Sidewinders/7.1.5

I've been poking around in my guild's raid logs since the patch, partly because I'm so glad to be rid of Sidewinders, and partly because being rid of Sidewinders didn't make me worse.

Pre-7.1.5:  ilvl 870, average DPS for boss fights in heroic Emerald Nightmare: 209,635.1 (log)
Post-7.1.5:  ilvl 876, average DPS for boss fights in heroic Emerald Nightmare: 240,105.2 (log)

My ilvl has only gone up a little, but that's about the same kind of boost in raw numbers that I saw from initially switching to Sidewinders a few weeks into normal Emerald Nightmare.  I didn't like doing it; I like the on-demand instant shot that Arcane Shot has become, and other than kind of switching Marked Shot for Serpent Sting, it's the same three shots that were the core of my Molten Core rotation.

I realize a lot of hunters are disappointed in Marksman (and Beast Mastery) right now, but playing at the level I am (where that 308k on Nythendra is kind of a personal non-trash best), I'm really happy with my numbers.  I'm also really happy to have some traps back.

After this long, I had gotten used to the Sidewinders/Marked Shot AOE, but by the time we got to Dragons trash I was pushing out relatively decent numbers again.

Overall, across our raid group, the patch was good.  We steamrolled through H-Emerald Nightmare, beating our record times for both Cenarius and Xavius, andwent for a couple easy kills in normal Trial of Valor, but no one wanted to go through then minutes of Helya after all that.  Sunday we're going to look at heroic Trial of Valor and see what it looks like now.

Still want some kind of really AOE (either damage or heals) for my discipline priest, but that doesn't seem likely at this point.

6.x Raiding Pets

Here I am, swapping back and forth between Exotic Munitions and Focusing Shot depending how much I actually need to move during a fight, when I have the option to just not use a pet.  Depending where you look, either Focusing Shot or Lone Wolf is the way to go for Marksman, but I haven't even tried Lone Wolf yet.

Why not?  Two words:  battle rez.

That's right, I'm raiding with a Crane.  Some raids, we have no druids, no warlocks, and our only death knight is one of the tanks.  If that tank drops, it could easily mean a wipe, and no one likes repair bills.  (We're saving for a yak. Ahem.)  Gift of Chi-Ji gives me the option to bring up a raid member without having to switch to Beast Mastery to bring a Quilen.

Now, there are downsides to this.  I have occasionally worried some people as I wandered into the maze of the Twin Ogron's flames to find a dropped tank and pick them up.  The cast has a 40-yard range, but in practice this means you may have to send your crane to stand closer to the unfortunate's corpse in order to reach them.

Optimal DPS versus raid utility is a trade-off you make sometimes; nowadays, with pet DPS normalized regardless of what buff they're bringing, you can focus on bringing the best pet for the raid - if you need to bring one at all.  The buff redistribution that happened with the 6.0 patch means that no longer am I bringing a sporebat to every raid (regardless of how amusing Stampede was with one).  The nine standard buffs are almost always covered now, and on the occasion that we've been missing multistrike, one of the other hunters has been able to bring that.

One of the reasons I've opted to go with the crane is that I don't frequently die early in a fight, my DPS is usually just kind of average, and I'm good at watching what's going on.  (The third is likely feeding into the second.)  This means I'm generally still alive and not in immediate danger of dying if a tank drops, since it's been quite a while since I regularly rode just under the tanks for threat, and I notice when a tank or healer drops.  I also notice how much mana the other healers have if it's a healer, I've got a Weak Aura set up to monitor how many battle rezes we have available, and I not infrequently can easily pull up Recount to check either the healing or DPS meters without too much affecting my output or immediate safety.

So if we've got two battle rezes up and three DPS down, I'll pull up Recount, see who was riding highest before their demise, and burn one of the rezes on a DPS, saving one in case we have a tank or healer drop.  Some fights you get to know you're more likely to lose one or the other - most of us only raid about six hours a week at the most, and then maybe LFR, so we expect folks to die sometimes.

As our raid pool slowly shrinks due to interest attrition, the people who need a battle rez aren't coming as often, and our raid group is getting to know each other better, so on non-progression fights, the tanks don't die as often.  I'm still not really inclined to go pet-less, though, since Focusing Shot helps make me stand still more (for the mastery buff), and Exotic Munitions means fire arrows that I've wanted since forever.

Dragon Soul meant raiding with Coby, my armor penetration ravager; Siege meant raiding with Clarence, the spell haste sporebat; so far raiding in Warlords means raiding with Lucius, the green crane with the Gift of Chi-Ji, who was originally acquired to be part of the Aesop's Fables stampede group.

Durumu's Maze

I'm going to tell you something for which you can hate me:  Durumu is my favorite boss in Throne of Thunder.  One of the things I'm good at is situational awareness, so I notice a lot of the visual cues for the fight.  For example, when the red, yellow, and blue beams first pop out, circles of the corresponding color flash where the three mist beasts are.  You can save yourself a lot of running as one of the beams if you notice where they are.

What kills most people, though, is Durumu's maze.  When Durumu pre-casts his disintegration beam, it will always be pointed at the entrance of the wing, so if you remember where you came in, that's where he'll be facing.  If at all possible, immediately move to stand behind him at this point, where the blue circle is on the first graphic:

Durumu's disintegration beam pre-cast

The maze will start forming on either side of him.  It is important to note which side the maze starts forming on to minimize the damage you take during this phase.  He won't start moving the beam until the floor has filled with fog, so you have a bit of time to get in position.  The following two graphics are laid out for if the maze starts forming on Durumu's right; if it starts forming on his left, just flip the following two images.

The maze beginning to form

When the maze begins to form, a purple cone of fog will appear on the floor to one side of Durumu, at a 90-degree angle to the disintegration beam precast.  The fog will then begin filling the floor, moving in a circle around the room.  Regardless of which side it starts on, it will go in the direction which moves away from the beam pre-cast and behind Durumu.  So, as shown above, it it forms on Durumu's right (illustration left), it will move clockwise around the room.

In this case, the raid will move counterclockwise to get in front of where the maze fog began forming.  Never run through the beam pre-cast.  This will kill you.  Ideally you will be somewhere behind Durumu when he begins forming the maze, and you can just run through a bit of fog to get to the starting point.

Once the floor fills with purple fog, the maze will start forming.

Moving through the maze

The path for the maze will not open up all at once, but will open up in three paths as Durumu rotates the disintegration beam.  Basically, the floor is divided into six concentric rings; the inner (melee) path uses the two inner rings, and will zigzag its path between the two.  The middle path uses the third and fourth rings, and the outer path uses the fifth and sixth rings.  Avoid the outer path unless you have speed boosts, because the disintegration beam will move faster than you can run otherwise.

The maze path will move in the direction the maze formed, so if it formed going clockwise, you need to run clockwise.  Whichever way the maze fog filled in is also the direction the beam is going to move.  You must stay ahead of the disintegration beam, or you will die.

The full maze won't spawn at once, so you'll just want to stay at the furthest extent of your currently spawned path.  Try to avoid any puddles left from the lingering gaze attack.  If you need to, in the LFR difficulty, you can cut over to a closer path to stay ahead of the beam.  Just don't do this too often, or the fog of the maze will kill you.

