Patch 3.0.8 Hunter Fallout

So its been almost a week since the patch and I’m learning my rotations for survival. I’m not even trying trap dancing because until they give us a ranged option for more of our traps the very concept grates on my sensibilities.

Once again blizzard have altered hunters so that one tree alone is end game raid reliable. And what grates the most is that tree is out damaged by hybrid classes, which ones tend to depend on the fight but Death Knights, Fury Warriors and Elemental Shamans and Retribution Paladins are usually up there.

Anyway I’ve sort of got over the fact that in 25 mans on single target fight like patchwerk I’m no longer likely to be near the top of the dps charts. Its still really annoying but maybe it’ll be fixed one day…

I have noticed that with survival my burst damage has jumped and after almost messing up a 10 man patchwerk pull I have learnt that using Explosive shot with a Misdirection can be bad due to its ticks being able to crit! Survival is interesting and different and I don’t mind having to learn it that much, what I do mind is being forced into it.

Finally, volley was over powered and needed to have its damage reduced, it was insane that hunters could be topping the charts on AoE packs. But WHAT THE HELL where blizzard thinking? If there is a class that it makes even less sense to give huge AoE potential to it’s the Rogue. But lo and behold in 25 man Naxx I have been seeing Rogues put out almost the same level of dps as pre nerfed volley!

Blizz Get a Grip please, I’m begging you!

Wisp

Depression

So its happened, patch 3.0.8......

And BM hunters have been f**ked up. I did a 25 man VoA on the day of the patch, and my dps went from just under 4k to 2600......

So I'm trying a survival spec, its something new and currently is far better than what was Beastmastery. But trap danceing... I'll be honest I don't like it, why O why O why should a hunter have to move in and out of melee range to maximise their dps??? It is completly and totaly STUPID. We are a ranged class no a melee one! 

Any way another problem with with Survival is I'm geared up for BM, so I'm forced to spend gold on re-gemming AND all that mail armour that has been passed on an DE'd in the past I suddenly need to go back and get.

The argument from blizz was that BM hunters where doing to much damage compared to other classes.... Maybe to start with, but up until this nerf, and nerf is an understatement. I've been watching the mages & locks catching up. Our achivement gaining Patchwerk kill, I was only a fraction above a lock.

Now I get beaten into the ground by hybrid classes, DK's near the top, elemental shamens, boomkins, all of them beating me in the 25 Naxx I've just done. I was around 8th place on patchwerk a single target full out nuke fight. Something that hunters and rogues should be excelling at.

Blizzard got this patch very very wrong. Hunters needed a nerf to our AoE damage, but BM didn't need to be screwed on this scale, MM & Survival needed to be brought upto the same level as us. Mages & Locks in PvE where with gear catching up. Rogues needed bringing up in line Hunters.

Suppose atm, I am feeling really let down, disappointed and depressed. If I wanted to stick with BM and try it, I know I'll be way down on the damage these days and I'd have to swap my cat for an ugly looking devilsaur OR spend days doing nothing but camping the spawn points to try and get a spirit beast (I'm OCD but not to the point where I can't see progress as time passes).

Maybe the large bar of cadbury's will make me feel better, but currently I doubt it. I'll let my imaginary readers know.

Wisp

Damage Charts

I did write this the day after my last post! But forgot to sort of put it up. So Here is my view on where a hunter should be on damage meters. I know that Blizzards current policy is something about utility no longer being purchased at a cost to DPS, but I feel there should be limits especially if you include PvP. This game has two major sides PvE and PvP and the majority of players will do both, and so to give all the DPS classes/specs the same damage in a raid situation is in my opinion a bad thing because when you swap to PvP that gives the classes with added utility an unfair advantage. Just have a look at how over powered retribution paladins and death knights are at the moment in battlegrounds and arenas.

So below is a list of how I feel the DPS chart for at least ¾ of raid bosses should look if every one is equivalently geared and the players equally skilled. Then I’ll run through the different classes, but please be aware these are my opinions from observation and experience.

