70 scorpid to a level 22 one, theres not actually as much difference as you might have though, I put this down to the low to the ground look of scorpids, since they don't get much taller they don't look much bigger against your character model
Look its her first ding! I'm much happier with the green scorpid skin, I just need some time to tame her up. My old excuse for not doing this was not wanting to let her go when WotLK comes out, but I realized I *never* use sinbelore anymore, much as I love him he is pointlessly filling a stable slot, so come WotLK he'll probably be the one to go.
So what else do we have? oh yes, new fishing daily, that was to catch a baby crocolisk from Orgrimmar, easy enough took about 10 casts to get one, then turn it in for around 7 gold, a bunch of fish hooks (+100 fishing skill for 10 mins) and a vendor trash worht another 1.5 gold.
Oh and Kara right? well we went, that is to say, they went I was taming/leveling my scorpid, since I couldn't come on time and the dps slots got filled. I was called in for Moroes, since everyone loves a chain trapper with improved traps. We killed him first try, the healing fell off at the end, both of the tanks died, I tanked him with deterrence for about 3% then died, the rest of the dps finished him off. I then left and let the person I replaced come back in, it didn't have to be me... just one of the 3 hunters we had, but being the guild leader I was the only one to volunteer.
Now WWS was having a few issues with the 2.4 combat log changes, but they are now up and running, and with automatic actor detection that seems to be far more accurate than ever before, you can see the WWS report for the moroes kill here! I am Dione, as you can see I had the highest dps, but not the highest damage done, this is because of the presence and dps time columns, since I had to chain trap from start to end of the fight (literally, my trap target was killed after moroes)
This did cause somewhat of a distraction, you can also add in the time where Moroes has vanished, and is thus untargetable. I had set my focus on a rogue so I could assist them to get the dps target, its hard to see them at range when you have 3 pets and 2 melee on them and the targets are only normal human size! As you can see the rogues dps time was only marginally better than mine, and when he wasn't targeting the right target, neither could I!
But thats all excuses, what can we learn form this report? Well, both the other hunters were low on the dps, Ganyemede was the hunter I had gven the MM spec the other day, I know he lacks +hit, however last raid he was below Leo, the pala tank, while this time he is above him, a marketable improvement. Titan has a very odd spec, 5/25/31 it seems to be aiming for pvp, and he is extreemly defensive about his spec, saying it "pwns every1 in bg" I didn't check his gear, but with that kind of pvp attitude I imagine a lack of +hit too, combined with a spec not really specialised for raiding.
Looking in detail, Ganyemede missed 9.5% of his arcane shots, Titan missed 5.5% of his auto-shots, 10% of his steady shots and 9.5% of his arcane shots, I suspect now that he has next to 0% + hit. I missed nothing, and I'm sitting at about +8.5% including talents, so its possible for me to miss, just unlikely.
Now looking at pets, my pet was renamed Garfeild, 53% of her damage comes from physical attacks, 32% from lightning breath and 13% on kill command, now I did make a mistake with her. since I was only called on Moroes literally before the pull (warlock summon inside instances now!) I didn't really get int eh raid mood... and left growl on, she then proceeded to get aggro and killed by the shadow priest mob, of course I did res her, but still she wasn't happy, so her dps would be down, plus its a whack against my mana. Titans pet: Cheshire used no focus abilities during the fight... obviously I need to talk to titan, while Snagglepuss, Ganyemede's pet, used only 2 bites for the whole fight. looks like I need a word with him over the benefit of a claw, plus sending your pet in, only 9 physical attacks too!
Hmm thats long-winded enough of a post... back to leveling Telson methinks, catch you all later!
Well its patch day, so how will you be celebrating? Theres new lore to be found, new places to explore bosses to kill, new quests to complete, new loots to be had and, for the pvp minded among you, the separate arena tournament reams should no be open. Well I won't be doing any of these, because the servers are still down, being upgraded.
The effect this has on the lore is going to be interesting, Kael'thas is returning to Azeroth! but he's returning as a broken shell of former self, from what I understand he storms into Silvermoon and takes the Naaru that the Blood knights are using to drain their holy powers from, an act that has broken his ties to the blood elven people. He has then re-activated the sunwell... in theory this would be the savior of the blood elves from their magic addiction, were it not that Kael'thas is using the energies of the sunwell to summon demons... and not just regular demons either, he is summoning KIl'Jaeden, second in command of the legion only to Sargeras and comparable in power to Archimonde, the source of the third great war of Azeroth!
However his plot is known, and alliances between the mortal races are once again being tempered by a universal enemy. The Aldor and the Scryers are joining forces in arms against Kael'thas, and the blood knights of Silvermoon have sworn to assist them. Logic would dictate that without M'uru the blood knights should have lost their font of holy power... and yet it remains, suspicions arise, have the blood knights found true faith in the light after the betrayal of Kael'thas? Or perhaps it is simple A'dal providing them willingly with holy power so they may assist in the fight against Kil'Jaeden.
Bit of course the newly formed Shattered sun offensive cannot perform this task alone, They need manpower, laborers, craftsmen... and heroes. They need everyone they can get, to forge a base on Sunwell isle from where they can launch full-scale attacks on the forces Kael'thas has let into Azeroth!
"So rise up in arms! Outland be damned, there is no promised land there, merely a tool for our traitor prince! We head home, my kin, and wage a new war, a just war, a war we cannot afford to lose. For should Sunwell Isle fall to the demons, then the whole of Quel'Thalas will soon follow, before you know it our home will become a portal spewing demonic war machines into our world. No-one will be safe, no elf, no orc, no human, no goblin, and should the demons reach the dark portal, even those of us who remain in Outland will be doomed! So take hold of your swords and march to the sunwell, we go to carve the destiny of our race!
Today I was planning on going over a WWS report with you all in detail... except that I managed to mess up and only got about 10 minutes of last nights black morass run on the log, I'm not sure why the log stopped logging the fight, maybe I hit my combat log macro sometime half way through the instance, though it seems unlikely.
Well instead I'll go over how I actually did some hunter officer work for once, you see our last karazhan had a hunter 2nd lowest on the dps only beating a retri paladin, both of which were below our paladin tank! Now I refuse to put hunters of any spec ont he same level as retridins (and no doubt there will be defenders of this spec, I'm not going to go into detail of why I don't like it, but I've only once seen a retridin do well in a pve situation, and with his gear that wasn't surprising). So hunter "A" likes to pvp, but also likes to try pve, though little non-raid instances, this of course results in a low hit rating, so the first thing I did with him was take him to orgrimmar auction house and grab some hit rating gems, as well as a relentless earthstorm diamond to fill the empty meta gem slot in his helm.
So now he's at +2.35% hit instead of around 1%, a good start, but still some work needs to be done, thats still a 6.65% miss chance on raid bosses, so 6.65% dps can be gained simply by grabbing more hit, however theres little I can do about that, pvp gear isn't filled to the brim with hit rating, and he still needs to get cenarian revered to get the helm enchant for another 1%.
Next we move onto the talent spec, now I didn't actually take a picture of his old spec, it was something odd like 3/58/0, I'm not saying this was the exact talent spec, but this is roughly what he had, notable issues: 1/2 rapid killing, improved hunters mark not maxed, master marksman not maxed, silencing shot not taken despite being a pvp hunter build. Theres probably more glaring issues, but I'm not *that* well informed about the MM spec to pick it apart completely.
Still I did my best and now he's running on this build, now I know I'm not the perfect person at MM builds, so any more advice would be helpful, but I'll explain my logic:
BM: 7 points
Improved aspect of the hawk: okay its situational on mana, since aspect of the viper will take priority if your low, but is extra speed which means extra damage, it might not be very consistent, and if this were a 20/41 build I'd probably go for endurance training, but in the interest of getting the most dps we can I thought this would be better.
Focused fire: a flat 2% boost in damage just for keeping your pet alive? this would be a good enough talent with jsut that, but add in the extra kill command critical strike change this is well worth the measly 2 talent points it costs.
Survival: 6 points
Humanoid slaying: if you want some pvp fun 80% of your targets are humanoid all the time, for 2 talent points you can get an extra 3% damage against them, and an additional 3% damage ontop of your critical strikes against them
Monster slaying: it was this or hawk eye,and really it comes down to if getting the first shot off against caster by outranging them is more important then getting extra damage against feral druids and other hunters pets. "A" chose monster slaying, lets hupe silencing shot is enough to keep the casters at bay.
