So this week was weird.Not zombie weird, or paladins nerfed to the ground weird, or even horseman disappearing RIGHT at 4am weird.

I mean weird as in, no one had a clue what to do kind of weird.

I was settling all comfortably into my role as emissary of doom from the cult of the shadow, pewpewing and face-melting as necessary in my attempt to maybe reach outlands properly. Then I thought, hey, it’d be kind of neat to go with a group into one of them thar dungeons again. I bet I’d be fine in BRD.

So I went to my trainer in Thunderbluff. Don’t ask me why I was in Thunderbluff. I think I slurred or something when talking to the flight master. It was a long, meandering flight, and I spent most of the time wondering why the stupid scorpio-cat-bat-thing was as drunk as someone with a year’s subscription to beer-in-your-mail. Which is not me.

Anyway, poof, there went all my spells, and I tapped into that magic looking-for-meatshields thing while I poked around at new healery type spells.

And I kept poking around, and kept watching people looking for tanks for this or that. All for places in outland. Or Wailing Caverns. Why those two extremes all the time? But only for tanks. One person was looking for heals, but he was also looking for tanks and three “good dps” for Kara. These days, I don’t even know what counts for good dps. Not dying? Dying in a spectacular manner? Finally I got tired of half-heartedly poking at my healing spells and started just picking talents willy nilly. I don’t think I know what half of these things do anymore, but anything that looked to increase my super-awesome priest healing abilities would be great.

And then the world ended.

When I logged back in, all that random point-clicking had come undone. Maybe I didn’t click hard enough? Anyway, I joined back up in the looking-for-meatshields and started scowling at my trainer again. Before clicking anything, I took a closer look at who was available to be my personal meatshield. I wasn’t picky about what dungeon we molested, so that made it both easy and difficult to find people.

“Healer looking for whatever” doesn’t encourage people to join your illustrious cause, it seems. Besides, I wasn’t technically a healer at the moment. I wasn’t technically anything, and my trainer was looking impatient. As impatient as someone can look when they have leather straps bolted in an X across their face. It can be done, trust me.

So, yeah. There was no one. I don’t mean there wasn’t anyone looking for a dungeon that I wanted to visit - like I said, I wasn’t picky. I mean, there wasn’t anyone. NO ONE. I did a quick scan using powerful magics of /who 54-58.

It was me and some druid in Tanaris.  And he logged off as I watched.

Picking out all those healing abilities seemed kind of silly at that point, but with all the changes that have come down the line, recently, I wasn’t really sure where to put my pewpew-facemelting points.

Maybe I’ll just wait for Northrend and something will happen to make people pop up around looking for healinators again. Yes, I’m still nervous about running around out there by myself after the whole zombie thing. I still can’t talk to the bankers in Undercity like I used to…

/shiver

ps: ASK ME KWESTCHUNS.  Maybe I will use your innane quandries to fuel my spite-filled anecdotes another time, while I wait for some meatshields to get big enough to be deserving of my leet heals.  Or … have me along for face melting.  I have no idea.

First off, let me say this will prolly come off as a QQ Post. Which is not my intention but it is what it is. You’ve been warned. What a way to start after an almost two month hiatus huh? Anyway, on with it!

Almost as soon as Patch 3.0x (or whatever they’re calling it these days) hits, I will be retiring Genuflect (my shadow priest and mana battery extraordinaire) possibly forever. They’ve moved the spec, in my eyes, from a Support/Buffing Class to an attempt at a “pure DPS” class, because that’s what they want all the DPS specs to be. If I wanted to be a pure DPS class, I would have stayed on my Rogue (which as of now is where I look to be returning).

The biggest change is likely that of the concept of a Mana Battery, because it’s now a flat increase every time it ticks as the replenishment buff.  Where in most of BC I could rest well knowing I’m kicking ass and doing my best rotation to keep my group’s mana near the top, now in Wrath it’s just a mechanic and everyone gets the same amount no matter how hard I push it. To me this removes almost the whole point of why I rolled a Shadow Priest.

