*poke*

So, I looked at the page-view stats for this blog for the first time today, and mostly it was kind of depressing, because they're about seven times the stats for my other blog - and I haven't written anything here since June.

There's a really simple reason for that - huntering hasn't really changed dramatically over the course of the past year.  Firelands added some new pet models (and Deth'tilac, as much as I hate spiders, is very pretty), but none of them have tempted me to try taming them.  Heck, I didn't pick up Skoll until this expansion (looking for the Time-Lost Protodrake, of course).  I don't go looking for most rares for taming purposes.  (As much as I love Har'koa and the Zul'Drak quests, her boyfriend is so dead if I ever find him.)

But no, this expansion has been pretty stable for Marksman PVE.  The secondary stat numbers (haste, specifically) for when one's rotation changes (adding a Steady or an Arcane, basically) are so huge that you really don't need to think about them.  It's not like the magic 800 for swapping to stacking Armor Penetration was.

Guild drama has been minimal all summer; raiding has been good; I still don't have the Headless Horseman's pony for Duskhawk.  Brewfest threw daggers to all my toons but my rogue.

Mists of Pandaria was rolled out at Blizzcon last week, and I was stuck at work, obsessively refreshing WoW Insider's live blogs.  I like the talent changes - 3 specs that you get your special abilities just by picking the spec, and then one talent tree of fun stuff that you can put points in regardless of your spec.  I hope improved mend pet ends up a glyph or something.

In the meantime, I've been playing a baby priest Alliance side on another server to play through the quests again - an RP server, at that, although I'm far too shy to have actually done any interactive role-playing.  When I leveled my priest on Bronzebeard, I was fashion-conscious on her to the point of getting ribbed for it - there are some awesome robes out there, and I refused to have shoulders that didn't coordinate.  I also may have used her little pillbox hat from a rare spawn in Hillsbrad well into the 50s.

I'm leveling as discipline again, partly because the dot-dot-channel playstyle of shadow has never appealed to me.  I've tried shadow, briefly, at 85, so that when I want valor/justice points on my priest and there's already a guild healer going, I can still take her, but I much prefer healing - atonement healing, that is.

Anywho, a priesty-comic I did (stick figure art!) a while back, since she's the alt I'm playing right now:

Replay Value

I played through Diablo II (including the expansion) all the way to the end at least four times; I made new characters and played them into the fourth or fifth chapter quite a bit more. Diablo II was a solo player game for me, and I never did its "hard modes" - I didn't take a character I had beaten Baal on and replay the content with that same character.

I did, however, enjoy running through the game with a new character, to try out a different class, or a different playstyle. (Charged bolt sorceress! Woo! Actually, the Amazon with charged-bolt-releasing gear was probably the most fun charged bolt experiment...)

I'm bringing this up for a couple reasons. Firstly, I've got a fairly serious stable of alts: 9 characters on my main server are level 80+. WoW is so much more of a time-sink than Diablo II was; getting characters to similar levels of investment and playability would require more time than my commutes 45-minutes both ways, works 50+ hours a week life allows. Secondly, WoW, to me, is the original Diablo III.

Right, right, Diablo III is still in development, and Azeroth is most certainly not the setting for Diablo II. They're entirely separate franchises.

At the same time, there's a lot overlap in the character classes and basic user interface design; paladins have auras and can heal or tank; barbarians and warriors both have a couple of different fighting styles and utilize various shouts (although I really miss the shout that got me potions... and dual wielding throwing knives, which was awesome); assassins and rogues both use a combo point/finisher style; amazon + druid = hunter + druid; necromancers and warlocks share a few traits; and of course sorceresses and mages.

WoW built on and expanded a lot of what I was already familiar with in Diablo II, which made switching to it as my graphical game of habit fairly easy. (I was replaying Diablo II up until I started WoW, and I've still gone back to it a couple times.)

What WoW didn't initially do was make it easy for me to "replay" it; this wasn't so much a matter of the content not being accessible from scratch, and hey, I could mail my alts money! No, the problem was the time sink. Leveling took time, traveling was slow, and the barriers to entry at higher levels were pretty steep.

