New Shot Macro

I picked up the 2-piece tier 13 recently, and I've been staring at my focus bar again, watching it sit way too full and debating what to do about it.  The obvious answer is to use more focus, but I couldn't cram in enough Arcane Shots in to burn off the excess without losing my haste buff or Serpent Sting from missing Chimera.

Enter Kill Command.  I wanted to maintain my ~10 second rotation (Chimera's unglyphed cooldown) but burn more focus, which meant using a focus dump that wasn't Arcane Shot.  Kill Command is a lot of focus, it hits hard, and it doesn't disrupt my existing rotation.  When I get the 4-piece bonus and have to deal with haste procs, then I'll have to reevaluate the rotation again and what it's most useful and feasible to squeeze in with the extra time in the ten seconds between Chimeras.

For now, though, the cast sequence looks like:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Kill Command, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

I wanted to maintain the pairs of Steady Shots before and after Chimera Shot so that when moving through the rotation, I keep the haste buff up, I'm keep Serpent Sting up by having enough focus for Chimera, and I have some focus to do something with after Chimera.  The biggest problem I had was on target switching if I happened to be at the Kill Command point in the macro and my pet was still running over, so I'd hit some other buttons and reapply Serpent Sting if needed in the meantime.

The result on LFR Zon'ozz:

Not the most amazing of numbers, but a personal best for him.  He's a nice, easy, stand-and-shoot fight in LFR, so he gives pretty numbers to start with.

Brief thoughts on the Cataclysm

The leveling guide will continue shortly.

In Cataclysm, hunters are going over to focus. I've heard that in the pre-release versions of WoW, focus was the planned resource system for hunters, but for one reason or another, we got switched to mana. This is probably the biggest change I saw for hunters coming out of the eventual 4.0 release; I'm looking forward to it. It'll take some relearning, but we simply have too many stats to watch right now. Cutting Int out of the equation entirely is good. I have a level 74 rogue, so I'm not unfamiliar with that style of resource.

Haste, on the other hand, will change some things. Haste will make focus regenerate faster, but since it won't affect our attack speed, that also means that our autoshot speed is probably going to be less mutable, and Rapid Fire and Improved Aspect of the Hawk procs will be more important to watch.

Attack Power on gear is going bye-bye. (/cheer) I loathed the switch from 2 AP from Agi to 1 AP from Agi and AP on gear since it happened. (From my enchanter's point of view, things are going to get... weird. All those Spellpower and Attack Power enchants are probably going away - possibly to be replaced with Agi, Int, and Str enchants? We'll find out!)

The change to talents - paring out passive stat/damage boosts for "fun" talents - should prove interesting. I play heavy MM in both my specs, and 5 more points means you should be able to invest enough into a 2nd tree for the first or second mastery bonus.

I like that we'll be coming back to Azeroth. I'm looking forward to underwater mounts. (I'm sitting at 90 pets/90 mounts right now.)