Less QQ, More PewPew

Hunter Talents - Confirmed? Probably. Awesome? Yes.

2008-07-18T09:58:00.003-06:00

So check this out if you haven't already seen them: http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?hunter
Confirmed? I don't know. But they do look pretty good I think.

The talents that are listed here are perfectly in-line with the changes from the Beta patch notes, so it's either legit information or someone at MMO-Champion spend a lot of time making things up.

Starting off with the current DPS champion, the Beast Mastery tree:

Beast Mastery

The bottom half of the tree looks exactly the same so far, and the changes don't begin to appear until we hit the 41 point level with the lone exception of...

Master's Call: This ability causes your pet to attempt to remove all Snare and Movement Impairing effects on a target and makes them immune to them for 4 seconds. "Attempt" is the part that makes me nervous. 7% of your base mana with a one minute cooldown. It could prove to be awesome.

Every time your pet scores a critical hit you instantly gain 1% of your mana back.Invigorate: The first new talent that we come across does not disappoint in my opinion. Every time your pet scores a critical hit you instantly gain 1% of your mana back. The bigger mana pool you have, the more effective this becomes. With a pool of 8000 mana you would obviously get 80 mana back, almost enough for a "Efficiency" Steady Shot. Given the up-time of Ferocious Inspiration this could go a long way in assisting with the concept of chain-chugging Fel Mana Potions.

Longevity: In my opinion there is nothing bad about this talent. It reduces the cooldown of Intimidation, Bestial Wrath and Pet Abilities by 30%. No matter how you look at it, this is a DPS increase. Obviously using Bestial Wrath every 1 minute 24 seconds will provide more DPS over the course of a fight, but also shortening the cooldown of Pet Abilities should increase pet DPS as well.

Cobra Strikes: Another talent that is going to work in your favor to slightly boost DPS but also indirectly affect mana issues. Combined with Invigorate, this talent makes your pet guaranteed to gain a critical strike on it's next 3 attacks, which will not only guarantee a Ferocious Inspiration up-time increase but also a 3% mana gain. And that's something we can all appreciate.

Aspect Mastery: As this talent sounds, it makes your Aspects, at least the frequently used ones, more effective. Viper will return 10% more mana, Monkey will reduce damage taken by 10% and Hawk will provide 50% more Attack Power.

Beast Mastery [NYI]: So this talent doesn't have a name yet, but it says it will allow for the taming of Exotic Pets and increase Pet Skill points by 5. If I understand that correctly, we will have 5 more points for our pet's talent trees. Hmm . . .

Potential BM Build

Also of note: Spirit Bond is still terrible.

Marksmanship

First, holy crap. The first thing I notice here . . Mortal Shots moved down to the second tier of talents, allowing us to pick it up after only 5 points. What this essentially does is free up the 20 points *every* Hunter has (better have!) in MM for the talent. It opens up windows! Lots of em. But as a result, it was swapped with Efficiency.

Focused Aim: We finally get our own interruption prevention for Steady Shot. It will bring it to a 70% chance, similar to healers talents that bring their interruption ignore to 70% as well.

Careful Aim: Not a new talent, but moved up the tree and vastly improved. Instead of just 45% of your Intellect being turned into Attack Power, now 100% of it is. Opting for mail instead of leather is looking better and better.

Piercing Shots: This gives Hunters a 6% passive Armor Penetration. Not too shabby.

Rapid Recuperation: Simple and to the point, reduces all the shot costs by 60% while under the effects of Raid Fire.

Wild Quiver: Hm. Has a 10% chance when dealing damage with Auto Shot to fire another shot dealing 60% damage. I can see this working very well depending on how often it will proc.

Kill Shot has a 6 second cooldown and costs 475 mana, so it is easy to see this becoming a staple in a MM rotation.Improved Steady Shot: According to MMO-Champion, Kill Shot reads "You attempt to finish the wounded target off, firing a long range attack dealing weapon damage plus [RAP * 0.15 + 325]. Causes an additional 745 to 825 bonus damage against targets at or under 20% health." So what this talent is going to do is provide a 15% on a Steady Shot hit (not crit) to increase the damage done by your next Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, and Kill Shot by 15% and reducing it's mana cost by 40%. Kill Shot has a 6 second cooldown and costs 475 mana, so it is easy to see this becoming a staple in a MM rotation.

Marked for Death: Is straight up awesome in a bottle. Keep Hunter's Mark on a target and gain a 5% damage increase as well 10% more critical strike damage. Wrap it up and take it home!

It consumes your Sting on a target and has various effects depending which sting was applied.Chimera Shot: Utility. Until numbers are tried and tested, whether or not the changes to the MM tree can swing with BM again, we can tell you that Chimera Shot seems fairly robust. It consumes your Sting on a target and has various effects depending which sting was applied. Serpent Sting will still probably be a waste of a global cooldown, but the other two might prove awesome. The highest rank of Viper Sting will drain 3092 mana without talents. That would mean that Chimera Shot would return 927 mana. But since the cost of Chimera Shot is 540, you only gain 387 mana out of the ordeal, if you ignore the cost of Viper Sting. Which just so happens to be 610 mana. Good for PvP? Yes. Good for PvE? No real gain.

Scorpid Sting on the other-hand. You know how the Survival Hunter is the person who brings EW? And he may or not be the same guy bringing iHM? And the person who is in charge of Scorpid Sting? Let me introduce you to the Chimera Shot whore. The person who's job it will be to keep Scorpid-Chimera on the boss every 10 seconds.

Potential MM Build

Survival

Improved Tracking: This is a great talent, robust and useful. It increases the damage done to a target being tracked. Track Undead? You better believe we will be using it now. Along with Demons, Dragonkin, and everything else that we haven't had a need to look for in a long time.

Deterrence: Not a new talent, but worth noting that a 60% spell resist chance was added. This should provide some usefulness outside of the "Oh crap the tank died and he's on me" moments.

