Living at the Threshold

Matticus recently writes about the internal threshold of performance that each of us has, below which you push to improve, and above which, you've got little motivation to change things. Good enough, satisficing, perfection vs slacking, Pareto Principle, 80/20 rule, diminishing returns, whatever you choose to call it.

We all have an internal feeling for that threshold. It drives us when we're below the limit, it often leaves us feeling "why bother?" when we're above the line. And its unique for each of us.

There's three concepts intermingled in the original WoM post...

1) Human Performance

The post opens with human performance (dying on frogger, eating a flame wall, clearing the ledge), if Matticus is indeed human, which is the topic of endless debate on our Guild forum :-P

Each person is in control of his/her own performance. We all mess up sometime, the value is in how you recover and what you learn from mistakes. Are you interested in reliably surviving frogger? Then you can examine why you died and make changes. Did that fire wall taste good? No? Then you can try to review things like your positioning before the wall appeared (were you too far away from a safe spot? where would be better to stand next time?), or what distraction caused you to not react fast enough (was somebody babbling on vent, was House jibbering and jabbering about Lupus, or was your focus too narrow on your healing assignment at the sacrifice of situational awareness and personal survivability).

Although the specific threshold of performance is unique to each individual player, people tend to be highly critical of their own performance. I'd wager that most WoW blog readers/writers have a high threshold that they want to keep their performance above. Sure, some of us are in the blog world for pure entertainment purposes, but when it comes down to it, we're also looking for things that can improve our own performance.

Readers of my blog know I obsess on this aspect of the game. The experience of improving my own personal performance alongside my teammates who are doing the same thing is what keeps me playing WoW.

2) Toon Performance

The original post then moves to toon performance. Professions to eek out more heals, running a heroic every day until you win that one perfect trinket just incase you ever find yourself grossly under the hit cap, maintaining multiple sets of gear perfectly tailored for certain situations, and so on with the toon enhancers.

I think that we all vary greatly in our threshold for this aspect of the game. Personally, I'll grind the hell out of just about anything Blizzard can throw at us to get a gear item or a shoulder inscription (curse you, spear thrusting quest), but as long as I'm having fun with my profs, I have no intention of dropping herb/mining for a DPS enhancing profession, even if that means I'm leaving 20 or 30 DPS on the table. I tried the min/maxing LW drummer boy routine back in TBC, and learned that for me its just not worth it.

This will vary much more from player to player than our threshold for our own personal performances, and will even change over time as our mood or gear situation changes.

If I look back through my performance improvement plans at the beginning of WotLK raiding, it started out almost exclusively focused on gear items and enhancements, and then as I reached my internal level of satisfaction with my gear, my thoughts migrated deeper into the softer side of personal skill improvement.

3) Dim Sum

The article then moves on to food. Delicious food.

I discovered my love for dim sum on a business trip to Vancover. When I'm in town, my work team knows its all serious during the work hours, but once we leave the building, its all dumplings, all the time.

Inspired by my chopstick agility, the natives (well, technically Hong Kong natives, so I suppose Vanc "locals"?) started ordering some things that were clearly out of Fear Factor like duck tongues and chicken's feet. Once you get past the cultural gag-factor, both were outstanding, although I'd rather stick to the basics that Matticus will be forced to buy me next time I'm out that way and I stalk him down. Cue scary-laughter-and-eerie-staring-eyes.

Its really not a plan

To keep my notes ongoing on my progress, I'll just float the latest update to the performance plan.

Its really not a plan at this point, its just a series of continuous tweaks as I identify areas of hidden DPS just waiting to be poured into raid bosses. Kinda like when you make a little bowl out of your mashed potatoes so as to hold more gravy. Sure, the mountain of potatoes with all its nooks and crannies of fluffy goodness can do just fine with a drizzling over the top, but with a simple spoon flick depressing the middle of the pile, you can really make the most of any gravy situation.

Small tweaks for big impact. That's what we're all about.

Mmmmm, gravy.

Last week

So, last week was my big "lag" revelation.

When LK rolled out, I stopped my TBC habit of hammering my shot key.

I mean, since I'm no longer macroing my shot rotation, and I'm selecting between a variety of shots in a priority order, I might as well just press the button once as soon as the GDC is up. Right?

Yeah....no.

Changes this week

I did install Quartz to help visualize the impact of lag. I honestly have no idea what I'm looking at, or more to the point, what to do about the information that Quartz is providing for me.

So the only real change I made this week was to spam the hell out of each attack. While the GDC from the previous shot was ticking away, I'd continuously hammer the key for the shot that'll be fired next.

The priority rotation stayed the same, the timing of haste pot & rapid fire & call o' the wild remained coordinated with heroism, kill command & savage rend remain together on a macro to be triggered each minute on the dot.

Only change was key spamming.

Oh, and properly tracking an attackable trackable (undeadables), rather than last week's wastable improved tracking on the non-attackable minerables. What????

Results

We'll go ahead and give it the ol'...Daddy's Back!

Lets take a look at the last 3 weeks:

Week 1 (simply pressing keys the instant the GDC was up): 4.4K DPS

Week 2 (carefully trying to press buttons a drop before GDC was up, to nip the lag): 5.2K DPS (includes adjustment for stupid tracking choices)

Week 3 (spam the bejezus out of the keys): 5.5K DPS

I'm going to go ahead and say that its a bit annoying that abusing my keyboard results in a solid DPS improvement, but oh well, I suppose I'll have to live with it.

94,000 DPS

The raid had a collective 94,000 DPS, which was just sweet to see. Almost got Patchy down in 2 minutes.

It feels pretty good being part of a team with every DPS player above the 4K watermark, most above 5K, and even players breaking the 6K barrier. Not many raid bosses can withstand firepower of that magnitude.

And you know you're pushing the limits of your gear and spec when two Hunters standing side by side end the fight 1049 damage apart from one another.

At the DPS we're doing, that's less than 2 tenths of a second between us.

And to think, I let my serpent sting fall off for one tick during the fight :-0

But its all good, and definitely reassuring to know the Hunters and the whole raid are putting up outstanding numbers as the T8 content is coming into swing.

And how cool to be able to get some payback from Hodir in Ulduar for all the crap we had to go through grinding rep with his damnable Sons in Dunder NIfflem.

Quartz. Now Spam?

So I installed Quartz to help out with the impact of lag on my shot rotations.

I don't know if I'm doing it right.

The only noticeable change to my UI is a big casting bar in the bottom-middle of my screen.

The bar has a small red section at the end to indicate my server's lag.

What am I supposed to do with that?

Do I wait until the casting bar reaches the very initial tip of the red zone, thus snipping out the lag?

Do I still have to wait until the cast bar runs its full length before casting another shot?

Speaking with another hunter who does some stellar DPS and uses Quartz, he just said "spam the buttons and forget the rest".

So I spammed

Anticipate what shot will be fired next (using the priority of Explosive > Kill > Serpent > Multi > Steady), and begin spamming it as soon as you identify that its the shot you'll be wanting to fire once the GCD is up. (I waffle between ES or KS being first, but lately favoring ES, dunno why).

