Naxxaramas: The Death of the Hunter Class.

(Copied from a rant I made on the Cd forums.)

This thread fucking depressed the shit out of me. It gave me flashbacks to forums before the 1.7 "Hunter love" patch again.

Cut through the whining and beating of breasts and at the core, there seems to be a very real problem: Our DPS just doesn't scale with the other classes past BWL level. And when you get down to it, apart from the tacked-on Tranq Shot fights, we're here for our DPS, which is becoming quickly obsolete. Therefore, why take a Hunter over a Rogue, Mage or 'Lock? Hell, even those DPS warriors in CD who haven't already out-DPSed us will be doing so soon.

Which is a fair point, most of the in-game ranged weapons were designed under assumptions that were changed in the 1.10 patch. The only ranged weapon in the game that offers a decent upgrade to a Ashjre'thul/Huhuran's Stinger-equipped Hunter drops from the last boss in the Naxxaramas! Imagine a meleer getting a nice weapon from Chromaggus and then finding out there's nothing more worthwhile for them in the following two instances.

Guess I should get back to levelling my alt before I find myself doomed to obsolecence. :(

New Signature.

Quick shout out to Valyir again for hooking me up with an amazing signature to celebrate my shiney new Crossbow of Imba Doom!

On smiting.

Well last night, Chaotic Divinity went up against Chromaggus in Blackwing Lair. It was our first time trying him with his Time Lapse breath, and despite reports from other Raid Groups of the difficulty of this particular iteration, we were able to take him down quite easily. This was only our fourth Chrommy kill, so imagine our Hunters surprise and delight when he dropped his fabled Crossbow of Smiting, an impossibly cool-looking ranged weapon that I've wanted for some time. Luckily then, I was able to win it, thanks to one of the Hunters with more DKP passing for me (I reaped the Karma for fitting out the fellow with full Black Dragonscale armour at no cost).

It looks so cool!





And it kicks like a mule to boot! With that in my grasp we went on to take down Nefarian on our first try with only half-a-dozen deaths. Not bad at all for our second Neffy kill. I also fell in love with a new mod which managed to prevent my new precious from suffering the ill effects of Nefarian's class calls.

The least said about the clean-up run to MC afterwards, the better. I'm really tempted to kick future MC runs in the head and concentrate on levelling Stormpaw during them. There are a couple of items I'd still like from MC, but nothing that's worth the constant grind.

Oh, and I should mention that I've changed my talent spec (again!). I've now invested heavily in the Beastmastery tree, which means my Wolf can actually survive being used to pull mobs and can also hold aggro a lot better when grinding Dragonkin.

On Missed Downings...

I don't normally discuss the demon that is RL on here, but last night I went out to see some bands and drink beer.

Today I'm hungover, my ears are still ringing, and I missed CD's First Nefarion Kill.

Congrats guys!

Tidings...

It's been about three weeks since I touched this thing. What's been going on since then?

*I blew most of Wulf's carefully horded DKP on the first Crown of Destruction to ever drop for CD in five months of Raggy kills. And then I proceeded to dump an Arcanum of Resilience on it and use it only as a Fire Resistance helm. (My full Gianstalker is still the best for normal DPS purposes).
*Chaotic Divinity got Nefarion down to 5% last night. We've got the fight incredibly stable up to the transition from phase 2-3 (when we're zerged by the skeletons of everything we killed in phase 1). With a bit more practise, he's going down! The most frustrating thing is the horrific lagspikes that ruined two otherwise promising attempts at him. Earthen Ring really needs a hardware upgrade pronto!
*I've realised I have nothing I want to do with Wulf outside of raiding whatsoever. Rep grinding quests really have no further interest for me, and Dragonscale farming has stopped being fun due to the fact that most of the best spawn points have 2-3 Goldfarming bots grinding them constantly.
*I moved Stormpaw from Earthen Ring to Moonglade, where I'm levelling him in-between raids with a few ex-CDers. Having a lag and queue-free server feels more of a luxury than it should be right now.
*Finally, I set up a new UI for Wulf last night, which is really, really, Purdy.



Kudos to the maker.