Marksman: 48 points
Lethal shots: 5% more critical hits, I shouldn't need to explain this.
Improved hunters mark: now this one might be controversial, and to be honest its me being selfish, someone needs to spec it in our raids and I'll be darned if tis me! Well pvp wise its not so important, but its a little extra damage for your pet/if you get stuck in melee
Efficiency: only 2/5 here, we'll see how his mana levels go while raiding, at the moment he's mostly in Bg's where a mana refill is usually just a conjured mana bread or a death away, its rare that you will have a continuous fight for so long in a bg where you can't just FD and drink for a bit anyway. Once he moves onto arena play it will probably be worth changing this to a full 5/5
Go for the throat: its really a core hunter talent that no build should be without
Aimed shot: it has its uses, especially in pvp, 50% healing reduction can easily swing a fight, and stop a resto druid from being a poster boy for immortality! that and its needed for mortal shots
Rapid killing: more rapid fire means more dps, which means your more likely to be the one who walks out of a fight alive, sure you can't always uses rapid fire if you need to kite etc, but if people make the mistake of ignoring the hunter, thats when you unleash the pain, also a 20% damage boost after killing blows can come in handy in pvp
Improved stings: okay so its not a great pvp talent, but the extra mana drain on viper sting makes this one of the must-have pvp talents, shut that paladin up in two thirds of the time!
Mortal shots: its mortal shots... you know *the* reason why most non MM builds have 20 points in the MM tree? if you have above 5% crit then this is a worthwhile talent to get! and since its impossible to have less than 5% crit with 5 points in lethal shots, that makes this an always good to grab talent!
Scatter shot: its MM's way of getting back to shooting range/trapping things scatter shot has many uses similar to wyvern sting, sure it has a shorter range, a tiny duration and no dot afterwards, but it has a quarter of the cooldown, the lack of dot can be advantageous sometimes, and hey in pvp 4 seconds is usually enough to save yourself.
Barrage: this one I'm not too sure on, but multi shot is one of the big pvp shots, and its part of a 1:1.5 rotation what many MM hunters use in pvp too, I'm not so sure if its worth the 3 talents, but still we went for it.
Combat experience: more agility, more intelect, both are nice, sure it might not be a huge difference like lightning reflexes is, but you are getting 4% more stats per talent point, rather than the 3% you get per talent point with lightning reflexes. plus its a nice stack with careful aim.
Ranged weapon specialization: We like flat percentage increases to damage, yes we do, 5% more damage with ranged weapons, well ranged weapons are where a good 85% of a MM hunters damage comes from (the rest comes form the pet, and maybe the odd melee attack) so its well worth taking.
Careful aim: 45% of your int goes to attack power, this is nice, assuming you have around 200 unbuffed intellect this is 90 attack power, which isn't to be scoffed at, add 18 for (improved) mark of the wild, 40 for arcane intellect, another 25 from blessing of kings, and your getting around 127 attack power from this talent, I'd say its worth it.
Trueshot aura: 125 attack power for 1 talent point? SOLD! also applies to the rest of the party... well its no expose weakness but its not to be scoffed at.
Master marksman: 10% more attack power, now even if your attack powers only 1300 thats 130 attack power, but as you gear up this talent gets better and better, got 200 attack power? great this talent gives you 200!, perhaps its not as talent efficient as trueshot aura, but still a nice boost to damage
Silencing shot: Silence cannot be removed by pvp trinkets. Silence completely locks down spell casters for its duration, it might only be 3 seconds , but its 3 seconds every 20 seconds, one of the most useful things about this is it stops spell casting, so if you see some healer charging up a 3 second big heal, give them a blast, they wasted their 3 seconds of casting, are silenced for a further 3 seconds, then need to start casting again, making their 3 second cast time spell use 9 seconds to cast, by which time you've aimed shotted the target anyway, so 9 seconds for half the effect! Silencing shot is great for putting all casters in their places, and if your really bored it stoops warriors from using their shouts too... you know... if that really helps you.
Now I hope I haven't messed up my friends talents by giving them a really sub-par talent build, but even if I haven't given him the best MM talents you can get, its still a good improvement from what he had before, hopefully he'll be far ahead of the retridin next time, and far above the tanking paladin too!
Another day, another Kara, once again we tried with 2 healers, and alas, it was a fruitless effort, I missed most of the raid due to RL commitments, but managed to sneak in later for a few attempts on moroes whom we got to about 30%, a couple of times. the problem we were having was healers running out of mana with potions on CD and then, not so much the tanks die, but the dps dies from the bleed effect moroes puts on us, the healers can keep the tanks up whith almost no mana, but they can't handle the extra damage he does to the raid.
Logic suggests that the way to deal with this is one of 2 things 1) kill Moroes faster, 2) get another healer. Now getting another healer would be ideal for us, apparently there were also attempts on maiden, that got her to 30% or so, again deaths because of lack of mana on the healers. however the first option is equally viable, we have 6 dps classes if we only have 2 healers, and the 2 tanks probably contribute the same damage as a 7th dps class, so in total the raid damage should be divided by 7, each dps should be doing about 15% of the raids dps, and the 2 tanks should be doing about 7% each.
Unfortunately this is not happening, some of our dps are doing less dps then the tanks which is just unacceptable. During the time I was in the raid I did 24% of the groups damage, and I'm only doing an average of 5-600 dps, not an unreachable amount by any means, if we oculd get everyone up to doing at least 400 dps we should kill things faster and then maybe we could get away with the 1 less healer. It would also help solve my personal mana issues, the more dps we have, the shorter the fight lasts, the less mana I need to use, and if I'm a quarter of the raid dps, that means we are losing a noticeable amount of damage when my mana is low!
So, I need to check up on peoples dps, now damage meters is an okay addon, it gives running totals as the fight goes on if you have it in dps mode, but since it activates as soon as the fight starts, you don't get an accurate statement of peoples dps. If everyone waits 5 seconds for the tank to get threat, then go all out and deal 1000 dps, assuming the fight lasts 10 seconds, this would give a result of 500 dps which is inaccurate to what actually happens.
So I'm going to need something more high tech Wow Web Stats is a site that allows just that, it analysis your combat log, then sorts, separates and gives you useful information. So if, like in my example, someone did 1000 dps, but was only attacking half the fight, it would show them at 1000dps, with a 50% dps time.
Now first I have to learn how to use WWS, and for this I'm referring to BRK's guide on the matter, as usual the dwarf+kitty combo provides information far more thoughtfully and useful than I can dream of. If all goes to plan I'll have a WWS report for the Kara on Tuesday, and I'll be able to analyze who is doing their job correctly, and who is just afk auto-attacking.
Edit: got a wws report working, me killing a dreadfang lurker outside of shattrah. See it here.
Now click my name for a more detailed rundown, now this was only 1 mob so its not the most detailed of logs, however it shows all the attacks I used, which ones critted, how much damage they did, which ones missed etc.
Now I opened with an aimed shot, then did steady-arcane-auto-steady, and as the log shoes, I had 1 aimed shot hit, 2 steady shot crits, 1 auto shot and 1 arcane shot, so that proves that its accurate. If you lick Faloranu's name, it comes up with an individual report just for my lovely windserpent, as you can see 5 melee hits form her, along with 3 lightning breaths and 1 kill command, none of which critted, but also none missed, as to be expected from killing a mob 8 levels below me.
Now I've got wws worked out I can unleash it on our next raid and see how the raid is doing!
Well I'm easting my words, after yesterday's comment that I didn't think we'd have the people for kara we actually ended up going and killing 2 bosses. Now I'll admit it wasn't the most impressive run, we would be capable of so much more if we had less people going afk every 15 minutes or so and also if we had a little more flexibility on our proposed strategy.
So what did we do? well first we went to the animal's where we killed the demon dog boss first try, a straight tank and spank with a little chain trapping/banishing on the 2 adds. The boss actually hit surprisingly hard according to the tanks, but we came packed with 3 healers this time, so that wasn't a problem, it dropped Ravager's bracers of healing, some plate bracers with 91 healing on them, which went to one of our paladins.