And my DPS went up considerably. I've only raided Sarth+3 and Malygos so far with this, which does not really give a scientific benchmark since Sarth is soooo mobile and dependent upon variable factors, and Malygos changes by how many sparks you stack and the ridiculous dragon vehicle mount in phase 3 messes up the combat log. But a general comparison of my standings overall in my raid show a big improvement by spamming.

Really?

After 4 or however many years, is that the best Blizzard has come up with?

No good way to solve the lag between client and server, so spamming buttons is the best because it will fire the shot as soon as physically possible, rather than waiting until some visual cue says you are ready to fire?

I had no issue spamming a single button in TBC. It was actually fun, and became the source of many jokes when I'd key my mic during combat and my raiders would hear the slamming of my #3.

But switching between spamming 4 buttons? Stupid.

I take no issue with needing to choose between 5 available shots and have to effectively give priority to the proper shots at the proper times. It adds an additional technical component to combat as a hunter, and I've grown to enjoy it.

But having a several hundred DPS difference between firing a shot the moment the visual indicators say a shot is ready to fire and spamming a button so as to have the shots fire sooner than the game is saying they're available?

This is stupid.

But I'll do it because I'm a big fan of more DPS, in case you're new here.

A New Visit to the Performance Improvement Plan

When my WotLK raiding began, it became clear very quickly that I had some work to do to extract more performance out of my toon. So I started my formalized improvement plan, with just about weekly updates tracking the progress and revising the plan as changes occurred.

The plan was most helpful in the beginning because a fresh level 80 toon has such an immense breadth of options to go after. Prioritizing the top 5 items allowed for constructive progress, without the overwelming feeling that comes with excessive options.

Over time, the very concrete items like specific gear items or faction reps began getting replaced with softer skills like working on the shot rotation, more detailed reviews of the talent trees, different timings of special abilities during boss fights, and so on.

Then some insane nerfs came in and flipped the performance plan inside out, mostly centering on learning how to work with a totally different set of special shots, pet capabilities, and the always-wonderful-but-strange-to-a-new-comer Lock and Load.

After the BM nerf came the stealth Explosive Shot nerf, leaving any baseline comparisons from week to week in total confusion.

But we've been stable for a couple of weeks, and an old friend threatened to have his alt hunter surpass my DPS on Patchwerk, so it was back to the drawing board.

Three key adjustments on my part for this week's : Anticipating Lag, Timing Special Abilities, and Being A Tard

The Real Kicker: LAG

I've had a sneaking suspicion that Lag is causing me some DPS issues

Comparing my numbers to brass (a hunter I raid with), when we were BM, our DPS numbers were much closer to one another. Since the switch to SV, we both took a decrease, but my numbers dropped disproportionately. We talk about shot rotations, gear items, stats, you name it, all the time, but nothing was coming out as a clear reason for us to have such different numbers.

My first theory was "he's just better at huntering than me". Likely true, but I'm not one to just sorta sit there and write things off.

So I developed an updated theory..."BM gets lots of damage from the pet that is doing automated attacking which has much less dependence upon client lag than human-activated key presses, therefore my higher Lag is hurting my SV output more than it was hurting my BM output. and brass is also just better at huntering than me."

Lag is unique to each player and a few in-game comparisons show mine to be about 100-200ms higher than what the other hunter has.

So this week, I decided to try to push those GDC's a little bit.

Hammering my shots just a fraction of a second before the GCD appeared to be up.

And lo and behold, the shots were firing without any issue, and clearly firing in a much tighter rotation than was previously achieved if I let the GCD fully expire before trying to fire.

Pain in my ass from a "repeatable scientific" perspective, because lag is variable week to week as network conditions vary. But interesting to note.

Timing Special Abilities

Timing is everything, and not just for GCD's and keypresses.

In the past, when BM was king, timing things to ensure I had Bestial Wrath ready when Heroism was called was a massive DPS increase. Likewise for other On-Use performance enhancing abilities.

On the plus side, proper timing allows for a very low cost way to improve your DPS, and is available to all players without any gold or grind. On the down side, optimal timing requires good knowledge of the encounter, your team's performance and time-to-kill, when your raid leader will call for Heroism, and so on.

But my benchmark is Patch-25, which is a very well known fight, with a very confident estimated duration, and a predictable Heroism invocation.

SV has no BW and both of my trinkets are on-equip rather than on-use, so I took a look at what cooldowns I have to play with: Rapid Fire (haste boost) and Call of the Wild (attack power boost)

I used to be a CotW auto-caster. 5 minute cooldown. So in a Patch-25 three minute kill, this would autocast right at the beginning. The new routine is to manually casting it during Heroism, which I know for my raid to be somewhere in the 2:00 or 2:15 point of the fight. Curse the pet special action bar and its 4 available slots.

Rapid Fire, since special shots dont clip auto-shots anymore, I don't think there's any such thing as too much haste. Why not lump that one in there with Heroism and CotW? Only going to get one shot at RF in a 3 minute fight, so lets make it count.

And Haste Potion.

I really wish I had opened up the character screen to see my shot speed, but it was just a machine gun. RF, Haste Pot, Heroism. Gattling would have been proud.

Who brought the Huntard?

Yeah, this one just sucks. You know 5 of those points you invested in Tier 1 of the Survival tree? The ones in Improved Tracking? Yeah, those!

YOU GET JACK SHT FOR THOSE POINTS IF YOU TRACK MINERALS THE WHOLE DAMN RAID!

Improved Tracking adds between 2-5% to your DPS, so lets just call it 3.5% that I shoved up my tail pipe. I thought I was sitting a little funny during that fight.

Results

I wish I could separate out the improvement via my lag adjustment from the improvement via my special ability timing, but whatcha gonna do?

Last week: 4.4K DPS

This week: 5.0K DPS

If we account for the Improved Tracking Brainfart: 5.2K DPS

Not quite a "Daddy's Back" kind of moment, but I'm definitely happy with the changes, and very happy to be back above the 5K arbitrary line of joy.

These techniques were used during all boss fights (although none are quite as 100% predictable/comparable week-on-week as Patch), and I noticed improvement across the board.

F#ing Lag!!

Its that time again, Performance Improvement Plan

Ok, I'll admit that I'm losing steam on the Plan. Patch 3.0.8 is looming over us and by the time this post gets published, may even be live. That brings so much change and uncertainty to playing a Hunter, it remains tough to focus on the here-and-now of improving what I've got.

But, its important to keep things moving, and now would be the worst time to let the plan go off the rails.

Review Previous Five Steps

1) Daily Mantra - I have not died in the fire for two weeks now. While not intending cease this pursuit, the mantra gets to take a rest.

2) Finish off review of Wishlist - I've come to the conclusion that I'm well geared. That's a good thing, because we all love pew pew that gear brings, plus shinies stroke the ego. Its a bad thing from the perspective of complexity. There are a couple clear improvements that are no-brainers. There are many items that provide a side-grade, or perhaps offer flexibility in the form of +hit or a socket. I think there's only three items I have left to do the analysis on to classify as: don't want, side-grade, upgrade.

3) Macro KC - I ended up only doing this for Steady Shot, since no matter what's going on, steady seems to sneak in there, even post patch 3.0.8.

