Time for another Improvement Plan update

I wrote the last update a week ago. Time for another one.

You might be familiar with the format: review previous 5 steps, describe any out-of-plan changes, assess the results, document the new 5 steps.

Review Previous Five Steps

1) Sons of Hodir - I actually found some Everfrost Chips. 5 of them to be correct. Its like christmas come early. On schedule to ding Exalted tuesday night, and since I post these roughly 18-20 hours after I write them, in all likelihood, I'll be exalted as you read. A happy day indeed. All this for a stupid upgrade to the shoulder inscription.

2) Revisit the Gear Wishlist - Using MaxDPS.com as my primary research tool, I put together a spreadsheet of all the upgrades available in the game. The spreadsheet format allows me to filter easily by equipment slot or by boss which is very helpful depending on what I'm doing at the moment.

3) Titanium Impact Band - Already wrote about this, but for the sake of sticking with the format, I'll put it here also. Thing I like the best about it is the yellow socket because +16hit is very helpful to me right about now.

4) Darkmoon Cards - Zero progress on this one.

5) Knights of the Ebon Blade - Ding revered. That mental block that somehow prevented me from doing some simple addition proved to be a non-issue, and I nailed revered that very night via dailies. So I've got the new helm arcanum which is very nice, but surprisingly had to adjust to the lack of +hit that the new arcanum has when compared to the Cenarion Expedtion one.

Out-of-Plan Changes

You know, so much changes in a week, its tough to say at this point.

Got a pair of shoulders from the Loot Council out of Naxx-25 which was a nice upgrade, but still has 3 more upgrade options in Heroic Raids. I'll happily slap the new Shoulder Inscription on these puppies once I ding Hodirs.

Got a 1H Melee weapon that's a big DPS upgrade over one of my Fangs of Truth, however came with a big drop in +hit so I had lots of shuffling to do.

Regarding the aforementioned shuffling, changed every gem to have some +hit on it, plus changed my boots enchant to Icewalker, to get within 5 points of the 8% hit cap.

Also got Arc-Scorched Helm in Naxx-10.

That's all I've got.

Assess the Results

Patchwerk-25 is what I'm generally using as my benchmark.

I came this |--------------| close to passing 5k DPS on Patchwerk this week -AND- I was a total noob and forgot to swap in my Fancy Saronite Arrows, so I was using the old school Mt. Hyjal ammo -AND- I think I mis-managed the timing of my Rapid Fire cooldown. Brass still won at WWS, coming |----| this close to 5k.

My pet did roughly 2.3k DPS, comprising 48% of my overall damage.

The upcoming nerf for Hunters makes me a drop sad. Not because my total damage will go down. I'm ok with that, and will continue to work my Plan to keep the numbers improving. No, the sadness is that they're nerfing the pet DPS the most. I'm loving the nearly 50/50 split between Hunter and Pet. I'd prefer they nerf the Hunter and keep the pet solid, making for a 60/40 Pet/Hunter split.

But, lets let go of the saddness, its almost Christmas. And revel in the massive numbers we're posting for now.

The New 5 Steps

Interestingly, the upgrade options are becoming fewer and fewer. Pretty soon, the Plan might feature fewer than five, so if any of these are a stretch, call me on it and let me know it's time to chop the number down.

1) Last week they get to appear in my plan - Do two more quests and ding Hodirs Exalted. Just Do It.

2) Clean up Wishlist - Version 1 of my Wishlist came mostly from manually scanning boss loot tables and Kaliban's Loot List. Version 2 came almost exclusively from MaxDPS.com. A visual inspection of some of MaxDPS's choices leaves me scratching my head in a couple cases. I might need to get Cheeky with it.

3) Out with the green - My only greenie left is one trinket. I dislike it (A) because its green (B) its 'on-use' effect causes me to turn green a bubbly, like I've got a poison on me. Its got to go. I could replace it with one of three blue trinkets I have in the bank, but I they're all haste oriented, and my greenie is AP and Crit based.

4) Melee Weapons - Ok, so this kind of overlaps with #2, but its an area of closer focus. There's so many different options for the melee weps for a Hunter. Dual wield or go 2H? Fang of Truth is nice, but mostly for the +hit. What weapons are nice enough for me to consider dumping 1200g into Accuracy? Inquiring minds want to know.

5) WTB another T7 piece - Some of the Loot Council members indicate they read the blog. Good stuff, thanks for comin'. Let me use this place holder to share with you how utterly wonderful the 2-piece T7 bonus is for a Beast Master hunter. +5% damage to the pet. The way it stands now, that'd be a 2.5% increase in my overall DPS. Hard to find any single piece upgrade that'd add a basically guaranteed 2.5% boost. In the meantime, I'm saving badges for incase you decide to send the loot elsewhere, but pretty please, with sugar on top, hook a brother up.