On Altoholism...

Over the last few weeks I've been wrestling between my desire to do something different than just the "Monkey DPS" of a raiding Hunter and my compulsion to help my friends in CD during a time when most of our regular Hunters are becoming, well, less regular. Ideally I'd like to be able to play an alternative character whilst having the ability to assist CD in its progress on an ad-hoc basis.

Sadly, much as I love playing Stormpaw, he doesn't allow me to do this, since he's not only on a different faction, but a different server to CD. Earthen Ring is a flakey piece of crap as servers go, and there's always massive queues at peak raiding times. Even if I was able to recieve word that Wulf was needed, transferring from Storm to him would involve sitting in a server queue for anything up to fifteen minutes. Not ideal for me or for CD.

So obviously, I needed an Alliance alt on Earthen Ring. I first tought about my Night Elf priest, Delanthir, who is currently sitting at lvl 25 in Stormwind disenchanting whatever goods I send his way and selling the proceeds to fund Wulf's raiding. I pretty much dismissed that idea because, powerful as a Shadow Priest can be, I hated solo-levelling one. They have neither the survivability or burst damage to take down powerful mobs solo, particularly if other mobs add. As with most casters, as soon as they run out of mana, they're dead.

I briefly considered another Druid, but I dismissed it for two reasons:

1. The Night Elf starting zone is one of the dullest and most isolated zones in the game. The only way to get to the other Alliance zones is a long run through a level 20+ zone which manages to combine the worst aspects of being dangerous and interminably dull.

2. I really wanted to try a different play style.

In the end, I settled on the one healing class I hadn't tried and rolled a Human Paladin called Greysun*. I started him last night and got him up to level six before Wulf was called in to take down the Brother/Sister team of Onyxia and Nefarian. Paladins seem to be pretty fun, at the moment, and in raids, their role is the polar opposite of the Hunter. Whilst the Hunter is a ranged damage class, all DPS and little utility, Paladins are a melee support class, all utility and little DPS. :)

*I originally wanted to call him "Grayson" in a tacet reference to Dick Grayson, one of my favourite comic book characters. Grayson was taken or forbidden however, so I settled for the phonetic equivalent. I am geek, hear me roar!

A Moo-ving Tale...

Ok, for this post I'm not going to talk about our titular hero and his adventures in Huntardom. Mainly because I've really scaled back my time playing Wulf recently. I'm recharging my enthusiasm for raiding before I launch myself back into it with hopefully renewed Gusto.

So instead, I've been taking the time to level Stormpaw, my Tauren Druid:



Since moving him to Moonglade, where I've had the pleasure of playing with some of my old friends from CD. I've also managed to get him up from a rather humble level 19 to his current level 38, which is a hitherto unprecedented feat for an alt of mine. Having friends to play with regularly helps, as I quickly tire of the solo game and normally give up on alts by their mid-20s at the latest.

The Druid playing style is pleasingly varied as well compared to the rather dull "send in your pet and hit autoshot" play of the Hunter. In his normal form, Storm can cast spells to damage opponents or heal himself and his friends. He can then shapechange into a Bear where he's able to absorb a lot of damage, and has abilities that allow him to hold off a large group of opponents for a while (assuming there's someone there to heal him). He can also change into a cat where he is able to sneak around and deal a lot of damage at close range, but he lacks some basic survivability. Most of the time when he's soloing, Stormpaw stays in Cat, sneaking up to his target, doing a lot of damage and then repeating. If he get's too badly hurt, he can quickly switch to caster form, heal himself and then move onto the next target.

When grouped with my friends (Shaman, Priest and Mage normally), I'm usually able to stay in Cat Form and help the group take down targets quickly. However, sometimes we get extra enemies adding and our priest's healing isn't sufficent to keep everyone alive. At that point, it's normally a good idea for Storm to switch to caster and help out. It normally works fine, but given that Storm's normal gear is focussed around his physical damage stats (Strength and Agility), it tends to leave him without much mana. To this end (and with the help of a couple of nice quest rewards), I've started putting together a hybrid set of gear. This sacrifices some of his damage-dealing ability for more Stamina (for Health), Intellect (for Mana) and Spirit (for faster Mana recovery). This second set of gear will probably be what I'll wear for most of Storm's group playing, since it gives him more versatility. The downside is that he has to wear what the game refers to as a "kilt":



Now I'm Scottish, and I know kilts, if only because I make a point of refusing to wear one. That, my friends, is a skirt, not a kilt!