Improved Feign Death: Also not new, but added a line about taking 30% less damage while feigned. Not too shabby.

Potent Venom: Ehh . . . maybe. It increases the damage to targets under the affect of Wyvern Sting or Serpent Sting by 3%. It sounds good, but having to keep Serpent Sting up? Maybe, maybe not. If it said Scorpid Sting . . .

Point of No Escape: This looks like a great PvP talent in my opinion. It increases the critical strike chance of all attacks made against targets affected by your Frost, Freezing or Bear Trap. By the way Bear Trap says "Place a bear trap that locks onto the first enemy that approaches, rooting them and causing [RAP * 0.1 + 1575] Bleed damage over 10 sec. Damage caused may interrupt the effect. Trap will exist for 1 min. Only one trap can be active at a time." Well, since Freezing will break when you hit them, the bonus is gone. Bear Trap has a chance to break on damage. So that leaves Frost Trap as a long-term effect for the talent to take effect. And since most boss mobs are immune to snare effects . . . it will be awesome on the AV bridge.

Sniper Training: This talent increases the damage done by Aimed Shot, Steady Shot, and Explosive Shot by 6% if you are more than 30 yards away. Kill Shot also gets a 15% crit chance increase on targets with less than 30% health.

Hunting Party: Zomgyesplzwhowantstobeinmypartynowholycrap. I mean, this talent is awesome. It has a 100% chance on a crit shot to restore 2% mana, 10 Energy, 4 Rage, or 10 Runic Power to everyone in your party, with an interla 8 second cooldown. This talent is awesome. Who loves me now?

Explosive Shot: This is a new AoE shot we get that does 760 Fire Damge every second for 2 seconds to all enemies within 5 yards of the target. Great single target DPS? Nah. More for us to do other than Mulit-Shot and cast Volley to be funny? Yes.

Potential Hunter Build - This one is a little harder. It hinges on whether or not Serpent Sting will be worth keeping up on a target or not. Otherwise the points might as well go into the buffed Master Tactician.

A little more has come out about Death Knights obviously. As always DeathKnight.info has some awesome information. Checking out this gives you an interesting idea of what Runes are going to do. Not to mention the opening cinematic for Death Knights is up, which I can just link right here.

There is no NDA for the beta so you can expect tons of information. About everything. It will be a beast to keep up on it all. Let's wrap up this smorgasbord. Questions, comments, sources, confirmations, etc. Leave 'em here!

Random Ramblings

2008-07-17T09:29:00.006-06:00

Last night was fairly uneventful. We finished clearing Black Temple and actually one-shot Illidan. Nice. Still no bow. Not nice. And another crappy dagger. Very not nice.

So today I have a few things I felt like bringing up. And they aren't Warcraft related. First of all...

Dr. Horrible. Starring Nathan Fillion (of Firefly/Serenity fame), Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, How I Met Your Mother, Starship Troppers), and Felicia Day (from "The Guild") apparently all got together with Joss Wheddon during the Writer's strike. And the came up with this.

All I can say is that it is a big ball of win! Seriously, how can you go wrong with "Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog?" Act 2 is currently available for free streaming on the site right now. I know that I purchased all 3 Acts through iTunes for 4 bucks to help support the awesome work that Joss and these guys do. I know I loved "The Guild" and you better believe I am a Firefly geek! I've got the multiple t-shirts to prove it. I highly recommend watching it. And if you are a Joss fan, help support these guys and dropping the 4 bucks to purchase the episodes.

No, I am not starting to put advertisements up on the blog. But I loved Firefly so much I can't help but promote this. I missed Firefly while it was on TV. I cannot let another travesty happen!

Ok, secondly, rant.

I read a lot of web comics. Some I have bookmarked, some I just remember to go to. You know why I read web comics? To laugh. To see something funny. Whether it is a game comic or whatever. Wednesday's are great because that means there is a new Zero Punctuation. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I get a new Penny-Arcade. And every weekday there are new PvP Online and Least I Could Do. These go along with GU Comics, My Extra Life, and LFG.

So what is the point of me rattling off all these comics? If you frequent sites such as these like I do, there is one missing you may notice. And that is Control Alt Del Online. Why? Apparently he decided to stop being funny. I know a lot of people stopped liking CAD a bit ago. But I kept reading. There were a lot of great gems in there. But for at least a couple weeks now he has been running with the story arc of the main character's fiance having a miscarriage. That's some touchy stuff for a lot of people right there.

But I decided to ride it out and see how long it would last. And it's going on far too long. I haven't enjoyed any of the comics in the past two weeks now. And just when you think the story is about to move on and get back to, you know, humor and gaming, he continues to drag it on. The funniest thing he has posted in weeks have been the sketch drawing on the front page. So yeah, I pretty much stopped reading CAD. I don't enjoy it. I don't go browsing web comics for thoughts and reflections on life's hardships and misfortunes. While it has a place in life, for me, it is not in the web comics I read.

Ok, rant off.

Tonight we are going to the midnight showing of the Dark Knight. And I am excited as is the rest of the world I would imagine. Go home and take a nap, raid, go to Batman. Not a bad afternoon/evening.

If you get a chance, you might also consider visiting Death Knight Info to vote on the Design-A-Rune contest from the selection their users have sent in.

The Raid Designer is coming along quite nicely. I am at the point where I am trying to make a buff list for a given group to populate automatically based off which classes are in the group and what spec each person is. The trick is getting it to check to see if that buff is already present. Big thanks to my buddies Jon (Band Geeks and Bag o Cool) and Tom (Not sure what his blog is) for the tech support. They are far smarter than me :)

Which reminds me of an old project we did . . . at work . . . while being paid. Candroid versus the Acrobots! It's what we did when we weren't playing around with Flash and Flex all day.

Ok, sorry about the randomness today. Any thoughts or comments, leave em!