When I first rolled her, I knew they didn’t scale as well as some other classes because if they did infinite mana would be a possibility and Blizzard would never want that. So I was satisfied when I started eclipsing 1300 DPS on her, I knew I was stacking the gear correctly and running my rotation right.

I am fairly sure the rotation or spell priority system Shadow Priests use has really yet to change come the expansion, so in order to put out the DPS you’re still going to have to make sure you’re not failing at it, but the only benefit is to show up higher on the DPS meters.

No longer will your group members go “zomg mana!” because you’re busting your ass. In all likelihood, they won’t even be able to notice a difference. Not that I need a pat on the back, but when you end the fight and your group members are giggling because they all finished with nearly full mana, it lets you know you were doing something right. And it’s always made me smile when I pulled it off.

I can see the reason the change was needed…I am just not happy about it.

Also, they’ve removed the Shadow Weaving debuff from affecting other people. No, it didn’t buff everyone but it helped Warlocks and their Improved Shadow Bolt effect (which now also only affects them) used to help me. We fed off each other. And I personally love Synergy, I look for it everywhere. But they’ve seemed to remove most of the caster stacking like this for reasons. I don’t know what those reasons are, due to not having a Beta Key and able to see it first hand. Perhaps because everyone’s supposed to be able to function on their own, I dunno.

My biggest upset is the fact they’ve turned Misery into 3% Spell Hit rather then the 5% Spell Damage, and turned around and gave it to Boomkins at almost 3 times its value…totally confuses me. Now I know the 3% Spell hit is going to be helpful, but not as much as 5% Spell Damage. You can make up hit pretty easily, but there’s no item in the game that I know of that increases your Spell Damage by 5%. I know they’ve made up for this loss within the shadow priests spells themselves, but I loved seeing a DPS increase for the other spell casters in my group/raid.

Perhaps I rolled Genu for the wrong reasons and that’s why I don’t look forward to the new patch. But I was having a blast on her till I learned of the planned changes in WotLK.

I want my synergy back.

Another major reason I’m not going to miss Genu is Trash fights.

Going from a Rogue to a Caster of any sort makes me feel like I’m slacking. Doesn’t help that my major damage spells all have cooldowns. Maybe I just haven’t figured out how to do it efficently, but I troll the normal sites such as EJ and Shadowpriest.com and I haven’t read of some eye opening experiance. My DPS still rocks on bosses, and dips dreadfully on trash fights.

So for now, Genu will sit on the back burner till I feel like trying my hand at healing one of our 5 man squads, which most likely won’t happen as we have 4 healers. I may level her to 80 for some Disc PvP but as Arenas stand right now with the random elements, I’m not terribly excited. I usually love me some PvP so I might be able to put up with it. We shall see if Genu ever comes around again.

Expect to start seeing some regular posts from me, more than once in a blue moon.

I WAS going to post on my addons for Vonya today. But I forgot. So instead, I’m going to talk about my shot rotation, and how I get between 800 and 1,100 dps in pre-Kara gear.

Now that I have your attention, I’ll give some small addendums. The 1,100 dps was with shaman buffs, drums, and I think I also had a pally buff. The 800 is what I normally get when we do instance runs. When I solo, I can’t even come near those numbers, because I’d pull aggro constantly from my pet. Also, I do actually have one piece of Kara gear - my old guild had a slot that needed filling until a missing guild member appeared, so we took down Attumen and got his wrist armor.

However, since I have seen hunters in very very good gear who thought they were doing well to crank out 500 dps, I wanted to debunk the myth.

For hunters, DPS is determined by shot rotation, and augmented by gear.

I’ll say it again.

For hunters, DPS is determined by shot rotation, and augmented by gear.

If your shot rotation is horrid, no gear is going to fix your constantly flagging dps. Sure, you’ll get boosts from gear upgrades, but you won’t see the true benefit of the gear.

I have discussed some of the key tenets of hunter theorycraft in my posts on Hunter Macros and LittleTrouble.

Around the time I made my LittleTrouble post, there was talk of autoshots no longer being clipped quite as mercilessly by steady shots. I didn’t get the opportunity to test that at the time, but based on tests I’ve done recently, that’s a load of horsehockey.

Steady Shot, as of right now, pre WotLK, still clips your Auto Shot, and this still has an incredible adverse affect on your dps.

And here’s the point where I say something that makes half of you stop listening.

I don’t use a shot rotation macro.

I hate them, I have to be completely honest with you. You could give me mathematical, categorical proof that they’d up my dps, and I would still not use one. For me, personally, reducing a complex and enjoyable class to a single button is killing all the joy I get out of that class. I know that MANY players love and rely on macros. Our own hunter uses a macro, and that allows him to pay attention and call out things like infernals on Prince. That’s fine. That’s just not how I personally enjoy the game.

So my shot rotation isn’t going to help people who rely on macros to get their dps.

Let’s see…did I cover all the legalese? Probably not, but if I didn’t leave holes for you guys to poke in the comments, it just wouldn’t be as much fun, now would it?

So I’ll start from the base shot, and add in my rotation from there. Hopefully that’ll make it easy to see what I’m doing.

AS = Auto Shot
SS = Steady Shot
ArS = Arcane Shot
KC = Kill Command

Just Autoshooting
AS………..AS……….AS………AS……….AS……….AS

Nothing special here - right click on the mob and do nothing else, this is what you get. Remember, AutoShot is your Bread and Butter shot. It’s where most of your DPS should always come from.

Adding in Arcane Shot
AS.ArS-…….AS……….AS………AS……….AS.ArS-…….AS

Arcane Shot is the highest DPS shot that we can include in the rotation. It’s very mana intensive, but at the moment, we’re not worrying about that.  It’s instant cast, so it only takes up the global cooldown, but it has a longer cooldown that allows it to be used every fourth AutoShot or so.

I added a dash ‘-’ to the graphic to indicate the global cooldown. During that time, you cannot cast another shot.

I’d also like to point out that I’m using it at the BEGINNING of the AutoShot rotation. I do this for a few reasons, one of which I’ll cover in a moment. Also, although it’s difficult, it is NOT impossible to clip an AutoShot with an Arcane Shot. I’ve done it, but I have to be either very unlucky or trying really hard to accomplish it. The bigger reason is because Arcane Shot trips the global cooldown, which means it can keep me from casting another shot quickly in the next Auto Shot slot. Which leads us to….

Adding in Steady Shot
AS.ArS-…….AS.SS—-…AS.SS—-..AS.SS—–.AS.ArS-…….AS

Steady Shot WILL clip AutoShot if it’s not fired off at the right time. Personally, I use the LittleTrouble Addon so I know exactly when to time it. I’ve found that hitting the button JUST as the AutoShot seems to be ending yeilds the best results for me. Server lag keeps that from clipping my shots (it took me some experimentation to find the right timing) and Steady Shot gets off as quickly as possible, making it less likely to clip the NEXT auto shot.

Steady Shot is more mana efficient than Arcane Shot, but does less damage. On the other hand, it doesn’t have a cooldown, just a cast time. You could, theoretically, chain cast Steady Shot, but that would clip almost all of your AutoShots and drastically reduce your dps.

You’ll note in my totally professional graphic up there that I indicated with a large group of dashes just how much of the AutoShot time is taken up with the casting of Steady Shot. Timing is key - even a second can mean the difference between a clipped shot and a perfect rotation.

But we’re not done! Look at all that time left between the AutoShots on the rounds where we do the Arcane Shots! Surely we can fill that up with something useful….