What am I grinding for again?

Wa-hey, another rant. This time it's about armour, and more specifically the sets of armour a Hunter can obtain going through the various raid instances.

We'll start with my favourite: Giantstalker. Giantstalker armour peices were some of the first pieces of Epic-level gear Wulf ever got, and they were a massive upgrade to the armour Wulf wore up to that point. The set bonuses were kinda questionable, however. If you wore three peices, you could heal your pet better. Not that big a deal, but hey, I'm getting nice stats from all this stuff anyway, so who cares. Then at five pieces, we get a buff to your pet's stamina and resistances. OK, once again, not that big a deal since my pet's normally out of harms way, but like the three-piece, it helps me when I'm grinding. Finally, we get to the eight-piece, and we get the real money shot: +15% damage to my Multi-Shot and Volley skills. Finally, a bonus that actually buffs my damage, and it only took me eight months of grinding the place to get it.

Meanwhile, I've started collecting Dragonstalker armour as well, since that's the next big upgrade. But wait, the stats aren't that much better than Giantstalker, ah well, the bonuses might compensate. Three piece is +20% Ranged Attack Power to my Aspect of The Hawk buff. Doesn't sound bad, but it only really equates to 1 extra Damage Per Second, as opposed to the approximately 7 DPS buff my 8pc Gianstalker gives me. Wonder which one I'll be wearing? Then the five-piece bonus which is a buffed version of the Giantstalker five-piece, nice, but once again, not enough to break up my five-piece. Finally we get to the eight piece and again, we get the good buff: A chance to boost the Ranged Attack Power of the entire group by 450 (32 DPS) for 7 seconds. Shame I have to get a drop from Ragnaros, one from Onyxia and then six from Blackwing Lair to get it. Given the fact that we've had five sets of the leggings drop in six months of Ragnaros kills makes it unlikely I'll ever complete that set.

The we get onto Ahn'Qiraj and take a look at the set there. It's only a five-piece this time, so you can keep that oh-so-uber three-piece set bonus from Dragonstalker if you wish. Stats are nice as well, no +hit but I've got that covered. Shame about the dodgy spell damage on it. The we get to the set bonuses. The three piece reduces the cost of my Arcane Shot (which only gets used in kiting or PVP) by 10% (around 20 mana saved, woo!), and again the full set bonus is utterly uber (Rapid Fire every 3 minutes rather than 5, gimme!).

And this is my problem. The only truly worthwhile/useful set bonuses from the Hunter sets from MC-AQ40 are the end bonuses. I don't expect the lower tier bonuses to be as useful, but it would be nice if there was a genuine advantage to wearing anything less than the full set.

Amusingly enough though, the set from Naxxramas reverses this trend. In the Naxx set, the two,four, and six-piece bonuses are all pretty respectable, but the eight-piece one's a joke.

What's prompted this post is CD's retiral of MC from our regular raids to focus on AQ40. With that gone, I'll never manage to get my 8-pc Dragonstalker set (although I might just get the shoulders for coolness and wear five pieces of DS). As for the AQ set, it's a sad joke before the 5-pc bonus. So it looks like I'll be sticking with 8/8 GS until the expansion comes and we kiss goodbye to BWL and Naxx in favour of what the lvl 70 raidholes have to offer. If Blizzard can be bothered to fix the Hunter class by then.

On Gratuity.

So tonight, we clear BWL from Ebonroc to Nefarian. Excellent run, no wipes and less than a dozen deaths all the way through. Ebonroc also dropped his rather nice Drake Fang Talisman for the second time. This time, I was the winning bidder and I now wear it proudly. However, in stark contrast to my earlier post, I now have a completely gratuitous +16 to hit in my normal gear. (Anything above +9 to hit isn't nessesary for ranged damage against a raid-level target).

The only real +hit I can afford to lose however is from my trusty old Band of Accuria, which will be recieving an upgrade when I can acquire a Circle of Applied Force, or some other equally nice ring. Pretty much everything else is inherant to whatever item I'd place in those slots (like my Giantstalker armour set and Onyxia Tooth Necklace) or from talents I don't want to lose, since I'll need them in cases when I'm not wearing as much +Hit gear (such as when I have my Nature Resistance gear on)

Of chips and yellow water...