Firefly + Doogie + The Guild =

2008-07-16T16:22:00.000-06:00

Holy crap I am geekin' out here!

http://www.drhorrible.com

Get your nerd on!

Don Carlos' ain't got nuttin' on me!

2008-07-16T09:51:00.006-06:00

So we had a rough time in Black Temple last night, spending far too many attempts on Gurtogg Bloodboil. So let's talk about happy things! Like our 4 Hunter 1 Shaman 5v5 Arena team!

After our raid last night we formed "It needs more Hunters." The composition was Wannabecow, Atroxus, Badhitman, Doittoit, and myself. And we did better than we thought. After briefly stopping at 1575 so people could go buy bracers, we rolled on to 1600, where I bought my Brutal Gladiator's Chain Armor. We continued to play and we ended up at like 1637 or so (the Armory isn't updated with the team yet), which wasn't too shabby. The final win/loss ratio was 15-7 or something.

The funniest combination we fought was the 4 Mage 1 Shaman team, which we took 18 points from. I guess their plan on sheeping and PoM-Pyroblasting people doesn't work when you can't cast and most of the team can't be sheeped. We fought a couple other higher-rated teams that we lost 7 points to, but all-in-all the focus train ate people alive. Only against the well-coordinated teams with healers on their toes did we lose. Because we came out of that gate like bats out of hell unloading on the first target we could get our hands on. Even if it was a Warrior.

All the Hunters stayed as BM while I specced into MM to provide the Silencing Shot and Scatter Shot. It was good times.

And then after Arena, myself and a couple folks decided we needed to go obtain the fattest of the fat loot . . . Don Carlos' Famous Hat. Want to get your own sweet hat? Get yourself a tank, healer, and one, two, or three DPS and head into heroic Caverns of Time: Hillsbrad. Follow the road that leads in front of Southshore until you spot Don Carlos and his dog Guerrero. Tank 'n spank Don and his dog, loot the hat, and zone out. Change the dungeon difficulty to normal, reset the instances, and then back to heroic. Zone back in and kill Don until everyone has a hat. We did this last night 4 times. Ignore the "You are now saved to this instance" message, as he will respawn.

And once you do, you can have sweet pictures like these! Sure to make everyone jealous. Especially Pike! ;)

Pretty sweet if I do say so myself. :) Questions, comments, concerns. Leave 'em here!

Looking at Kalecgos

2008-07-15T10:19:00.003-06:00

Our guild decided to make a serious venture into Sunwell last night. After clearing the trash, we got in 8 or 9 solid attempts in on Kalecgos. And I must say, we did rather well. Our best attempt brought Kaelcgos down to 26% and Sathrovarr the Corruptor to 32%.
If you are unfamiliar with the fight, let me lay it down real quick. The raid starts on a small balcony-ish area with Kalecgos. Every so often a portal will open on a player, taking them to an alternate dimension where Kalecgos' human form is fighting Sathrovarr. The person who was ported, along with a tank and a couple healers and some other DPS uses the portal that spawns to go to the alternate reality as well in order to help kill Sathrovarr. Your raid has to kill Sathrovarr first to help free Kaelcgos from his corruption.

We are looking to go back tonight instead of doing Black Temple or Hyjal provided we have the proper class composition. A pair of Starstalker Legguards or Gronnstalker's Bracer would be pretty awesome. :)

Phuzuda, my fledgling Shadow Priest, hit level 40 last night. The day before the implement level 30 mounts. Go figure. Not pictured in this . . picture is him wearing his awesome M. Bison hat.

I am making decent progress on the raid designer. I was able to get certain element properties to become draggable from one component to another. If I get it even remotely working today, I will host it up for people to check out.

How To: Jan'Alai, Dragonhawk Avatar

2008-07-14T11:29:00.001-06:00

As promised, here is the Jan'Alai video from this weekend. It is uploaded to Filefront for this stream, as Vimeo has a upload cap per week and I used mine already putting up some of my other videos. If you are having any trouble with Jan'Alai hopefully this will help get you and your group through the fight! Try using it in conjunction with the strategy I outlined in this post. This video is shorter, weighing in at just under 5 minutes. Enjoy!

Speaking of Vimeo, the page for my videos is right here -> http://vimeo.com/user593098/videos. I will be adding this video there as well as soon as my upload limit resets. What I am liking about Vimeo is the site loads quickly without a lot of extra stuff, plus the embedding feature has more options, such as customizing the embedded video's size.

Questions, comments, etc. Post 'em here!

Jan'Alai Video Incoming!

2008-07-12T18:53:00.001-06:00

I got what I think is great footage of the Jan'Alai fight (Dragonhawk) today. I will cut it together this weekend and upload it when I get a chance! Stay tuned!

Wowhead expanding it's reach . . into Petopia.

2008-07-12T02:24:00.000-06:00

I am not sure if this is good or bad, but Wowhead just released a Pet Comparison Table, a Pet Gallery, and a Pet Calculator. I know Mania has put ridiculous amounts of work into Petopia. Not to mention extensive research such as the latest post regarding Pet Loyalty loss is amazing things to know.

Having all these extra resources is definitely a boon to Hunters everywhere. There are plenty of Hunters out in the world who don't know about Mania's incredible site but do know about Wowhead. And smarter Hunters is great for everyone. No matter how you look at it, Wowhead is further extending it's reach into "everything you need about WoW" territory.

Working on the Raid Designer - Picture

2008-07-11T17:21:00.000-06:00

So I started developing the raid designer because it seemed like a lot of fun. Here is the first shot I took of it:

Illidan has crappy loot! Random Ramblings

2008-07-11T10:03:00.000-06:00

It's true. So we went back to tie-up our loose ends in Black Temple. Namely those loose ends being Illidan. And after a couple of wipes due to ridiculously stupid stuff (Mages dying to their own parasites? Huh?) we downed him with the chant of "Glaive" coming from our raid leader and the chant "Bow" coming from me.

And what did we get? Shroud of the Highborne and another Shard of Azzinoth. Can Illidan have bad loot? Yes, yes he can. And these are the worse two items on the table.

And holy crap, our server *finally* got our gem vendor up. Chaos ensued. Gear got re-gemmed. Guild jewelcrafters were bombarded with tells for cuts. And now my gemming looks the way I want it to. Check it out, it's pretty hawt. :)

We are desperately close to the 900 unbuffed Agility mark. If I decided to switch to something like a Shivering Felspine, my Agility would go up to ~895. Super awesome. I would be giving up my Armor Penetration, so further testing would be needed. But holy cow, 900 Agility. I wants it.

Myself and a few guildies spent a little time last night browsing WoW-Heroes to we could compare the "gear score" it gave us, to brag about who was more awesome. So far I am second-highest in rating, right behind our tank. :) I pulled in a '954' score. Type yourself in and tell us what you got!

The site is a little prettier than http://be.imba.hu but Be Imba provides a little more useful information, such as how much more hit, expertise, etc to be at caps. But both are pretty nifty and can be quite handy.

I am in the process of uploading my videos to Vimeo. They have a cap on how much you can upload a week, but the quality is nice. Much better than some sites. And a little more functional than Filefront. Plus they have a couple fun widgets I can use for the site if I so choose.

There are a couple projects I want to try. Neither one may take off or get finished. But the ideas are fun. The first one is a DKP front-end using Adobe Flex. Importing the XML that is generated from MagicDKP and reading it in from a mySQL database and then using the awesomeness of Flex to view and work with the data.

The second idea is also using Flex. The concept popped into my head last night, and it was a raid builder. You would essentially choose the size of your raid and then drag and drop classes into raid slots after specifying what spec they are. You could then see what buffs the party would get to give a visual representation when trying to put together the optimal raid set-up. For those times where you need to come up with the best Brutallus group with your current raiding members. > >

We'll see how either one of those go. Short post. No pictures. But if you have any questions or comments, you know what to do!

WotLK Official Talents on Wowhead/MMO-Champion

2008-07-10T10:06:00.017-06:00

It seems that Blizzard has given the go-ahead for sites to post some of the stuff they saw that the WWI. And it's nice to see how accurate some of the leaked information was. Obviously there is still a lot of things that we don't know, but what we do know is friggin' sweet. On a sad note, Hunter talents and abilities are still unknown, so anything you have seen about it (you know, if you have been looking. Not that we have at all . . .) has been unconfirmed.But let's talk about what we do know for a second. So before I continue, let me use my handy little image . . .

What I want to cover today is a quick look at the Death Knight abilities and their talents with some slight speculation on how things might work together. You can get a look at the Death Knight abilities right here.Some of the abilities that really stand out to me (other than, you know, all of them), so I am just going to pick a couple from each tree and then layout some theoretical talent trees.

Blood Presence: Strengthens the Death Knight with the presence of blood, increasing damage by 15% and healing the Death Knight by 4% of damage dealt. Only one Presence may be active at a time.

Hysteria: Induces a friendly unit into a killing frenzy for 30 sec, increasing their physical damage by 20%, but causing them to suffer damage equal to 1% of their total health every second.

Unholy Presence: Infuses the Death Knight with unholy fury, increasing attack speed by 15% and reducing the global cooldown on all Death Knight abilities by 0.5 sec. Only one Presence may be active at a time.

Degeneration (Rank 3): Instantly attack the target, dealing 60% weapon damage and inflicting a disease dealing 182 over 21 sec. Any existing heal over time spells on the target become corrupted, dramatically increasing the damage done by the disease and removing the healing effect. Stacks up to 3 times.

Frost Presence: The Death Knight takes on the presence of frost, increasing armor by 45% and threat generated by 25%. Only one Presence may be active at a time.

Obliterate (Rank 4): A brutal instant attack that deals 100% of weapon damage plus 494 and 183 additional damage for each of your diseases on the target, but consumes the diseases.

Wow. These things are awesome. Frost Presence? Druids, eat your heart out. Not to mention Blood Presence is incredible and a Blood-specced Death Knight could easily keep themselves alive on their own during most raid encounters, especially when you start combining it with talents that make it better and other selections of talents. Obliterate looks like it will be huge damage, especially with a brief glance at how easy it will be for the Death Knight to load a target up with diseases. And what DPS isn't going to be begging for Hysteria when it comes to those "burn baby burn" phases of boss fights?

So how will this all work out with talents? Let's lay out a couple builds with our speculation and what we know about how talents work right now. If you have a strong understanding of your current class's talents and how mechanics work, you can look at these new trees and wrap your head around how things are going to work.The first thing I notice about the Death Knight talents is that everything scales. You don't see any flat numbers like you do on Trueshot Aura. It's all about percentages and scaling effects. Which means all the talents are going to be viable and are not likely to be out-classed as the game progresses.

And here we go . . .

Frost Tanking: 0/14/57 - Mages aren't the only ones who get to spec deep Frost now. ;) And this definitely looks like the tree of choice if Death Knights want to soak up tons of physical damage.The Frost tree is just chalked full of awesome talents for tanking and PvP. And looking at other innate abilities such as Icebound Fortitude (Consumes all available runic power, causing the Death Knight to become immune to Stun effects and increasing armor by 50% for up to 12 sec. Does not remove existing Stun effects.), the Death Knight definitely has it's own form of "Oh crap" abilities.

Including the 14 points in Unholy to pick up Lichborne. Then consider abilities that may or may not stack, such as Icy Talons and Frigid Dreadplate, and mobs are probably not going to be swinging very quickly. Also taking Frost Aura not only increase your Frost Resistance, but increase yours and your party's health by 4%. See? Scaling numbers.