Remember, the maze's fog can spawn on either side of Durumu initially, and the side it spawns on determines the direction you run.

Raiding!

We've been hacking away at the Stone Guard for a while, killing them the first time two lockouts ago, and again last night (this time with chains up!).  Feng will fall soon - probably this week or next.

I've been raiding as Beast Mastery since 5.0 went in, but with 5.1's last minute buff to Aspect of the Hawk and the change to allow Steady and Cobra Shots to be cast on the run, I went back to Marksman last night.  The change is good!  I'm posting decent numbers (for me) and finally not feeling like a deadweight.

I'm switching back and forth between Spirit Bond and Iron Hawk for soloing/raiding, as well as between Barrage and Glaive Toss.  I shouldn't love Barrage as much as I do, given how much it tries to get me killed, but let's face it:  40 yard range, hits everything in front of me?  It just makes some of the dailies go so much faster.  On the other hand, I don't dare bring it into an instance, because I don't know what it's going to pull.  (Also, randomly accidentally killing critters that may or may not be capturable battle pets... ;_;)

I'm not sure if I'm going to push to finish reputations first, to hit 150 mounts, or if I'm going to hit up the old raids for the battle pets contained therein, but so far 5.1 has been good for me.

PS: cloth heirloom panda is creepy:

Those eyes!

The fun fights

I have favorite boss fights for, if not every raid, at least every expansion.  I'm partial to dragons, but not every raid has a dragon.  Recently I was thinking about this - my love of dragon fights - and I realized I don't really care for either of the Deathwing fights.  One has frustrating pacing, and the other is just too long.  So here are a few fights that I do especially like:

Onyxia (original)

My guild did three and a half raids in Vanilla, with random shots at the first boss in Blackwing Lair to no avail.  I ran Molten Core a lot, but never enough to get exalted, since I worked on two of our three raid nights.  My first raid was actually Zul'Gurub, but none of the fights in there particularly excited me.  We also did Ahn'Qiraj (20), but not all of it.

But Onyxia.  There are a variety of reasons I liked the fight: It was multiphasic.  It allowed for epic kills.  You had to work to get into it, but other than finding a group for Upper Blackrock Spire and actually winning the blood, it wasn't a terribly odious attunement.

Multi-phasic boss fights weren't terribly common in the first tier of Vanilla raiding.  The fights were generally, "boss does x, y, and z the whole fight, and may enrage at q%."  Sometimes there were adds to initially kill, or something to be off-tanked and killed afterwards or ignored.  There weren't a ton of fights were the boss changed tactics entirely at a%, b%, and c%, or on timers.  Even the Vanilla Ragnaros fight was just two phases cycled.  Onyxia starts out as a tank-and-spank, then flies up into the air for an add phase with random fire breathing, then comes back down but adds fears and lava bursts.  Onyxia was a hint of things to come, of bosses that require mid-fight adaptation.  Looking, for example, at Firelands:  Beth'tilac has two phases with different tactics; Rhyolith is a similarly phased fight (complex phase + burn phase); Alysrazor has four phases that repeat until you kill her; Staghelm has two alternating phases, each with some extra bits built in depending how many of each phase you've done; and Ragnaros, who has three phases with different tactics for each.  Shannox isn't really a phased fight different from the "kill the adds, kill the boss" tactics of a lot of other flamewalker bosses (every one but Shazzrah in Molten Core, really), although you have to be a little more careful about how you kill the adds, since dropping both dogs too early or too late is bad; Baleroc uses the same tactics for the whole fight, but is a bit of a DPS/gear check.

So I guess I'm saying I like complex fights, and Onyxia was the first taste we really got of it.  And then of course there are the epic kills.

Vanilla Onyxia was a 40-man raid.  One of the thing I liked about these big raids was that people could die and you wouldn't wipe.  If you lose people in a 10-man raid, finishing the fight becomes iffy.  The healers may not be able to keep up; the DPS may not be enough to finish it.  The closest we've come to similarly epic kills in Cataclysm (in my guild, anyway) are 3-man standing Gunship fights.  Well, dude, 3/10, that's pretty skin-of-the-teeth, sure.  But 3-man standing Onyxia kills, when you started off with 40?  That's an adrenaline rush, to be sure.  (I say 3-man, but really, it was one man and two women - the tank (male), one of the priests (female), and me, a hunter (also female).  I've gotten pretty good at not dying early most of the time.)  This isn't to say that people were expendable; just that if you got a boss to 3% and people started dropping, you weren't necessarily going to lose.

Magtheridon

When the Burning Crusade rolled around, we didn't get terribly much further into overall raid progression than we did in Molten Core: that is, we didn't move very far beyond the first tier.  We ran a lot of Karazhan.  I liked both dragon fights in there (Nightbane and Netherspite) and the Shade of Aran, despite the frustrations of the Flame Wreath.  (The advent of Flame Wreath is when I bound escape to the thumb key on my mouse, since I couldn't jump to interrupt casting during it.)  We also killed Gruul, delved into Serpentshrine Cavern to kill Hydross and the Lurker Below, and we tackled Magtheridon.

Magtheridon was an interesting fight - you had to kill his adds one by one, kill the adds they summoned, and then click on cubes the five original adds were using simultaneously with four other people in your 25-man group in order to interrupt his blast nova.  This was a fight where your raid team working together was important - if the timing on the cubes was off, you were going to get hurt.  And then of course at 30%, he'd drop the ceiling on your raid for more spike damage, so you'd have to throttle your DPS to not hit yourselves with the ceiling and blast nova damage at the same time.  Oh, and I think he threw fire puddles on the ground, so you had to stay near the cube you were going to click, but not right by it, or you'd have fire on the ground by the cube when you needed to be channeling it.

Thaddius

Wrath of the Lich King brought back Naxxramas, which we didn't really see prior to the expansion other than running around with about 15 people and dying horribly at some point towards the end of the Burning Crusade.  The fights were mostly of the Vanilla style of complexity (tank & spank with some twists), but you got some like Heigen that were just off the wall different.

Thaddius was one of those fights where if someone died, you were probably screwed.  Every person up was another added to the stacking damage buff, and the DPS threshhold meant that, in the fairly casual guild we are, you needed everybody alive.  He was also a personal-responsibility fight, because you had to pay attention to your polarity and stand with the right people.  Overall the fight wasn't terribly complex, but the pace of it, and the "am I + or -?!" switches gave it a nice edge.

Mimiron

Ulduar was a taste of the new - a raid full of complex fights, and my guild's first advancement beyond the entry tier of raiding in an expansion, because Ulduar was the first long-form (not one or two boss) raids we cleared after an expansions initial multi-boss raid tier.  I liked a lot of the fights in there, but Mimiron was my favorite.  He was engineering-related, he required you to watch what you were doing and where you were standing, and he was a complex, multiphasic fight.  I still haven't gotten to do his hard mode. :(

Blood Prince Council

Icecrown Citadel was a continuation of Ulduar for us in some ways - new, complex fights and a new tier conquered.  I should be listing Putricide, or Sindragosa, or the Lich King here, because they were all complex, changing fights.  But I associate Putricide with the exodus of several of our raid leaders, and Sindragosa with the stumbling of our 25-man raid (and our quest towards the legendary axe, since the person we were sponsoring stopped showing up to them).  And, let's face it, the Lich King, like Deathwing, is just too long a fight.  I like fights in the ~6 minute range - long enough I can and should be watching to use my five-minute cooldowns twice, but short enough that my hand doesn't cramp up.

