Marksman 1-80: Level 40

Level 40

Level 40 used to be when you get your mount; now you're just going to pick up Trueshot Aura and your epic mount if you can afford it. You also learn to wear mail armor.

Skills, Level 40:

• 40: Aspect of the Pack, Freezing Trap (Rank 2), Hunter's Mark (Rank 3), Raptor Strike (Rank 6), Track Giants, Trueshot Aura, Volley (Rank 1)

Aspect of the Pack seems dinky when you're getting your epic mount, until you realize you can use it when you're indoors. This is the "running back from the graveyard through a dungeon" Aspect, and as long as there's nothing to daze you, your party will appreciate it. Just remember to turn it back off when you get back to where you need to be.

Level 40 also gets you Giant Tracking, useful for several quests looking for wandering giants. A lot of giants in Azeroth are still roaming elites, too, so this can also be used for avoiding getting smooshed.

Trueshot Aura, your talent point, is a 10% AP boost. It is no longer a 30 minute buff, but it does still turn off when you die. It will get temperarily overwritten by Enhancement Shamans' and some Death Knights' 10% AP buff procs, making the glyph for it less useful in raids, but it's still a good buff to have overall.

Volley is your last new level 40 skill, and it is great. Even if you're leveling with a tank pet, you're probably going to be pulling aggro off it by now, but if you're careful about it, you can start doing some AoE fighting. Combine it with an Explosive Trap for extra oomph. When I was leveling my baby hunter, this is the skill I was impatient to pick up.

Marksman 1-80: Levels 31-39

Levels 31-39

Talents in the 30s are pretty flexible; I generally go with Focused Aim, Careful Aim, and Barrage. You won't have Steady Shot for a while yet, but the extra 3% to hit will help if you want to kill stuff higher level than you. As a Marksman hunter (at least till Cataclysm, when we get to learn to operate with Focus), Intellect is your friend, and more AP from it is good. Not everyone is a Barrage fan, but the damage boost on Aimed Shot is worth it.

Skills, Levels 31-39:

• 32: Flare, Raptor Strike (Rank 5), Track Demons
• 34: Explosive Trap (Rank 1), Serpent Sting (Rank 5)
• 36: Aimed Shot (Rank 3), Arcane Shot (Rank 5), Immolation Trap (Rank 3), Mend Pet (Rank 4), Viper Sting
• 38: Aspect of the Hawk (Rank 4)

New skills in the 30s aren't as flashy as some, but there some useful ones.

At level 32, you get Flare. It's been tweaked over time, in terms of both duration and cooldown, but right now it's a 20 second cooldown and a 20 second effect. It puts a flare on the ground that makes an area that will reveal stealth. Depending how a rogue or druid is specialized, it can be very useful in PVP. It's also useful for the stealthed cats and wolves you'll start running into in this level range. Oh, and those stupid stealthed infiltrators in Dustwallow... grr...

Anywho, you also pick up Track Demons at 32. Like most of the other tracking skills, the utility depends on if you're somewhere with demons. (If you run Dire Maul at level later, you can use it to keep an eye out for the patrolling Eye of Kilroggs that will summon a couple of mean Voidwalkers.)

Level 34 gets you Explosive Trap. This is an area-of-effect fire trap that will pulse for periodic damage. Now that traps are on separate cooldowns by fire/frost/nature, they're more useful, and more fun; you can drop a Frost Trap and an Explosive Trap together and have slowing plus fire.

I use a couple macros for traps to keep my bars less crowded; they're basically along the lines of:

#showtooltip
/cast [button:1] Explosive Trap; [button:2] Immolation Trap

I have a separate one for the ice traps.

At level 36 you'll pick up Viper Sting. This is a bit more useful than it used to be, and the mana gain from it can be beneficial. Combined with Chimera Shot at later levels, it's sometimes better to use than switching into Aspect of the Viper.

Marksman 1-80: Level 30

Level 30

Level 30 isn't as exciting as it used to be; still, you can pick up Readiness with your talent point, and a second Major glyph slot is available. I'd go with whichever of Mending or Serpent Sting you didn't take at level 15.

Skills, Level 30:

• 30: Feign Death, Mongoose Bite (Rank 2), Multi-Shot (Rank 2), Scare Beast (Rank 2)

In addition to the new skill ranks, your talent point here is probably Readiness. Readiness resets many of your hunter abilities that have cooldowns - shots, traps, Rapid Fire, Feign Death, and so forth. It's useful at the higher ends for resetting Rapid Fire for a little DPS boost, and it's useful all the time for resetting traps and Feign.

Speaking of Feign Death, you pick it up at level 30. Feign Death is what will let you sometimes get away with running through things you can't kill, or survive when the rest of your party wipes. It lets your hunter play dead. (Unfortunately, your pet will not play dead with you, so if you're trying to survive something with an area damage effect of some sort, tell your pet to go play with it while it's not by you, or otherwise send your pet somewhere else. You can always revive your pet, but you have to run back from the graveyard.)

Note that Feigning will shunt the aggro onto the next person on the aggro table, which may be your healer. Sometimes it's better for you to have the aggro if the healer can keep you up long enough to kill it. This is where knowing how to kite is more important than having Feign.

Feigning can also be resisted. Bosses in particular like to resist (or don't care if they think you're dead, they'll still hit you... one or the other). Some bosses won't reset while you're Feigning, so if you're in that situation, just stand up and die, or you'll make your party angry. (Attumen in Karazhan almost always resisted me. My best night: Feigning successfully on every Hydross attempt (about a dozen) for the three hours it took us to kill him the first time. Deaths for the night: 0 is awesome.

Ahem, #94

Totally unexpected.


Monday night I came home from gaming (D&D) and logged in to see inquiries about whether anyone else wanted in on a Darnassus raid. I had planned to just do Brewfest dailies on my alts and go to bed, but I decided to go. So! We one-shot Velen and Tyrande with 21 people with no problems, and get on the boat to Stormwind. Varian was at 9% when too many of the PVPers by the battlemasters came over and said hi.

So tonight, when we didn't have enough for an Onyxia-25 raid, we headed back to Stormwind. Varian went down this time with a raid of about 24 people.

Then we logged off in the tram.

For twenty minutes.

A few of us have Alliance toons, so we logged over to watch /trade and /localdefense. Eventually the Alliance got bored and stopped watching the tram.

So everyone logged back on after we lost Wintergrasp, and we hit Magni Bronzebeard with about 26 people. For the Horde!



Then hearthed, flew back to the Zoram Strand, went back up to Exodar and Darnassus and wiped out those bosses again.

Bears for everyone!

#93

I think he looks rather sassy at that angle, don't you?

Yes, he's 310%, and I owe my guildies lots of props for the help over the past year - especially with Halloween and Brewfest; I can't remember at the moment whether the others required groups.

I also picked up the pink baby elekk this morning (#92 for small pets).

And, ahem, I was made guild master last night. Our GM of almost five years is crazy busy with school, and won't be able to play for much of the next... 6 months? year? Sad to see him go, even temporarily. We gave him a send-off in Booty Bay with Pirate Day going.

Second time I've inherited an online group - I got made leader of my clan on the MUD I used to play on after the previous leader quit playing. Hopefully I don't screw this up.

Race/class changes in Cataclysm

So, since I'm trying to consolidate down to one WoW-related blog and one non-WoW blog, there will be non-huntery posts here.

Anywho, I'm full on Bronzebeard. I have three toons under level 70, one being a level 66 death knight, a level 26 rogue (my bank guild toon), and a level 18 warlock. All the other toons have a profession at high levels, and I don't to transfer off my night elf hunter because I still want to be able to check the auction house over there.

The complication is that toons off Bronzebeard pretty much never see level 20. (The exception is a human paladin I transferred off when it was free, at level 36, to free up a slot. She's still 36.) I admittedly don't have a ton of interest in playing a goblin or a worgen, other than the starting zones. (I did the same thing with a draenei - starting zone, and that's about.)

No, what I want to play is a dwarf shaman.

I have an orc shaman; she's level 70, elemental, and tons of fun. I've never really played a dwarf - I have a level 2ish one somewhere, I'm sure, but I don't do anything with them. I have three hunters, two rogues, and I deleted my second priest. My warrior I'm content with having just one, and paladin just doesn't do it for me. I think these are major contributing factors to the lack of dwarf, besides that they're Alliance and I, ahem, am for the Horde.

I'll confess, part of it is the hair. My orc has the 3 foot braid, and when she casts, her hair does a flying-in-the-wind animation. Dwarf women have the same long-hair kind of options, I think, and I for some reason find the idea of a dwarf shaman intriguing.

Maybe on an RP server, but honestly, the only reason I ever talk to people on Bronzebeard is because my husband got me into a guild (which subsequently merged into a larger guild)... and I'm sure there are people in the guild who wish I would stop talking sometimes. I'm painfully shy around new people. Online I'm better, but I'm still not likely to approach people. So I'm not sure if there's a point to playing on an RP server if I'm never going to RP outside my own head.

And then there's the whole problem of my gnome (deleted at level 11) being my most-hit-on character ever. I'm wondering if a dwarf female would have similar problems.

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.)