Next we headed towards attumen, unfortunately after the first 2 pulls all 3 of our healers went afk for 5 mins! They trickled back and we began to clear again and eventually got to the boss and pulled. Now Attumen has a wonderful little ability, if there are any trash alive when you pull him they get pulled to, due to our time out waiting for healers the first 2 groups had popped back up again, 3 trash horses came charging along and proceeded to smack all of our healers in rapid succession, which of course caused a slight wipe. We then realised the trash respawns were slightly out of order, we would have to wait the time the healers took off to get it back in order, unfortunately we realized this after killing the 2 respawns, so now we would have to wait for those 2 to spawn again or else it would be a nightmare!
And so we headed to Moroes, trash clearing went fine, got to the boss, we had 3 hunters and a priest at the time, so it should have been an easy fight, except for the strategy we used. For some reason we decided on having 1 tank on the boss and 1 tank on the add we were burning down, *big* mistake, but regardless we tried this 4 or 5 times, and each time we died because of the same reason, Moroes stunned the tank, then ran after and one shotted some healers! What we will do next time is have both tanks on Moroes and instead kite the add target, they don't run extremely fast and seem to be vulnerable to all types of slowing and stunning effects, shouldn't be a problem. Still Moroes is a fun fight, theres some enjoyment from chain trapping for most of the fight (since I'm survival they made my add the last to be killed) in fact I think we might find it easier if I chain trap for the entire fight, so long as I'm not given a caster its easy as pie!
Now after the last attempt on Moroes we headed for Attumen again, by this point we had one of the other 2 hunters leave, as well as a healer, both were replaced by rogues. we stormed through the trash only stopping to pick up a pair of Zierhut's lost treads for one of the rogues. We then killed Attumen first try (and our first proper try this run being that our last try involved 3 extra mobs) we lost 2 rogues during the fight, but the healers kept the tanks alive and the rest of the dps got him down. I'll admit I was having some mana issues by the end of the fight even after downing 2 fel mana potions, but such is life, I'm still working on getting my alchemist's stone!
Attumen was kind to me and dropped Stalkers War Bands, and I think for the first time ever I beat a fellow hunter in a /roll contest! Now technically I lost about 4 agility by taking these, but for the sake of an extra 200 or so mana and 40 attack power its worth it, 4 agility = 1 attack power on expose weakness, which means I'd need 40 physical dpsers in the raid to make my old bracers better than my new ones! Sometimes personal dps does have to be taken over boosting other peoples. He also dropped some Gloves of Saintly Blessings, which went to the same healer who got the bracers earlier.
Overall, things could have gone faster and smoother, however we came our with 4 more epics than we entered with, even if it cost the raid 3-400 gold in repairs and reagents and ammo etc, you still can't buy 1 epic for 400 gold, let alone 4! besides it was our guilds first foray's into Karazhan, we will get better, both in skill and gear. Infact I need to find some time to teach a couple of our hunters some of the finer points of shot rotation, I shouldn't be out dpsing 2 beast mastery hunters combined! I know my dps is decent, however I would rather be at the bottom of the charts in a group that storms through mobs, than at the top in one that struggles (as you can see from the picture, I was top dps on Attumen, even with being oom for the last 25%).
They are trying again tonight, however I'll be at my mothers having an nice meal, so on that note Happy easter all!
Hey how come Easter was the first day in 3 that I didn't have a picture of a bunny on the page...
Busy busy busy, painting the dining room today, my hands are covered in peach emulsion, oh joy! I feel like I'm letting the guild down by not being online more... thats probably a sign of wow addiction isn't it? I hope the original guild leader comes back soon so I can relinquish control. I don't think I can handle being *the* leader, I make a good adviser, but I'm not made to be the head honcho!
But of course I'm not really, the 2 people who are in the rank below guild leaders are the ones who do all the recruitment and arranging, I was made guild leader because I don't break apart when things go wrong/the others didn't want it. Well I didn't hugely want it either, but hey-ho. Most of the guild leader stuff I do is promotions and sorting the guild vault and keeping it clean (oh you donated 5 stacks of Razor sharp beaks, how kind of you!)
Tonight we try for Kara again, I have my doubts on whether we'll have the people to go, we only have around 15 attuned in guild, and 3 have already said they can't come for sure. If any old combination of 10 people worked then we might be okay, but since we need 3 healers, 2 tanks and 5 dps (we tried 2 healers, 6 dps last week, we wiped due to tank death mostly).
Anyhow time will tell on that, if we can't go then we'll try and get some more attuned/do some heroics. unfortunately quite a few people have the attitude of "next patch will attune us anyway" while this may be true, if you can't get around to doing 4 instances for the sake of raiding, your not likely to be geared right, and your not likely to put your full effort into raids either.
I swear every time I log off theres a huge meeting in silvermoon city (where else) afterwards all of the guildies come out whistling trying to disguise that theres an few more leaving than entered, they are breeding like rabbits, not just normal rabbits, some kind of crazy giant rabbit that comes armed and is capable of magic!
That is all
(we are now over 80 members in the guild, thats separate accounts, not just characters, starting to think we might just march up to Illidan and mob him!)
I get a lot of people come here from searching on google and the ilk, seeking answers to their questions, many of which I've already tackled and I hope that they reach the correct page and find the answer they were looking for, however theres always the odd one which find me due to one of my articles having some random word, so I shall do a brief Q&A session to answer some of those which were previously unanswered...Well the first question comes from Elitist jerks, where people are inquiring to the true focus generation of pets, is it really 24 focus per 4 seconds? Well I've actually found it fluctuates, some ticks I get 23, some I get 25, but most I get 24, as proof here is a series of snapshots of focus from Faloranu soloing a ripfang lynx while I was doing the manalicious quest this morning. Naturally dive and growl were turned off and I didn't fire, so its only base focus regeneration vs lightning breath:
As you can see 15 changes in focus, the first 2 being the first 2 lightning breaths the rest are either a tick of regeneration or a tick of regeneration and a lightning breath at the same time, as we can see the first 5 regen ticks (pics 4-8) regenerated 24 focus, the 6th (on the 9th pic) regenerated 25 focus and then the remaining ticks all regenerated 24 focus (pics 10-15). SO out of a grand total of 12 focus regenns 11 were 24, 1 was 25, giving an average of 24.083 regenerated per tick.
On to the next question: "whats the best damage pet in outland" Well that depends, for most BM hunters, and probably many MM hunters, your best bet is going to be a ravager, if I have to pick one to tame, then go for the Nethermine Ravager which comes at level 70 allready so you only need to worry about loyalty before you can train it to your desire. However if your survival or BM/MM with a high crit chance and bestial discipline then you are going to want a wind serpent, a Swiftwing shredder to be precise, at level 69 you only need to bring this species up 1 level, and it allready comes with lightning breath so its ready to go as soon as you tame it. Of course any ravager or windserpent will do the same damage once trained I merely highlighted those 2 to show which require the least leveling.
"What does the ! do on a cast sequence macro?" The exclamation mark in a cast sequence macro is there to stop it acting as a toggle, normally "/cast auto-shot" would turn your auto shot on, but if you clicked it again it would turn auto-shot off! Change this to "/cast !auto shot" and you can press the button as many times as you like and auto shot will be turned on and stay on. Without the exclamation mark you simply couldn't include auto shot or auto attack in any cast sequence macros without causing major issues.
"Is bite better than claw?" Bite had an advantage on claw because it is more focus efficient, for each point of focus spent on casting bite you get a higher amount of damage than you would have if you were using claw, however it has a cooldown, which means if you have any focus regeneration talents bite rapidly becomes lackluster, you may find bite effective to use in conjunction with growl until you get either bestial discipline or go for the throat, once you get one of those talents claw becomes the leader by far.
"Should I tame my scorpid in claw for pvp?" This ones debatable, I would say its worth training it, but don't put it on auto use, see what your up against, if your going to be doing the old mana drain trick against a couple of casters then leave it off, you can't afford for scorpid poison to go down and your viper sting be dispelled, if you find yourself against a rogue and a warrior, or any combination that can't dispell poison, then turn claw back onto auto-use, your stings are going to be un-removable by the enemy anyway so you just want your scorpid providing as much damage as you can squeeze out of it.
"Are the boars in outland tamable?" see also "Are there any boars in outland?" Answer to both of these is no! There are no boars in outland, there are Helboars, there is a difference, a boar is an animal, a swine, type of pig. A Helboar is a demon, a nightmare, a warp-spawned monstrosity. Now hunters can tame beasts, and therefore boars, but we can't tame demons, and therefore Helboars are off the menu. However they are demons so Warlocks can enslave them as pets, if you ever see a warlock enslaving a Helboar, kill them, you know they are only doing it to rub it in our faces! The highest level tamable boar is the plagued swine in Eastern plaguelands, they come with the highest rank of charge and second highest rank in gore, so despite their looks they are highly recommendable.
Okay thats all the questions for today, hope these helped someone, if not... get off my property!
Sometimes your heart just isn't in it, the less said about yesterday the better, it was a sucky day for me and many of my friends, all for unrelated reasons, but its left me pretty moody today, I tried logging into wow, but there were another 5 hunters in the cue for the daily heroic, and the daily cooking quest was Manalicious. Thats enough to get the best of people down!
I'm going to be relaxing and trying to resist eating the chocolates I bought the other day that are meant to be saved for easter.
This will be tough!
I have an appointment in London today, got to be going in about half an hour, so the guilds going to have to run itself for a day, lets just hope I don't come back to a burning wreck eh?
The guild is supposed to be trying to get people onyxia attuned, its something fun we can do with the under 70's we still have, its something I still need to do as well, but I might just have to solo the lot of it, the only part which would be hard would be ubrs, not sure if thats soloable (well, actually at one point you need several people to open a door if I recall?)
To tide you all over while I'm gone (for an entire day!) go visit some other hunter sites, try Pet Attack for some weapon musings and retro pet talk, or the lone bowslinger for some info on the upcoming patch. Or you can always pop on over and say Hi to BRK, he has the best wipe shot at the moment! any wipe shot that includes murlocs is guaranteed fun! Besides the other day he linked to a load of other blogs which are worth reading, naturally he still didn't link to me, I promise you I am going to London, I'm not flying over to "pay him a visit" honest!
Master tactician, it gets a lot of bad press for a talent the gives crit in a talent tree that relies on critting to do so much of its damage and to provide the raid with bonus damage via expose weakness, so why all the bad press? surely survival hunters want to get as much crit chance as physically possible right? Well people are happy to point out that the higher crit chance you have, the less difference a 1% crit chance bonus makes, this is undeniable, going form 0% crit to 1% crit makes a bigger difference mathmatically than going from 25 to 26%.
Is this largely an abuse of maths to try and make crit look worse? Well yes and no, lets look at examples, if Mr Example Hunter does 10 damage a shot and fires 100 shots, if he has a 0% crit chance he would do 1,000 damage. With me so far? Good, if he then got a 1% crit chance and fired another 100 shots, he would do 1,010 damage, an increase of 1% on their previous amount as you often expect 1% crit to give you.
Now Mr Example Hunter has geared up considerable, yet still only does 10 damage a shot, but now has a 25% crit chance! He fires another 100 shots and this time does 1,250 damage! He then gets another 1% crit chance taking him to 26% crit chance and fires 100 shots again, this time doing 1260 damage, now the difference between 1250 and 1260 isn't a whole 1% (I think its 0.75%, but for the life of me can't remember what formula I should be using to double check that, bear with me here)
However I would like to highlight something, while gaining the first 1% crit gained more damage than gaining his 26th percent of crit when you look at things in percentile. If you look at things numerically, both times 1% crit gave Mr Example Hunter a gain of 10 damage for every 100 shots. So gaining 1% crit doesn't always give you a flat 1% damage bonus, however each 1% *does* give you the same amount of extra damage, the only reason the percentages are changing is because you already are getting the bonus damage from the rest of your crit rating!
So onto Master tactician, well I'll be honest, it isn't the jewel at the top of survival's crown like it should be, however, for someone who is trying to get all the crit they can, it is actually a considerable talent! Lets look at some details about this talent: It has a 6% proc chance, this means that to get it to proc you have to fire an average of 16.6666 shots.
Now using my own weapon and rotation for example, I use a 1:1.5 rotation, and have a 2.7 speed weapon, this means I'm firing 2.5 shots every 2.7 seconds (1 auto, 1 steady and half an arcane/multi/sting/whatever) This means I'll need 18 seconds to get 16.6666 shots fired (18/2.7x2.5=16.6666) the proc then lasts for 8 seconds, so that means on average master tactician is up 44.44% of the time! Now for that 44.44% of the time I'm gaining 10% crit chance, so if we multiply 44.44 by 10% we get 4.444, so to express master tactician as a flat crit chance, so as to compare to talents such as lethal shots or killer instincts, its giving me 4.44% crit chance on average!
Now sure 4.444% for 5 talent points, this isn't perhaps as good as gaining a flat 5% for 5 points (lethal shots) or a flat 3% for 3 points (killer instincts) but the wonderful thing is, it stacks with both of these! Meaning you are getting an equivalent of 12.444 crit chance from 13 talent points. If thats worth it is up to you to decide, personally I'm keeping with Master tactician, I'm a crit junky, and I do love that readiness!
I'd like to nip another rumor about master tactician inn the butt while I'm here too, you see some of the reasons people argue its not worthwhile is "I could have critted with those shots anyway, how do I knwo when its master tactician helping me, and when its just my normal 30-40% crit chance?" Well again using my attack speed and rotation I can show you how much of an impact master tactician is having!
Now with a 2.7 attack speed and a 1:1.5 rotation you will fire 7.4 shots over 8 seconds, which is the duration of master tactician, it is fair to say this might vary, since master tactician procs from shots it will proc at a completely random part of your rotation, sometimes you might get less, sometimes you might get more (particularly if there are multiple targets to multi-shot) however 7.4 shots is the average.
Now each of these 7.4 shots gains a 10% bonus to their crit chance certainly there will be times that 10% does nothing, perhaps they will all crit regardless, perhaps they will all fail to crit. But Master tactician gives 7.4 shots a 10% bonus, thats a 74% chance that one of the crits you had during those 8 seconds was due to master tactician, and this isn't dependent on how much crit rating you already had (well unless you have 91% crit chance or more already, in which case stop hacking wow) its a flat 74% chance of making a difference, no discussion thats all there is to it!
1:1.5 rotation, 2.7 speed, gets 7.4 shots off in 8 seconds, so master tactician gives 74% chance of a crit per proc
However your mileage may vary depending on your weapon speed and rotation, if you get a faster weapon but keep with a 1:1.5 rotation our going to get more shots which means more procs, and more shots in the 8 second duration if, however, you get a slower weapon, or are forced to change to a 1:1 rotation then you will find yourself getting less shots and therefore less procs and less shots in the 8 second duration.
Besides, taking this talent keeps your breath minty fresh for only 2 calories!
Well Saturday's been and gone, I managed to do a lot of shopping, get some new earrings, and couple of cheap dvds and some birthday presents. Oh wait you want to hear about the WoW stuff, sorry. I log in at 16:20, Karazhan invites are starting at 16:30, I made it in time *cheer* I really didn't want to miss the guilds first Karazhan!
Well as I previously mentioned we only have 11 attuned people, well we had 12 by the time we started, so I'm sure you can imagine how easy it was to get a full guild group to there. Well surprisingly we did have 10 attuned people online! and they were all free! and it was a tolerable (though not ideal) group layout too!, we really could have used having 3 healers instead of 2, but such is life, the fact remains that we had enough people come on in time to start!
Now once we got in there, thats when the problem started, after a brief detour to show one of our warlocks the smilie face under Karazhan (forgot to take a picture of that, sorry) we began, we cleared to the first boss, fairly slowly, but steady enough to get there in time, but once we got there our lack of healers payed its toll and about half way through Midnights health bar one of our tanks died, while I'll happily state survival hunters ability to take for short periods of time, I can't quite do it for half a fight.
We tried Attumen 4 times in total, and Moreos twice, our best attempts was something like 30% left on midnight for Attumen and we got 2 of Moreos's adds dead before our priest got splatted by their own loose shackle. Now some people could consider this a disappointment, I could understand that point of view, spending two hours in a raid and not killing a boss isn't the best situation, I would like to highlight we did get an epic drop for our troubles and everyone got enough reputation to get their first violet ring, not much use for a survival hunter who's already hit capped, but still I'll hang onto it, in case I even need to swap out some gear.