So how does that lead to the Blood Prince Council?  I like the fight because I got to do something entirely different most of the time - I often got tasked juggling the balls.  In 10-man, between me and my pet, I could generally handle them alone.  When I'm not healing, I've got pretty good awareness of what's going on in the room, and I really liked the change of pace.

Halion

We got a bonus raid in Wrath of the Lich King - the preparation for Cataclysm brought us a Twilight dragon to fight, Halion.  Halion was, hands-down, my favorite fight of the expansion.  I was generally in the twilight realm and got to deal with the cutter; the balancing of damage between the parts of the raid in either realm, the stuff to avoid standing in, the dancing around to keep ahead of (or just behind) the cutter - overall I found it to be the most satisfying encounter in terms of design and challenge.

Nefarian (Blackwing Descent)

Cataclysm meant another expansion, new raids, and a more-or-less end to the guild's 25-man raiding, which we had done for most of Wrath, parallel to 10-man raiding.  The initial tier gave us three raids to deal with - two mid-sized and one short one.  I liked Valiona and Theralion in the Bastion of Twilight, but for the tier, my favorite fight was Nefarian in Blackwing Descent.

Nefarian is a great boss.  He apparently hates all his minions, but he talks to the raid throughout the whole fight.  He knows you're there, and he's confident (despite having been killed by, presumably, you before, in Blackwing Lair) that he can handle you even if his minions can't.  This is a great throwback to the Rend Blackhand fight in Upper Blackrock Spire, where he observes and gives commentary and advice throughout the fight.

The fight itself gives you three phases, with a persistent electrocution effect at every 10% throughout.  One of the interesting change-ups about the phases in Nefarian's fight is that they're not reliant on his health; you can't push him too far in phase one just because of the interplay with Onyxia's electrical charge; she'll blow up and wipe you if you ignore her too long, so you have to kill her and transition the phases.  But phase two is a three minute phase regardless, and if your healers can handle it and you had enough ranged damage, you could burn him once the adds on the pillars are dead.  Phase three is more complex compared to some burn phases, since you have to both not stand in moving fire and have your second tank kite around the skeletal adds.

We worked on him for weeks and I never resented it.

Ragnaros (Firelands)

I mentioned Firelands earlier, about how the fights are generally all more complex than the kind of fights we saw in Vanilla raids.  Ragnaros was two cycling phases in Molten Core, but faced on his own turf, he's apparently much more devious and resourceful.

I liked Firelands overall; there was a lot more trash than the initial tier had, but it was all upfront.  Once you got most of it out of the way, that was it, with just a few more pulls per boss.  Between Staghelm and Ragnaros there's just an elemental and two worms, which, while admittedly more than was between Executus and Ragnaros, is just two pulls.

The fight was probably the first real adrenaline rush I got in Cataclysm, which was a bit disappointing given how many things we had killed by that time.  There were positioning challenges on occasion, but really most of those stemmed from my camera angle and that damned fire gate that pops up to fence you in for the fight.  It's the same problem I have on things like the Gunship in Dragon Soul:  I turn to move, and suddenly I can't see anything, and damn it, I may as well have a cat in front of my monitor.  (New cat hasn't yet learned that mommy can't see through him when she's playing her game but you can sit in my lap but wait I can't move my arm now could you--yeah, that kind of cat issue.)

But it has a nice first phase - stand around and shoot stuff but don't stand in the bombs and avoid the fire waves; the sons actually do something besides just mana drain now, so we have to kill/slow them fast.  The second phase is also a nice challenge: stand apart, collapse and AOE, and hey, don't stand in the lava that spawns or the fire waves.  The third phase?  Boulders.  (I may or may not have killed a warlock by feigning two off myself.  Ahem.)  The third phase has just enough tension built in the escalation of boulder-threats to make it enjoyable but not insanely frustrating if your raid is on its toes.

Warmaster Blackthorn

Okay, so Warmaster Blackthorn isn't really my favorite fight in Dragon Soul; Yor'sahj is, because I like the Skittles combinations and that which ones you kill decide how you react for the next part of the fight.  (Personally I'd say kill the add-spawning one every time, but that isn't a universally popular choice.  I just hate the adds.)

The most satisfying fight for Dragon Soul (in normal 10-man, not looking-for-raid), however, has been Warmaster Blackthorn, or really, "Keep the Boat Alive!"  Warmaster Blackthorn has given us the epic kills of half-the-raid-dead-but-we-got-him, and it's sometimes got skin-of-the-teeth recoveries for not losing the boat.  It's got two and a half phases, both challenging:

First, you have to keep the boat alive by blocking damage to it from the twilight dragons, while simultaneously killing the attackers they're dropping on you and keeping goblin sappers from blowing the ship out from under you.  Oh, and you have to kill those twilight dragons that are spitting stuff at the boat, too.

Secondly, you have to deal with the attackers' leader, Warmaster Blackthorn and his steed, the twilight drake Goriona.  I called it two and a half phases because the first part of the second half is dropping Goriona so she'll stop dropping void zones on the boat.  Once she's gone (not down, gone; I do wonder if she's going to be back in the future), you can focus on the Warmaster, whose Shockwave can be a pain to get out of if he happens to drop it equally around you.  Shockwave while Goriona is still around is especially dangerous, since if he stuns you, she tends to drop a void zone on you.


I'll admit there have been points during this expansion where I wonder if I'll keep raiding.  I don't have the time or the energy to keep pushing multiple toons through, and as much as I've missed raid healing, I don't have the time to go back to it regularly in alt runs (and it's been intimidating to try in more complex content).  And then we got to Dragon Soul.  I liked the Firelands fights better, but the low-trash design of Dragon Soul?  If they stick with this, if they keep the fights challenging but the time commitment to raiding at a reasonable level, I'm not going to worry about staying in it with at least my hunter.

Keybinds and Macros

I have an Intellimouse Explorer 3.0, and I love it to death.  Literally: I think I'm on my third.

A lot of my macros use mouse:1, mouse:2, and mouse:3 for targeting the same spell, not just for my hunters, but also for my priest.  (Button:4 is bound to Escape, to stop casting, and button:5 is bound to, ahem, Fishing.)  Mouse:3 is also my Ventrilo push-to-talk key, and has been for five years.  This hasn't been a big deal; I don't use mouse:3 targeting much on my hunters, which are usually what I'm playing when I'm on Vent.

My priest, on the other hand?  Mouse:1 is generally @self; mouse:2 is @focus, and mouse:3 is the unspecified cast, which means whatever I target or whichever party member I hit the function key for or click on.  Most 5-man dungeons I can just get away with Atonement splash healing with Penances on the tank (@focus casting), but raid healing tends to require a lot more direct healing.