A curious phenomenon I've become aware of over the last few days is the curious need people on the internet need to metaphorically "piss in the chips" of their peers. I was first struck by this when, after putting up my last post to thank Cd for helping me acquire an item, a Hunter from a guild further into Ahn'Qiraj left the following comment:

"Not to rain on your parade, but Hunters should NEVER be wearing NR for Huhuran. There are only 15 people that need to have huge NR number in this fight, usually the rogues, warriors, shamans i believe. Hunters main part in this fight is to tranq, and then once she hits 30%, go absolute BALLS OUT dps. You don't want to be wearing NR when 30% hits, as you will never kill her due to lack of DPS.

Truthfully, 75% of the huhuran fights, you will never take damage in."

Now to answer him here and now. First of all, as should be evident by my many screen shots, Wulf is a Night Elf, and is therefore part of an Alliance raidgroup. This means that we don't have Shamans to fall back on, and our Paladins will most likely be doing a little thing called "Cleansing" throughout the fight. Therefore, assuming a "balanced" raid with five of each class, then the fifteen should be made up of Warriors, Rogues and Hunters (who can wear a large variety of armour types and therefore have an easier time maxing out their Nature Resistance).

Secondly, whilst I appreciate you've found a tactic that works for you, it's not nessesarily a road we'll go down with that fight. From a raid perspective, I'd rather take the hit to my own DPS and let the Mages and Warlocks (who have abilities that actually help boost each others DPS) worry about the massive burst damage needed at 20%.

The bigger issue however, is why do we (and I've been guilty of this myself on occasion) feel the need to belittle the achievements of others simply because it's not the route we ourselves would have chosen? Are we genuinely that insecure in our knowledge that we can't envisage any way other than our own?

Now, before you believe I'm picking unnecessarily on you Aeigelus, this isn't something I see restricted to your input. To Hunters claiming constantly we're useless in Naxx, to people sniping about gear. A new Hunter can't even ask for advice on what to do with their newly-ground Fire Resistance enchant or for advice on what to do on their first Molten Core run without the veterans getting into an off-topic discussion about how much Fire Resistance gear is actually needed in Blackwing Lair. Drives me to distraction sometimes, it really does. :) (I should point out that most of the time, TKAsomething.com's a brilliant site for any Hunter player, and these examples are isolated incidents.)

In other news, CD's made some progress into Ahn'Qiraj. We've got the first boss down now and we've made about half-a-dozen attempts at Battleguard Satura, but it's proving a difficult fight to get under control. Then again, it wasn't that long ago, I said the same thing about Nefarian and we got him in the end.

The hardest thing for me is keeping up interest in the place. I love Molten Core and Blackwing Lair to bits, and I can't wait to start Naxx, but Ahn'Qiraj just bugs me (pun unintentional). The look and design of the place just doesn't compell me or capture my imagination in the same way as the other instances.

I love CD!

Now we almost have BWL on farm status, I've been looking more and more into preparing Wulf for the 40-man An'Quiraj instance, which will prove to be CD's next challenge. To this end, I've started getting a decent set of Nature Resistance gear together for him, however, the problem I forsee is that the third boss (the first to require major Nature Resitance) also requires Hunters to provide Tranquilising Shot to cancel her frenzies. Given that there's next to no Nature Resistance that offers +to hit, this could prove to be a headache (missed Tranq Shot = Dead Tank = Wipe). I've mitigated this problem partially by taking a talent in the Survival Tree which gives me +3% to hit, but this still only leaves me at +5% to hit in my NR gear. To this end, I've decided to get a new Scope for Wulf's Crossbow which will give it +3 to hit. The only problem is that the list of components is intimidating to say the least:

2x Lava Core
2x Essence of Earth
4x Delicate Arcanite Converter (each converter requires 1x Arcanite Bar and 1x Ironweb Spider Silk)
6x Dark Iron Bar
1x Thorium Tube

Easily a few hundred Gold's worth of materials there. So, steeling myself to grinding most of the materials solo, I put up this post on the Cd forums Last Thursday asking for a couple of the difficult/impossible to grind/buy materials from the group's bank.