4) Thaddius - I read over the wiki page for the fight and can't find any specific trick that might boost my numbers. In a naxx-10 run, I did find that having the other players die sure helps improve my position on Recount, but that's sorta cheating. I'll just have to accept that my output on this guy will suffer, and take solace in the fact that I generally don't fail at the ledge boss. (oops, just jinxed myself).

5) Purple is as Purple does - I replaced my last greenie the very same night I wrote my last plan update. Fury of the Five Flights off of OS25+2. Once patch 3.0.8 lands, my feral staff will have its stats changed to Hunter stats, and my last blue will out the door. In the process of looting FotFF, I dinged Epic!, but only by cheating and swapping some ilvl 200 and 213 trinkets and rings. Sue me.

Out-of-Plan Changes

Well, the biggest is Kel'Thuzad dropping Envoy of Mortality, which shall not become known as my new precious, as Arrowsong was substantially more beautiful. But, I'll take it!!!

And I think that's it.

Assess the Results

We fought Patchwerk before KT dropped the gun (natch).

5.2k DPS, ftw!

The majority of the night in Naxx-25 consisted of Brass and I taking turns at the top. And celebrating that this might be the last week we get to do it, woe is us. Actually, he'll generally stay on top even after the nerf, but I might have to go back to the formal Improvement Plan to get back up there. Cry me a river.


The real key at this point is understanding the timing of the encounter, rather than gear.

We kill Patchy in a smidge over 3 minutes.

This means I get one shot at Readiness.

Seems like its two BW's, and then we're at a point that the DPS lead calls for Heroism.

Save Readiness until near the end, and use it to trigger BW during Heroism for max results.

Maximizing the output becomes harder for fights that're less predictable for duration, and also mobility or other factors.

Like Grobbulus. How frustrating to get nailed by one of his farts immediately after triggering BW, and have to run all the way across the room to avoid blowing the raid up?

The New Steps

I'm not going to force it to be five steps anymore, but rather just go with what needs attention.

1) Pet Spec - During OS25+2, the Hunters were discussing pet specs that might make the fight tolerable. It really is awful on Beast Masters in here. Some additional magic resist might be good. It'll be tough to pick what to give up to get an additional two points for full resist, but I guess that's the fun of talent points, making compromises.

2) EJ Spreadsheet - A reader commented and emailed about the EJ Spreadsheet. I downloaded it and tried it out. It is very involved and quite complicated for a new person. I failed to get it to do anything. I think I'm going to try again, as it will be a very useful tool to weed out the last few upgrade vs side-grade decisions.

3) Sit and Wait - Yeah, 3.0.8 is just too dramatic a change to really do anything about (and I really don't want to go on the PTR to play), so its time to sit and wait, and keep in touch with the major Hunter resources to see what the general opinion is (aka, what's the new cookie cutter, and is it so divergent from my fun of uber pet that I cant stomach it).

And that's all I've got for now.

Tuesday Plan Update

I say "tuesday" because I write one day, post the next. Such is life over here. /shrug

Seems that I write these puppies up on tuesdays, so here's another improvement plan update.

I'm at a strange place, performance wise.

Most of the obvious or solo-able things have been addressed. There's no more rep rewards (gear, helm arcanum, shoulder inscription) to grind out. My gear is pretty solid with fewer and fewer upgrade options available, several pieces are already best in slot as of the current patch. (3.0.2??)

On the gear front, I'm mostly swapping and fiddling to keep T7 set bonus intact while also maintaining a 263 hit rating.

And all this while watching a nerf bat swinging in our direction.

Oh, that....and I died in the mutha-f-ing fire last week on KT, and as a result, we didn't kill him due to lacking DPS and the Enrage Timer. /fail Just plain old lost focus and stood there like a turd in a camp fire, paying way too much attention to my pet and completely ignoring my own guy. /shame

Luckily, the experience gives me some ideas for what to put into the new version of the plan.

Review Previous Five Steps

1) Hodirs - ding. done. never again. In a strange twist of fate, I realize I made tons of money via those dailies and also the stacks upon stacks of icethorn, lichbloom, and saronite I gathered in the process. My Gatherer map is nearly wall-to-wall icons of saved node locations, to the point that I may need to shut it off because the map is unviewable.

2) Clean up Wishlist - This one is tricky. MaxDPS.com is flat out giving me some bad picks. I don't know if its viewing the world from a Survival perspective or what, but it is just giving flat out massive downgrades as best-in-slot. I started visiting each item that remains on my list in the WoW Head comparator. I'm about half way through it.

3) Green Trinket - I'm still sporting the greenie. The two best trinkets seem to be Darkmoon Greatness and Fury of the Five Flights off of Sartharion. I'm not putting too much energy into the Darkmoon avenue, and I'm crossing fingers for a FotFF drop and Loot Council love (forget about that dying in the fire thing, pretty please :-)

4) Melee Weps - Strange one here. Heigan dropped a staff. Very clearly a Druid staff. Very clearly not a Hunter staff, chock-a-block full of +strength. Brass says to take it. I'm a suspicious sort, and figure he's messing with me to have everybody laugh at the huntard who dies in the fire wants a strength staff. But, as it would turn out, the new patch will be changing this staff to a beautiful Hunter weapon. So it sits in my bank, likely to receive an Accuracy enchant, which is nothing to sneeze at.

5) T7 - Actually, the very same day I posted my previous plan update, and the same day that LC member joked on my beloved blog that it'll be a cold day in Helfire when I get another tier piece, the sun shined and I can haz T7. Since then, I've also gotten a third piece, which is nice for flexibility as I swap items in and out to work with the hit cap.

Out-of-Plan Changes

Jeez, I dunno. Its been a while, and lots has happened.

Um, I got a new helm to upgrade my week-old Arc-Scorched one.

I suppose it was out-of-plan to become dumb and stand in the fire.

Assess the Results

There were two Patchwerk fights to examine since the last plan update, with a variety of differences between the two attempts.

Kill #1 - 5k DPS. Just a smidge over 5k, as it were.

Kill #2 - 4.7k DPS.

I'm a bit at a loss of what was different between the two. Unfortunately, the 5k one was measured via Recount only, as it was vacation and we didn't have a WWS or WMO (WoW Meter Online) report for it.

For Kill #1, I was under the hit cap by about 30 points, but more heavy into Attack Power and Crit. So maybe that's it right there.

Kinda frustrating to dip back below 5k, but oh well. With the impending nerf, it was a fleeting joy at best.

However, during kill #2, the raid had 6, and very nearly 7, players with >4k DPS, and we killed him in 3:27, which is getting pretty fast. It actually changes the fight, since you get fewer of your cooldowns to pop.

Hmmm, I wonder. I wish I could remember how long Kill #1 was, maybe I got an extra Readiness for an extra Bestial Wrath, Kill Command, Rapid Fire and Kill Shot? If that were the case, that'd explain the difference right there.

So can everybody please slow down? I want to get to pop some more cooldowns :-)

The New Five Steps

1) Daily Mantra - Say it with me. 100 times each day. "I will not die in the fire."

2) Finish off review of Wishlist - I'd really like to know in advance whether I want a drop or not. Validating MaxDPS.com's advice is vital.