I didn't raid heal much in Wrath of the Lich King; maybe three or four times.  In Burning Crusade, on the other hand, my priest was just as geared as my hunter for most of the entire expansion.  She healed for Karazhan; she healed for Gruul's and Magtheridon's Lairs; she healed in Zul'Aman.  Other than the last 800 reputation for the Caverns of Time faction, I even did the reputation grinds to get her the enchanting and tailoring patterns from reputation.  I healed with a hybrid 33/28/0 Discipline specialization, and I actually found it relaxing compared to the pressures of maintaining DPS levels on my hunter.  Karazhan was the raid that pushed me to actually start looking at hunter mechanics and for which my shot rotation macro was born.  For my priest, though, she was one-half of the guild's first two-healer raid through it.

In Wrath we tried very hard as a guild not to end up in the same rut we'd been in Burning Crusade, mostly running Karazhan for three or four combinations of alts and never progressing out of the first tier or tier and a half of content.  This meant I didn't really raid on my priest much, and given how fantastically we progressed through the raid tiers in Wrath, I was content with that.  I missed raid healing, but I would rather see my guild progress.

So now we're running Firelands, and we had been running alt/main Tier 11 raids to get people later to raiding more up to speed.  I had mostly been running on Duskhawk for these when I went, since we had plenty of people wanting to heal, but I took my priest a couple times recently to make the raids happen when we were short a healer.  So my priest has about one and a half Blackwing Descent runs under her belt.  Raid healing is an entirely different strategy from Atonement healing for most fights; a few (Omnotron Defense System, especially, but even Magmaw if I'm tank healing) actually work quite well with it, but many fights end up Prayer of Healing/Penance/Shield focused.

A couple weeks ago we switched from Tier 11 alt runs (waning interest) to Firelands alt runs (more interest and, since we're clearing it in about two nights, more slots per week needed to get mains in).  Like I said, I have about one and a half Blackwing Descent runs under my priest's belt; last Saturday I ended up taking her to the alt Firelands run.

It was terrifying!  I had an awful time figuring out where to stand so I could reach both tanks on Shannox (but I managed not to stand in any traps, woo!), and on Beth'tilac, I was immensely frustrated by Prayer of Healing's party-based targeting.  We tend to run in three groups for her, with the Phase 1 Beth'tilac tank and his/her healer in Group 3 and everyone else over in Groups 1 and 2.  I just couldn't seem to manage Penancing the targeted tank in Phase 2 and to still do sufficient Prayers of Healing on the other two groups in three groups.

The main thing I ended up getting out of that raid (besides a staff) was that I needed to rework my Penance macro to handle tank swaps.  I use default raid frames while healing, plus Decursive, and everything is smooshed down in about a six-by-eight inch area of my screen, by the parts of the toolbars that I use for most of my healing.  My DBM warnings are also dragged down there, along with the timers.  So my set-up is pretty basic, and pretty focused.  My Penance macro, for the longest time, was

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1, @focus][button:2] Penance

This was unlike all my other healing macros, which look like

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1, @self][button:2, @focus][button:3] Heal

I really didn't need to target myself with penance; I have Alt set as my self-cast button, and I tend to just Shield and Alt:Renew myself if I need healing.  To handle a tank swap without changing focus targets or targeting my non-focused tank, I needed to change up something in that standard macro line.  What I ended up with was

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1, @targettarget][button:2, @focus][button:3] Penance

This lets me maintain the boss as my target for Atonement opportunities (because if I can sneak in some stacks to pull out Evangelism, woohoo!), and when I hit Penance with button 1, whatever tank is getting facemelted gets the Penance.  When we did Beth'tilac last night, I was able to manage just fine with the three-group setup.  There are occasional hiccups; I'm pretty sure I Penanced Baleroc at least once last night when I had a tank targeted.

Speaking of Baleroc and mouse buttons and macros:  this is what I actually meant to write about today.  So I got pulled into healing Firelands again last night, and you've seen my healing macro pattern now, and I've told you I use middle-mouse (mouse:3) for Vent's push-to-talk.

Baleroc is a healer rotation fight, at least the way we run it. You spend two cycles healing shard targets and then switch to the tanks on the third shard in your rotation.  Since this means hitting targets as they get the shard debuff (the little blue person icon, I know now - DBM puts marks on them, but as I've said, I look at a 6"x8" section of the screen while healing, and if it's outside that area it doesn't exist), it's a lot of mouse:3 healing.

Mouse:3 healing, which is my Vent key.

As this was my first time ever healing Baleroc, and fourth time this expansion raid healing at all, I was doing a lot of talking to myself and swearing.  About halfway through the fight, I realized:

"You all can hear me, can't you?"

They thought I was asking if they could hear me, because I got a, "You're cutting in and out," response.  I was more concerned that the swearing was coming through, but apparently the "F--- me," that came out during one of my "which tank is getting hit" panics didn't come across.  (I still use oRA2, and my target-of-target for it just creeps into my healing field of vision, so I started using that to pick my tank healing target.)  I temporarily remapped my Vent key for the rest of the raid. >.>

Random coda:  On the drive in to work this afternoon, I realized: Wait a minute.  Baleroc, who has fire and shadow attacks.  Balrog, a creature of shadow and flame.  /facepalm

Moving On: Guild Achievements

It's maddening when the one thing you need to get off your chest is one of those things you don't talk about in public. Long story short, I had a falling out with one of my guild's officers, which has mostly left me sad about how the situation resolved. But I've gotten to where I'm thinking about more than my frustration with the episode again.

One of the things I would love to be more help with, but can't without deleting characters, moving them off server, or paying for race changes, is the Classy achievements. The only up-and-coming I have that will be useful is my Undead Hunter, and my God, but I love her.

I'm actually not a fan of Forsaken policies. No, I'm with Argent Apothecary Judkins: Sylvanas is off her rocker, and I'm not going to spend my undeath helping a Banshee Queen replace the Lich King. But I love all my undead characters - my priest, my rogue, and my new baby hunter. (Well, "new." I rolled her when 4.0 hit. She's 66 now, with a stupidly large number of heirlooms.) I'm torn between changing my warlock to Undead and leaving her a Blood Elf; I love the Undead caster animations, but I like her BElf hair. Silly reasons, but still.

Besides Classy, which is what we need for Bank Tab #8 (oh second deposit tab, how I covet thee...), recently we have gotten done 100,000 critter kills (I spent two or three hours in the bug tunnel in the Plaguelands for the last three or four thousand) and the 50,000 fish caught. The fishing was a guild-wide accomplishment, and it made me happy to see how involved people got with it. The first 50,000 critter kills (for the Armadillo pet) was a guild raid in the bug tunnel - done while I was at work, so I missed the fun. Our Alchemists finished off the flask achievement to get us cauldrons, as well. Several groups have been working their ways through all the older 5-man dungeons.

So March has been hit or miss so far - my guild is awesome, but I miss talking to the officer who left. On top of it, I've been sick for the past two weeks - a cold that became bronchitis and an eye infection. I've been to the doctor more this month than in the past ten years.

PS: I got to see Cho'Gall last night! 47% to go.

Notes on a Guild and my (often ham-fisted) leadership thereof

I've been with my guild 5 of its 6 years (we turned 6 on Christmas); an officer for 4.5 years; GM for 1.3 years.

I don't come to leadership naturally (I make decisions slowly - or rather, I admit my decisions slowly), so I don't think I've done the best job of it. On the other hand, we're still here, so I haven't entirely botched it yet.

Problems I've generally handled badly:

• Intra-officer conflict. It tends to happen in whispers and private messages, so I haven't really found out about it until someone is on the verge of quitting. This is very frustrating, and officers who are all buddy-buddy aren't necessarily the best thing in a guild of 150 people. I don't expect everyone to be best friends, but we all have common goals, and I'd think we could all be at least collegial about it. On top of it, it's very difficult for me to watch two people I like argue. Sometimes there are no ready or obvious solutions. (Sometimes the solution is so foreign to your mindset that it doesn't occur to you that it was obvious until about 6 months too late.)
  
• Personality conflicts. These tend to show up blatantly in guild chat, but again, we're a large guild, and they're going to happen. They can be difficult to deal with when, say, the humor is a matter of taste, and someone refuses to believe that while the subject probably shouldn't be in guild chat, it's not a reason to boot someone. (Some things are just flat out, though - racial/ethnic slurs, casual use of 'gay' or 'rape' - not everything is a matter of taste.) I generally handle them badly mostly because I'm not easily offended. (I am sometimes disappointed in how people react to being offended, but it's their loss.)
  
• Dealing with the trigger points I do have. There are some things that will set me off. They're generally narrow, specific, and involve raiding. If someone's in the guild, I'm of the opinion that they have equal access to all our amenities (at least on their mains; alts have different privileges so as not to edge out other people's mains). I mean, hell, that's written into our charter. If someone is capable of the content, I think they should be eligible for our raids. Sometimes the metrics for determining "capable" seem arbitrary or capricious. (16 hit rating gem versus 20 hit rating gem, when you only need 12 more hit rating (prior to reforging existing), but our raid requirements would have made you buy the epic. That's a "WTF?" moment for me.) So suggestions of set raiding teams or other methods that would pare our raiding pool of ~45 people down to ~15 irritate me, and I don't always manage to be civil about it.

Things my guild did well in Wrath while I mostly stood by and organized the bank:

• Raid progression. Oh. My. God. We got past the first tier of Wrath raiding. In Vanilla WoW, we raided Molten Core, Ahn'Qiraj 20, and Zul'Gurub. We took shots at the first boss in Blackwing Lair, but we never got anywhere. In Burning Crusade, we cleared Karazhan and Zul'Aman, and with the lovely Daughters of the Horde, took on Gruul and Magtheridon. Later we managed to kill the Lurker Below and Hydross, as well. That was the extent of our progression, however. In Wrath, we killed everything, most of it on both 10 and 25. (What's missing on 25: Thorim, Freya, Mimiron, Vezax, Yogg-Saron, and Algalon from Uldamon; Sindragosa and the Lich King from Icecrown Citadel; and Halion from the Ruby Sanctum.) We didn't do the hard modes for everything, but some were done.
• Kept calm and carried on. Even when raid leaders or officers or guild members were leaving (it wasn't often, but it did happen), the guild kept going. Someone always stepped up to help out. Raids happened, bosses died, and we eventually saw the Lich King die. Heroic dungeon drakes were obtained. Alliance faction leaders were slain. Old raids and reputations incomplete were organized and finished.
  

Cataclysm brings some logistical problems to our raiding - specifically, the 10 vs. 25 debate in that the loot is the same; and single-boss lockouts regardless of raid size, so that if you go to a raid Tuesday, you can't help with the guild's scheduled raid of the other size Thursday. Given what I've seen out of the guild in five years, this is mostly a headache for the raid schedulers, and not the end of the world. I do have constant concern about burnout for those who organize and run our raids; we lost four officers in Wrath after I became GM, and we have, besides me, four left. Only one of those actively works on raid organization, and we have one designated official raid leader outside the officer corps. I think there is room for growth there, but it's unlikely I'll know who will fill those shoes, or even if there are indeed some sitting empty, until we've gotten back into raiding.

There are aspects of Cataclysm I'm curious to see how they work out - rated battlegrounds, later guild levels, longer-term guild achievements, and so forth. Being as old as we are, it's a little bit of an affront that we have to do the guild leveling from the beginning, but really, it'll be done in a couple months, and the real benefit will be for the long haul. Of the large Vanilla Horde guilds on Bronzebeard, we are one of the last handful remaining. Going into the next expansion, probably two years down the road, I would guess there may very well be another 5 guild levels, which we will be poised to start as soon as it launches. Some people, I suppose, would be surprised by an online gaming social group lasting so long, but really, it's no different than a bridge club meeting for years. We're just location-independent.

So... Lessons I learned from...

• 5 years as a Pirate: Pirates are awesome! I play WoW with some of the best people out there. Even though I have neurotic fits and normally push me away from online social groups after about a year, somehow this group has managed to get around that.
• 4.5 years as an officer among Pirates: There's always someone who can step in to help, even if you haven't realized it yet. The vast majority of the people who get into the guild are awesome, and the bad apples either disappear quickly on their own or find that they can't really be a bad apple if they want to stay a Pirate.
  
• 1.3 years as the guild master of Pirates: I'm not used to overseeing other people with authority. Everyone has different standards for other people, and mine are stricter than some's and laxer than others'. Still learning how to balance that. I think, overall, I've learned that some people I like are going to disappoint me. I won't babysit adults; I will help mediate problems, but people have to let me know there's a problem first.

I decided a while back, when we were going through one of those "where's our raiding going" rough patches, that the one thing I would be stubborn about is that I'm not going to get bullied out of my own guild. (One person in particular tried it.) There are very few points of policy that I'm adamant about; the rest don't affect the flavor we've developed. I could probably better communicate which are the "this is how we are" things and which are the "just my opinion, but I don't really care which way we decide, because it'll all work out in the end" things. There are quite a few of the latter. For the most part, the guild works, and my biggest goal is to not break that.

Oh, God, I've been writing on this too long; I'm starting to edit for grammar and style. Enough navel gazing for now. ;)

Yogg +1

It was epic: we all died. We did manage to hold off long enough for it to count, though. Our resto shaman's Flame Shock tick got him.

Yogg was the last raid boss I had never killed.

Undergeared, sure

So Mabs hit 80 on Thursday, 5 minutes before I had to log over to Duskhawk for Icecrown-25. The guild she's in took her along to Trial of the Crusader-25 today to fill an otherwise empty slot.

Mabs is wearing mostly leatherworking blues. So, yeah, her DPS wasn't spectacular - mostly around 2k, somewhere up over 3k on the Twin Val'kyr thanks to empowerments - but I at least know how not to die.

What I do find interesting is that at that level of gear, Dusk was doing about 1300 DPS in Naxxramas. It's interesting to see how much better player I am now than I was about a year and a half ago.

We didn't get Anub'arak (the perils of an alt raid), but afterwards I was able to get the T9 shoulders for her. Not that I could find a Tenuous Dreadstone for them over there (on the Alliance side).

It may take some time to spread the Agi/mp5 gospel before Cataclysm rewrites the book.

While we're at it...

Blood Queen 25 - she took a while.


Oh, look, Valithria stood up! (Oh, hey, still kiting zombies...)


So we're 10/12 on ICC25 now.

Screenshots or it doesn't count (Halion)

Yeah, my monitor is huge, heh.

Halion, the Twilight Destroyer

I'll admit that, after we downed the third mini-boss in the Ruby Sanctum last night, I was initially underwhelmed by being confronted by a giant fuchsia dragon. The only lasting disappointment, however, is the color.

So, a bunch of us were in various Vault PUGs yesterday evening when, essentially, "WTF, Ruby Sanctum is available?" happened. A few minutes of, "Do you want to go to..." mixed in with, "I'm in VOA at the moment but..." and, "Wait, we're all in VOA at the moment," ended up with ten of us in Ruby Sanctum at about 7:30 EST last night.

The trash took some time - the dragons have a lot of health. There was much giggling about "Help me! I'm trapped in this tree!" The first miniboss (on the left) wiped us once because, hey, raid marks don't stick when he splits. The first of the five-dragon trash packs half-wiped us, but we quickly picked up that the commanders had to die first, and splitting the second of those packs went much better. The second miniboss, the drake, almost wiped us, because, hey, that patrol comes over really close, but we recovered with only two deaths. (And, hey, another chance to use Tranq Shot.) After that, the third miniboss was surprisingly not too bad - misdirecting the adds as they came in made it much smoother after the first wave. I think all that took us maybe a half hour.

Halion took us the next hour and a half or so; I was 6 minutes into my third flask when he died. (Note to self: Get more flasks before Thursday's raid.) To be honest, I didn't mind the wipes. This is, hands down, my favorite raid encounter of the expansion. (Sorry, Ony! You're still my favorite Vanilla raid boss.) I think I like it because while it requires "don't stand in the fire," the actual fire is forgiving enough to let you move out of it, and there's plenty of room to maneuver. The basically insta-gib laser in the Twilight phase is, if you're paying attention to the rotating orbs, easy enough to avoid, but not forgiving if you're not watching for it. Good DPS was important, but it wasn't a DPS race; balancing DPS, backing off or jumping over to the other phase if needed in phase 3 was more important.

In short - it requires coordination, it requires some precision, but it's not as frustratingly unforgiving as Sindragosa. (Sindragosa could have been much more fun if the whole fight were just phase 3. Maybe without chaining ice tombs.)

If the Ruby Sanctum is indicative of Blizzard's continuing evolution of raid encounters (that is, if it at all foreshadows what bosses in Cataclysm will be like), Azeroth 2.0 can't come soon enough.

June, argh

June has been a busy month, and it's not even friggin' done yet. The first three weeks basically went vacation, Kingslayer, conference. I found Sindragosa to be a much more difficult fight than the Lich King was. Maybe that's just me, though. (I'm so glad I switched to rocket boots.) I'm still toting around Bloodsail Admiral from Memorial Day weekend, though.

There's been mild drama in the guild, but it's not so much of the volcanic argument type as the slowly simmering personality conflicts eventually pushing someone to go. It really sucks for those of us, officers or members, who like all the people involved. I don't like feeling as though I've disappointed other friends by not being able to keep all of us together in the guild. But at the same time, I learned to accept several things a while back that have helped me deal with it.

• I can't fix everything. Not every problem has a win/win solution.
• I can't make people like each other. Some personalities just clash, and not everyone is willing to deal with someone they just don't get along with.
• I can't change other people. People have to change themselves.

One of the hardest things is that some people don't recognize that they are part of the problem. They expect everyone else to conform to their expectations or standards and don't realize that maybe it's their expectations or standards that are part of the problem. If there are problems, I generally assume that I'm contributing to them somehow, and look at what I've done or how I've interacted with people to see if there's anything I can do to remedy the problem.

I've had a lot of friends leave the guild over the past four and a half years, but I think, in an MMO, that just happens. Their goals shift, and they want other things out of the game. Or there's someone that they're just tired of dealing with. And it's a game; there are ways to keep in touch and continue to play with the people you like spending time with even if you're not in the same guild anymore. People shouldn't stay in a guild if it's going to make them unhappy.

My rogue just finished the holidays for the Violet Protodrake, and my priest should finish up tonight or tomorrow, depending how much time I have if I'm raiding tonight. Last week the guild downed Putricide in 25 for the first time, which bumps us up to 8/12 for 25s. (I think I'm personally still at 6/12.) Hopefully I'll get to see Princes on 25 sometime - I've managed to solo-juggle kinetic bombs in 10s twice now.

I am not a Kingslayer...

But as of last Wednesday, 10 of my guildies are.

I have reached the ennui stage of raiding, I think. I've had my 4-piece T10 long enough that I've sold six or seven Primordial Saronites on the auction house. Our raid nights only align with my free evenings on one night right now (I'm available 5/7 nights a week most of the year), so I'm seeing the same content, or variations thereof, in ICC10 every week. This doesn't mean I'll stop signing up (unless the glut of DPS means I'm taking a spot someone who could use the gear needs), but I'm hoping that my Wednesday nights opening up will at least get me some variety in content. Next month our 25s move back to Thursdays, too, which will give me another night of raiding (hopefully). I prefer the larger raid size, and I miss 40-mans.

This Saturday's ICC10 group 2/night 2 was canceled for lack of healers, so I spent this weekend getting my baby hunter to 80. Yes, I have two level 80 Horde Marksman hunters on the same server. I regret the Blood-elfy-ness, but I can't afford to race change her, and the name doesn't seem Troll or Orc-ish to me, anyway. And two Taurens would be even more silly. The baby hunter is my jewelcrafter/new scribe. (The death knight scribe will be deleted in Cataclysm, to make way for... an undead hunter. Ahem.)

Next up will be the shaman, then the warlock, and then Mabs, the Night elf hunter who is my original. Mabs did 1-70 with a nightsaber named Kitty, but I'm going to do 70-80 with a crocolisk to see how that tanky pet works out. Kitty was pretty much Mabs's only, pet, too. I went to look at her again, and all she had in her stable was Kitty. (Kitty was aptly named Kitty, because Duskhawk's KitTabik, the wolf, is always called Puppy, despite having a proper name. Most of my other pets I actually refer to by name - Hadrian, Darius, Violet, Olin, Chad... I don't remember what Duskmoon's blue strider is off the top of my head.)

But those are pretty much my plans until I'm getting more raiding in - level the alts so they're ready for Cataclysm.

Five years, and the tune never changes

One of the things I discovered when I was going through our guild's forum archives, deleting about two years worth when we were being evaluated by our forum host for suitability for Google ads, was that with regards to raiding, there have always been, and always ever seem to be, the same arguments about raiding.

1. We're becoming too hardcore/casual!
Since we are, at our heart, a casual guild, this comes up any time we set up standards for progression. We're still casual; we're just not going to stick our heads in the sand about what kind of requirements are needed for actually getting all the way through a particular tier of content. People have been squealing about this in our guild since Molten Core, but it's never really been true. We're not going to be a "raids 7 days/nights, you have to be at every raid" kind of guild. None of us have the time.

2. Loot Distribution.
Do long-time raiders have first dibs over newcomers? Do you roll for loot, use a point system, etc.? We've gone through several loot distribution methods, and there are still people who are worried about getting their shinies first. First shouldn't be as much of a concern as keeping the raid as a whole improving. Starving your newer players of loot through overly restrictive system doesn't help the raid as a whole, and if their butts in the seats are what's making the raid happen, you're not being fair to them.

