Back to the Cat!

Well I took advantage of the Christmas break to get Stormpaw up to level 60. He hit 60 whilst main healing a doomed run to Strathholme Undead. As soon as that was over, I got asked to join an Upper Blackrock Spire raid being run by a guildmate's Raid Group.It went ok despite a few wipes and Storm's going be raiding with them a bit in the future.

Apart from that, I've sadly abandoned Storm's Moonkin spec in favor of something not dissimilar to what he used before the patch. He's now a decent healer, a capable damage dealer and a serviceable tank. In fact, last night I attempted Storm's first run as main tank since Wailing Caverns at about level 18, in Scholomance.

There was a steep learning curve involved, but two of the people in the party had played Warriors before and were in a position to give me advice. Despite some deaths, we managed a decent run on the place, everybody learning their new roles in familiar surroundings.

Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational Battle Chicken!

A couple of pictures of Stormpaw in Moonkin form:





I'm really enjoying the Moonkin whilst soloing. Not only does Stormpaw do a lot of damage, but he has the resilience to take some hits if an enemy gets close. The only downside is that it costs me some of my efficency as a healer in groups, but I should be able to mitigate that over time.

Stormy as it stands is 3/4 of the way to level 57, and I'm going to push to get him as close to 60 as I can before the weekend. Wulf hasn't been getting that much love at the moment, I only log on with him every so often to kill a few Dragonkin to keep my hand in. Part of me regrets stopping raiding with Adventure Lovers, but then again, I know if I was still raiding with them, then I'd be thinking about playing my healers. There's only so many hours in a day after all.

Attack of the Killer Alts!

Well, I haven't been playing Wulf that much recently, although I've managed to get on a couple of raids with mate's groups, and my current spec seems to be performing admirably under those circumstances. I'm going to concentrate this post on my two alternate characters who have been taking up most of my playing time right now.

Stormpaw's gone through some changes recently. Up until the patch, he was focussed on the Feral talent tree, dealing damage through his animal forms. It's great for soloing, but since Storm doesn't really use his feral forms that much when grouped with others, I decided to change his set-up. Initially I split his talents pretty evenly between the Balance (offensive spellcasting) and Restoration (healing spells) trees, which worked pretty well in groups, but Gave him some problems whilst soloing. That in mind, I ended up respeccing him to focus more on the Balance tree. The end result, he now has the ability to shapeshift into a Battle Chicken (well, ok, it's technically called Moonkin, but it looks like a frigging battle chicken!).

In this form Storm becomes more physically robust, able to take a pounding, but sacrifices his ability to cast healing spells. He also tends to draw a lot more aggro than a lot of other offensive casters, which means I won't be using it much in groups (no problem, I'll end up healing in most groups anyway). He also tends to run out of mana very quickly, although there are ways around this that he'll be exploiting.

I've also been levelling Delanthir, my elven priest. He's only level 28 at the moment, but I'm finding his ability to grind XP almost as smooth as my Hunter's, thanks to a slightly unorthodox talent spec reccomended by some friends. I doubt he'll hit lvl 60 before the expansion, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

More on 2.01 and Pics.

As promised, some pictures to illustrate my point.

First of all, on Tuesday Night, before the patch hit, I took a couple of Screenshot's of Wulf's old status quo:


This is how his combat stat's used to pan out with his old 20/31/0 spec. What the old interface doesn't show you is that his Ranged combat critial strike chance was at 23.09%.



This was the stats for his trusted Wolf, Fellpaw.

Now, after the patch, things changed remarkably.

First of all, Wulf's endgame DPS went up despite a drop in ranged attack power:



Also, Fellpaw now got a percentage of some of Wulf's stats, which boosted his combat effectiveness somewhat, even before I'd applied Beastmastery talents:



Of course, once he was fully specced out, things got really silly:



(Editorial note, I don't remember Fellpaw having that high damage unbuffed, I suspect I took this at the tail end of using Bestial Wrath.)

Speaking of Bestial Wrath, Wulf has also gained the ability to share in Fellpaw's Bestial Wrath with The Beast Within. Although the visual effects are endearingly silly:



Finally, a few other changes I really like about Hunters in this patch:

New Ammo: The new level 55 Wicked Arrows are a godsend for Hunters. Before, our most common option was the Jagged Arrow that added 13 damage per second to our ranged attacks. They're pretty awesome when you get them at lvl 40, but twenty levels on, they kind of leave a bit to be desired. Whilst it's possible to get better ammunition by either going to the Alterac Valley Battleground (16.5 DPS) or by taking up engineering (17.5 DS), both options require a lot of time and money (you can expect to spend roughly 60 silver for 200 of either of these options, compared to 10 for the Jagged Arrows.) Having arrows now that not only do more damage (22 DPS), are cheap (16 silver per stack) and are freely available is a massive boost.

Scorpid Sting: This was something of a poor cousin before. It's old form (reducing a target's Strength and Agility by 68) it was useful, but not groundbreaking. The new form (reduces target's chance to hit with melee and ranged spells by 5%) makes it damned-near *essential*. It will now be my sting of choice when soloing.

Pet Scaling: All pets now benefit from the bonuses given to their master's armor, stamina, attack power and spell resistances. Incredibly useful, since it gives your pet a chance to keep up with your damage output as your gear gets better.

UI: The default character screen now has more detailed stats for ranged combat, melee combat, spells and defensive values. I can finally see things like my Ranged crit chance right next to my ranged damage stats.

Post patch: First thoughts.

Went with this Beastmastery/Marksmanship spec in the end:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent-bc=mE0h0xxRVuVoVx

The white numbers are sick! My wolf went up from 70DPS pre-patch (with 20points in BM) to 107DPS post-patch, and that's before factoring Frenzy, Bestial Wrath and Ferocious Inspiration.

For my part, I had something like 1480 RAP-self-buffed before the patch, that now sits at 1184. That said, thanks to Serpent's Swiftness and the new 22DPS vendor ammo, my self-buffed paperdoll DPS has gone up from 190 to 224!

Haven't tested it in raid situation, but the inital numbers look encouraging. Although I suspect a lack of Mortal Shots will hurt my overall raid damage output somewhat.

I'd taken some before and after screenshots, but I've yet to upload them for the web, so they'll wait for a future post.

The more things change...

Well after a fun couple of weeks raiding with Adventure Lovers, I've come to the conclusion that I wasn't avoiding playing Wulf because I couldn't raid, but rather because I didn't have fun playing him. I've cancelled my application, returned to Chaotic Divinity and am currently dividing my playing time between Stormpaw and Delanthir, my elven Shadow-specced Priest.

I won't be playing Wulf much before the expansion. That said, I made some screengrabs of his stats before the changes made by today's patch. If I can get on tonight, I'll make comparisons about how the changes have affected him.