3) Macro KC - I've found myself losing seconds here and there forgetting to trigger Kill Command when its available. Need to change my Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, and Serpent Sting buttons to be macros that tie in KC. Small upgrade, but maybe reducing the variables I'm mentally tracking will allow me to better manage item #1.

4) Thaddius - I'm not sure what's the deal, but my DPS is awful on Thaddius fight. Every week, I'm way off during Thaddius. Granted, Brass drops a bunch on Thad also. The repositioning due to polarity shift favors Melee or DoT damage, however my numbers drop disproportionately. I'll have to see if there's anything I'm doing that is causing a problem.

5) Purple is as Purple does - I've got two non-epic items. One is Fang of Truth, which will be replaced as soon as patch 3.0.8 hits and my staff changes from Druid to Hunter gear. Last one is trinket. This is pretty passive approach though, because I really don't want to go after the massive cost of Darkmoon Greatness, so cross fingers for Sapphiron to drop my precious.

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.

Continuing the Improvement Plan

[edit] You'll see mention of 3.0.8 patch in the article. At the time of the writing, I was of the impression that 3.0.8 was being released to live servers tuesday. I was wrong. Read on....

See, I'm trying to keep the titles somewhat consistent for the Improvement Plan posts, in case you hate them, you can skip them. They're long, they're dry-ish, and they have a nice unhealthy sprinkling of ego stroking.

But I like to write them (A) to help organize my own thoughts, and (B) maybe someone else out there is trying to improve their own toon, and they just might glean something productive out of my experience.

Standard format: review previous 5 steps, throw in some stuff that happened outside of the plan, assess the results, write up the new top 5 steps.

Review Previous Five Steps

1) Hodirs: Continue doing this daily. Only missed a single quest a single day so far. And that was because the server crashed half way through my 6th attempt for the day at the Grip the Dragon, Stab the Dragon quest. Dinged Revered over the weekend which opens up one additional quest. Read up about Everfrost Chips. Searched high and low for a long time. Found a grand total of ZERO chips. I am no longer searching for chips.

2) Shoulders: Over the weekend, I replaced my T5 with a pair of blue leather shoulders that dropped in Heroic [something]. Reasonable stats and no longer look like I'm clinging to the good old days. There are definitely upgrades I'm still looking for, but this new pair is milk chocolate with a creamy +hit center.

3) Legs: During the last update, I wrote "Maybe RNG will smile upon me Thursday night." and did she ever! Beautiful pair of Leggings of Failed Escape. T5 is now on the shelf, and I've had to re-learn my love for Mend Pet.

4) Aces High! To practice for Malygos Phase 3, I've been doing this quest every day. It is a frustrating quest, due in large part to the cludgey interface, sloppy game mechanics, and overall bugginess. But, practice makes perfect, so to speak. To quote our DPS Officer "Amava rocked the DoT's during Phase 3" in response to my output during P3 for our guild-first 25-person and 10-person Malygos kills.

5) Knights of the Ebon Blade: Doing the 6 dailies pretty much every day. For some reason, I have massive math block regarding calculating determining if tuesday's set of dailies will ding me revered or not. It really is strange, its like this massive black hole in my brain. You'd think X + Y = Z would be pretty simple for a guy who likes calculus and differential equations and infinite set theories, AND who also is reasonably well versed in spreadsheets (lol). But its a brain fart that's stopping me from figuring this out.

Its as if there's a secret directive programmed into my brain like Robo Cop had, preventing me from the simple calculation. Either way, I'll know tuesday night when I finish the dailies. If revered, I get new Helm Arcanum and a pair of blue shoulders that're a DPS upgrade.

Oh, and I now wear the Ebon Blade tabard in Heroics.

Some stuff that happened outside of the plan

1) Argent Crusade: While technically not part of the documented previous 5 steps, AC rep was always on my backburner. It came to the front burner Monday night and I became possessesd with exalted. PuG'ed my way through Heroic Halls of Stone, which was a little bit tough, but fun, despite the Royal D0uch3 Bag of a death knight, followed by a 4-man run of Heroic Nexus once the tank booted His Royal Highness. But I digress. With Exalted AC comes a very nice Hunter chest piece, the Polished Regimental Hauberk.

2) Mirror of Truth: This is an outstanding epic trinket available for 40 or so Emblems of Heroism. Happily replaced one of my last remaining Northrend greenies with this puppy.

3) Hammerhead Sharkskin Cloak: Available for Emblems of Valor out of 25-person raids. Wonderbar! This is a fantastic cloak that I highly recommend if you have access to dead 25-person bosses.

4) Belt: I wrote about this guy yesterday, but for the sake of completeness, the Depraved Linked Belt landed around my waist via a circuitous path. Still need to get a belt buckle and gem for this little baby. According to Max DPS, this is the best-in-slot item for a Beast Master, so me likey.

Assess the Results

I'll not bother with the epeen'ery and what not. Suffice it to say, the nerf is presumably incoming with tuesday's patch 3.0.8, and I totally understand why. Mass Quantities of Sustained Ranged DPS. MQoSRDPS. The M should be changed to an I for Insane.

During 25's (and the couple 10's that slipped in there), its all about pumping out ludicrous damage, and the Improvement Plan makes it ludicrouser and ludicrouser with each passing day.

I really hope we get a shot at Patchwerk (the perfect pew pew benchmark boss) tuesday night so I can see the impact of the patch. Maybe that's why they call him Patchwerk? Test out how the Patch Werked? lol.

The New 5 Steps

I'm only partially overlapping the action item steps I listed in the previous post. Some of the items are simply tasks I need to do tonight (aka, enchant the chest and fill empty gem slots) and others are sort of upgrade paths (aka, get a new ring crafted to replace an old one).

1) Sons of Hodir: Exalted cannot come soon enough. The Horde gankfest, the Alliance ninjas who refuse to accept invites, the low drop rates, the buggy grippy/stabby quest. Just make it go away, please. And the biggest joke is that by the time I'm exalted, they're going to let you turn in Ulduar thingies for rep. What a slap in the face!

2) Revisit the Gear Wishlist: I created the first revision of my formal Gear Wishlist over Thanksgiving weekend. Along the way, I've done some small maintenance, but things have been changing so fast, I need to revisit the whole list. I recently started playing with MaxDPS.com. Its a fantastic source for creating an upgrade path, so I'll need to examine where I need to go for each item slot.

3) If you like it then you should'a put a ring on it: One of my rings is a Northrend greenie, and is ripe for the replacing. My initial view of MaxDPS.com showed me the nice Titanium Impact Band as an easily accessible JC crafted upgrade option.

4) Learn about Darkmoon cards: I've never really explored getting a Darkmoon Cards piece of gear, other than idly collecting most of the Furies deck, but never following through and ended up selling the cards for a nice profit. MaxDPS shows that Darkmoon Card: Greatness is one of the best trinkets in the game right now, so I'll have to take a look.

5) Knights of the Ebon Blade: This one might be "done" on tuesday night, depending on if the dailies yield me enough to ding revered. Or if they bring me close, maybe grab a tank and a healer and just kill 15 or 20 trash mobs in any old heroic before the raid. I want the new Arcanum of Torrent, and also the shoulder pads they've got.

Level 80 Shot Rotation

In a recent comment to a recent post, Durgan asks...