Don't worry Warlocks, no more tanking for you! Fire Resist tanks? Yeah, we got that.Unholy/Magic Resist Tanking: 0/51/20 - You know all those fights where your raid leader calls out for the Warlock tank? Don't worry Warlocks, no more tanking for you! Fire Resist tanks? Yeah, we got that. Because if you are looking to be the magic resist tank for your guild, Unholy is without a doubt the way to go. Between Bone Armor, Magic Suppression, and Anti-Magic Zone it becomes easy to see why Death Knights can take over the resist tank role. Also, as an innate ability, Death Knights have Anti Magic Shell which reads "Surrounds the Death Knight in an Anti-Magic Shell, absorbing 75% of the damage dealt by the next harmful spell. Damage absorbed by Anti-Magic Shell energizes the Death Knight with additional runic power. Lasts 5 sec."

Combine them all together . . . casters will hate you when the fight you and they will love you when they are by your side.And to top it off, they will be a great support class dealing decent damage (from what I can tell) and buffing other magic damage dealers through Ebon Plaguebringer. Oh, and having a Gargoyle is pretty sweet too. I am unsure if Black Ice will be worth the points, depending on how Death Knights end up gearing themselves. It might end up being more beneficial to try and take the points into the Blood tree to get Spell Deflection.

Blood PvE DPS: 55/16/0 - The stat-buffing talents in Blood looks straight up ridiculous to me. Venetran of the Third War, Might of Mograine, Blood Aura, Bloody Vengeance, toss in Bladed Armor and enough points into Unholy to get Lichborne and Shadow of Death.Seriously. as I mentioned, Death Knights specced into Blood can almost be self-sustaining. With free Death Coils, Rune Tap, and all Death Knights having Death Pact (Sacrifice an undead minion, healing the Death Knight for 2600 health.) and Blood Presence (as mentioned above). That's a lot of health regen. And Mark of Blood on a friendly target such as, you know, the main tank perhaps? That's a lot of residual healing for the party.

Combining Bladed Armor for more attack power with Impurity will make for great diseases.Unholy DPS: 18/53/0 - The build for an Unholy build focusing on DPS rather than tanking has a few more points to toss around, ignoring some of the survivability talents a magic resist tank might pick up. For example, Corpse Explosion and Improved Plague Strike are most focused on DPS. Then dropping 18 points into Blood for things like reduced threat generation, improved critical strike chance are excellent talents most DPS classes come equipped with. But combining Bladed Armor for more attack power with Impurity will make for great diseases.

I will wrap up this post, as its length is continuing to grow. You can see how well the Death Knight talents work together, easily building off each other regardless of what tree they are in. I could continue to post different builds, as I am really looking forward to trying out a DPS/PvP Frost build and throwing around the Unholy DPS build will be tons of fun.

Questions, comments, thoughts, post 'em here!

Video: Illidan Stormrage

2008-07-09T11:49:00.002-06:00

I finally got around to putting together the Illidan video. The music selection is incredibly random, so if you don't like one of the songs, don't worry! The next one is probably going to be entirely different. Filefront seems to not want me to stream my files, so now we are trying Vimeo. If it works, I will upload all my other videos there as well.

Bow Comparison: Raid, Old Faces

2008-07-08T10:05:00.005-06:00

As I mentioned, we went and cleared out Hyjal last night before the weekly reset, giving me the opportunity to test the Ancient Amani Longbow. It is going to be tricky to do an accurate comparison now that my Steady Shots are doing 10% more damage due to having 4 pieces of Tier 6 (Woot). But regardless, we can now look at the numbers and get a general idea.

Comparison 1: Rage Winterchill
WWS: From the previous week, WWS is reporting me as doing 1447 DPS on Rage with my Crossbow of Relentless Peacocks. I had a Shadow Priest and one of our BM Hunters in my party. However I did not get a Bloodlust that fight.

WWS: With the Ancient Amani Longbow, it is showing me as only pulling in 1226 DPS. However the group composition was significantly different. I did not have a Shadow Priest in my group and only regained 7000 mana as opposed to the 10,300 I gained the previous week. And while I did have a Bloodlust for this week, I had to move out of two Death and Decays while the previous week I was able to stay still the entire time.

Fight Conclusion:
Damage Done:
Crossbow of Relentless Strikes: 293,793
Ancient Amani Longbow: 293,120

DPS Time:
CoRS: 97%
ZA Bow: 90%

It's a toss-up. While I had completely uninterrupted DPS time with the Badge Bow, I was also lucky enough to have a Shadow Priest making my mana-sucking spec a non-issue.

Comparison 2: Anetheron
WWS: With the Badge Bow, I pulled in a paltry 1055 for the duration of the fight. Judging by the WWS report, I did not receive a Bloodlust, but did receive a single Ferocious Inspiration, one Drums of Battle, and one of a lot of buffs.

I was also put to sleep by Anetheron twice while the previous week I was not slept at all.WWS: Apparently last night, I was really on top of my Anetheron DPS, as I brought down a 1432 DPS for the fight. I still didn't receive a Bloodlust, but I did get Ferocious Inspiration 5 times, and used Berserker's Call twice. I was also put to sleep by Anetheron twice while the previous week I was not slept at all.

Fight Conclusion:
Damage Done:
CoRS: 224,922
ZA Bow: 336,635

DPS Time:
CoRS: 82%
ZA Bow: 91%

In the end, it's hard to tell if having less DPS time helped or hindered by DPS when I was using the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes. I also lost 20 seconds of DPS time by being put to sleep with the Ancient Amani Longbow. But there was definitely a gap in the amount of damage done between the two bows, as well as DPS. And it's easy to see how the my guild loves to not give my Bloodlusts!

Comparison 3: Kaz'rogal
The raid kept Judgment of Wisdom up on the boss, which was a big help.WWS: With the CoRS I pulled in a impressive 1551 DPS for the fight. I downed a single Fel Mana Potion and the raid kept Judgment of Wisdom up on the boss, which was a big help, restoring almost 3000 Mana over the course of the fight. 4 Ferocious Inspirations and no Bloodlusts.

