Getting a grip

I've just been doing a little reading of Blizz's hunter forums, and it's pretty easy to feel like you're doing everything wrong and there's too much conflicting information and oh my god! What to do!?

It's ok. Take a deep breath, exhale, then take another. Exhale again. Whew. Ok. We're just over a month away from Cataclysm's release. That is not a whole lot of time left at 80, then we're going to be leveling and getting into new 5-person dungeons and heroics, using those to gear for raids. It is actually completely fine if you're not optimally geared and reforged right now. That was the issue that caused this post, by the by: reforging. The big question is "do I reforge crit or haste into mastery? Or both?" Incidentally I'll be giving my version of the answer to that question a little further down, but the real answer is: right now it's honestly not a big deal. The value of every point of rating of everything is going to go down once we start leveling. We have an entirely new resource system and new shot priorities for all three specs. We're not tied to a wolf (or a windserpent, hi burning crusade!) any more. Play around with your specs, practice timing on target dummies, think about the pet you'll want to use for leveling, and if you really really want to, think about what you should reforge on your gear. But honestly? Don't worry about it all that much. T10 doesn't even look as cool as T8 or T6, in my opinion, so I'm probably just going to toss it in the trash when I start replacing it with level 85 dungeon blues. It's ok to not care.

If you do care, I understand. I was over there reading stuff, and I think I do have a conclusion. Personally, I'd like to have a 1.5 second steady shot cast time, so I'm going to hold on to my haste until I hit that point. I'd also like to not go much lower than 50% crit rate, so if I'm dipping under that I'm going to stop reforging. As it happens, I haven't raided with my hunter in months, her gear is out of date, and I actually can't really do much reforging at all. So whatever! I'll just farm my welfare T10, try to help my new little 10-person raiding guild kill Arthas, and then move on to the expansion. I've already upgraded my account and it's finished the download that they've got ready so far (although I'm sure there will be more stuff to download).

In the meantime, at some point yesterday I spent ten minutes apiece on practice dummies, checking my DPS for MM vs. SV. My MM was consistently three to four hundred DPS higher. I've also changed my marks spec to this, essentially dropping marked for death in favor of bombardment. I've had a few procs from RiF since then, and it's a little bit of a bothersome proc, since it doesn't discount the kill command but instead refunds its cost. That means you have to find a space in your timing to borrow 40 focus and lose a GCD. The most natural place I've found is when I've just renewed my ISS buff and would normally cast two arcanes in a row. KC hits harder than an arcane, even for marks, so losing the global works out ok, and the focus refund makes it possible to work in something extra a little bit further on.

Anyway, happy huntering!