Oooh-gri'la and Shot Speeds

Get home sunday night from a sweet RL roadtrip where I got to make stuff out of real molten glass, and log in to grind out some dailies before bed.

Oooh, hey, very nice, ding Ogri'la Exalted.

I never really checked out their quartermaster before, so I wander over and look through his stuff.

What have we here? The Crystalline Crossbow.

That little baby represents a nice damage upgrade over my Sky-Fire Hawk Bow, small AP drop, made up for by nice crit increase, while still keeping me Spicy Hot Talbuk hit-capped without changing any gems or other gear.

What's got me thinking, though, is the shot speed. My current bow is a 2.4 speed, and the crossbow is 2.8.

Not sure what to do about it. Some say test it out at Dr. Boom. Sure, that'll show me what my personal DPS will behave like with either bow. But that misses out on an important thing since my rate of fire keeps my kitty happy.

Whether I crit for 67 damage on a wing clip or for 2617 on an Aimed Shot, my pet gets the same Kill Command, the same helping of Focus, and the same frenzy effect. A Beast Master really wants crits. Lots of 'em. Fast and continuous. Not necessarily big'ens, but lots and lots of crits. Ok, big'ens are nice too, as I'm not one to pass up on Mortal Shots, just so long as there's lots of them.

So, if I choose to go with this x-bow, which I most likely will, what are some short-term accessible (pre/early-kara) haste options that I can go after to offset this effect?

That, and I need to figure out how to get Apexis Crystals, as the quartermaster doesn't take Amava's Platinum Card.

Midget Hooker

Fun times in Heroic Slave Pens.

The last two bosses are basically "stand there and DPS like a madman".

So for the first time, I tried out a new trick to make use of Improved Aspect of the Hawk.

I waited for it to proc, and then I nailed Rapid Fire and my Bladefist's Breath attack power trinket.

And I just stood there auto-shotting, so f-ing fast, it was insane.

I was like the midget hooker packing the machine gun on Mars in Total Recall. You know the one.

I gotta get me some gear with haste improvements and try that out again.

That, and I need to do a WWS report to see how I did against the boss.

Shots

Shot rotation seems to be a big source of contention for hunters. You've got one school of thought that says you should build a complex macro that eeks out the most mana efficient and DPS maximizing rotation of shots for your specific weapon speed, and you've got another school of thought (BRK's an advocate of this one) that says you should understand your shots and manually fire them and adjust your rotation to the circumstances.

And I suppose there's a third school of thought, but I hesitate to call it "thought". Those of us who more or less randomly manually fire our special shots, with no real attention to mana efficiency, or DPS, or much of anything at all besides pressing buttons.

I've more or less grown up in that third school of thought, with just a drop of attention paid to not clipping my auto shots, but not a whole lot more than that. Hell, I've even fired shots sometimes because I wanted to see a different color fly by (ohh, purple arcane shot, oooooh, green serpent sting. its like the 4th of July).

To improve my DPS, especially in longer sustained fights, I've got to learn a bit more about what this shot rotation stuff means to me.

In a comment to my post about Kill Command, Kestrel offered a simple macro that just does Steady Shot/Auto Shot, with a call to Kill Command whenever its available. Papewaio offered an alternative, with a bit more sophistication surrounding the error messages that'll pop up while spamming this guy.

I tried a hybrid of this puppy out wednesday night.


#showtooltip Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()

I put this guy in place, headed over to Netherwing Fields to do the daily quests, and sat down on one of the floating islands to do the Not So Friendly Skies.

Having no idea what to do with the macro, I just tried hitting it like I would to weave my steady's in with my auto's manually. Didn't really work, with steady shot not really firing other than the first time I hit it. But it was proc'ing my Kill Commands, so happy me.

Then I figured I'd try spamming the key, litterally hitting it again and again, knowing full well that it wasn't ready while steady shot was casting, but with the nice error message suppression, no real problem other than my Cooldown Timer addon animation bar for Kill Command would sort of enlarge to indicate to me that KC was still on cool down. Ok, I can live with that.

Initial thoughts on spamming the key...(1) sort of silly, but ok, lots of life is silly if you think about it, and (2) holy DPS batman.

I didn't do anything quantitative to measure my output, but intuitively, the transporters were dropping like flies. I was just amazed at how fast they'd go down, and how long my mana lasted with Aspect of the Viper turned on.

Just simply from Steady/Auto shots in a 1:1 ratio, spaced as close together as I could get them. I was only slowing down at times to allow my pet to keep aggro.