...I would be curious to know your shot rotation and macros your using for the raids.With all the new abilities that I'm getting I'm having trouble making sure I'm using all my abilities to their fullest.

Lemme start by saying, I hear ya, brother.

I've been a long time advocate of the Burning Crusade beauty for Beast Masters, the 1:1 Steady:Auto macro, with Kill Command baked in for simplicity.

Arcane shot was only used while mobile, and Serpent Sting only if I was drinking IRL.

The bottom line was that cooldown-wise, the only things I was concerned with were Bestial Wrath, Feign Death (back when tank threat was actually a limiting factor, not the post-3.0.2 where tanks do so much threat its as if it the mechanic was taken out of the game), and potions.

So, on the surface, two of those cooldown's were removed. Potions are only once per fight, and Feign Death, while still on my action bar, is much less of the make-or-break the raid type of ability that it once was. Because of auto shot clipping, I rarely even used Rapid Fire in those days.


Well, where does that leave us today? If you want a thoroughly theorycrafted shot rotation, go visit elitist jerks, they've got the maths taken care of.

On this blog, we talk about intuition and gut feel. Lets start with the basic concepts, and then move into the specifics.

Firstly, don't worry about clipping. I still find myself trying to time steadies between autos. Silly habit, hard to break. Likewise, variable haste effects (Rapid Fire, Improved Aspect of the Hawk, Heroism, Haste on-use trinkets, etc) don't cause you to change your rotation like they did in the past.

Secondly, stings are your friend. Serpent Sting does enough damage to be worth the mana, and if you use the highly recommended Glyph of Steady Shot, you get 10% more damage from steady when one of your stings is active on the target. Keep Serpent Sting alive and ticking.

Thirdly, Kill Command is not part of your rotation any more, its just a "hit this button every minute" kind of thing.

Fourthly, I don't spec for Aimed Shot, so its not part of my routine at all.

Fifthly, tank AoE threat is so high, Multi Shot is a normal part of life. In the good old days of first entering Karazhan, crowd control (shackles and freezing traps) were such a big part of our game, that Multi wasn't even on my action bar. Now its bread and butter.

Sixthly (is that even a word?), Kill Shot is a beauty, but only useful when mob is below 20%, and has a long enough cooldown that you likely only get to fire it once. If the boss has massive health like Sapphiron (10 minutes to kill her, two Kill Shots, FTW), you might get a second Killer in there. Readiness also might add an additional Kill Shot.

I think that's it for the basics.


So, lets put those six concepts to use and pour out some major damage....

Conservative Approach: Many sources still indicate that 1:1 Steady:Auto is a very solid choice for a Beast Master.

As long as you ensure Serpent Sting is ticking continuously, this will do very good damage over long periods of time because it is very mana efficient. For simple minded folks like me, having to only time my shots based upon either the Steady Shot casting time or the GCD (variable haste effects might make one or the other faster for different periods of a fight) is a very nice thing.

Theorycrafters or min-maxers might call you a noob, but then again, folks like that tend to call everybody a noob for just about everything. 1:1 remains a decent choice.


Roll Your Face on the Keyboard: Amazingly enough, Brass mentioned that ever since the unlinking of autoshot, he just rolls his face across the keyboard and delivers chart-topping output.

Perhaps there's more to it, and I suspect there is, or else his face has an uncanny dexterity and knowledge of in-game mechanics. But, I surely can't argue with his numbers, because they're rock solid on trash pulls and bosses alike.

Fire Every Available Shot: This one is my "rotation" of choice right now.

There might be a macro for this, but I don't use one. Yet. Managing all these details is cumbersome, so I may have to go macro.

At a high level:

1) Make sure Serpent Sting is active. Always. Watch the DoT countdown and be aware of your GCD so you can time when you need to fire the next one. If you fire it too early, you're wasting mana which leads to extra time in Viper (bad). If you fire it just a smidge too early, don't cry over the mana. If you fire it too late, you waste (A) damage from the Sting, and (B) damage from Glyph of the Steady Shot. So make sure its active.

2) Hit Arcane and Multi whenever they're available. I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, but I've been pretty happy with the results.

3) If you can predict when you'll need to be mobile during a fight, feel free to wait a few seconds with Arcane on cooldown so you can fire it while on the move. Same for Serpent. Sometimes I'll fire Serpent early if I'm moving around, since, for the price of a little mana, I'll have an extra "standing still" GCD later which means an extra Steady Shot (that hits for 10% extra thanks to the Sting/Glyph combo).

4) Any time you're standing still and have a GCD to spare, Steady Shot.

Is it perfect? I bet its not. But it is pretty good. Or maybe BM is just OP.

Next Steps

As you can tell, I'm never quite done tweaking things.

Things that need work:

1) I'm not sure what the experts think about Multi in a single-target fight. For trash when it hits three mobs with three separate chances to crit? Outstanding. For a single-target boss fight? Not sure.

2) DoT timer. It is a pain in my ass trying to watch the Serpent Sting timer. In my current UI setup, it appears as a little debuff box on my target's unit frame. Challenging to keep track of. Need to find a better display for this.

3) Cooldown Timers. Also, I currently don't use any cooldown timers. Managing all the cooldowns (Arcane, Multi, Kill Shot, Kill Command, Bestial Wrath, Rapid Fire, Readiness, Trinket #1, Trinket #2, Hunter's Mark) simply by watching the sweep of the cooldown on the action bar button is too hard. I've got to focus on the cooldowns so much, it makes it hard to also watch your toon and stay out of the fire during a raid.

4) Find a damn macro. I'd love to spam one button and make all this magic happen. I'd much rather watch the fight.

So that's my shot rotation. Not much of a rotation, sorta close to mashing my face on the keyboard, but its all I've got for now.

This'll only take 4 seconds

Got to try out my new 2-piece Beast Lord gear set out in some dungeon runs.

Four seconds off of the trap cooldown.

Just silly, I tell you.

Ran Shattered Halls, Mechanar, and Heroic Slave Pens. To sum it up, in Shattered Halls my favorite comment was, "good lord, you're like a machine gun with those traps". Nuff said.

I was happily anticipating the cooldown reduction, but I never realized it would make quite that much difference. In Shattered Halls, you deal with tons of mobs simultaneously and with a Warrior tank, every bit of CC is helpful. I just had no idea that the 4 seconds would make quite that much difference. It was wonderous. No matter how chaotic a pull became, I always felt I had a new trap ready whenever one was needed.

The next day, same group, only swap out a Warlock for another Hunter.

Party Leader gives out the assignments, and says amava=blue square, otherguy=star.

First pull, blue square goes up, no star applied. Mob runs to otherguy.

Second pull, same deal.

Sensing what's going on, just for fun, I start breaking his trap and trap over by me, and chain trap from there.

A few pulls later, and otherguy says "who's breaking traps?"

I say "who's pulling blue square?"

Party Leader says "amava=bluesquare".

Otherguy says "but you don't have any points in survival".

I say "lol".

Granted, I'm fine with him on primary trap duty. With the right points in Survival, you can definitely be better off than I am. But don't ignore the party leader. He gives an assignment, either communicate your alternate strategy to the party along with your reason for preferring that plan, or follow instructions.