WWS: Ancient Amani Longbow helped us in putting out a decent 1313 DPS for this fight. While I did get a Bloodlust this time, I did not have a Judgment of Wisdom up on the boss, and our only other Mana regeneration came in the form of using Aspect of the Viper and 2 Super Mana Potions.

Fight Conclusion:
Damage Done:
CoRS: 285,540
ZA Bow: 266,575

DPS Time:
CoRS: 96%
ZA Bow: 96%

Comparison 4: Azgalor
WWS: 1238 DPS with CoRS. 2 Rapid Fires, chugged 2 Fel Mana Potions, and had to pop Aspect of the Viper.

WWS: 1339 DPS with the ZA Bow. I received 2 Bloodlusts, used Berserker's Call three times, Rapid Fire twice, but only regained 3000 Mana from using Aspect of the Viper, causing me to have to stick to Auto Shots for the last 5%.

Fight Conclusion:
Damage Done:
CoRS: 369,117
ZA Bow: 370,920

DPS Time:
CoRS: 96%
ZA Bow: 95%

This is a hard one to call. At face value, the ZA Bow out-performed the Badge bow. But having received 2 Bloodlusts and being able to (read as: remembering to) use my trinket three times no doubt made a difference. But as this fight only happened last night, I know I ran out of Mana and was forced to Auto Shoot for 5-7%, living off of AotV for a stray Steady Shot here and there at the end.

Final Thoughts:
It's tough to make a final decision. Obviously I cannot perfectly recreate each boss fight to put myself in a nice bubble world for flawless results. But at the same time, having these fluctuations are valuable too, to compare how things panned out in each varying situation.

If I was in the position to make a decision between spending 150 Badges or use the Ancient Amani Longbow that I had already picked up, I would personally take the Ancient Amani Longbow and use the badges to fill out some other item slots I might feel are lacking. The mileage you get out of the ZA Bow might be slightly different though, as I have previously stated, the Armor Penetration on it gets better the more you add.

Also make note that the Badge Bow is a lot better for BM than it is for Survival or Marksmanship. When I ran the Dr. Boom tests, remember that the Badge Bow won both of my DPS tests when I used the 3:2 macro. Take all of this into consideration when you make your Bow decision.

On completely unrelated news, Warbull re-activated his account and I am friggin' excited! Moirainne hates me now for some reason but Warbull is back and that is sweet. We had a nice conversation last night about the good times we had back doing our weekly ZA and Karazhan back when this blog was young and fresh. Some of the old guild members (only like 5 remember him anyways) hold some ill-feeling towards him, but I am excited for him to be back. We ran a Karazhan last night just because we could.

Questions, comments, concerns? You know the drill!

Shot Damage Calculator

2008-07-07T16:32:00.003-06:00

This is the first release of my Shot Damage Calculator. It only supports the current max level skills for level 70 Hunters. It does not take into account damage reduction or armor penetration at the moment, but it might be added in the future. This tool is fairly simply, as it will allow you to see the damage each of the major shots will do based of weapon speed, attack power, ammo DPS, and weapon damage. It does not have any error checking involved currently, so it will be fairly easy to break if you enter random letters.

If you have any questions, comments or problems, please leave them here and I will respond as soon as I can.

How To: Leveling a Hunter 1-30

2008-07-07T09:50:00.005-06:00

One of my friends (actually the one who convinced me to start blogging) asked me if I would be willing to write up a guide to help his friend level his new Hunter. And since his friend leveling a new character convinced him to re-activate his account, I was more than happy to oblige. I was hoping I wasn't stepping on any toes, especially Pike's awesome Hunter Kindergarten series. I still plan on cutting together the Illidan video, but I refuse to do it in Windows Movie Maker.

This post is a little different than my normal ones, as it is talking about low level things, rather than my incessant ramblings on raid progression or level 70 mechanics, so hopefully you can bear with me. I actually plan on putting together a quick Flash tool for shot damage calculations later today once I get another free moment.

How-To: Leveling a Hunter

Levels 1-10:
Leveling at the beginning can be tricky. You don't get your pet till level 10, so you have to survive without one till that point.

Up until level 10, your selection of skills is limited. You have Auto Shot, Raptor Strike (Rank 1 and 2), Serpent Sting, and Arcane Shot as far as damaging shots go. In reality, this should be more than enough to get you to level 10. And then things get easier.

Taming and choosing a Pet:
At level 10 you get a chain of quests to be able to tame a pet. You will have to tame three different animals and at the end you will get the skill Beast Training. You will also get Tame Beast, as well as the ability to call your pet, dismiss your pet, feed your pet, and of course, revive your pet.

At level 10, choosing a pet is really a matter of personal preference.At level 10, choosing a pet is really a matter of personal preference. Since we are not concerned about maximizing raid DPS, make sure you choose a pet you enjoy the most. It can be one you like the look of, the type of animal it is, or anything of the sort. If you need help choosing a pet, make sure that you look at and bookmark Petopia. It will tell you everything you need to know. Everything from base stats, how much more base DPS they do in comparison to other pets, unique effects, everything. Find one that you will enjoy. :)

Pet Trainers will be able to teach you base skills, such as Great Stamina, Great Armor, etc.One things that is important to note is how you acquire more pet abilities. Browsing Petopia, let's take a look at a new tamely tamed pet. Perhaps you are a fledgling Night Elf Hunter and tamed yourself a Moonstalker Runt. By default, the Moonstalker Runt comes knowing Cower (Rank 1). Pet Trainers will be able to teach you base skills, such as Great Stamina, Great Armor, etc.

But the Moonstalker Runt can also learn Claw, which your pet trainer does not have. So in order for your new cat to learn claw, you will have to find a pet that already has Claw, tame it, and then use that pet enough (usually it happens the first time they use it or you click it) to where you learn the ability and it gets added into your Beast Training skill. You can then teach all your pets who are capable of learning Claw that ability.