Thinking of next steps. Firstly, spamming the key is going to become boring in a hurry, so I'm gonna have to think about that part and see if there's any options that allow a bit less spamming and a bit more variety. Secondly, I've got to figure out where people go to for ideas on what they consider to be more optimal rotations. I guess I'll have to dig around, and maybe find out how to do Dr. Boom so I can measure this stuff.

The Tale of Three Hunters

Not a whole lot behind this story that you can't imagine from the title.

Which would you rather...
>Semi-PUG with 3 Hunters

-or-

>Voluntary eye surgery and knee replacement at the same time


I'm probably more inclined to choose the latter.

Well, actually, I kinda had fun in the end, so that's an extreme position, but I'm going for effect here, people.

I got an invite for Mana Tombs. My Resto Druid friend whispers me saying his guild had a run going in there, and someone had to bail out, so would I be interested in coming in for a few minutes to down the last boss.

Sure, why not. Join the party and see that we've got a 66 druid, 66 warrior, 2x70 hunter, and me. Yeesh. Ok, lets fry the boss. I'm not sure who they had with them that dropped out, but I think it was a result of a wipe and then him choosing to leave. Well, we slam this nexus prince boss. Not sure what level, and maybe we were overpowered, but wham-o, he drops. They were all pretty happy at the firepower, and I was internally proud at providing fully 25% more DPS than the next guy on the list for the one boss encounter. And with 5 minutes of work, I got some nice quest to turn in for 17K XP. w00t.

We decide to make a run from the beginning.

Firstly, Mana Tombs is pretty cool. The visuals are pretty cool, and the music reminds me of something out of ghost busters (not the ray parker jr song, but rather some of the background music as all the demons are coming out and wreaking havoc in manhattan).

Man, 3 hunters who aren't used to working together is a bit of a chore. You've effectively got 8 party members instead of 5. You've got all 3 basically wanting to orient themselves in the same positions during a fight. You've got one hunter assigned officially to be doing crowd control, and the other two who insist on freezing everything else in sight without communicating it. Combine all those, and you've got one heck of a chaotic screen.

Then you've got the issue of level. Our tank was a level 66 warrior. And you've got two 70 hunters with their 70 pets, insisting on using big threat generating abilities, such as leaving high ranking growl on. Tank could barely hold aggro on anything, and as such, wasn't getting hit very much, and could then barely generate rage. Definite starvation going on.

But since the pets that were holding aggro were a little over power for the instance, and our healer is on the ball, we did pretty well. My chain traps were going pretty smooth on my assigned mobs, so I was happy.

We down one of the bosses in the middle, and one of the hunters has to go. We decide to try to 4-man our way through.

Did pretty well, too. By removing one of the hunters, we had a relatively simpler battle field to coordinate, and we got into a groove. Many of the pulls in there were 3 pulls, so i'd chain trap mine, the other hunter would single trap his, and by the time we killed the skull, the other hunter's turkey would just about be ready to thaw so he didnt need to chain them.

A drop of chaos on the 4-pulls we encountered, but nothing too bad, still managed. Until we got to some escort quest that starts in the instance. During that we wiped and the escort guy got killed. All their armor was broken from the wipes in their earlier run so we called it a night.

The funny part was, at one point during the 4-man part, tank throws a nice remark my way about the trapping going pretty well. Then other hunter throws in something along the lines of "your traps last forever, you must be spec'd survival and have improved traps?"

41/20/0, FTW!!!!

I didn't say anything, but standing there with nothing to fight, I popped bestial wrath to show off my big red boar, hoping the subtle hint would illustrate my point, but I doubt it did. Then again, it looks like it only takes 12 points in survival to get clever traps, so maybe I was too subtle.

EDIT: ran another Mana Tombs tuesday night with other hunter who was part of the 4-man attempt, and we did awesome, so shout out to him!

Mano a Mano

In my journey to 68 (at the time), I think I had duel'd another player, maybe 3 times in total. I just don't really like doing it. I'm not sure why, but it just feels way too much like the "lets see who's got the bigger one" mentality that I tried to leave in the Jr. High School basketball locker room of my wonder years.

Let me tell you...I've got the bigger one. And I don't need to prove it to you.

At least that's what I tell myself. But in fact, its probably because I'm a hugely insecure sore loser, and since I'm already convinced that I've got the bigger one, there's no satisfaction in victory. But if I lose, then there's bitterness and anger at your little one besting my big thick juicy one. So dueling is not something I do, very little upside for me, semi-large childish down side. I avoid it.