Ended up being a pretty cool run from that point forward. Standard heroic wipe-fest that pre-kara beauties like me are growing to loathe love.

Oh yeah, that mob is under control

Here's one, that's a bit of a rhetorical question. Or perhaps a concrete one. Or maybe I'm just bored and want to see if I can conjure up yet another blog entry from that Botanica run. But I'm no magician, I use a bow and arrow. And a little magic.

Trapping. Chain Trapping. One of the most exciting parts of playing Hunter, IMHO. And one of the biggest utilities we bring to a party.

Lets fly back to Tempest Keep and head on in to Botanica again, shall we?

Lets say its a 4 pull, and the CC you've got with you is your Tank, a Mage, and you, the Hunter. If you've been following along with today's posts, you're wondering why a mage, when I've been singing on and on about a shammy. Yeah, alas, the mage had to go to sleep shortly after the second boss gave me his shoulder pads, and the Shaman was nice enough to join in.

The way my team was doing it, we'd mark skull and X for the tank to take aggro on and perform CC on them by generating threat and letting them beat on him. Then moon gets polymorphed, and blue square becomes a frozen turkey.

One thing I really like about the sections of Botanica near the second boss is that you get these nice groups to pull. They start in a narrow hall-like area, and then you pull them into a wide open space so you've got lots of room to spread out.

Perfect chain trapping terrain.

For this particular party, we'd burn skull and X fast enough that I would only have to trap the turkey twice. But I can illustrate the point anyways.

I'd start by dropping my trap pretty far back, on the right side of the battle. Tank would pull and grab his two mobs, Mage would sheep her target, and I'd fire some arcane and distracting shots at the turkey, who would then nicely trot into the trap.

While the turkey was running towards me, I'd spam my /assist macro to grab the main DPS target and send my pet and open fire. Once the turkey was frozen, i'd strafe to the left, firing instant shots whenever possible on the move, all the way across the battle field, and then drop a new trap on the far left side.

This big wide open space was good for illustrating the point I'm going for here. When the turkey thaws from the first trap, she's got a long distance to run before settling nicely for another chilly break from battle.

Along the way, she's gonna run past the healer, maybe past the warloc and mage who are doing their ranged DPS on the main target.

The point is, there's lots of sets of eyes that are going to be seeing this turkey with its bright blue icon on it, running about, seemingly uncontrolled in the open battle field.

Now, as the hunter who is doing this on purpose, I know that the mob isn't out in the wild, but is in fact following a very carefully planned route according to my every desire. That mob is under our control.

But sometimes your team gets antsy and you hear "ZOMG, blue square is loose" and then the tank does his best to help out and next thing you know, your little turkey dance is not so easy any more.

I find myself wondering what techniques other hunters have found for communicating out to their teams that blue square should be considered "under control" until you hear otherwise. And please don't touch.

Slightly different than "dont break my trap". That one is pretty obvious to other players, as Blizz was kind enough to draw a nice big blue visual effect around our mobs. Wouldn't it have been a hoot if they called it "snare trap" instead, and the only indicator was a tiny little wire around the mob's ankle? lol. And they get the option to gnaw off their own foot to escape, with a -agi and -movement speed debuff.

It is definitely counter-intuitive to see a mob running around the battlefield, and think "oh yeah, that mob is under control".

Amava, the Short Order Cook

Picture yourself....WoW'in it up....New Year's Eve.

Lots of people logged in. Lots of spam on the general chat channels, or idle banter, drunks babbling, good times.

Even a nice thread of people on the trade channel re-naming movies and TV shows, substituting in the name "murloc". You get the idea...Bridges of Murloc County, Interview with a Murloc, Two and a Half Murlocs. Personal fav....Murloc Does Dallas. And of course, lots of people spamming hate towards those who were murloc'ing away. Yeah, because you're really doing lots of business at a quarter till midnight on New Year's Eve. And don't you people understand even a little psychology? Saying stop in 85 different abusive ways only encourages it and makes it gain more and more immature momentum. Ah well, I was having fun reading it.

At around 11:45 PM, I finish up a run through BM to help 2 guildies finish their Master's Key (so a day later they could later steal my spot in Kara, but more venting on that to come. maybe, unless I get on a positivity kick and avoid the subject all together). Hearth to Shatt, enjoy some murloc humor. Someone on guild chat mentions that he just hit 50 cooking skill.

Hmm. Looking for something to kill the time till midnight, as the murloc thing was getting a bit stupid with all the hate messages being flung around, I think to myself. 50? Amava's got 1 point shy of max cooking. The two green recipes that remain both have their ingredients walking or slithering around up in Blade's Edge Mts. Why not give it a shot?

Thus began the 15 minute drive for 375 in '07.

Quick flight up to Blade's Edge. Don't drink and fly at epic speeds. I flew right past the area where the serpents and raptors live, wasting a few precious minutes. Nearly got stomped by one of Gruul's kids that roams the area. Not sure how many ribs and crunchy serpents I'd need to fry up to get the skill point, I was feeling the clock ticking.

After I got 3 ribs and 1 serpent, I figured I'd give it a shot. Whipped out the flint, started up my cosy campfire, and got to work preparing my meals.

On the last of the 4 dishes, ding, 375. With 4 minutes to spare before the new year.

M-I-C-K-E-Y

So what's the deal with using the mouse for movement?

I read lots and lots of stuff that seems to indicate that freeing up your left hand for spell casting by using your mouse for movement is the way to go.

Ok, makes sense. No problem moving forwards or turning one direction or the other. Actually nice for excecuting snap turns substantially faster than via the keyboard, although I'm pretty clumsy with it now, I can see getting more accurate with practice.

Some things I can't figure out that leave me unable to actually make the switch:

1) Selecting new targets. Currently I can keep moving with the keyboard and select new targets with my mouse. How does a mouse mover overcome this?

2) Strafing. I press q or e to move directly sideways. Can you do this with the mouse?

3) Jumping. How you jump up and down? I know PvP'ers are big on mouse movement, and they're also the jumpiest bunch I've ever seen, so there must be a way. Or do you need to revert to keyboard for jumping even if you're a mouse mover?

4) Backing up. Do you ever have to take a few steps backwards when you're a mouse mover, or do the snap turns become so natural that you just turn around and walk forwards and then turn back around to simulate reverse?

What's the deal?

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.

How the hell do you tank?

Warning, this post isn't about hunters, but it does lean on my experience as ranged DPS in contrast to in-your-face world of tanking.

Part of my family of toons includes my AH pally mule who does enchanting, specifically to DE those green items that won't sell after a few rounds of listing and lowering the price.

Amava's been collecting items that require 275 enchanting skill to DE, and my enchanter was lvl 20, thus maxed out at 225 skill, and needing to level up to 35 to allow Artesian training to raise the skill max to 300.

So my Pally has been getting some play time. And the 2.3 patch changes to XP make a level in the 20's go by in about 2 hours at my pace of play on my pally, so its flying by.

On the trek from 10-20, he was all retribution since a really quick read of the talents showed that this allows for the most DPS. I have dreams of playing this guy as a tank some day (I was inspired by Amava working with a 70 pally tank and his Avenger's Shield. Just looks really cool, and seems very effective).

This weekend I quested with a guy who's main is a pally and he said I should check out protection tree.

Ok, so I looked it over and went with it. Got a nice shield and a 1H sword, applied the best enchants my 225 level would allow to all my gear.

Very nice stuff. Sure, it takes a while to kill stuff, but I feel indestructable. 3 same level enemy mobs, and my health only gets down to about half, without me healing at all during the fight. Kinda neat, plus consecrate makes the ground look nice.

Found myself in a cave with some random guy (named PizzaTheHut, which cracked me up..."You're Delicious, Boss!"), a warlock. We quested together for a bit.

Ok, so I really quick tried to think of what my job is? Hmmm, you mean I'm not supposed to stand far away and let my teammate get up close to the mob? Oh, and I'm supposed to MAKE all these guys hit me?

How the hell do you do that?

Granted, it wasn't super important because the two of us were crushing the mobs pretty quick, and we're only in our low 20's so this isn't like brain surgery.

But I was definitely in a quandry as to how to make this happen. If any of you are Paladins out there, please chime in with how I can be a better (or even passable) tank at this level (dinged 24 this morning).

Seems there's a spell that increases my threat from holy damage. Cool, I can do that with a seal or some judgement that does holy damage. Later on in the talent tree, there's a bunch of talents that increase threat output, so when I get there, I'll invest in those if they make sense.

What item stats should I be trying to stack at this point? I'm sure stamina's a good one, but what else? Strength like a warrior? Or intellect like a caster? What about +health?

What else? How do you guys do it? Its really counter-intuitive to me to be MAKING these guys hit me, when I've spent my whole WoW life avoiding hits.

So now I want to run a dungeon and try it out. I think BFD is appropriate for my level, and maybe DM. See if I really can be a tank. If for no other reason than to understand the challenges you guys face better.

Ok, sorry for the digression for all you hunters.

Focus

I don't really use the focus target option at all. I see three possible uses for it...

1) Set the turkey to focus. That's the guy I'll be freezing. Then set up a few macros that allow me to send an arcane shot or distracting shot at the focus, while maintaining my target on the DPS mob that we're burning to the ground.

2) Set the Main Tank to focus. This will let me easily Misdirect to my focus. I currently have a Misdirection macro with a hard-coded name in it that I alter at the beginning of each party.

3) Set the Main Assist to focus. This will let me choose my DPS targets easier. My assist macro also has a hardcoded name that I fill in at the beginning of a party for this purpose.

I'm on the fence as to which would be best to go with.

I've never run with a party that uses a different Main Assist than the Main Tank, so for all intents and purposes, both my Misdirection macro and my Assist macro get the same name every time...the main tank's name.

What I really need is an addon that gives me little check boxes next to player unit frames, one for MT and the other for MA. At the start of a party, I'll just click to select the tank and assist, and it'll update my macros for me. That would really help, especially as I run into players that have goofy characters in their names and I can't type them into my macro. If I could do this, then I'll use focus for the turkey. I wonder how hard that would be to write. Perhaps something to consider once I'm Netherwing Exalted and I have a bit more free time.

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!

The Underbog Undermines the Underguild

Ok, so I made up "Under Guild" but it made for a fun title.

And, ok, so it wasn't The Underbog itself, but rather the goings on in the Underbog.

Specifically, the reaction that a guild officer had to seeing a hunter who was pretty new to grouping. We'll call him OtherHunter, a level 67 randomly spec'd but mostly marksmanship Hunter. And notice that I don't call him Huntard, because as events play out, he may or may not qualify for the title, despite the first few things you'll read about him. To me, this is the exact situation that gives popularity to the label Huntard, even when its prematurely assigned to someone.

It really was interesting to watch. Friday night. The Underbog. We go in with OtherHunter, Warlock, Warrior, Priest, and me (BM Hunter, for those of you just tuning in).

Some background: Warrior is guild leader. Warlock is guild #2 guy, and also the Party Leader (PL) for the instance.

PL announces that the icons will be OtherHunter traps blue square, and Amava traps green triangle.

OtherHunter asks, "do you mean fire trap or explosive?"

I think "oh boy, here we go".

First pull only requires one mob to be controlled, so blue square goes up. You can see by his positioning and the fact that he didn't drop a trap that OtherHunter does not really know what PL expects of him. I select him and see through target-of-target, that he's targeting the skull (first mob to kill). Ok, I keep my mouth shut and let it play out just in case I'm misinterpreting things. If he does OK, then I save myself from being a bossy boss boss. If it fails, this pull is easy enough that we aren't going to wipe, so no biggie.

Pull goes down and he doesnt even drop a trap. Bam Bam Bam and they're all dead. Like I said, no problem.

PL asks what happened to trap. OtherHunter is clearly confused. PL explains that he's supposed to freeze the one with the blue square. OtherHunter seems to indicate his understanding.

Next pull, same basic thing as we start, same positioning, no trap dropped, I didn't look to see who he was targeting. This time he does end up dropping a trap, and it is a freezer trap, but he somehow gets the red x in there (supposed to be second on kill sequence). And no sooner does the mob enter his trap, then he's melee swinging his sword at it, breaking his own trap.

At this point PL is getting a little agitated. I've never run with PL before, but I have run with the warrior/guild leader. I whisper OtherHunter asking if he's ever chain trapped before. He says he's only run an instance a few times, and never heard of chain trapping.

Ok, I think I can work with this. Any immediate feelings of Huntard that were running through my head went away, and I replaced them with thoughts of ignorance, which is forgivable. I have been, and still remain, ignorant of a great many things, and its only through trying and failing and trying again and learning (and failing) that we overcome ignorance.

I ask PL to use green triangle for the next pull, so I can show him what we're talking about. Pull goes perfectly, tank handling two mobs, and two traps later, the third one sitting there as a nicely frozen turkey for us to burn down.

Next pull, there's 4 mobs, so green triangle and blue square both go up. He does get the blue square into a trap, but then wacks it with his sword and breaks his trap. I let him know to do anything he can to de-select the mob and stop attacking AS SOON AS it's changed direction and headed towards him after the pull (ie, he has aggro). Click somewhere on the ground, hit escape, select your pet. ANYTHING to de-select the mob so you wouldn't attack him and break your trap.

He had some trouble with this concept, and especially because we were getting to this part of the "lesson" just as we were getting to a slightly complex piece of terrain with a ramp and a platform and a sharp turn as you got up to a new walk-way, so the pulls and patrols were getting a little hairy.

The PL was getting more and more agitated with him on voice chat. I was trying more and more to whisper him text-wise to give him pointers, mainly on where to stand and position your traps, and how to coax your mob into the trap.

And here's the point where I think he showed me that he was just ignorant, and not a true Huntard, always to remain a Huntard. He was showing signs of improvement, and being that it was his first time trying this stuff, did admirably, under lots of stress and scrutiny. And he was very nicely letting us know how he wanted to be doing it better, and that he knows he's not doing it right and stuff. So he clearly was not just a coconut who was clueless. He's a bright guy who was clueless.