As you can see, almost immediately, folks offerred to grind the items for me. By Sunday, the people of CD had provided most of the items free of charge (well except for an applicant Rogue who charged me less than half the going rate for an Arcanite Bar). Frankly I was, and still am, shocked and humbled by folks generosity. All I need to do is wait for the CD banker to get back online and I'll get the Lava Cores needed to make it. So once again, I would like to thank the following:

*Svetle for proving 6 Dark Iron Bars, a Thorium tube and 4x Ironweb Spider Silk for the Delicate Arcanite Converters
*Niloc for providing the Thorium Bars and 2 Arcane Crystals for the DACs
*Creyldor for providing 2 Essence of Earth and transmuting one Arcanite for me.
*Hurby for selling me one Arcanite Bar at a reasonable price
*Tibarin/Betty for providing me with the last Arcane Crystal and doing the Transmute to boot.
*Hadji for performing an Arcanite Transmute.
*And Demaz for agreeing to log in each morning to check wether or not I've sent him the bits to make it yet.

Bye-Bye DPS...

So after BWL yesterday, I also respecced for the umpteenth million time. (Sidenote: My name's Paul and I am a respec addict. I'dve probably been able to afford two separate Epic mounts if I didn't spend all my gold on a new Talent Spec every few weeks.)

My most recent spec was an optimised damage spec which I heard about from Hunters doing Naxxaramas. By all accounts the only Damage-dealing talents in the shallow end of the Survival tree didn't apply in there or in AQ40 (a distinct lack of Humanoids, Dragonkin, Giants and Beasts in either). Their response was to reinvest points that they'd normally put in the Survival tree into Beastmastery, which made your pet tougher and able to do more damage. On paper, it seemed to be a good idea, but in practise, ten months of raiding have taught me not to send my pet into combat, and that's a hard habit to break. I'm too used to having my Wolf beside me in raids providing a useful buff to my ranged damage.

Given reports on Hunter DPS in Naxxaramas, and my own experiences that even our best-geared Hunters are being left behind in the DPS stakes as our Rogues, Warriors and offensive casters start to get access to BWL and later-level gear, I've decided to bow out of the damage race.

Don't worry, I'm not rolling a Paladin *grin*, but I've decided to respec to a 0/21/30 build that's focussed around having a bit more utility in raids than just "straight" DPS. This build is focussed around Survival in raids. Survivalist, Deterrance and Improved Feign Death will help me get out of sticky situations (like pulling) until the tanks and healers can get mobs off me. Survivalist also means I can take a couple more hits before showing up on the Healer's Emergency Monitors, giving me time to get the mob off me, then bandage, before I waste their mana. Surefooted also means I can sacrifice some of my +hit gear for resistance gear in certain fights.

I also went for both the trap talents, since they've proved pretty useful in Razorgore and Nefarian in Blackwing Lair and on the Core Packs in Molten Core. Improved Feign Death will also improve my chances of laying a trap in Combat.

And of course we have Killer Instinct and Lightning Reflexes to compensate for the loss of DPS from MM, giving me about 140 attack power and just over 4% crit chance in my normal raiding gear. That said, losing Improved Aspect of the Hawk, Barrage, Ranged Weapon Specialisation, and Trueshot Aura hurts my DPS badly (I'm still about 5 DPS down even with another Hunter's Trueshot Aura buffing me).

Farm Status?

Well, yesterday we went to BWL and cleared from Ebonroc to Nefarian. What's more amazing is that we did it with only one wipe (a three-hunter Tranquilising Shot rotation on Flamegor is tighter than we're used to, and a druid aggroing him into the group at the start didn't help). Annoyingly Ebonroc dropped the trinket I was after, but I had nothing like enough DKP to win it. Ah well, next time!

The Chromaggus and Nefarian fights are still the most rewarding and fun fights in the game for me. And the fact we pulled them both off flawlessly on our fifth (Chromaggus) and third (Neffy) kills amazes me. It won't be much longer until we have BWL down to a one-night farm status. :D

I went to level Stormpaw for a bit after BWL, and tried to get back for AQ40 in the evening. Sadly, Earthen Ring had a 380+ queue that I couldn't be bothered wading through, so I went back to Moonglade and got him to lvl 29! :D