Adding in Kill Command
AS.ArS-..KC-..AS.SS—-…AS.SS—-..AS.SS—–.AS.ArS-..KC-..AS

That looks much better! Very few dots left (dots being time not spent on DPS). Kill Command may not be the best dps ability we’ve got, but there’s no reason not to trigger it while we’ve got the opportunity. There’s just enough time in that Auto Shot gap for you to slip in both an Arcane Shot and a Kill Command.

Kill Command, for those who don’t want to look it up themselves, is triggered whenever YOU (the hunter) land a critical strike. It tells your pet to land an extra attack for X amount of damage. So it’s going to be available pretty often, but it’s honestly not impressive (or reliable) enough dps to consider using it instead of either an Arcane Shot or a Steady Shot. Using this method, you don’t sacrifice any of your shot dps, and you still get to use it. You may not get to use it quite as often as if you were spamming the key, but you still use it more often than if you only used shots.

Alternately, you could add a sting in there. I’m very guilty of never using my stings. Things just don’t usually live long enough for it to matter. On bosses, I could probably put up the poison sting in the first Arcane Shot companion slot, instead of a Kill Command, and see if that improved the DPS. That would require me to actually do more instances with Khuuna though, and she mostly solos and farms. Those furious crawdads up in Skettis? Yeah, they’re mad at HER.

And, of course, in the expansion, there is talk about how steady shot will no longer clip auto shots. I know. I’m focusing on the here-and-now, not the what-may-possibly-happen-later. Also, I didn’t add in any of my “special” stuff - my KittyBomb macro (Kittybomb is Bestial Wrath, trinket, and Rapid Fire) isn’t in here, and neither are the sometimes-needed pet stuns and things like that.

USE YOUR KITTYBOMB, beastmaster hunters! Use it! Don’t save it up for the boss fights, go ahead and use it on trash. Don’t wait. Use it. Don’t worry about clipping your autoshot with it. The dps boost from it is too high to try and “slip it in”. And yes, if you’re good, you can still slip Steady Shots in your rotation, even with Kittybomb. I can say from experience that drums + kittybomb + shaman buff pretty much negates steady shots. Don’t even try. But if it’s just kittybomb, you can still slip in some Steadies.

Well, the warlock has been semi-shelved again and again I have picked up a toon that is a class/spec combination I have attempted to play a few times in the past. This go round I have little choice but to stick with it. Also, as I started said character from scratch just last Thursday and with a whopping amount of help (read that as ‘he did most of the work’) from Aensu, said character is now level 48.

That’s right. From diapers to level 48 in 8 days.

I imagine that over the course of the next few weeks I shall choose to share my insights and convoluted thoughts on this class (yes I am purposefully keeping it a mystery for the time being). For this weeks post I shall simply leave a thank you to Vonya.

Thank you for keeping this site going strong, thank you for pushing the rest of the EgoCorp to keep blogging with you and thank you for the new avatars and sidebar images.

As a side note I think my avatar looks like Might Guy in the “Nice Guy” pose. I should totally have a word bubble so with “Yosh!” in it.

A VERY interesting post went up over at WoWInsider not too long ago*.

The gist of the post was that hunter pets can be massaged even further with family-abilities than they are now, to make them more flexible and raid-viable. I encourage you to go over and take a gander at it if you’re interested, the details of the various pet abilities are an interesting read even for non-hunters because you can dream about what kind of pet might synergize well with whatever class you play.

Normally I don’t like to dwell too much on entries that have “wouldn’t it be great if…” and “oooh, it’s possible we may get…” type topics. Not only does it accomplish little, it makes me weep to think of how badly I want my priest to have a Holy Form to counter the Shadow Form for shadow priests. It’s not a new idea, it’s not a unique and special snowflake of an idea, but by golly it would be SO FRACKIN COOL. You know it would! Don’t even bother to deny it!

Ahem. Back to the hunter pets.

The reason I decided to go ahead and make a post that is not only just a response to someone else’s post, but also has nothing to do with the reality of huntering at this moment is because I really like the idea, and it got me to thinking.

I love the hunter class. One of the things that MAKES the hunter class is how very customizable it is.