However all loot aside, what we gained was experience, those 10 raiders now know what to expect form the trash pulls going to Attumen and Moreos, which means we can do them in half the time, it was very noticeable that the second time we cleared to Attumen we rushed through the trash with only one death, while previously we had a couple of deaths along the way, and one wipe! I was also proud how, with only 2 healers, we only had 1 death on the aoe groups before Moreos, which was me... yeah double explosive trap makes the aggro *blush*
But whats more its an incredible bonding experience for the raiders, I got to know people much better than I did during 5 person encounters and random chatting on guild chat, you get to see the people who are deadly serious, those who are optimistic, those who are pessimistic and those who fancy themselves to be comedians (guilty as charged). You also get to see what people need to improve, and whats more now we've been to Karazhan, the guild chat that night with alight with people talking about doing this or that quest to get some new gear, or running a heroic or two for their new belt!
Failure to conquer the tower wasn't a failure at all, surprisingly its hugely boosted guild morale, we've also got in quite a few new people, encouraged to hear we are ready to enter. Next time, Attumens going down, Moreos is going to see the meaning of chain trapping the arms warrior (though I have to say both me and our BM hunter did fine trapping on both our attempts) and from then on, who knows what will happen, perhaps we'll see ourselves face to face with Prince someday soon? Time will tell...
Lienna is temporarily indisposed due to an unexpected level of motion sickness caused by a new breed of Wyvern we apologies for any inconvenience, but have managed to get the following quote from her:
"Wheeeee *huuurck*"
For those in and around the Terrokar forest area we highly recommend bringing umbrellas with you at all times.
Yes thats a swift purple wyvern, its absolutely wonderful for collecting herbs, I can get about 4 times as many now! Thats not to say it didn't cost me, 5200 gold is a lot of cash, and just to spite me there was a stabilized eternium scope on auction house just after I bought my mount, which I was short 50 gold to afford, and by the time I got the cash it had sold! I've been looking for one of those scopes for a while, but they only turn up very rarely on my server, oh well, next time I'll have the cash, I already thought I was being clever by saving up 200 gold more than I needed so I had money spare for an enchant or a couple of gems.
Today brings the guilds first Kara attempt, fingers crossed I'll be online in time, we actually only have 11 people attuned, 3 healers, 3 tanks and 5 dps, so if we want to make it all our guild that means almost everyone needs to be online! Odds are we're going to be taking a few people from a friendly guild for our first few runs, people aren't encouraged to attune themselves since next patch its being removed, and since the background downloader's started on that its killed peoples spirit. (you still need to use the key to open the gates though, so you need some attuned people)
In a recent post, replying to one of my recent posts, Mishalak was talking about why you'll only find such a legendary orc huntress doing solo content. The discussion moves onto getting a group through an instance safely and securely, not necessarily the fastest, but with that inherent speed boost that comes from no-one dying and also onto people thinking that purples can compensate for skill.
Now I've just come from heroic slave pens, todays daily token grind, and with me was one pala healer, fully decked out in heroic drops, token items and the odd piece from karazhan, as well as a paladin tank and rogue both from a guild thats working its way through tier 5 instances, lastly was an arms warrior, completely decked out in gladiator gear. Guess how many times we wiped...
Now if you call a wipe a complete loss of all the parties lives, then none to be fair, there was no point when all 5 of us were dead. If however you consider getting through 3 heroic packs at once with only the tank and hunter left alive a successful pull, then you also probably need to reevaluate your group techniques.
What can we put this down to? Largely cockiness from the T5 geared players, now they were good I have to admit that, the rogue was hitting 800-1000 dps on most pulls, a consistent 200 or so dps above me, and the tank was able to take on full groups of heroic mobs at once without dying or losing threat. However there are certain rules in an instance that having epics won't save you from, theres strategy which needs to be obeyed.
Skipping mobs for example, a perfectly viable strategy to speed up the groups progress, but theres a condition: so long as there are no mobs around which fear! The only wipes we had (and yes me and the tank survived both times, but still wipes) was from our ignoble leader deciding we would skip this group, then pulling a group with a mob that casts intimidating shout, then watching us 1 by 1 get feared into the skipped group, killed in half a second flat, then the skipped group went back to wait for the next victim to be feared into them.
Both of these occasions could have been avoided by using strategies, now the most obvious strategy is not o skip the group before the fearing mobs, however that does take extra time to do, so we'll ignore that one for the moment. What we did have was a hunter and a rogue with 2 fearing humanoid enemies, 1 sapped, one chain trapped, kill the others. a simple enough tactic, add a wyvern sting on the sap if it gets broken for some reason and you have a nice margin of safety.
Now why didn't we do that? Well because Mr tier 5 pala tank was too full of himself and decided that he can take on everything, even when I wyvern stung or trapped something, he'd come over and immediately break it and get aggro back on himself. Obviously his ego was largely inflated by excess of purple.
So I beseech you, yes gear yourself up, grab as many purples as you can, but keep some things in mind: 1) pvp gear might be epic, but its still not designed for pve, if you must use it in pve use it to fill in gaps in your pve gear, not as your one and only gear. 2) being all in purple does not make you immortal, things still hit you, and can do so hard! 3) being all in purple does not make you better than other people, it makes your character better than other peoples characters, sure, but you yourself are the one controlling it, theres a limit on what items can do for you, getting purples won't teach you how to chain trap and it won't make your sporebat a tolerable pet choice.
Sorry for the late post everyone, lets just say Virgin's internet service lives up to its name, unsure of itself, below average technique and sometimes, plain doesn't perform!
Well the buzz about Karazhan this weekend is growing, and now we have the question: how do we sort loot? Well the first answer someone gave was, lets just roll for things, now you can't doubt this ones effectiveness, its speedy, fair to everyone on the run and needs no tracking of any shape or form. Now the problem with rolling, as I pointed out, was that you might well go to every raid we run, kill every boss for the first time and generally become a bane of all things elite. But that won't stop the person who's on their first Kara run out rolling you on the epic weapon drop from prince.
Some people might site this as being fair, as the person who goes every time has that many more chances for the item to drop than the person who only goes once, theres some truth to that, but it doesn't reward loyalty. To reward Loyalty you move onto the realms of DKP, now we had a little discussion among the officers and were looking at a fixed price system right now, although our first few runs we may still roll.
Are there any systems you all have uses that are particularly successfully? the only real methods I know of are open bidding(aka an auction), closed bidding (an auction, but whispered, so people can't raise the stakes) and fixed price (person with the most dkp gets the item, paying a set amount, in the hope that their dkp at its new lower value allows someone else to get the next item). They all have their advantages and I'm sure whatever gets chosen will upset someone somewhere along the road.
Hey my internet's gone down again half way through this post, bless you Mr Branson, bless you all the way to Satan's personal love-shack.
Beast mastery, its the "in" spec in TBC, it helps you level fast, it makes you great damage, your pet can offtank reasonably, at least until heroics, even then a decent healer could probably keep beast master's turtle up. Of course since a noticeable amount of the damage is coming from the pet it will keep threat much better than other spec's pets, and comparatively its a far better solo tank because the hunter on its own is doing less damage than a marksman or survivalist.
So lets see, with a beast mastery spec I could solo better, do more damage, be more mana conservant due to being able to use a 1:1 rotation, have an effective offtank in instances, plus I would get to see my pets big and red and I'm a girl who does love her pets. Also pvp advantage could be cited, bestial wrath is amazing in pvp circumstances and on a mere 2 minute cooldown! Now I would lose burst damage from crit chains, true, but with resilience crits become less of a big deal these days anyway.
So why don't I? I've just pointed out how absolutely wonderful the beast master spec is, so whats wrong with me to make me stay survival? Do I have some kind of rare psychological disorder? Well actually yes I do, but thats none of your business and nothing to do with my choice in hunter spec. Lets look at some reasons not to change:
Firstly, I simply don't have the gear for it, I'm stacked in agility and crit, sure, and neither of those hurt a BM build, but I'm far behind on hit rating to be a beast master, they need an extra 3% hit compared to a survivalist, and I simply don't have the items to give me that bonus (Hell I'm still working on getting hit capped as survival without having to swap out agility items for +hit items). nd its not just in the hit rating, beast masters want a faster weapon than survivalists, while a gladiators crossbow might do me well in survival it would mess up shot rotation should I change to beast mastery, its simply not fair to judge a spec without gearing properly for it, which for me would mean about 3-4 items with extra hit rating and a new bow, no thanks.
Secondly: Beast masters might give a nice buff for 5 persons, but In do have a tendency to do raids, even if they are pug ones, now theres nothing wrong with beast mastery hunters in raids, hell they should be ending up near top of the damage meters unless an encounters particularly pet unfriendly, but raids is where survivalists group buff really shines, its fair to say I reach 800 agility in raids, variying in what classes I get grouped with (gimmethatfreakingenhancementshamannow! BeforeIwyvernstingyousobadsleepingbeautywillhavenothingonyou!) so thats 200 attack power to everyone hitting in melee. Sure in some raids thats not many, but I would hope I would get more than 5 people effected with that (remember hunter pets count as people for this buff too) which is the limit of ferocious inspiration's targets.
Thirdly: In the right 5 person group expose weakness is like a gift from the gods, I've been in a group with an enhancement shammy, feral druid tanking, rogue, me and a paladin healer, thats 5 people getting a nice attack power boost (further boosted due to druid and shaman agility buffs) we absolutely slaughtered the instance, bosses seemed like trash, trash was little more than speed bumps.
Fourthly: Wyvern sting, how I love thee, let me count the ways... Well you and deterrence anyhow... oh not to forget readiness, because rapid-fires get lonely if you only use one! So far I've succusfully got boss kills form deterrence usage several times, I think the toughest I've tanked was the dragon mount of the last boss in heroic ramparts for 25%, hit aspect of the monkey and use readiness for a second deterrence, and if you can get a scorpid sting on the enemy and you'll last ages, whats more survivalist hunters might not be as effective in melee as, say, a warrior but we can hold our own far better than other hunters, so while your tanking your dps is probably only halved (while over hunters are probably dealing with a a quarter).
Now Beast mastery is a wonderful spec, I don't doubt it, it has huge benefits which I can clearly see, but I just can't see myself as a beast master, survivalism has too much to offer me
Its not you... its me.
I'm sorry... forgive me?
You'll never guess where I went yesterday! Oh, guess the picture spoils the surprise huh? yeah we went to molten core... ish. You see pugs have slight problems, firstly its hard to get the right class balance, its hard enough to find one pug tank and healer, let alone 3! Secondly you tend to get people in their late 50's or mid 60's who aren't actually overpowered for the instance and so don't help too much compared to a 70, and some of them are geared worse than people who would have been doing Molten core in the first place.
Thirdly everyone expects to get all the rewards for none of the efforts, its really quite creepy, they come along unattuned and expect to get both halves of thunderfury's quest items in one run! Now we spent a good half of the time attuning people, I went in first to solo brd a good 2 hours before the raid, ended up getting a pala and lock from the guild join me, but really brd is easy to solo as a hunter, there wasn't any time that I felt I needed the other two's help, still they needed the attunement too, so they came along.
The the raid started, we invited people, gathered up and then 10 of the 18 people we had announce they aren't attuned, not only that but none of them know their way around brd to get attuned. *sigh* Here I come to the rescue, I guide a group of 4 of them through brd to the quest item and MC entrance, then turn on aspect of the pack, run back tot he entrance and guide then next 4 through then back again and guide the last 2. Finally we are all in, well except that 5 people decided they didn't want to wait for the attunement runs and left the raid.
So we start going through MC, the first group of 2 fire elementals we kill, but don't kill the spawns fast enough so they start splitting and we have to run out and wait for them to despawn (I later found out that I was to be the only person to kill the spawns for the whole instance, apparently one hunter can just about keep on top of their spawn rate, and that saves anyone else having to think about what they are doing!), but after that it went quite smoothly, we cleared to the third boss (for some strange reason not going tot he first boss first) and Telson (my pet scorpid) even got to take a core hound that was pulled by accident, funny story, but apparently mend pet isn't enough to keep a scorpid alive against a 40 person raid mob, who would have guessed?
So we wiped just in front of the third boss, and then strangely the wipe coincided with people having to leave for a variety of different reasons, its odd how no-one ever mentions that they have to go unless there has been a wipe recently, it must be something I missed in wow's term's and conditions "you cannot announce that you wish to leave a group unless your character is currently dead"
People need to accept that arranging things like this take time and effort, you shouldn't just decide one morning "hey lets do molten core" and expect the fairies to come along and arrange the group, attune everyone and prevent people from dying when they pull 2 core hounds and 2 molten giants at the same time. I need to get some of those fairies, I wonder if I can borrow a bottle from Link...
And you'll never guess who was top of the damage meters! by a mere 3-400 dps depending on the fight, this might explain why I'm a little tetchy, its one thing to be doing the most damage in a 5 person and dragging people through, but to do it in a 40 person instance just isn't what I had planned. The one thing in wow thats really annoying me at the moment is how I'm expected to lead raid groups everywhere. Even if I'm not officially handed the leader tittle, I'm asked and asked to be master looted, and regardless end up having to lead or else the rad goes no-where at all! Sometimes wow is just too much work to enjoy.
Ah the guild vault, a wonderful blessing from blizzard, finally its no-longer needed for the guild leader to make a level 1 alt to haul all the guilds stuff around, now everyone (who you allow) can see whats available to be taken, and if you let them, can take a limited amount too, not to mention the ability to donate money, which is a plainly useful thing to have.
but nothing can be all good, oh no, the guild vault has its little complexities, most of which come from people, who might be great 90% of the time, but it only takes one moment of stupidity to ruin the vault for everyone. Now of course you can set allowances for the guild vault, personally we have a system where the low levels are only able to take things from the first tab, which gets filled with low level items that are useful for leveling, as well as some buff foods. The second tab is only accessible for officers and people who are raid ready, it contains the items or worth, netherweave cloth and bags, potions, recipes, 30 stamina foods and boe items.
Now I'm a little paranoid about people being hacked, so no-one gets unlimited access, the weakness of the guild vault is someone given appropriate access can drain the vault completely should they get hacked/sell their account/eave the guild in a huff. So everyone is limited to 2 stacks a day from each tab at most, they probably could take about 200 gold worth of items, but not much more than that unless they did it over several days.
Of course the next problem is people, for you see some people are givers, they will donate everything they can, every time they have a full stack of herbs or cloth it goes into the guild vault, every day they put in 10 gold or so, a tithe of their daily quest profits. Then there are the takers, they have access to 2 stacks a day so they will damn well take 2 stacks a day,even if they have no use for it they will take it and sell it on AH. It should be quite apparent that a guild cannot function with more takers than givers.
Now last night we had someone get all huffy and leave us, but not before going to the bank and taking as many items as they could, fortunately they decided to take items that they could use, rather than items of value (a stack of mana pots and 2 stacks of food) but its still annoying that people can be so calculating when they leave, the attitude of "I'll take everything I can get"
I think its time to make a 3rd bank slot, one exclusively for the true valuables, items, patterns and flasks, ofcourse that requires 500 gold, which means a donation drive is in order. Oh the fun of running a guild vault
Been busy lately, making a forum for the guild today, didn't expect it to be as much work as it is being, but then its not exactly hard, just time consuming, we now have around 60 members (thats separate accounts, not characters). So we are of reasonable size so we are starting to need a way to discuss raid times, attunement levels and such that doesn't require me to whisper everyone, and doesn't clog up guild chat.
Oh and the picture? thats the crest on our guild vault, need to upload it somewhere to put it onto the forums, so here's as good as anywhere!
Hey what do you know, I reached 100 posts, I'm not usually this committed to a project, especially one that involves writing, in a way this blog is practice for when I get into college, cause then I'll have to do a lot more writing so I'm sort of easing myself into it!
Now I managed to get some time in game late last night and had a Mechanaar run, I was happy to see the second dpser was giving me a run for my money, now you may remember me whining about very few people seeming to be close to me in the damage meter back here, so I'm happy enough when I'm with someone doing a decent amount of damage.
However this was even better for it wasn't just a random pug member, this time it was a guildy and not just any guildy, a hunter guildy! To be precise, the hunter guildy who I was talking about back here, who has since taken my advice on specs and is now doing very respectable damage (we were largely even for trash, but I soared ahead on bosses, double rapid fire will do that to your damage)
And there was more happiness last night, as our long absent guild leader came back to say hi, that would be the true guild leader, the one who will be guild leader again as soon as he's sorted out in RL, and I'll be more than happy to go back to just being hunter officer. He seemed to be doing better than the last time we talked, which was good to see, and also when he came online we had a total of 11 level 70's online, 3 healers, 2 tanks and 6 dps, hey, if everyone were attuned thats enough for Karazhan!
Of course not everyone is attuned, and it was 1:50am game time so it wasn't really an idea to go there, plus a few people are only new 70's and need to gear up a little first, but still its a morale booster to see that many people online at once!
We have also set a date for a karazhan run, which will be half from our guild and half from another, which is next Saturday, of course next Saturday I'm going shopping with a friend, so I might well be out at the time, depending on where we go and how long we take, so unfortunately I may miss our guilds first steps into the tower, which would be more than a little disappointing, but real life does have to take precedent, and maybe I can sneak in later during the run.
I really need to find time to log on during the evenings, at the moment I'm playing maybe an hour or two a day, and its mostly during the day, while this is great for doing daily quests, no-ones around to steal all the quest mobs, it does have some disadvantages when your meant to be guild leading. I haven't spoken to any of my officers in 3 days, which I'm sure can't be beneficial, and I don't really know when there are people online at the moment, so we can plan on what days and times its best to plan guild raids, once they start anyhow.
Mostly I've been cleaning, my room is done, the lounge is done, I managed to get my brother to start on his room (which in itself was a whole days work) the computer room is now filled with junk, either to go into the loft of charity shops or just because my brothers idea of cleaning is to move the junk out of his room and into another! Still the house does look better for all the work.
Which I had better get back to, *sigh* I'd probably be a lot more encouraged if I had received the letter from my college saying that they had accepted me (of course there is a chance I'll receive a letter saying they haven't, which will be a pain in the rear end, which is probably what I'm panicking about the most)
If you've managed to max out both your level and cooking skill, then you will find a goblin in Shattrah who is more than willing to take on amateur chefs to cook one of his many specialties. He will ask you to make a meal for him every day and at the end of the month will award you the master chef trophy and each time you cook for him he will reward you with a little cash and either a barrel of fish or a crate of meat.
There are 4 different meals he might ask you to make and they are as follows:.
Manalicious: This ones actually only gathering ingredients for him, what you need to do is head over to netherstorm and look around the eco-domes, inside most of them you will soon find a lot of mana berry bushes, herbalists can even track them with track herbs, once you gather 15 just head back to the goblin for your reward!
Revenge is tasty: This one needs a flying mount! What you need to do is find some miscellaneous warp stalkers and kill them until you have 3 bits of warped flesh, then go to Skettis, find one of the giant Kalriki flying around, get it to attack you then land and kill it, hopefully it will drop the wing you need, if not kill another until one does then cook the warped flesh into warp burgers and use the pot your given and hand it back to the goblin. You can use warp burgers you have cooked before, apparently no-one noticed old, stale and rotting ingredients in Kalriki stew!
Super hot stew: Again this requires a flying mount! You need to kill a few raptors and some windserpents (easiest to find in blades edge, but any in outland will do) to gather 2 bits of raptor ribs and 1 piece of serpents flesh, then cook these up into Mok'nathal shortribs and crunchy serpent (both recipes come from a blades edge horde quest, alliance can buy them from the cenarion outpost in blades edge) Then you need to head up to the mountains, just south of Ogrilla, in the forge camp there you will see big infernal style demons, kill one of them and use the pot over its corpse to make the dish!
Soup for the soul: Available for you footsloggers, this recipe requires you to get 4 bits of clefthoof meat, cook them into roasted clefthoof and then take them to the Ancestral grounds in Nagrand, The ancestral grounds are a little north-west of the big crystal mountain (which I can't recall the name of) and are swarming with orc ghosts. You should soon see a large bonfire, thats where you need to use the pot, in fact you can even cook the clefthoof meat there, making this the easiest quest to do.
Now as for the reward, well its a choice of what you need more, fish or meat, and also the recipes you need Spicy hot talbuk is the only recipe unique to the meat crate, so if you need to cook for, or need yourself, hit rating then grab the meat create until you get it. All of the other recipes can be found in the barrel of fish, but only broiled bloodfin and skullfish soup are unique (the other 3 recipes can be found in either the meat or the fish) Your first target might be to get all the recipes you can but once you have the recipes what do you want to get? Lets look at the rewards you get from each one, once processed:
Crate of meat:
Buzzard meat (20 stamina food or 20 strength pet food)
Raptor ribs (20 stamina food)
Clefthoof meat (20 strength food/lightning zapping aura food)
Warped flesh (20 agility food)
Serpent flesh (23 spelldamage food)
chunk o basilisk (23 spelldamage food)
Talbuk venison (20 stamina/20 hit rating food)
Barrel of fish:
Barbed gill trout (2 types of non-buff food)
Figlusters mudfish (20 agility food)
Golden darter (44 healing food)
Zangarian sporefish (8 mp5 food)
spotted feltail (20 stamina food)
huge spotted feltail (30 stamina food, 5 per fish)
Enourmous barbed gill trout (health and mana regen non-buff food)
furious crawdad (30 stamina food)
So if your looking to help out your tanks and healers, as well as hiding away a few agility foods for yourself, then go for the barrel of fish, the downside is that a couple of the fish you can get (the trout) aren't usefull for much more than keeping your pets happiness up. If you want to help your dps classes then opt for the meat, with its selection of strength, hit rating and spell damage foods, not to mention a pet-buff food and some agility foods for yourself.
Either way, enjoy your meals!
Marksman hunters, you specced 41 points in your talent tree, so learn how to use that shot, shoot everyone with it today, for a minutes silence is due for Gary Gygax (July 27,1938 - March 4 2008), now you might not know who he is, so I'll tell you a little information, although if you want more wikipedia has a page on him.
Now it may be unclear why any WoW players should bow their heads to this man's passing, Gary Gygax had no direct interference with the Warcraft series, what this man did was work on the creation of Dungeons and Dragons, you know, the game with the dice where you have to write things on paper and use your imagination! D&D is commonly seen as the foundation of fantasy games everywhere, so much fantasy is derived from this game its simply unbelievable, what do you think made fireball such a classic mage spell? Who decided that rogues should be stealthy? Where do you find an archer who has a pet animal? All from D&D!
Who knows if WoW would exist if d&d didn't, certainly it would be different, Today we mourn the passing of a man who helped shape fantasy gaming as we know it today, and I think that makes him due a healthy amount of respect.
"I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."
Its time to clean my house IRL, its not a pleasant task, but someone has to do it, and since my brothers too lazy and my father moans too much if he has to do anything, it falls to me. I don't like cleaning, and theres a hell of a lot to do, I managed to spend the entirety of last night emptying, cleaning, dusting then polishing one cabinet, theres another 3 like it in the house, understandably my wow time has dropped, I'm aiming to get dailies done so I can get some cash towards my epic flying mount, but I really want to get all this cleaning over and done with rather than still be doing it in a fortnights time.
I will endevour to keep up posting here, but if I miss a day or two please forgive me in advance, it probably means I have my arm down a u-bend or something, so don't panic.
In the mean time you can talk amongst yourself, need a topic? How about racial pet skills, I'll start: bear should get hibernate, the bear falls asleep for 5 seconds and regains its health fully over 2 ticks, one at 3 seconds and 1 at 5 seconds, wakes if damaged, 50 focus, 1 minute cooldown.
To respec or not to respec? that is the question, no I'm not thinking of doing anything silly like changing to marksman or beastmastery (not that theres anything wrong with them of course), what I'm actually thinking of is whether to swap around my talents in survival a little bit, I have definably noticed that I could use some more mana over the course of heroic bosses I often end up downing a mana potion to keep myself going full blast to the end of the fight.