But remember, you will need to find animals on your own with the different ranks of skills. Your pet doesn't automatically learn new ones. For this reason it is highly advisable to tame pets as you level with various abilities so you have them at a later date.

The Talents:
Now that you have a pet, leveling should be incredibly easy from here on out. In addition, we need to consider the talent points we also received. When it comes to leveling, there really isn't a right or wrong spec. Even though BM might be the top raid DPS spec, it doesn't make it better or worse than the other two specs for the up and coming Hunter.

Personally, if I was to level another Hunter, my first 21 talent points, getting me to level 30, would look something like this.

Why? 5% increased critical strike chance is awesome regardless of level. There is a reason so many classes have a similar talent to close to the bottom of the tree. In addition, picking up Aimed Shot now for those pesky healing mobs and Scatter Shot for utility just screams "versatile" to me. But it is definitely not the only choices you have.

I could just as easily spec into something like this. Leveling BM is just great, and puts a heavy focus on your pet at an early level. While I wouldn't take Thick Hide at level 70, fighting mobs at low levels you will find that this can make a difference. Alternatively Focus Fire is still a great talent if you don't want the extra armor. Intimidation is on a longer cooldown than Scatter Shot, but for leveling, it serves a different purpose. It generates more aggro for your pet, and can interrupt a ranged caster rather than being an escape mechanism, although it still can be used as that too.

Ad for the sake of using all the trees, we have this for Survival. Counterattack, which I don't recommend at 70, can be great for leveling when employing Aspect of the Monkey.

The most important thing to consider is what while some talents are not effective for raiding content, they take on an entirely different purpose when you are at low-levels or soloing some content.

General Leveling Tips:
Now that we have a pet and a talent plan, let's work on getting to level 30. A popular strategy for Hunters is to set down an Immolation Trap, which you get at level 16, and pull the mob through it for additional damage. It is an effective strategy, especially when you pull aggro off of your pet. Using Wing Clip and opening a gap to unload a new ranged barrage works great.

But if you can get your pet to hold aggro, they can tank most quests that you are going to come across. With good use of pet aggro as well as effective employment of Frost Trap, you can easily find yourself killing 3 or 4 mobs at at a time. One thing to remember is to not freak out if an extra mob is beating on you. As you level, you are capable of taking some hits. Mobs will not 3-shot you. So quickly finishing a mob your pet is tanking and then opening a gap with the mob that was hitting you is quite easily done.

You will easily find yourself soloing elite quests with good pet management and actively casting Mend Pet to help keep it alive.One skill I don't see enough Hunter's employing is Mend Pet. You will easily find yourself soloing elite quests with good pet management and actively casting Mend Pet to help keep it alive. If your pet is taking more damage than it is getting healed, pull your pet back and hit the mob with Concussive Shot to get your pet some free ticks of Mend Pet without an incoming damage to help gets their HP a little higher. I still employ this strategy when farming trees in Skettis and my pet took a couple unlucky critical strikes.

As you level, this will be (and should be) the most you are going to melee in your Hunter career. Despite what the tooltip description says about the Hunter class, we do not fight alongside our pet once we finish leveling. Pulling aggro off of our pets will happen. But voluntarily going into melee combat is wrong. Casting Wing Clip and running out after someone closes the space between you is one thing. Choosing to bring fat Raptor Strike DPS is something completely different. If you have grand plans of dual wielding weapons to smash some face, the Hunter class is not for you. Roll a Rogue, Warrior, or Enhancement Shaman. They do it better.

That's all I have to post for now. This certainly isn't all-encompassing, but it should server as a decent starting guide for those who are interested in trying out the Hunter class. BRK, Pike, and Petopia all are excellent resources on everything from learning to do a jump shot for kiting, Chain Trapping, or what animal has Dash 3. All great to learn to become a great Hunter. And definitely stop by The Hunting Lodge. Ran by Brigwyn, the forums is populated with some of the smartest Hunters around and void of the retardation found on the official WoW Hunter forums.

Questions, comments, corrections, or concerns. Post a comment!

Jan'Alai in a nutshell. World PvP, and DKP Systems

2008-07-03T09:29:00.009-06:00

So, we didn't run a ZA last night. But that's OK, I can still make a snazzy little diagram for the Jan'Alai fight. So here we have Jan'Alai in a nutshell.

"Help, I'm in a nutshell. How did I get in this nutshell?" Sorry, it's one of the few Austin Powers quotes I still find funny. But seriously folks . . .

Jan'Alai - The Dragonhawk
Phase 1: During the first Phase, your tank should grab Jan'Alai and tank him near the pile of bones in back-left corner (relative to where you approach the platform).

All other players should move onto the platform bridge on the left-sideAll other players should move onto the platform bridge on the left-side except for the healer(s) that are going to keep the tank alive and a single DPS who will be killing the hatcher that would be heading to the right side. The reason you do this is so that no one can get hit by the Flame Breath except the tank or the tank healer(s) since everyone else is out of line of sight.

Keep the left side hatcher alive until you feel you have allowed him to pop a sufficient number of eggs. If you are not doing a timed run, you should be able to allow half the eggs to pop, and then finish off the side when the second round of hatchers come. If you feel confident in your AoE tank and your AoE or if you are doing a timed run, it is recommended to allow all the eggs to pop.

Phase 2: Phase 2 is the same as Phase 1, except your raid should move to the right-side egg platform, as well has having your tank position Jan'Alai in the back-right corner (adjacent to where he was) to continue preventing Jan'Alai from casting Flame Breath on the raid.

Depending on your proximity to him, he might teleport you to his locationDragonball Phase: At various points during the fight, Jan'Alai will cover the platform with a number of spheres made out of fire. Depending on your proximity to him, he might teleport you to his location when this phase starts if he thinks you are too far away. The key to this phase is to quickly move to a location that is open and not be in contact with any of the Dragonballs. I am desperately refraining from making the "over 9000" joke. :) After a few seconds, the Dragonballs will explode doing a significant amount of damage. If you get hit by a couple, you will die.