3. Raid slot distribution.
Who gets to go when? I think this is something we generally do fairly well - we take people who are qualified first, people who aren't quite there but qualified for the next tier of content down next, and so on. Within each pool, the attendance gets shuffled around so that people still get an opportunity to raid. We don't have as many raid nights as we used to - a peak of six or so in late Vanilla, and we're down to about three - so it's harder to fit people in that it used to be. We used to just do roll outs, and if you were only available certain nights and had really bad luck, you could end up raiding next to never. Scheduling in advance at least lets people know they can make other plans some nights.

4. Mains and Alts.
What's a main? What's an alt? Which gets priority on invites/loot? Yeah, this is a perpetual topic for debate. Do you look at every character that person has ever played when defining the terms? Their active toons? Their toons on your server? Their toons in your guild?


I think what frustrates me the most about any of these topics is when someone takes one side at one point, and then when it's personally advantageous, or no longer personally advantageous, to support the other side, they switch. What that tells me is that neither position is right or wrong. So I tend to go with what seems to be in the best interests of the guild in the long term.

Screenshots or it doesn't count

Before I forget again.



Yeah, I have a kinda large screen. I'm the one in the tabard, next to the black & white boy cow.

(If you're not familiar with ICC, that's Fester-25.)

Ready to Raid? Maybe, Maybe Not

I'm not particulary familiar with either Beast Mastery or Survival; I dabbled in them for a few levels at a time here and there (mostly on my Elves), but I drift back towards Marksman pretty quickly. (I like big numbers, I guess. Chimera Shot is critting in five digits now, and it's hard to back away from that.) Despite that, though, I've read enough that I think I can exposit on some general information for more than just my favorite tree.

The question, of course, is, "Am I ready for Icecrown Citadel (10/25)?"

Your raw output will probably give you the best idea, based on the guidelines of the raids you run with. Websites abound which will tell you what your gear has you ready for. The one I look at most often nowadays is WoW Heroes; it gives a good breakdown of where your gear lands you in terms of where you're likely to be successful.

How well you're doing versus how well your toon can do are different matters. If you don't have a DPS meter, both Recount and Skada are pretty accurate. Recount has pie charts that I'm partial to, but Skada is more modular and lightweight, so you may prefer one or the other. If you're not familiar with Elitist Jerks or have no idea how to use Excel, Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer takes Shandara's hunter spreadsheet and puts it into a web form - import yourself, check the rotations for shots you do/don't use, and hit Update DPS without buffs to see what your baseline, unbuffed DPS maximum potential is. Then, while unbuffed, take yourself and your pet over to one of the boss level Target Dummies, reset your DPS meter, and go at it for at least 5 minutes. (Hunter's Mark having a 5-minute duration is a good way to guesstimate your timer if you don't have another convenient way to measure.) To cleanly end the test, if you have Serpent Sting up, put up Scorpid Sting, pull your pet back, and Feign as quickly as you can in succession. Otherwise Serpent Sting will keep ticking and lower your meter's reading.

Compare your target dummy meter with your theoretical number from Zeherah's analyzer, and you'll have a good idea of your stand-still numbers; you can extrapolate it upwards by figuring what percentage of your maximum you're hitting (I hover around 90% on target dummy tests), then go to Zeherah's analyzer and enable best raid buffs and debuffs, take the percentage you're pushing, and you can guesstimate your ideal 25-man stand-still output.

You don't normally get to see these numbers on bosses, though sometimes things like the Icebound Wards will approach them, or, if you get your movement down cleanly, you'll get close on Festergut. They will tell you if there's something seriously wrong with your execution, however. And if your raid leaders tell you they want to see 5k minimum, and your analysis on Zeherah's says your toon's maximum output is 4k with raid buffs, no matter how good you are, you've got some work to do.

So, what can you do to bring your numbers up?

The first, and fastest, thing is to look at your talents. Other people have done the legwork, and there's a lot of information out there. The summary is basically that, at the highest gear levels, the top tree is Marksman, then Survival, then Beast Mastery for raiding output. All the trees can meet the minimum enrage timer thresholds for fights like Festergut, but, especially if you want to raid as Beast Mastery, you need to know what you're doing. If your execution isn't as tight, you'll probably want to try each spec and see which one meshes best with your capabilities. Don't just toss points wherever; respecing is expensive. Poke around the various hunter blogs (I link a whole bunch over to the right) and Elitist Jerks and see what good options are for the tree you're using. (For example, some distribution of 7/57/7 is the most common Marksman raiding spec, but going through Aspect Mastery in BM or including Hawkeye in Survival isn't uncommon or wrong.)

If there are talents you absolutely love but which don't help you with raiding, consider dual-specing to have the talents you enjoy most on your own time in one spec and the talents that make you most productive in a raid in the other.

How are your glyphs? Some glyphs that are great for soloing aren't so hot for raiding, and if you're going to stick with one spec rather than dual spec, you might want to invest in a stock to swap back and forth.

• Marksman will probably want Serpent Sting and two of Steady Shot, the Hawk, Kill Shot, or Chimera Shot.
• Beast Mastery will want some combination of Serpent Sting, Steady Shot, the Hawk, Kill Shot, and Bestial Wrath.
• Survival will probably want Explosive Shot and two of the Hawk, Kill Shot, Steady Shot, or Serpent Sting.

What pet are you raiding with? As cute and lovable as your spore bat might be, a wolf (top choice in most cases because of the AP buff), cat, raptor, or even a wasp or worm for raid debuffs will probably be a better choice for your raiding pet.

Are you pushing the right buttons? Rotation is one of the hardest things to fix if you've been playing a long time; if you've got some bad habits ingrained, it might take a while to break yourself out of them. Unlike some people, I don't consider being a clicker to be a bad habit, but if that turns out to be the core of your problems, unfortunately I don't have a recommended way to break out of the habit (at least for a ranged toon). Kill Shot at 20% and below is important; Kill Shot has edged me over someone I was competing with on meters because when it crits, it's sweet, and it's end-of-fight burst not everyone can match.

• Marksman will, at the beginning of a fight, put up Hunter's Mark and Serpent Sting, pop Rapid Fire, hit Chimera, Aimed, possibly Arcane, and Steady Shot until Rapid Fire wears off, hit Readiness, pop Rapid Fire again, and then fall into the Chimera, Aimed, possibly Arcane, Steady x3 or x4 rotation until Rapid Fire and Readiness are off cooldown. I say possibly Arcane because after you get about 500 Armor Penetration (ArP), you want to drop Arcane from your rotation (and talents), because you'll get a better return from physical damage at that point (Steady Shot, Piercing Shots).
• Beast Mastery starts out with Hunter's Mark and Serpent Sting, then falls into an Aimed, Arcane, Steady rotation; remember to refresh Serpent Sting as needed. I don't know enough about Beast Mastery to tell you when the ideal Bestial Wrath usage is, but if you're set on raiding as BM, one of the hunter blogs over to the right should have information. At some level of ArP, Beast Mastery will also drop Arcane from the rotation.
• Survival will put up Hunter's Mark and Serpent Sting to start, then go through Explosive, Black Arrow, Aimed (or Multi depending on spec), Steady, refreshing Serpent Sting as needed and taking advantage of Lock and Load procs whenever possible. Arcane isn't even on Survival's radar.