On saturday, we had a guild meeting scheduled. Everybody meet in Goldshire, and even though we could just do a chat scattered all around the WoW universe, take the 5 minutes to get to Goldshire, and we'll get to see the team all nice and shiny together. Was pretty cool, too, to see the team like that. About 30 members all organized in a circle in the heart of Goldshire. Everybody passing by was like "woah" when they saw us. But then again, it was mostly levels 1-20 passing by, and at that point in my career, I was impressed with the level 1 squirrels hopping about, so I guess that's not too much of a compliment.

Either way, I knew going in, that with this guild meeting, there would be a bit of down time while we waited for everyone to show up, and in down time, people duel.

I told myself that I wouldn't decline any duels, regardless of class or level of the challenger, as long as they were from my guild and not a passer by. Next thing you know, all the guildies get fired up and you see duel after duel going on. I'm just sitting there on top of a fence, scratching Ruby behind her ears how she likes.

Then the challenge comes.

Paladin, same level as me. Ok, I have no idea what to do in a duel, so I'll just try to wing it. I figured it can't hurt to have a freezer trap down, so I drop one. I back away, he instantly steps into it. Sweet. So I back up to max range with him helplessly watching.

Aimed Shot...crit - 1427

Steady Shot...crit - 618

Arcane Shot...crit - 741

Pally eats dirt

It was over so quickly, I didn't even have a chance to pop bestial wrath, and forgot to use any attack power trinkets.

Pally said "lol" and ran off.

I don't think I want to duel anymore.

Chopper, Sick Balls!

Ding 66

And with that, and a trip from Terokkar Forest to the Hunter trainer in Stormwind and a few gold, comes Kill Command.

I think I'm going to make a macro that just wraps around Kill Command, just so I can call it "Sick Balls".

Pretty cool stuff. And now I know what people are talking about when they say that more crits mean more kill commands. Up until now, i was like "kill command! yeah! I like those too. That sounds good, I'll have that......(turning to the guy next to me and whispering) what's kill commands?"

Playing with it for a few minutes, I first thought it would just automatically proc like growl. Doesn't seem to. So I dragged it to my action bar. Went to fight some warp stalkers. When I crit, I would click it in the action bar, and Ruby would turn red for a split second and so some extra damage. Ok, I see how this works now.

Not wanting to click the mouse, I mapped it to letter c since I never use c to pop up the default mapping of the Character screen. And my hand is typically hovering right near the letter c because I use the keyboard wasd for movement, and my most often used special moves are mapped to 1-6 and f1-f4. So letter c is right in my left hand's neighborhood.

I've got Critical Alerts addon installed. When I crit with anything besides Aimed Shot, it emits a little "bloop" sound. And when Aimed Shot crits, its a wild wild west bullet richochet noise. Both easy to identify so I know when crit happens and therefore Sick Balls is available, so I start spamming c.

Works just fine out solo where I really don't need to concentrate too hard on my shot rotation, or chain trapping, or keeping mobs off my healer, or any of the other dozen things I do when we're not just tanking and spanking.

What techniques do you use to make Sick Balls easier to manage?

And the real question is...is there an addon that will play an audio clip of "Chopper! Sick Balls!" for my party mates whenever I proc Kill Command? Or do I have to write it myself and insist that my guildies install it :-)

Is that an ice cube in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Running Slave Pens for the first time last night, I was asked to do some crowd control. Very cool. Chain Trapping is becoming one of my favorite parts of the game. Complex job of juggling trap cooldowns, aggro management of the mob you're controlling, and the team effort and discipline to allow you to control your mob. Add in that you also are trying to deliver punishment to the main mob that the team is burning down, and I'm having a real good time.

Without going through the mechanics in detail, I'll just say that I learned that one of the keys to chain trapping is not the hunter, it is the team around the hunter.

Everyone did an awesome job supporting me in my chain trapping.

Firstly, the group leader always put the blue square up as soon as he could, so I knew I had to trap and could put the trap down and get my cooldowns going. Maybe saved us 5 seconds per pull, which isnt much, but really makes the team feel like chain trapping is seamless and not interrupting the flow of the game because the idiot hunter has to wait for his stupid traps.

Next, semi-obvious one, nobody attacked my mob. During the night, not a single time did someone break a trap of a mob that was marked for freezer. In fact, the only trap that was broken was during a chaotic fight where we didn't see a patrol, so we pulled a group and had the pat show up and jump us. On the fly, I picked a mob that looked like it wasn't receiving any direct damage, so I could pull him off pretty easily. I did pull him and freeze him, but a teammate mistook the mob's movement for running at the healer, so she tried to help out. Completely good intentions, and a good move in general, so no problem with the broken trap. Plus she apologized afterwards, which won big points with the hunter.

Thirdly, they gave me space. On the initial pull, I'd place my trap off to the side where ever possible. The tank would engage and position the other mobs a little away from there so as to not interfere with my traps. And even better, they seemed to be aware of where I was placing my second trap and stayed away from there. In the Slave Pens, I was finding a bunch of open spaces so I was able to maintain good distance between my two trapping positions, allowing me a few extra seconds to deliver DPS down range while a mob was running at my waiting trap.

It was funny because at first, I don't think they were doing this on purpose. I think they just naturally were going about their jobs burning down the mobs in order. Because on the first few pulls, after the uncontrolled mobs were dead, they'd forget that there was 1 more left 25 yards behind them. On one of the early pulls, I actually ran up to them, into their line of sight and started jumping and pointing, because nobody saw my text message "ice cube behind you". Everyone got a chuckle out of that, and they learned to trust that at the end of each fight that started with a blue square going up, there would be a nice an tidy package waiting for them to beat on after all the action cooled down.

So one of the happier parts of the night was during a corpse run after a wipe. I posted the screenshot, the text conversation speaks for itself. If you click, the popup has the whole screen, not just the chat.

I tried to explain to them that they were the reason I was doing well, but they didn't want to hear it. I guess that's the sign of a good team in an of itself.

Ding 64 - Aspect of the Viper

Post #1 for the day. The normal routine...accomplishments.

Really only 1, but perhaps 1.5. You be the judge.

1) Ding 64
1.5) Downed Magtheridon

At 64, I got Aspect of the Viper. Sounds cool, better mana management. But now the quanry between Hawk and Viper. Any ideas about when to use one versus the other?

The note aboug magtheridon is really only a partial win. When I logged on, a guildie asked if I wanted to run Blood Furnace. Yeah, SURE!!! I join the group to discover 2 hunters (including me), 2 mages, and a warlock. I'm no expert on tanking, but I'm not sure I see any tank here, besides some pets and a minion. I could be wrong. I'm also no expert on healing, but other than mend pet and 2 stacks of heavy netherweave bandages, I don't see a whole lot of healing power.

I gently raise the issue ("so who's tanking?") and get answers like "dont worry about it". Gahhh. But OK, I figure we'll either wipe really fast and I wont have wasted too much time. And I might just learn about some hidden tanking powers in that group that I didnt know of.

Enter the instance, and its empty. They had cleared up until the room right before Magtheridon and one of their guys dropped. One mage logs off and logs back on with a priest. We clear the room right before mags. The priest logs back off and the mage comes back. I'm getting happier by the second. Not!

We down Magtheridon without much fuss.

So I'm really not considering that an accomplishment.

Oh man....I just had a total light bulb moment in my head. I was thinking that at least I did accomplish the collection of some orc blood vials for a quest. And bam-o, it hit me. I've got two quests in Blood Furnace completed, just waiting to be cashed in. Sweet, 20k XP just waiting for me to get home :-)

Back on topic...shortly after that group disbanded, the guild leader invited me to run Blood Furnace. Got a decent group together, all guild members which is nice, had a great run going, until we got locked out. Lemme explain.

We made it to the second boss, and cleared him, then somebody hit a lever that closed some gate that looks like teeth or claws or something, coming horizontally out of the doorway to the room. This closed behind us, and we didn't think anything of it at the time.

We continued on for a bit. Then the mage. We got a replacement, but he couldnt get to us because the teeth had closed behind us, so we could see eachother, and dance with eachother (I'm a dork and I /dance all the time, even though the Night Elf female Britney/Toxic Alizee (edit - thanks Pike for the correct dancer) dance is pretty stupid), but he can't get past.

The mage who DC'd was a major contributor to our DPS, but we decided to try to 4-man it anyways.

We made it to the room right before Mags (sound familiar?). There's two packs of 3 mobs. You can pull them separately. Both packs have two big melee guys and one caster. The plan was for me to freeze one of the big guys, and then focus all firepower on the caster. Lacking a big part of our DPS, it was going to take a while to burn these guys down, so I knew I was going to have to freeze this guy at least 3 times, if not 4 or even 5. And with me being distracted by this trapping stuff, I would not be as big a contributor to the takedowns as I would otherwise be. But with the mage gone, the damage meter was showing that I was basically it for the DPS, with the other DPS guy barely out DPS'ing the healer who would throw in some offense as the situation allowed. So that guy needs to be talked to, but at least he's a team player. I can live with the low DPS output for now.