Druids (bless their heart) look exactly the same in bear form and decked out in the most fanTABulous gear available as a brand spanking new level 10 bear druid. I am convinced that this is an oversight that will be fixed in the expansion, but that’s not the point of this post.

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Wow, the slacker finally gave us part 3 of this “guide”. Psh, how can he even use that word? If you missed the first or second installment I’d recommend starting there.

Anyways on to the final part.

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While reading this blog, one may often come across the phrase “Main Assist”. You may have even read the lovely articles written on this subject by our very own Vonya. We know what a main assist does: he or she picks the target for the other dps and the tank to focus their aggressions on, making everyone’s job easier, even the healers’ (two wounded mobs do more damage than one healthy mob). But is that really all there is to it?

No. The mantle of MA isn’t one that can be assigned arbitrarily. Not only must you consider class factors (do the mechanics of this person’s class require them to switch targets often to apply CC or other effects), but you must also consider the ability of the player. The tank and other dps rely on the MA to provide them with a primary target in a timely, intelligent fashion. The job of being MA can be just as difficult and nerve wracking (and fun) as tanking or healing. Just like a bad tank or bad healer can ruin an otherwise good group, a bad MA can turn hard pulls into wipes. A good MA plays a large part in pulling a group through difficult battles and large pulls, and in concert with a good tank, creates order from chaos, allowing the team to do things that the average player would consider improbable or even impossible without being ridiculously overgeared. Raid icons, while handy, are no replacement for a skilled MA that can adapt to changing situations.

Not all mobs are created equal. Some are far more dangerous than others, designed specifically to ruin your day, and most of them have some kind of trick up their sleeve. One key component of what makes a good MA is the ability to recognize high threats and prioritize targets so that the most dangerous enemies - which can vary wildly depending on the composition and overall skill of your group compared to the composition of the pull - are taken down early, before they can cause a wipe. Sometimes it’s as simple as “kill the casters first”, but more often it’s not.

In our travels together, we’ve found that not only is the concept of the MA completely alien to many players, but so are the dynamics of prioritizing targets beyond the most rudimentary of guidelines. Further, many of those that do understand the concepts fail to deliver once the pull is engaged - they talk a big game, but fall to pieces when the pressure is on. This is who the MA system is designed for. One skilled player takes on the workload of the entire dps team so that the rest can focus entirely on dealing damage, and all they have to worry about is assisting properly and watching their threat.

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Well friends, it has been some weeks since the inaugural (no I did not misspell Arugal just there) Warlock leveling post. I am sure some of you have noticed Zasp has been trying to steal my thunder by writing on the topic of leveling a combat rogue. Well I won’t have it. Or I tried not to have it. He was to be tied up, set on fire, followed up with being kicked and stuffed into a closet. But, what can I say, he is a rogue and seems to have vanished from my local vicinity for the time being.

Back on topic! Shall we? Yes!

As we learned together in the aforementioned previous post, leveling with an affliction build is a breeze!. But guess what, once you reach the summit, its not all down hill for a warlock. There are other options friends, yes there are and today I intend to address that which I feel is not only most viable but most fun to boot (in this case the usage of that phrase does not mean “to kick” but feel free to give a Rocket Kick, its fun).

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Lets go back to the basics, shall we?

Hunters are ranged dps. We have a pet, which also contributes to the dps we output. As BRK illustrates every time he talks about huntering, a hunter and her pet are not two separate entities. We are a team. We work together and the combined might of our contributions is more than simply the sum of our dps.

But when you’re just a baby, starting out, you don’t know any of that.

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Continuing the post on my preferred leveling build, I hereby present the second installment of the 3 part “guide”. If you missed the first part, I’d recommend starting here. A little reminder, this is about combat leveling. It talks about using Sinister Strike and no other attacks along the lines of Backstab are discussed.

With that, I remind you that the Brain Melt Warning light has been turned on, please enjoy your flight.

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