Then it settled down back into normal 4 and 5 pulls. And he started getting the hang of at least a single trap, backing away, not attacking/breaking his trap. The way we were doing it, for the 5 pulls, I'd off-tank with my pet for 1 mob, main tank would take two mobs, OtherHunter would single-trap one, and I'd chain trap the last one. Then we'd burn them down, first the two that the main tank had, then OtherHunter's turkey, then my turkey.

Worked OK, especially because I asked the healer to keep an eye on my off-tanking little Ruby, which he did an excellent job of. We proceeded to pwn the instance, and get some phat loot, including a nice piece of chest armor for yours truely, which is pretty rare for me.

To me, this is the exact situation that makes everyone jump straight to the Huntard label. Our crowd control is a little complicated to use. To do right, you've got to be aware of a number of variables, and show extreme discipline and attention to details to ensure that you AND your pet don't break your trap. All the while delivering damage down range.

Add to this, the fact that it really is easy to solo as a Hunter, and you end up with some relatively bright people reaching level 67 without ever really paying attention to the finer things in our bag of tricks (for instance, me and my "kiting"). Its a lethal combination, that really makes it hard to filter out the -tards from the -ers when you get to the upper levels. You join a party and people expect you to be as good a crowd controller as a rogue or mage standing next to you.

I'm no expert on the other classes, but my understanding is that its point-and-click to sheep, and all you have to do is keep an eye for when the sheep expires or gets broken, and then point-and-click to re-sheep. None of this tap dancing and head stands and cartwheels to keep a mob's attention and in the freezer.

In any event, the intro to this posting promised of stories of guild drama and intrigue. Bah, seems anti-climactic at this point, but here goes....

The next day, there's all this crazy chatter in guild chat about how to run an instance and team attitudes and how the guild is being run and what not. Seems that guild leader and guild #2, both of whom were in there with us, were having a spat about how PL handled himself with someone trying to learn new skills. And then he fires back with all kinds of personal shots about how the guild leader (who you know I'm a decent fan of his leadership) runs things and what not.

Lots of strange snippets of guild chat and voice chat on two different voice channels (which made it really hard to keep up with).

Ends up with #2 PL-guy leaving the guild and a handful of others leaving with him. Eh, whatever. Probably better off, both him and us, clearly a different approach to the game in both camps.


/cast true-inner-feelings-hidden-by-shroud-of-sarcasm
/yell And its a damn good thing that mutha f'ing Huntard didn't out roll me for the chest piece, or I'd have flipped out
/grin [modifier=crooked]
/stopcasting

;-)

Kiting, I think?

As I learn to improve my understanding of the Hunter class, and all the wonderful abilities we have, one topic I've read about but not really approached is kiting.

At its most basic, my understanding is that you use your various crowd control capabilities plus your own movement to keep an opponent at range, while still delivering some damage.

Appears to be useful for staying alive, and even winning, in PvP.

And in PvE, it seems to be useful for keeping an opponent mob occupied when its immune to freezer traps or just resists your freezer trap.

At its finest art form, I've heard kiting described with various types of running away from your enemy and then executing jump shots where you leap and spin in mid air, firing an instant shot while in the air, then landing back in your original direction and keep running away.

I tried doing that a couple times over the past few months, and I just don't get it. Perhaps I'll come back to that when I can, but for now, not pretty.

One time, when I was relatively new to Hellfire Peninsula, I was mounted and aggro'd some mobs, and kept running with them on my tail, until I came to a little outpost, where the NPC guards then jumped on the guys that were chasing me. Some player standing there observing said "nice kite" to me after the battle was done. I thought to myself "that's kiting? i didnt do any jump shotting or what not? i'll take the compliment, but i doubt that was actual kiting."


Then there's last night. In western Nagrand, there's some demons and such with a quest to grind 2 of this kind, 5 of that kind, and 8 of another kind. You get to take a joy ride on a Netherdrake and he does a fly-over to show you who you'll be fighting. The 2 demons are elites, roughly my level. I group up with a guy to try to take him down. I pull one elite demon, and we're fighting, my pet has aggro, bestial wrath is on and she looks pretty in red, and mend pet's going strong.

Mage I'm with grabs aggro from my pet, and gets 2 shotted. Me and my pet hang in there, popping my two attack power trinkets, but mend pet just isnt fast enough. Ruby takes a dive with the bad guy at about 25% health left. I think real quick "feign death? bahhhh! let me give this a shot. worst case, we call it a wipe".

Knowing that I have no chance of running directly away and jumpshotting, because any time I've practiced that I land completely disoriented and facing in any of 360 possible directions.

So I drop a freezer trap and walk backwards and bandage myself to full health, and let Arcane shot cooldown. Trap thaws with me at just about max range. Fire arcane shot and walk backwards. Fire concussive shot and keep walking backwards. When Arcane is ready, wham. When trap is ready, I dropped frost trap (in retrospect, perhaps freezer would have been better, but I was excited and not thinking clearly), when concussive was ready fire that.

I just kept walking backwards, repeating the frost/concussive/arcane whenever any of them was ready.

With less than 100 health remaining and out of mana, having covered about a quarter of Nagrand's north-south distance, he died.

So does that count as kiting? I think that pre-2.3 patch, the dead zone would have made this impossible because a couple of my concussive shots were with him pretty darn close by, but whatever. I was alive (barely) and he wasn't, and the XP was in the bank.

w00t!!!

Zangarmush

I'm lovin' me some Zangarmarsh.

I just really like the zone so far. The strange debuff that those bumblebees put on Ruby (my pet Boar) is just a sweet visual effect.

I'm a big fan of Cenarion Expedition, and its my first real taste of reputation (sure there was that Magram quest line in Desolace, and a little taste for rep with Argent Dawn, but nothing too notable there). Fun to see the vendor's items change from red to actually purchasable as my rep lvl's up. Of course, none of the items are of particular use to me, but just fun to see things happen. Also the master cook book is here. My cooking is semi-stuck at 279 and has been for a little while. I should probably just suck it up and go to Azshara where the Nagas drop zesty clam meat which is one of the ingredients to the remaining recipe I have that will give me skill. I also have a recipe for cooking Winter Squid, but I'm not sure when winter starts in the WoW universe, and I'm not sure what waters I can fish to get winter squid. Need to do something though, because I've got some recipes and a stack or two of ingredients waiting for when I turn 300.

Ding 63

One of the things I've been liking in Zangarmarsh is how I've found it really easy to work 2 or 3 quests simultaneously. I find that each time I head back to the Cenarion Expedition in the east part of the zone, I've got 3 quests ready to turn in. Very nice jump in XP and quest rewards.

Something else that the zone is showing me is the benefits of only choosing one of herbalism or mining. I haven't seen any mineral veins in Zangarmarsh, so I only keep track herbs active. Much less stress as I run about. But the money is so sweet with dual herb/mining that I'll keep them both, but its something to think about for my next toon.

Ding 375 herbalism

I just love the herbalism.

Ding 1500g

I actually enjoy mining more than herbalism because I find the ores and bars sell better on my server. I almost never have a stack of any metal expire on AH, where as herbs are much more sensitive to day of week and stack size. But then again, I kind of like the mother nature feel of herbalism (I must be Tauren at heart) rather than the industrial, strip mining, ecosystem crushing aspect of my other gathering profession.