But not last night. We just couldnt pull it off fast enough and wiped.

Everybody's got high spirits because we think we know what we did wrong, and actually might be able to do it.

We get back into the instance and find those teeth blocking our way. I tried searching all the dungeon guides I could to no avail. Nobody had any info about the silly Blood Furnace tooth gate. We ended up having to leave and reset the instance. But by then I had to go to bed. It was an awesome run for a group that was built entirely from guild members, which always makes me happy to see.

Big Red Me

If you're not a hunter, you gotta respect beast mastery.

If you are a hunter, you gotta spec beast mastery.

Pretty straight forward. I dinged 50 last night, which made my 41'st talent point available to me.

And now I can become a big raging red hunter who has no remorse or ability to be stopped. So much fun.

BRK (sorry I pirated your name for this blog entry title, send me a cease-and-desist email and I'll back off) gives an excellent talent build path for a lvl'ing BM hunter. Its been working QUITE NICELY.

When I first started out playing WoW, I had no clue what talent points were or what specs were. I didn't even find out that I had talent points until about lvl 15 when I noticed a cute red icon on my UI, clicked it, and found these magical talent trees. So I just randomly read around and thought "hey, I like my pet, let me give him some more health" and gave a point in the BM tree. Then I saw the range increases in the survival tree and threw some points there. Then I saw marksmanship and figured that would be fun too, so threw a couple points in there.

Then I started making friends in WoW and one looked over my armory profile and she recommended a BM focus for my talent points. In my guild, we had an informal, bragging-rights-only, arms race for the biggest crit, so I ignored the advice and kept pushing points into MM. Over time, I started to wonder why everybody says playing a hunter is easy to solo, since your pet can tank for you. In my experience up to that point, my pet would start the fight, and shortly thereafter, the mob would come at me and spank my leather-clad @$$. I had no clue why.

About the same time, I stumbled across KTM threat meter addon. Installed it just for fun, no real goal in mind. I start to notice, sharp cookie that I am, that as my threat bar thingie passes Teddy's threat bar thingie, the mob's switch attention and come at me.

Being the sharp cookie that I am, I go search around to read about this phenomenon and discover threat, hate, and aggro.

Light Bulb Moment! I'm generating too much threat with my special aimed shots and arcane shots and multi shots. How 'bout I tone it down a drop and try to keep my threat bar thingie lower than Teddy's. Trouble was, that even on auto-shot only, I was still out-threating Teddy. So I tried letting Teddy attack for a bit to build up threat before I'd open up with auto-shot. Even still, I'd pretty quickly steal aggro from him.

Then the real Light Bulb Moment....I seemed to remember my friend mentioning that BM was the bomb. Maybe she's right, and I should put my silly guild arms race to the side? So I did my first respec and randomly threw points into the BM tree.

I loved it right away. Teddy builds lots of threat and holds aggro. As long as I throttle the DPS back a drop, he holds aggro indefinitely. Very Nice.

As I lvl'ed up a bit more, I then discovered the treasure that we know as BRK's blog. He's got a recommended lvl'ing build. I held out for a bit, but finally did a respec to get rid of the 3 points I was stubbornly holding on to in the Survival tree to increase my range. I missed that extra range for about 10 minutes, and now I can't even remember what it was like, the BM build is so cool.

The icing on the cake is that many of my guildies still are on the crit arms race, and one of our most prominent members is a MM hunter who likes to poke fun at us less flashy beast masters. On friday, I installed Damage Meters, and then 5 of us went into Zul'Farrak. 4 of us were at lvl 46, and the 5th was a 49.

As an individual (not including Teddy's damage), I was just squeaked out by the lvl 49 rogue for raw damage output, and just squeaked past the lvl 46 rogue. I crushed the lvl 46 MM hunter. Then I clicked the button to combine my damage with Teddy's. WOW!!!! Off the chart with damage output.

And I don't even think I'm that good of a player. I just try to stick to BRK's mantra of..."The purpose of a Hunter is to provide massive quantities of sustained, ranged DPS". Now, the mobs and bosses we're fighting in ZF aren't too hugely challenging, so its not like fights last quite long enough to really need to squeeze out every last fractional drop of increased damage, but I'm convinced that BM is where my heart is at.

The real kicker was that I took a screenshot of the damage meter bar chart, mainly for my own personal satisfaction, but maybe to share with the guild. But I discovered later that with windows vista, there's a folder permission problem that requires you to do some setup before you can take a screen shot. Too bad, because I really would have liked to capture that one for my memoirs.