Now with survival speccing to mana regeneration is a simple change to put points in either efficiency on the marksman side (which I already have) or Thrill of the hunt on the survival side, at the moment I have 0 points in thrill of the hunt, having preferred a point in Resourcefulness and Wyvern sting instead, since I intend on keeping both wyvern sting and readiness I won't be able to change my spec to put more than one point into thrill of the hunt without taking away from mortal shots. something I consider a bad idea, an extra 6% damage on every crit is generally better than 40% mana returned on a third of your special crits.
However like much of survival's talents thrill of the hunt varies with gear, at low levels its near useless, getting an average of maybe 1 mp5 from each point, once you get steady shot and start doing proper shot rotations it becomes more valuable, and especially when you get given raid buffs to boost your crit chance it starts proccing more and more! Lets look at how each point of it works out:
Let us assume a 5 min fight, long enough for proc chances to average out at least somewhat, now take your attack speed (2.7 for me) and then your rotation (1:1.5 for me) now with my attack speed and rotation I am doing 1.5 special shots every 2.7 seconds, Thrill of the hunt only works on shots that require mana so we can ignore the auto-shots for the rest of this. Now a 5 min fight is 300 seconds long, divided by 2.7 gives me 111 auto-shots in a 5 min fight, multiply by 1.5 gives me 167 special shots (I have rounded on these calculations by the way)
Now we know I do 167 special shots in 5 mins, but my crit chance is only 27.63 so not all these special shots are eligible to return mana to me! Divide 167 by 27.65% and we get 46, so now we know I get an average of 46 crits with my special shots over 5 mins... but each rank of Thrill of the hunt only gives a 33% chance to get mana back (well technically the last point gives an extra 34%) so only a third of these crits get me back mana! Thats an average of 15 procs over 5 mins per point in thrill of the hunt (would get 16 for the last point).
Now 15 mana returns, but what does that mean? if I'm casting rank 1 arcane shot thats only 8.8 mana per shot!, but I'm not, I'm using a 1:1.5 rotation of max ranked steady shot, arcane shot and multi shot, the rotation is 4 steady shots long and contains 1 arcane and 1 multi shot, that means that for every 6 crits 4 are steady, 1 is arcane and 1 is multi, the fairest way to work out an average is to add these all together in mana cost, then divide it out to give me an average for a thrill of the hunt mana regen.
As I have maxed out efficiency arcane shot costs me 207 mana, multi shot costs 247, and steady shot costs 99, so (4x99+207+247)/6= 141.6 mana, thats the average cost for my shots, however thrill of the hunter only returns 40% of that, so thats 56.6 mana returned per proc, multiplied by the 15 procs and we have an answer of 850 mana over 5 mins, which comes to 14 mana per 5 seconds, so its easy enough to compare to gear that gives Mp5
So thrill of the hunt gives you:
fight duration / attack speed
result x rotation (1 for 1:1, 1.5 for 1:1.5)
Result / crit% (make sure you divide by the % not just the number)
Result / Thrill of the hunt proc% (33/66/100%, again divide by a % not a number)
Result * mana per shot (add the mana of your whole rotation, then divide by number of shots in the rotation)
Result / 40% (again make sure you divide by a % not by 40)
Result / fight duration
Result * 5
And the result from that is what Thrill of the hunt will give you in terms of mp5! Now lets test this a little bit, if I were to down an elixir of major agility and some agility food (giving me a net bonus of 2.5% crit chance) I would gain 15 mp5 for 1 point in thrill of the hunt, rather than the 14 mp5 that I currently would gain.
Now as for my talent spec, well it currently is like this, however I shall be changing it to this, its onyl a minor change, taking 1 point out of trap master (I want to check on whether having both points in this really makes much difference) and putting it into survivalist, and swapping a point in resourcefulness for a point in Thrill of the hunt, hopefully this should help my mana regeneration, while providing minimal losses on my effectiveness at trapping (and since I have 2 parts of the Beast lord set, I can always wear those to gain a 4 second reduction on trap time)
So on Saturday we had a semi-planned raid to the ruins of Ahn-Qiraj, unfortunately I wasn't able to arrive at the raid time due to RL obligations but I came on an hour and a half later, fully expecting to be met with a group having downed at least 2 bosses, maybe 3.
I'm starting to get used to having my expectations dashed, after logging on an hour and a half late the group was at the meeting stone, starting to summon people, it wasn't full and hadn't killed a single boss, this was more than slightly disappointing to see, but I got invited and then we started.
Its always interesting to see the old raids with groups of 70's, though any sense of order is lost to the raid, being level 70 apparently makes you immune to any tactic discussions, not to mention that every single boss was ninja pulled, just to make things even easier. Still we managed to see much of the instance, killing all the bosses bar the last one and the sphinx boss, a few people got some nice items for RP, and a lot of people had fun, even with the late start.
Still it would be nice if th person who originally organized this raid was able to lead it, rather than counting on me to do so, not to mention that he was one of the people who seemed especially unwilling to listen to tactics (we had a try on the last boss, but couldn't move it as we had to because he over-aggroed the boss and just stood there). Still shouldn't complain so much, its a fun night, and I recommended that people go and visit this place sometime when you have a free evening from your busy schedules.
Theres one thing which annoys me to no end in wow, and it actually comes from having a damage meter addon, if I so chose then I wouldn't see this problem, wouldn't know about it and probably wouldn't care. However I like running DamageMeters for the simple fact that it has a dps column, the most useful thing on the addon in my opinion, sure seeing who did the most damage over the raid is interesting enough, but seeing what dps *you* did over the course of the last fight allows you to see how much difference your new gear is doing, how much dps you lose from having to do a tricky trapping, what change you get from having a warrior do 5 sunders on the target etcetera.
Now I can see my dps, on most trash mobs in most instances, tends to float around the 4-500 mark, this depends on what enemies I'm facing, how much armor they have how well my tanks doing, how difficult my trap is and if I have to go out of my way for something special. Of course this varies, but as a rule it stays between 4-500 dps. On boss fights I tend to get around 7-800 dps, again this depends on the boss, longer fights my dps tends to lower as the bonus damage from my double rapid fire pales in comparison, also mana starts to become an issue for longer fights, especially if the enemy does nature damage and I have to use aspect of the wild, still 7-800 dps is a fair target for me without raid buffs.
So wheres the problem? I mean I'm doing great, shouldn't I be flexing my E-sexual organ like most people who consistently top the damage charts? No, because I'm topping the charts while other people are frequently a long way below me, its not rare for me to see people doing about 20-25% of the groups dps while I'm doing around 40%, thats a huge variance and it gives me the feeling that I'm taking these people through the instance rather than that I'm part of a co-ordinated group! On occasion I see that on my own I'm doing the same damage as the other 2 dps in the group combined!
Now this in its self is rather irritating, but so long as the instance gets done it doesn't matter too much in the long run, however last night, the guild had a black morass run to try and get another guildy attuned for Karazhan. Now at first I was put onto the adds, a simple enough job normally, however I've done this instance a good 6 times, and never before have I seen more than 5 adds come per portal, after the first boss the dps of the other two was so slow we started getting 2 portals open at once, and when that happened the trash began to overwhelm me and we wiped. We then had another try with me on the bosses to provide quicker killing, half way through the second mini-boss the person on the adds calls for help from the other dpser, suddenly I'm soloing these mini-bosses!
Now on that run we wiped at the 5th mini-boss, because the person doing the adds refused to move closer than medihv's island and did little damage on the adds meaning our healer outthreated him and got mobbed. I look on the damage meter and on this run I have done 55% of the groups damage! Now I know these meters aren't 100% accurate, but to have one person providing more dps than 2 dpsers and a tank combined is just insanity!
So, erm, does anyone know some good sites that give hints on how to play warlocks? some advice on spell rotation and such? Its not my area of expertise unfortunately, if those 2 were hunters I could have them doing an extra 200 dps in the time it takes to visit the class trainer! Unfortunately as they are the evil side of the pet class I find myself asking for help! As I am now their guild leader I feel responsible for them, and I know neither of them are stupid, they just need someone to show them the ropes.
A lesson has been learned after curator yesterday, there is a reason that respeccing your pet is so cheap, sometimes it needs to be done. I have Faloranu with a standard 2 ranks in all resistances, but against curator and his melee smashing adds it really isn't enough, I was having to keep mend pet up almost permanently, even occasionally bandage her!