Damage Meters for Boss – Generic

1. Hunters, Rogues, Mages, Warlocks
2. Priests (Shadow), Druids (Feral/Balance), Warriors (Arms/Fury), Shaman (Elemental/Enhancement), Paladin (Retribution), Death Knight

Hunters – I know I’m a hunter but I do think we should be one of the classes topping DPS Charts in a raid situation. And this should be regardless of talent tree. The reason for this is a hunter is a damage dealing class, translated into PvP we are still a damage dealing class our only shared form of Crowd Control is freezing trap which has 100% chance of break on any form of damage. Then based on spec there is Intimidation which requires our pet to be alive and to hit and is a very short duration or scatter shot which breaks on damage and is also a short duration. Apart from that we have a few tricks for staying at range which can help against some classes but against others who have multiple stun, slow, cc options we are stuffed if our anti cc trinket is on cool down, or we are not a BM hunter with Bestial Wrath off cool down.

Rogues – Should be pretty much sharing our top spot. A rogue has weaker armour than a hunter and has to fight in melee range, which is an argument for them having more DPS. But they also have better damage mitigation in stupidly high dodge ratings and better CC options than a hunter. Vanish is also a much better get out of combat option than Feign Death. Taken all together these all roughly balance out.

Mages – When it comes to AoE and group mobs, like all 5,10 and 25 man trash fights seem to be so far in Wrath. Mages should be up there at the top along with the destruction type warlocks. For raid bosses, mages have much weaker armour than hunters and also stand at range. This may, like with rogues, be an argument for slightly higher DPS but again their utility in party and personal buffs as well as better CC options, ways of getting out of combat in PvP and off course their AoE abilities should balance that out.

Warlocks – Warlocks are currently completely underpowered in PvP, gone are the days of the joke “I beat a warlock and then the game credits rolled”. This was followed by or had replaced shaman, can’t remember which way around it was. Warlocks should really be sharing the spot with mages on the DPS charts, with those spec’d into direct damage being higher than those spec’d into DoTs. Warlocks have the same armour as mages and also fight at range. Warlocks like mages have good CC options but there other utility is in the fact they can have pets and put DoTs on lots of enemies at once. Apart from CC and run they are lacking good ways to get out of combat.

The Rest – One thing that the remaining classes have that the first four don’t is entirely different role options in the different talent trees. Priests can spec to heal or DPS. Shamans can spec to heal or DPS. Druids and Paladins can spec to heal, DPS or tank. Warriors can spec to DPS or Tank. Death Knights currently appear to Tank & DPS in all three talent trees. Because of these options the DPS specs of these classes should be behind Hunters, Rogues, Mages & Warlocks who are damage dealing classes in all talent trees.

How far behind is  probably a contentious issue, and my personal opinion is that it should be around 2%. Its not a huge amount, but to me it sounds reasonable.

Wisp

AutoHotkey

There was a major problem with hunters that existed at the end of TBC in the end content raiding. This problem stems from the need to maximise your dps and the use of a “button” mashing macro to achieve it. The idea was that you rapidly hit the key binding or clicked on the action button for a macro. Each press can only trigger one skill so by spamming the button it fires off the ones not affected by cool downs. Before Autoshot & Steady shot got decoupled they where two of the actions included in the button, the rest where usually pet related.

Now button spamming has a major problem, you are doing a repetitive action for sustained periods of time and this leads to injury! And it got that far with me on more than one occasion. The solution to this problem? Don’t use a macro, watch your damage drop and get shouted at for slacking on the dps? Buy a programmable keyboard, a solution I know lot of people use.

I didn’t have the money to justify this so in the end I found a little bit of software to do what I need, AutoHotkey. With this program I run a script on my PC while using wow. 

XButton1::
Loop ; Since no number is specified with it, this is an infinite loop unless "break" or "return" is encountered inside.
{
  if not GetKeyState("XButton1", "P") ; 
  break 
  ; 
  send 7
  sleep 200
}
return

This script is simple as can be, my left side mouse button, the one in reach of my thumb has been reprogrammed to press the 7 key on my keyboard 5 times a second. Number 7 used to be my hotkey for my old TBC Steady Shot spam macro, currently its just normal steady shot. I get the same effect of repeatedly hitting the key or clicking on the macro button, but without the risk of RSI.

Wisp

Hunter Specs

When I first started this game I levelled my hunter in the Marksman Tree. To me, coming from a pen & paper RPG background, the hunter was a ranger type character. The main attraction to the class was distance combat that wasn’t spell casting. From a lore point of view I was thinking along the line of the night elf sentinels, maybe they should give night elf hunters an ability to put an owl up a tree... And from the fantasy RPG side one of my preferred classes has always been ranged fighters of some form. Back on point, the pet part of the class was an interesting gimmick and not that important.

And so I level to 60 and started to raid still as marksman. The pets had started to grow on me a bit by now but due to their vulnerability back then I did instances and raids as much without my pet as with it. At some point while at level 60 I switched from MM to survival, I think it was while I was doing a lot of PvP as well as raiding.

Burning crusade came out and I was soon back to MM, well at least I think I was and I levelled up to 70. It was at level 70 when I started to raid the new 25 man instances that I began to look at optimising dps. In the old 40 mans as long as you knew your job and didn’t slack it seemed less of an issue. But now with only 25 people not only did you have to know your job and not slack but also try to optimise dps. So I started to investigate and for a while I stayed as MM but eventually, despite pets still being vulnerable I made the leap, and to me it was a huge leap, into Beast Mastery. I lost scatter shot!, I ditched silencing shot! I even sacrificed my extended range. Because I do a lot of solo as well as group content as well as play in battlegrounds every now and then this loss to me was HUGE.

A BM spec took some getting used to, having to try and keep my pet alive as well as dealing DPS. Back in the time when it seemed no healers realised how important the pet was, especially to BM hunters, and so the only heals it got was the old channelled mend pet. Seeing my pet die on any boss fight with AoE damage was depressing but I got used to it. Then as time passed I suddenly realised my view on the class had changed, my pet had gone from a gimmick to an integral part of what it meant to play a hunter. And from that point onwards I have been a Beast Mastery hunter.

Then the awesomeness that is Wrath came out and levelling to 80 with my gorilla being able to tank 3,4 & even 5 man quest mobs for me. I was tempted to level as a PvP orientated spec so I could practice a different style of play ready for Arena’s at level 80 but Beast Mastery had become for me the defining spec for my class. I tried various MM & BM builds for raiding but BM always came out top. I didn’t try Survival because since it was nerfed way back in early TBC or it could even have been before, my memory fades, I’ve considered it more of a PvP than PvE talent tree.

So here I am completely committed to the BM spec, dreading the host of nerfs threatened on the current PTR because competent PvE BM hunters have been blowing every other class out of the water. My views on these proposed nerfs and where a hunter should be on a DPS chart shall be my subject for tomorrow. And I listen to the latest BRK pod cast, this time he has an experienced survivalist hunter talking about survival raiding talents. Its well worth listening to, but got me thinking about once again trying an alternate spec.

As I see things the rotations for a BM hunter are the simplest to use > Put Serpent Sting on the target and then SS every 1.5 seconds until SS expires and replace it. The complexities come from managing your pet, keeping it alive changing aspects to maximise the gain from Bestial Wrath etc.

For a MM or Survival hunter the pet is a lot less important, if it dies your not going to lose 40-50% of your dps. Because of this it needs less micromanagement. These two specs have their complexity in the shot rotations and knowing when to use a special shot based on the procs of others.

Where as the specs of some classes like Paladins and Druids are obviously completely different most people don’t realise that different hunter specs are subtlety completely different and I would, just for my own ego like to master the different aspects of what it means to play a hunter expertly. Changing specs at 50g a shot doesn’t really help this as the gold is needed for other goals I have in the game and now I’m exalted with pretty much everything I don’t always bother with the dailies. So I think once dual specs come out it will be time to master the multiple ways of being a hunter as they exist now.

Wisp

Achivements

In the early hours of Sunday morning I reached 5555 achievement points. And as the number looks cool here it is!

It was a nightmare to get that last 10 point achievement to reach the 5555 goal! I thought to myself the hoard have Winter Grasp and I still needed the Leaning Tower achievement, so all I have to do is kill some hoard to get rank two and drive a siege engine up to a tower and level it!

Unfortunately in the WG battle around 3am the number of alliance in the zone ranged between 3 and 5, While the tenacity buff grew up to around 8. Taking down that tower while outnumbered like that was not easy, One of my siege engines didn’t even reach the tower, the one before got just a single hit in. But I persevered and eventually using a demolisher I got close enough for the last three shots needed to bring it down. Getting my achievement and somehow around 2000 honour for a loss……

Wisp

Naxxramas Pwnage

Last nights Naxx raid was amazing for a whole host of reasons. To start with it was our first one night clear of the instance which is AWSOME. During this amazing raid we did Arachnophobia again for those in the raid who still needed it and because it made clearing stuff faster. This was achieved the same way as the first time; through the treacle effect of lag.