Hunter Tip: If you were on the bridge/egg platform killing the hatchlings (you were, weren't you?), you will get teleported to Jan'Alai. However, your faithful pet who was fighting at your side will not. If your pet comes running towards you, he will run through a wall of fire that Jan'Alai put up to prevent you from crossing on to or off of the bridge, which will inevitably kill him.

If you are quick, it is highly advised to put your pet on "Stay" the moment you get teleported. That will case your pet to remain on the bridge and not take any damage and can resume fighting once the walls of fire go down and the Dragonballs have exploded.

Phase 3: Once you have cleared both sides of the eggs, your tank should then move Jan'Alai to the center of the platform so your raid can make a complete circle around him. This way, when he chooses to Dragon Breath someone, they are the only one getting hit.

At 30%, Jan'Alai will do a mini-Enrage as well as pop any remaining eggs on the platforms. But of course, you killed them all, so you can focus on DPS and keeping the tank alive. :)

You will continue to need to avoid Dragonballs for the duration of the fight, but if you manage these steps you can get some shiny Jan'Alai loot!

And for visual representation, we created this handy Flash video. :) Make note that depending on your raid composition, the third healer can very well be another DPS. And if you are running a timed ZA will will definitely need it to be another DPS.

We killed Illidan last night for our third time. The raid was shaky, but everyone managed to pull it together. And lucky for me I frapsed the kill attempt. Unlucky for me is that my demo of Sony Vegas ran out and I don't think I can drop $80 to purchase it. I really want to cut this video together, because all-in-all, it was a clean kill outside of the tank dying at 5% right as he changed to a Demon phase. And with the power of Misdirection and Shield Wall, our Fire Resist tanks were able to take the last 5% so we could get the kill.

Still no Bow for myself nor Warglaive for our Rogues, but our tank did get the Shield, and I did get my Tier 6 Breastplate. That's 4 pieces of Tier 6, so we now get a set bonus of 10% more Steady Shot damage.

So I light our Bonfire, grab my 60 minutes of 10% more XP, and walk out of town, only to get killed by a Warlock.On a completely unrelated note, I was leveling my Priest late last night once I realized I couldn't edit my Illidan video. I head out to Tarren Mill at 2 AM or something and was going to do some random quests to try to accomplish my leveling goal. So I light our Bonfire, grab my 60 minutes of 10% more XP, and walk out of town, only to get killed by a Warlock. Twice.

So I logged on to Drotara, ported to the Undercity, and flew myself down to Tarren Mill. And killed him. Twice. He left after that. So I leave Drotara there, log back on the Priest, rebuff, and . . . BAM. Arcane Shot. Sigh.

Relog, kill Hunter twice. Well, I will spare you the boring details from here on out. But I ended up killing this Hunter 4 times, a Rogue once, a different Warlock 3 times, and a Warrior 3 times. Because they felt like they would act tough by attacking Tarren Mill at almost 3 AM my time. I ended up doing more PvP than I did leveling. Including some level 32 Druid who failed at ganking my Priest. What an evening it was. :)

I also have a question for everyone. My guild is looking to migrate to a new DKP system. Preferably something automated that just has some type of log file update, similar to how WWS works so they don't have to manually enter names and items received every night. Does anyone use a nice system that they would recommend?

This is a long post, time to end it. Questions, comments, etc. Post 'em!

Hi Fuzzywuzzy!

2008-07-02T18:15:00.000-06:00

I totally promised I would give a shout-out to Fuzzywuzzy in today's post. In the excitement of going home early, I completely forgot. So here ya go! A whole post to yourself!

Meetings. They are not entertaining.

2008-07-02T16:01:00.003-06:00

So I have been in a meeting all day, with a break for lunch and am just now getting back to write today's post. And on top of that, my boss just came in and said since we were in a meeting all day, we can all take off early. So now my already late post is going to be shorter than I anticipated.

But here is my plan for the evening:

1. Kill Illidan and get a Bow! :)
2. Put together a video/Flash animation on how to kill Jan'alai
3. Try to get my Priest to 28.

Sorry for those who I told I would have the ZA strategy up for today. But it will be tomorrow's whole post complete with visualizations. :)

I'm out! Time to head home for the day!

Update to Cheeky's and who came to visit!

2008-07-01T09:46:00.004-06:00

If you read the site frequently, you might notice I had a late-night visitor yesterday evening. Thanks to the handy Intense Debate plug-ins down at the bottom of the page, you can see Cheeky came by. Yes, THE Cheeky stopped by my little corner of the Internet. Being the big nerd I am, I geeked out a bit. :)

Well, he asked if he could include a link to the "How to use Cheeky's Spreadsheet" in the next revision. Of course I said yes. That's pretty exciting for me. So I spent last night sprucing up the guide, clarifying some of the information, and added a portion about the Gear Planner within the main guide, rather than having it in that second post. I also think I am going create some nice looking badges for the article, similar to the mobileQQ one so it's easy to identify. Probably one for the "Shot Rotation Macros" as well, as it is one of my most popular posts.

I was FINALLY able to get rid of my Bloodlust Brooch last night, as Zul'jin finally decided to give up a Berserker's Call. But still no bear. :)

So there have obviously been tons of announcements lately about Diablo 3 and Wrath of the Lich King and what not. I really have posted on any of them, because let's face it, if you subscribe to more than one blog, chances are your reader was filled with posts over the weekend reiterating all the awesome news that was released over the weekend. I was originally going to make some posts about it too, but I opted not to since there was no shortage of news regarding all of the awesomeness.

This is a short post today because I have a bunch of things to get done at work. As always, leave any comments, questions, or concerns that you might have! I do my best to respond to them!