For the most part, Blizzard has been really good at improving on WoW's replay value: between changes to the leveling experience and the introduction of heirlooms, a new character doesn't have to repeat content I didn't like, nor do I have to slog through every kill-and-collect quest I did five years ago on another character. Running dungeons lets me collect points for gear, so if I decide to go to alt raids on a character three tiers in, I have a reasonable route to gearing her up.

The biggest remaining time-sink in alt leveling? Reputation grinds. Oh, but there's tabards! Sure, and the tabards help. But I don't run dungeons on my alts nearly as much as I do on my main, and I can hit 85 in two or two and a half zones. Hyjal is nice and fast, and Deepholm is generally the follow-up, at least until I hit a level to go to Uldum or Twilight Highlands.

Skipping out of Deepholm, however, no matter how tired I may be of some of the quests there, locks me out of shoulder enchants on my alts. In Wrath they ameliorated this problem by making reputation based enchants bind-on-account; you could just mail them to alts. It remains to be seen if Blizzard will do so again this expansion. If they don't? I'm pretty sure my alts will never have anything better than the blue shoulder enchant... once I drag them all back into Deepholm to finish the zone and open up the Therazane vendors. I don't do dailies on my alts unless it's for profession tokens.

The Sons of Hodir were the barrier to entry for non-inscription shoulder enchants in Wrath, and you couldn't just waltz into Storm Peaks and start working for them. But maybe three hours of questing and I could unlock their dailies (including turning in boatloads of tokens for fast tracking exalted, prior to the BoA change). Therazane is buried so far in Deepholm (it's the last quest chain, no?) that it takes me much longer to get to and open. The time invested/reward ratio is steeper than my patience is willing to bear six years in.

Don't get me wrong - WoW's replay experience has gotten a zillion times better than it was originally, or (ugh) in Burning Crusade, when running heroics on my alts meant a rep grind again. (Most of them weren't too bad to get to honored, but the heroic dungeons in Auchindoun seemed terrible to unlock.) But tying profession recipes to reputations? *grumble*

For the longest time, Sporeggar was my rogue's (my third most played character's) only exalted reputation... because she was an herbalist and could farm the hibiscus. (Tiny sporebat, omg.) Yeah, yeah, flask recipes on reputation vendors... no, thanks. Don't have that kind of time.

Five and a three-halves toons into this expansion, I really don't have the patience for reputation grinds anymore.

My guild...

... is awesome. :)


We can now rent cars without paying extra for insurance. >.>

So close

Last Monday, my guild hit level 23. At 23, the caps on guild experience come off, and if you're crazy about grinding raids or heroics, you can hit 25 in a very short amount of time.

We're not that crazy - two of our raid nights this week were devoted to Nefarian (a fight I am unexpectedly in love with, despite dying twice on many attempts), so we're sitting pretty about 20% into 24 as of when I went to bed last night.

That 10% discount at level 24? It applies to flight training. That was the push I needed to buy fast flying on the two toons I'm currently trading off leveling.

I took my shaman into Vashj'ir this week to try to get deepsea scales for leveling leatherworking (and guild experience from quests); I hadn't done Vashj'ir on my priest or warrior, so I haven't really touched the place in four months. I still love it. Viatrix, on the other hand, is at level 70 in the Borean Tundra. Fast flying will make Northrend much less painful, and I'm looking forward to hitting Zul'drak again.

I'm eclectic in my WoW loves - female undead animations, tauren architecture and city planning, troll lore, my orc's hair while casting (3-foot wind-whipped braid: awesome). I think most of what I like about my blood elves is that they make feminine look bad-ass.

Level 25 will bring us scorpion mounts and mass resurrection. The mass summon has been pretty awesome so far - raids, "crap, my hearth is still set to Dalaran," "crap, I'm stuck, and can't hearth," etc. It was nice when you could summon someone who fell into a bad spot in a dungeon but didn't die back to where you were, but I understand why they disabled inside-dungeon mass summoning. Mass resurrection is going to make feigning or vanishing despite a bloodlust debuff desirable again, I think.