Then moving forward in time to the last wing of the night – The Construct Quarter. This one is left till last because of Thaddius, normally lag makes things trickier but Thad tends to lag even if there is no lag elsewhere, these two can stack up making him almost impossible. By leaving him till last the hope is a lot of raiding groups have left.

So… getting back to the point, last week we killed Patchwerk is 3 mins 23, leaving 23 more to shave off for Make Quick Werk of Him. Well last night he went down in 2 mins 39 and I hit 5092 dps!  WWS Stats  of the fight.

And finally at the end of the raid looking at the corpse of Kel’Thuzad I found this lying around.

Now armed with the Envoy of Mortality I should go way over that 5k dps on our next Patchwerk kill! Even on trash in 5 man heroics I was pulling 3000 dps with the new gun :)

So as the title says last night was Naxxramus Pwnage!

Wisp

Achievements

There are those who hate them, claiming they are just another grind, and there are those like me who think they are a great addition. Some off them keep track of the things in the game that interest me anyway such as reputations!

So achievements are earned for all sorts of things and some of the harder one even come with bonuses like vanity pets, mounts and titles. Each achievement also awards achievement points, there is no use for these apart from as a measure of progression.

My personal land mark achievements so far have been.

• Complete 3000 quests – “Wispcat the Seeker”
• Complete the fishing achievements – “Salty Wispcat”
• Exalted with 40 factions – “Wispcat the Exalted”

Now as achievements are something I wish to complete all off!!!! I’ve added my current score to the counters on right side of the blog. 

Finally there is a web site that crawls the EU & US armouries for each characters achievement points allowing you to easily compare yourself! This site, Achievement Tracker, appears to update on every Sunday and I’ve added it in my wow links, pre-filtered to Aszune.

Wisp

Playing Warcraft Catchup Again!

Its been a very long time since my last world of warcraft post. Initially because I was a bit fed up at the time, and later because I can be a lazy git! Well as I said in my new year post its time to start talking, once more, to my imaginary audience. 

So in roughly chronological order here’s a rundown of what has been happening.

• Due to poor attendance the GM of Dice called a raiding break for the summer period…. Over the next two months, yup TWO MONTHS! People understandably left to guilds that where not taking stupidly long raiding breaks.
• Being the kind of person who has never left a guild lightly I stayed around until September when raiding was planned to recommence. But the guild was pretty much dead at that point. So I left the guild.
• Within a few days some friends invited me into “The Exalted”. Now the main members of this guild where key members of my second raiding guild “Exalted”, way back in the days when MC & BWL where the places to raid. Why a different name? well that’s maybe a story for another time. The plan was to do 10 man content once WotLK was released.
• A few weeks later I got a whisper from an officer in Elysium, I’d applied to join them ages ago. Well here was a chance to raid SWP to see and master the final raid of the Burning Crusade which I had almost given up hope for. So I joined Elysium.
• Once by one the bosses died, clearing up to Muru by the time patch 3 hit and all the mechanics changed in preparation for the second expansion. Muru and Kil'jaeden soon died. I have to say raiding then was a pleasure, this guild was mature and the raiding atmosphere was reasonably relaxed.
• While not raiding I started working on the new achievements and maxing out more factions to exalted.
• WRATH OF THE LICH KING
• A week off work to play wrath. And OMG Blizzard have learned loads. The quest lines flow together, you talk to an NPC about a quest and those around them actually listen and offer there own quests! Then there is the phasing technology, as you follow the story lines the zones change to reflect what has happened. This whole new way of doing things adds to the feeling of immersion, to the feeling that what you are doing has AN IMPACT. Unlike the Sunwell where the changing was server wide, this is done on a player by player basis.
• Level 80 was reached during that week off work, as per the plan.
• In the month and a bit that has followed we have cleared Naxxramus the introduction level 80 raid and the two single boss raids Eye of Eternity & Obsidian Sanctum. Hopefully the next raid Uldar will be more challenging! But while waiting for that content patch the achievement system gives ways of doing the raids in harder and more challenging ways for greater rewards and loot!

And that sort of brings me up to date. I’ll cover my new obsession, achievements, in another post!

Wisp

Happy New Year

I've been a completly lazy git since september by not posting but that will change.... as if!

Any way to all my Imaginary readers! WELCOME TO 2009 :)