If you're pushing the right buttons but not getting the numbers you think you should be, find a hunter who plays a similar spec and does put out the numbers you want and see if they can help you figure out where things are going wrong. (Browse logs for your server if you don't know of someone to go to, or try the WoW hunter forums.)

How's your hit rating? You want 8%, which is ~263 hit rating without talents; if you put points in Focused Aim it can be as low as ~164 hit rating. This is the only stat that has a hard and fast cap number that you really have to worry about hitting - everything else is either capless or isn't worth going to the trouble of capping unless you're in a top end raiding guild (in which case I really hope you don't need to be reading my guide).

Are you gemming and enchanting right for your spec and gear level? Different specs use different gems, and at different gear levels, some gems are better than others. Meta gem requirements need to be met, as well. Nightmare Tears are always good options for turning on a meta if you're gemming straight through with your best gem stat. Your meta gem is probably going to be a Relentless Earthsiege Diamond, but if for some reason it's not, it's probably a Chaotic Skyflare Dimaond. If your hit rating is low or you don't want to invest talent points in Focused Aim, a few pure hit rating gems may be required. If you need to for socket bonus or your meta gem, pair it with Agility (Marksman or Survival), Attack Power (Beast Mastery), Stamina (Beast Mastery or Survival), or mp5 (Marksman).

• Marksman hunters want to gem for Agility until they hit about 800 passive ArP on gear. After about 800 ArP, gemming for ArP will give better returns than Agility. If you want to flesh out your socket bonuses (I'm a little compulsive like that, too), pair Agility with Crit or Hit (depending on your needs) for yellow sockets or mp5 (yes, mp5) for blue sockets.
• Beast Mastery hunters generally gem for Attack Power, but they can start gemming for ArP at a much lower threshold than Marksman. Crit, Hit, and probably Stamina (more pet health) are good secondary parts for orange and purple gems for socket bonuses.
• Survival is similar to pre-ArP Marksman, except that Stamina being a DPS gain for Survival means they will want that instead of mp5 on any purple gems they need. Agility stays good for Survival since they will never switch to ArP.

For the most part, you're going to want to enchant along the same priority as your gems: Agility for Marksman or Survival, Attack Power for Beast Mastery. If a slot only has one or the other, either is fine. Your head enchant will come from the Ebon Blade quarter master, and unless you're a scribe, you'll want to grind reputation with the Sons of Hodir for your shoulder enchant. (It's not as bad as it used to be - after getting to Honored, you can buy about 400-500 Relics of Ulduar and pop up to Exalted.) Beast Mastery and Marksman hunters will probably want Icescale Leg Armor, while Survival may opt for Frosthide. Take advantage of your profession's special buffs - cloak and glove enchants for engineers, extra sockets for blacksmiths, better gems for jewelcrafters, etc.

What's your ammunition? If you're still using vendor-sold ammunition, see if you can't find an engineer willing to become your supplier of higher-end ammunition.

Do you die too often? No matter how theoretically awesome your toon is, dead DPS is 0 DPS. Are you pulling aggro? Get a threat meter or turn on the in-game threat warnings. Omen is the tried-and-true in threat meters, and Skada can act as one, as well. Get the Feign Death minor glyph. (And, you know, use Feign. A lot.) Other than persistant damage (damage that hits the whole raid no matter what, or things like Saurfang's Boiling Blood), DPS shouldn't be taking damage. Yes, when you get a slime on Rotface, you'll take some damage, and your healers should keep you up long enough to merge the slime and get back to DPSing. But taking damage from standing in the slime pools would be your fault. Damage from standing in fires (fiery, poisony, or otherwise) is your own fault, and don't blame your healers if you die from it. If you're not seeing damaging effects, check your graphics settings. Turn down what you can live without if you need to for system performance issues, and make sure projected textures is turned on. Make sure you have Deadly Boss Mods or a similar addon to tell you about damaging effects as they get close. (For example, DBM will tell you when Putricide is throwing Maleable Goo at or near you.)

If you're doing everything else right but just have low ilevel gear, you'll need to invest some time running Heroics and older raids, and then spending badges. Trial of the Crusader runs aren't uncommon still - the raid is trashless and a good run can take less than an hour. If your guild or raid group isn't hitting it still, a PUG on your server probably is. Weekly raids, either in-guild or PUGs, will land you bonus badges and sometimes shots at gear you may need. Onyxia can be a fast, fun run with good gear (particularly a helm and guns). Even if you don't PVP, the Vault of Archavon in Wintergrasp drops tier gear.

If you're not sure what gear to go for, hit up some of the hunter blogs linked to the right, or WoW.com, and look for the various hunter gear lists. Or, do what I do, and go to WoWhead, pull up the Item->Armor->Mail->Slot I'm looking to upgrade and filter by stuff with Attack Power. Then I sort by ilevel, find what I've got, and see what's available that's better that is reasonably attainable.

And when you get to a raid, remember:

• Bring your flasks, food, and any other self-buffage reagents.
• Be stocked up on ammunition.
• Be on time, and try not to need a summon.
• Remember to swap into your raid spec and pull out your raid pet if you have more than one of either.
• Pee before you go! (To quote my husband.)

Moving on

After the shake-up of our raid leadership and, to some extent, our officer corps, our Icecrown 25 raid group has moved on.

Festergut is dead. (Pictures later when I get home.)

Yes, there's a 5% damage/health/heals buff in Icecrown now, but a raid DPS output of over 152,000 means that we could have done it with out the buff. (Technically. Psychologically may be another matter.)

We did a single ranged collapse point, in case of missing spores, but it was more or less unbugged for us. Once we had all figured out what we were doing for the collapses (some of us have only seen him three or four times ever), and everyone remembered to push buttons and not die, we were sailing smoothly. :35 extra on the enrage timer, as well.

Apparently repeating "shoot" obsessively to myself throughout the fight helps me remember to continue pushing my buttons during movement/spores - that was one of my biggest problems; I'd move over to the spore collapse point, and then be so focused on staring at the spore, waiting for it to pop, that I would forget to push buttons.

Quartz has proven useless to me - I can't get it to remember anything. I set it up, and as soon as I zone, it loses the profile, or something. The profile's still there, and still selected in the dropdown, but it's not being applied. I'm about at the point of deleting it. (All I wanted was an autoshot timer, and maybe a global cooldown bar.)

I don't think we have another 25 scheduled for this lockout, but if they decide to put one up on Monday, they'll probably be playing with Rotface.

Oh! And...

Yeah, yeah, he's way over in the corner. We followed it up with a Dreamwalker... kill? an hour and a half later. Dreamwalker is the first boss that I got the adrenaline rush after the fight was over, because once we hit bloodlust (somewhere after 75%), the fight was over fast. I wasn't watching her health %'s at all (I think if I get to see her again any time soon I'll suggest popping one of the healers up on the oRa tank list), and then suddenly giant green dragon stands up behind me. (And of course then she ports out, so there's no pretty screenshot of her.)

I am hoping eventually we'll be able to get Putricide down in two 10s every week - but we have to be getting Rotface down in two consistently first. Eventually people will figure out how to kite slimes properly. Right?