I'm dubious about the scorpion mounts, though. The stinger is right behind the rider's head.

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.

Patch love

Aimed Shot is hitting and critting hard enough I was cackling at the target dummy. In fact, it's hitting hard enough I'm finding it worth opening on mobs while soloing - because if it crits, it's sometimes half their health.

One of the paragons of hunter-dom, Frostheim over at WHU, wrote a guide on using Aimed post-buff.

The Chimera Shot and Arcane Shot buffs were also nice - I'm sure the Kill Shot one was, too, but usually by that time in the fight I'm watching things besides my crit numbers. Overall I saw a 2-3k increase in DPS in Baradin Hold without gear (or even rotation) changes.

(The other thing that has made me giggle this week was watching my warrior's new Toxic Wasteling eat critters. She has the best holiday boss drop luck - Headless Horseman's mount and the Wasteling. If only I could have sent them over to Dusk. >.<)

More thoughts on the /castsequence

I'm running with a spec that looks something like this.

Since actually raiding Tol Barad (three times now), I've dropped one of the Arcanes from my macro, due to focus starvation outside Rapid Fire, and finally realized that dude, I can pop Aspect of the Fox during Felfire and keep my rotation going during all the running around.

No, other than the opportunity to raid-test the macro and tweak for focus consumption, my thoughts on the cast sequence have been centered around two of the other Steady Shot-centered talents: Piercing Shots and Master Marksman.

Ignore, for the moment, that Marksman is bottoming out raid DPS rankings right now. We play Marksman because we love it, right? (There is some irony, I think, that the hunter specs are sandwiching that list.) Besides, 4.0.6 will bring us some changes that will help with that. Aimed, Arcane, Chimera, and Kill Shot are all getting damage buffs. We'll be able to Auto Shot while moving.

Aimed Shot is one of the main things I've been thinking about regarding the cast sequence. We really only use it on proc, and the proc is reliant on Steady Shot and the RNG. The only way to really get more Aimed Shots in is to get more Steady Shots in. Add to this the bleed damage both Steady and Aimed (and Chimera) can inflict. If Aimed Shot hits harder, the target is going to bleed harder. Add in a bleed debuff from an Arms warrior, Subtlety rogue, Feral druid, or one of our own pets (I favor the hyena for this when needed), and we're looking at some nice little boosts.

But again, we need more Steady Shots to get more Aimed Shots. If we prioritize Chimera to be every 10 seconds (in a normal rotation; if you use Kill Shot or Rapid Fire or Readiness, the spacing will vary slightly), that means we've got 9 other seconds of global cool down to work with. Getting Steady down to a one-second cast requires amounts of haste that are more or less insane. How insane? Not quite 9000. Yes, with the two hunter haste talents (Pathing and Improved Steady Shot), you need 8817 haste rating to get your Steady Shot down to 1 second with no other haste bonuses.

No, a 1.5 or 1.6 second Steady Shot cast is probably what we're sanely looking at most of the time, without extra haste boosts - that is, for most of our normal rotations. That means that the two bundles of two Steady Shots makes sense, and pairing it with two Arcane Shots will make sure we're not sitting on buckets of Focus.

What about that extra second or so of GCD? We could add another Arcane Shot, but raiding Tol Barad - a fight that is, more or less, the ultimate in stand and shoot fights for 98% of it - has shown that 3 Arcane:4 Steady will leave us Focus starved at points. 2 Arcane:4 Steady makes sure we have enough Focus for our next Chimera. 2 Arcane:5 Steady, however, pushes us past the 9 second mark, towards an 11-second rotation.

At this point I'm going to stick with the 2:4 Arcane:Steady ratio. The half a second is useful for flexibility when you need to pop some extra shot (Kill Shot, Tranq, etc.) or a trap, or perform some other utility action. If you've got the extra time or Focus, another Steady or Arcane can be added, but with the upcoming changes to Aimed, I would lean towards the Steady Shot.

So for now, the macro remains:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot