Why Aspect of the Iron Hawk is totally the wrong direction

Guys, I'm getting pretty worried about Aspect of the Iron Hawk. And Spirit Bond, for that matter! They're bad talents. The passive damage reduction tied to Shadow Priests' Shadow Form is bad. Passive damage reduction for Moonkin is bad.

Greg Street has himself written many times about exactly the reasons these sorts of talents are bad, especially when they're a talent or glyph. They eliminate having an actual choice between compelling options and instead provide the player with one unequivocally correct choice and one or more "traps." These other choices may look good to the casual or the less than completely thorough player, but the vast majority of players will be picking the single, mathematically best option.

This problem isn't unique to passive boosts, of course! A Cataclysm Marksmanship hunter that didn't take Readiness, for example, is absolutely just speccing wrong. There's no wiggling around it: if you don't talent into that button, you've made a mistake. The difference is that at least with Readiness, when you spec correctly you get a new button to push that has exciting ramifications for how you plan out your burst phases in a boss encounter.

With the current Aspect of the Iron Hawk, you get nothing of the sort. You simply take that talent because it's the correct choice. Then 15% less damage happens to you. The end.

Compare this with the relationship between Exhilaration, Crouching Tiger, and the Glyph of Deterrence.

Picking these three choices feels really good. They all synergize with each other in fun and exciting ways. Crouching Tiger lets you push the Disengage and Deterrence buttons substantially more frequently, while Exhilaration and the Glyph of Deterrence improve survivability value of choosing to push those buttons frequently. Considered as a whole, this set of choices rewards and encourage you to look for opportunities to use those abilities skillfully. You're going to be actively looking for excuses to use Disengage, ways to abuse Deterrence, encounter mechanics that present puzzles you can solve as a hunter.

Aspect of the Iron Hawk does none of that, and yet we'll be forced to take it, because it will overall be more effective in getting guild-first kills.

Think about the thousands and thousands and thousands of damage that happen to you during essentially any progression encounter. There are rare exceptions like normal Baleroc, but for the most part there is plenty of unavoidable damage to keep the healers busy. That's part of how they punish you for taking avoidable damage: on a progression encounter, your healers are already going to be stressed, so making mistakes means you can die very easily.

Iron Hawk just shaves 15% off the top of that constant, ongoing damage. There is no way that the healing from Exhilaration and the DR from Deterrence will catch up to that. It's just impossible. Spirit Bond, in addition to itself being a dull and dreary passive talent, is a joke compared to Iron Hawk.

Iron Hawk needs to go. I am 100% behind Mr. Street's stated goal for Pandaria when it comes to compelling choice. I think the current talent model is looking good, and I think the philosophy is looking good in Diablo 3 as well. But we've still got a few of these reprobate abilities sitting around, and the last thing we need to do is add more of them.

Or well, that's my opinion anyway! If anyone can make a good argument in Iron Hawk's favor, I would be delighted (if somewhat incredulous!) to hear it.

More coherent thoughts on the beta

Update: I hadn't originally read the current beta tooltip for Aspect of the Iron Hawk correctly, and the fact that it's a flat 15% DR changes my conclusions. Thank you to Jackbelucky and Pathemeous in the comments for pointing out my mistake.

I've done some more playing around with the beta so far, and I think I've got some more coherent thoughts on it.

First: as they currently stand in the beta, hunters are mostly the same.

Every spec has a their big nuke, and that nuke is hard-limited by a cooldown. Every spec uses a 2-second cast time focus generating shot and dumps excess focus using 1 or 2 abilities that don't have a cooldown. The differences between the specs, as I see them, are:

• BM managing Focus Fire and Bestial Wrath.
• MM maintaining their 15% haste buff.
• SV managing an additional cooldown (Black Arrow) and Lock and Load procs.

Second: I do think that some of the talents look pretty close to mandatory, for PvE anyway. If you're a raiding hunter and you're not taking both Exhilaration (large heal when you Disengage) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera (reduced cooldowns on Disengage and Deterrence) Aspect of the Iron Hawk (flat 15% damage reduction while in Aspect of the Hawk), you're probably making a mistake.

In fact, I'll go ahead and say that if the current Aspect of the Iron Hawk goes live as it is on beta and you don't take it, you're wrong. A flat 15% damage reduction that's on almost all the time renders the other choices nothing but traps. That will be the talent we'll look at to instantly dismiss hunters as being clueless or being worth a further look.

Obviously it's beta and that may change. Obviously I haven't used those abilities in a raid environment. Nevertheless, I find it hard to see any counter-arguments against them as of yet.

Third: glyph choices have some fun tradeoffs, but I think there are going to end up being standard PvE glyphs as well. They've turned the Cataclysm MM talent Marked for Death into a glyph, and I think it's probable that most raiding hunters are going to take that glyph.

I'm also pretty sure that not taking the glyph that adds another 20% damage reduction on to Deterrence would also be a mistake.

The third major glyph spot seems more up for grabs. I'm currently using the glyph that strips DoTs from anything that hits a freezing trap. It's not super useful in the beta at the moment - no one uses CC in the one dungeon that's available - but it may be a good choice for heroic trash mobs.

Or it may not. We'll have to see how the release heroics are tuned when Pandaria goes live.

Miscellaneous thoughts: I can't get a good feel for the Call Beast talent right now, because it's bugged and has no cooldown and no cost.

Lynx Rush felt great as a BM hunter on the Sha of Doubt - it ate really significant chunks of health off of all the adds in a hurry.

Binding Shot also feels pretty good. It's instant with no travel time, and I think it's going to be a near-universal choice for hunters in PvP. Take the following with a grain of salt because I am not a PvP hunter, but: the class is looking very strong to me with the current toolkit. Lots of survivability, lots of control, lots of utility, no minimum range. I wouldn't be surprised to see hunters considered a dominant class in the first season of Pandaria's arenas and RBGs.

Unrelated to hunters: I love the animations for female Pandaren monk healing. Love. Love love love them. And their animations for fighting, for that matter. I am almost certainly going to roll one when the pandatimes strike. Who knows if I'll level cap her or anything, but they really do look absolutely amazing. I can not give the art and animation teams enough accolades on this one.

I've been taking some screenshots, but of course they're on my desktop at home. I'll comb through them and see if any are worth posting tomorrow.

I have to say folks, I'm actually really optimistic and excited for this expansion. How's everyone else feeling?

This, my readers, I do for you

I got a beta invite in the mail last night, which I think means pretty much everyone that's eligible should have one by now. Normally I wouldn't even have opted in, but I decided that if I want to keep doing this blog thing, I really ought to.

I've only done a very tiny amount in it, basically I've spent some time at the target dummies as BM and as MM.

Re-doing the 4,800 hunter keybinds from memory was a pain.

I feel like my guesses at how to play BM from the previous blog post seem like they were pretty much correct. It's really, really rough going back to default UI with a 6-second cooldown signature ability, though. I keep having to flick my eyes back and forth between the middle-bottom of my screen to look at action bars and the top-left of my screen to look at focus. At some point they really, really, really should bake some improvements into the default UI. I know they've at least provided semi-functional raidframes for healers, but looking in totally different quadrants of your screen for cooldowns and resources is honestly terrible.

MM also seems to be much the same as it was. Keep Chimera Shot on cooldown, keep whatever the renamed ISS buff is going, dump focus with Aimed Shot.

Both specs were - I'm sure - easier to play with my T13 2pc bonus.

I'm running around on my bear trying to locate the entrances to dungeons at the moment. It's... it's not straightforward. I'm hoping that once I do locate them, I'll be able to fraps some video in various specs. Of course, there's also no recount or anything? So I have no way of comparing damage really. Still, it'll be nice to get a feel for how things go.

I'll keep y'all posted!

The duty of leisure

Warning! This is post is as long and pompous as the title implies - read at peril of falling asleep and/or rolling your eyes right out of their sockets!

Thank you to Hugh over at the Melting Pot for finding something I can write about. He picked up on an essay Bravetank wrote about feeling guilty for playing WoW. He then also links to an essay by a developer about why downtime is necessary. I don't think the second piece was written in response to the first, but it's pretty clearly applicable.

As far as these things go, I don't really disagree with Psychochild's position. It seems clearly true to me that a human expected only to work, sleep, and eat is going to go mad or die. Further, the only work such a person would be capable of doing would be the most rote drudgery you can imagine. They wouldn't have the energy to do anything else. Something like digging ditches would probably be your best bet. You wouldn't even be able to have them do something physically less demanding, such as standing guard, because a guard shift in a legitimately hostile or dangerous area requires real concentration and attention.

So he makes a good argument, but I honestly don't think that he even needs to appeal to a need for downtime to "justify" hobbies. Especially a hobby like gaming.

I recently said on twitter that "culture is collaborative," which isn't a new sentiment at all, much less one that originated with me. At the time I was saying it in response to complaints about the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings (the films are not the books, that's the point, deal), but I feel that it's a much broader truth.

The culture we live in is a huge, goopy mess of currents and masses and deformations and eddies. We are affected by it and we shape it in turn. It reaches into every aspect of our lives. Gaming is a part of culture, as is reality TV, literature, film, advertising, the nauseating Republican debates, fanfiction, folk art: everything. When we game, we're taking part in that grand project.

It's tough to talk about stuff like this because it's so nebulous, and to be frank it begins to sound pretty silly. Like someone logging in to camp for Loque has some kind of mystical bearing on the Greek debt crisis. Of course I wouldn't go that far. Amongst the analogies that I would use to illuminate my understanding of culture is one of gravity. All of us little gamers are tiny little specks of matter out there in the void. We have gravitational fields, and we do a lot of jostling between each other. No particular individual will have noticeable pull any of the big elements in the system, but in the aggregate we shape the way things look in the future.

The games we play today and the ways we play them determine the games that get made tomorrow. Games, films, books, visual arts, music, and conversation all impact each other. Mass Effect 3 is going to introduce gay male romance options, and that fact did not occur in a vacuum. Nor is the fact of gay marriage in six states in the union.

What games we play and how we play them are important. Not only is downtime necessary, but how we spend it shapes the society we live in, and it is also a part of shaping ourselves. Quite apart from the enormous, impossible to grasp nebula of "culture," I think that humans have responsibilities to ourselves. I guess I take an almost Aristotelian view of virtue, in some ways. I would say that we should always strive to be the best version of ourselves possible. Work can be and is a part of that, but for me personally I feel that I grow into a better self by the consumption of media.

This goes beyond games, of course! I am a voracious devourer of the written word (fiction, non-fiction, prose and poetry), some varieties of TV and movies, and lots of different games. In fact recently I've felt guilty because I've been doing so little gaming, to an extent that I think I've been failing a duty to myself.

Obviously, everything in moderation! But the mere act of playing WoW should not trigger a feeling of guilt. When you engage with a facet of culture, as you're doing when you play the game, you're doing the collaborative work of shaping culture at the same time that you're advancing yourself as a fully realized person. Take pride in your work!

Hunters in the Mists

I'm going to start with a brief discussion of the new talent system. Just to be totally upfront: I think this is a great change. I was really excited about the way they talked about the talent revamp for Cataclysm, but I was disappointed in how it actually came out. The proposed system for Mists is exactly the radical change that needed to happen. I also think that the change is being widely misunderstood, because I'm seeing tons of people calling it "simplified," "dumbed-down," or "pandering to casuals".

In fact, it's the exact opposite of these.

Since the game launched, talents have largely been a system whereby you spent points to modify abilities. So you gave something haste, or caused the use of a certain shot to proc a buff, or added 10% damage to something, so on and so forth. Any talent that just gave you a new ability was almost always automatically taken, such as Readiness. Not taking Readiness as a Marksmanship hunter is just a mistake. It's not actually a choice, there's nothing complex about it: if you don't do it, you're just wrong, end of story. Similarly, if you don't take Careful Aim you're wrong. No Improved Steady Shot? Wrong. You're not making choices, you're just picking the right things and not-picking the wrong things. The underlying theorycrafting may have been complex, but you probably didn't do that: you went to EJ or a blog or both and took the right talents. That's the antithesis of complexity.

The new talent system is largely about choosing between abilities. To get any given thing, you must give up something else. The talents they talked about at Blizzcon obviously aren't yet in beta, but looking at them gives us something useful to think about the changes coming up. Here's a helpful chart from MMO Champion:

Potential Hunter talents

If you'd prefer just a plain-old text version, Hugh from MMO Melting Pot has helpfully transcribed them here.

Take a look at the first tier talent, which becomes available at level 15. You can choose between your autoshots:

1. Applying a free snare.
2. Giving you a TON of focus.
3. Stacking a DoT on your target.

Those are hard choices! And the fact that they're hard makes them compelling. PvP hunters will be torn between the free snare and the free focus. If I had to guess, I would actually guess that (if these talents go live), the focus-on-autoshot talent will become the PvP standard. Less time wasted in AotF casting steady or cobra shots will be huge for PvP hunters, who already have pretty decent kiting tools. But then maybe that free, stacking dot will do enough damage to be chosen for PvP. And it's easy to imagine either the DoT or the focus becoming dominant for PvE, and I think their goal is to have either of those be a valid choice.

I do think that the hunter talents as we see them right now will require some tweaking. It seems to me that some of the tiers still have wrong answers as far as PvE goes, but I also acknowledge that it's difficult to make compelling choices for PvE. The question we're usually asking is "what does more damage?" and it's hard to get around that in interesting ways. I think possibly they could do something like toy with making survival a spec that's constantly starved for focus by removing Explosive Shot's cooldown: then you'd have things like survival hunters taking Thrill of the Hunt while marks hunters took Readiness.

Even if they don't get it totally perfect this time 'round, though, it's absolutely an improvement.

I was also thrilled by the announcement that hunter melee weapons are going away. Especially because they've said that they're looking at bringing back quiver/ammo pouch graphics that could be customizable in some way! This is completely righteous. Ever since they removed ammo I've missed the sight of a quiver on my back. So not only do we get rid of the annoyance of letting the feral have the staves/polearms first, we won't have to worry about enchanting a melee weapon any more and we'll get quivers back. Perfect.

Finally, while the new tiger model is absolutely gorgeous, I'm a little sad that it's not something else. Really, anything else. I have a low-poly wolf, a low-poly raptor, a low-poly hyena, and a medium-poly windserpent from BC. I would kill to have high-poly versions of the my other pets, but it seems like half of all the pretty pets are cats. Loque/Gondria, Sambas, Skarr, the shiny glow-eyed tigers from Neferset City, etc. Hell, even Skoll is a low-poly wolf with some zappies. Come on dudes! Why no pretty raptors? Why no lovely wolves?

With the sole exception of that gripe though, I am surprised at how pleased I am with everything out of Blizzcon. Mists of Pandaria is looking like an unexpectedly delightful expansion.

I'm also considering race-changing from Draenei to Worgen (still female, natch). OPINIONS?

Blizzcon reveals

Just like everyone else, I'm going to have a lot to say about these. As the reveals are ongoing, however, I'm going to hold off on making a "real" post for now. I'm just going to kind of get out my notepad and start scribbling thoughts and connecting them together. The summary of my reaction so far is that everything sounds like an April 1st joke and sounds like great directions to be going in.

Woe! Subscriber loss! Calamity!

To be honest, I am a little tired of people making blog and forum posts about the game's loss of roughly 800,000 subscribers. I think this discussion has been largely quite silly for a whole bunch of reasons.

Probably the most prominent thing I scorn it for is that I don't see the point. Right now, the game is fun for me. I like the people I'm playing with. I like the raid content. I've started doing some arenas with my priestess, and I like that a lot, not least because I'm playing with my boyfriend and several of our guildies. There have, of course, been times in the past when the game wasn't fun for me. I took breaks during those times, varying numbers of months when I didn't play. Why can't other people do the same without all kinds of discussion about it?

If the game is fun for you, keep playing - what do you care that some other people stopped? If the game isn't for you, there are books to read, stories to write, recipes to cook, sweaters to knit, tabletop RPGs to play, skydiving licenses to earn, whatever! There's a lot of stuff to do out there, and people to do it with, even other MMOs! Keep in touch with your friends however you see best and go do other things, there's nothing wrong with it. You don't need to agonize or fret or analyze the recent patches or whatever. Just accept that it's not the game for you at the moment and move on.

All of that said, I guess I can understand the desire to talk about it, especially if you do still like it and still play. Part of why it's a compelling hobby is because there is such a large population of fellow hobbyists. If the place was a ghost town it wouldn't be very fun, right? But even then, we have no empirical data to talk about. Blizzard hasn't exactly released the statistics from all those cancellations. And even if they had, there are problems with them: every time my boyfriend cancels his sub for one reason or another, checks the "other reason" box and writes in "buff paladins". Keep in mind that he currently mains a shadowpriest for PvE and a frost DK for PvP (although he has spent a lot of time playing paladins, mostly holy). So even if we had empirical data, we'd have to be suspicious of it.

But of course we don't have that data. So what people are doing is saying "this perceived aspect of it bothers me, and that must be why all those people quit." Reasons that I've seen include, but are not limited to:

1. Release/troll heroics too hard.
2. Release/troll heroics too easy.
3. Gear too easy to get.
4. Gear too hard to get.
5. Not enough to do unless you raid or do rated PvP.
6. Too much to do outside of raiding and rated PvP (i.e.: overwhelming).
7. New style of questing too linear.
8. Get to level cap too quickly.
9. Get to level cap too slowly.
10. Should have been more like BC.
11. Should have been more like Wrath.
12. Should have been more like Classic.
13. RDF for any of a number of reasons.

The funny/strange part is that no one seems to think "huh, all of these folks are providing mutually contradictory reasons for the loss, and they all seem to be based on their particular experiences. Maybe this isn't really relevant."

Instead, they argue amongst each other for their particular pet reason.

Sigh.

Marks again? Maybe!

PTR notes have already been updated again, and I wanted to highlight a couple things.

First, they've already nerfed the nerfs to ExS and BA, from 25% down to 15%. Honestly that's not the big news though. The really big omg what really for serious yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! news is this:

• Hunters can now use Auto Shot while moving.

Let's see that again, just to be sure we read it right:

• Hunters can now use Auto Shot while moving.

Woah. Yep, looks like it's real. This will actually make some super hardcore people sad - knowing the timing of your own auto shots and stutter-running when you had to move out of bad was (and still is) one of the signs of a really skilled hunter. On the other hand, even though I knew about it and could do it, it was never something that felt intuitive or fun to me; it was never a part of being in the raiding zone. It was always awkward and stressful and something to second-guess myself on: could I have done better and made more damage happen if I'd been better at finding those extra little milliseconds to let an auto shot fire? Maybe. Probably.

Ugh.

So I'm definitely hoping this goes live and the stutter-run tumbles jerkily into a shallow grave. It's also just going to mean that hunters do more damage - all those times when our white damage dipped to nothing because we were kiting or running out of fire or moving to a designated position or whatever? Now we'll be able to keep getting in those white hits. Awesome.

The buffs to Marksmanship look promising too:

• Aimed Shot weapon damage has been increased to 200%, up from 150%. In addition, the base cast time has been reduced to 2.4 seconds, down from 3.
• Chimera Shot's overall damage has been increased by roughly 50%.
• Wild Quiver (Mastery): Chance for this to trigger per mastery has been increased by approximately 17%.

I think that probably one of the under-recognized implications of those changes is that, with .6 seconds lopped off of the aimed shot cast time in conjunction with the buff to its damage, it could very well be worth casting while under the effects of rapid fire or a bloodlust - or maybe even during the focus fire buff that BM gives itself. And consider that aimed shot can be glyphed! And it's affected by careful aim! Very intriguing. A marks hunter build that values haste and mastery very highly could possibly be viable after the patch. Our reporters will be keeping a very close eye on this developing situation.

P.S.: 14/28 achievements for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero. Halfway there!

How come survival has explosive shot, anyway?

I really do like huntering. And despite the name of the blog, my conceptually favorite tree has always been survival. I've always ended up speccing whatever tree does the most damage, but my abiding love is for the "ranger" tree. In pretty much every fantasy game ever, single player or multi, videogame or pen and paper, I roll a "ranger" type character. I love the skill and beauty of archery, I love the aesthetic of the lanky independent traveller, skilled in the ways of the wild, I even love the story of Agincourt - although to say one loves a story wherein a lot of real people died is kind of bizarre. I suppose I simply mean that it gave me an appreciation for the elegance and power of the bow as a weapon. Bows as art are also compelling: the bowyer's craft is intricate and involved and somewhat mysterious, from the selection of source woods to the shaping and steaming and lamination processes.

I just think they're neat.

So you can see why I am drawn to the survival tree conceptually, while at the same time I'm disappointed by its reality. Tying a bomb to an arrow is, in addition to being unlikely to work, something of an exemplar of inelegance. Black arrow makes very little sense, and certainly has nothing to do with having a connection to nature and being able to perform extraordinary feats thereby. It's just not satisfying.

By the same token, the Marksmanship tree is lacking. I like that it's the tree that focuses on physical damage. That makes sense to me. But why, then, is its top-level shot chimera shot, which does nature damage and refreshes serpent sting? And how or why does said chimera shot cause the piercing shots bleed? Again, it's just not satisfying.

So I was thinking about this the other day, and it seems like some of the flavor issues with the class could be fixed by simply shifting things around for a little bit. I would move explosive shot over to the marksmanship tree and rename it aimed shot, for continuity. Instead of being a 3-second fire damage dot, I would make it a 3-second powerful bleed with crittable ticks (complete with an animated gout of blood every tick). What is now lock and load (again, inappropriate for what I'd imagine survival to be) would move over to Marks as well, perhaps being renamed to something like "Uncommon Precision". I'd proc this buff off of regular old auto-shots instead of the weird and unpleasant juggling between black arrow and a variety of traps that it works off of right now. I'm unsure if I'd even want to see Marks hunters continuing to use serpent sting, but if I did perhaps I'd tie a talented bleed damage increase to it.

The survival tree would of course get chimera shot. What is now the "improved steady shot" buff (and what does that even mean?) would be renamed serpent's swiftness - the 20% haste talent that lived in the old BM tree but is now gone. Proccing serpent's swiftness off of cobra shot makes a lot more sense to me than "improved steady shot". Chimera shot would probably not refresh serpent sting but instead consume it for additional damage, which would hopefully make for a fun resource management game as well as be fruitful for theorycrafting. How long should one extend one's serpent sting with cobra shots before eating it with chimera shot? Is it better to keep chimera on cooldown or try to manage your chimera use situationally?

This would all be a pain to re-balance of course, and I'm quite certain nothing of the sort will ever happen. It's fun to think about how things would be better If Only They Put Me In Charge, though.

Shattering of the world is duly scheduled

Sometimes the nature of the game being a game is funny to me, because we're all pretty sure that the shattering of the world is scheduled for a week from yesterday. It seems like maybe a thing like that ought to be a surprise, but of course it can't be in a project as massive and carefully managed as WoW.

I know I keep saying this, but lord in heaven I can't wait. I think we're probably going to clear ICC one more time and try to get titles for a couple more people. I'm really leaning towards letting that field go fallow once the Shattering happens, though. Of course it's not a unilateral decision and we'll have to talk it over with the raid, but the other end of that decision is that, what with us all wearing ICC gear and the various Ulduar HMs having been nerfed, we could maybe get rusted protos before Cataclysm, whereas I absolutely don't think we're getting bone dragons beforehand. And for that matter! ICC and its bone dragons are ugly and boring, but Ulduar and its rusted protos are pretty and fun! And I've still never seen Algalon and you see way more Kingslayers than you see Starcallers.

Anyway, this will be the argument that I shall make to the raid tonight.

Moving on to an utterly different subject, apropos of absolutely nothing, I'll mention that I watched a bit of youtube of what I guess is heroic Deadmines earlier. My boyfriend had brought it up on his computer and was watching it (because it was from a holydin's PoV and there are few things he likes more than holydins) and I wandered in and went "what's that?"

To which he responded "aw, it's cute because you don't know what Deadmines looks like."

This is true because I've never actually been in it. I grew up Horde, as they say, and am pretty familiar with Wailing Caverns (I think that's the level-equivalent dungeon) but I have never actually set foot inside the mines.

But yes, watching the video made me all kinds of excited, especially because it had a boss fight in it, and even though the player characters were premades decked out in free T11, that boss was living a long time. It had a whirlwind thing it did, and the (totally amazing looking!) trollish feral druid got itself out of LoS of the healer and then stood in the whirlwind and it died. Truly, in these days of overgeared Wrath heroics and bosses with total life expectancies rarely exceeding ten seconds, that's pretty impressive.

During the Cataclysm leveling/gearing period, I'm going to try to encourage guildmembers to log on during our normal raid times. Obviously we won't be scheduling raids or anything, but I really would like to have 2-3 dungeon groups just chaining dungeons together for 2-3 hours during Cataclysm. Most importantly it will be so fun! And less importantly (but still important), it will mean we'll be free to do things like exercise our atrophied crowd control reflexes in an environment where it's far less likely to be broken by a hellfiring 'lock whose mind and all his soul are bent unwaveringly on the sole purpose of making us wipe and then calling us noobs before demanding a rez. Instead! We'll all be on vent, we'll be able to talk with each other about Buffy or whatever, marking a mob with a blue square for frost trap will mean I'll frost trap it, etc etc.

To say it for a millionth time: I really can not wait.

UI update and some other stuff

Making the post yesterday finally motivated me to try to fix more of the issues with my UI, so I added tipsy, WiM, and SexyMap to my list of mods, as well as moved some stuff around and changed some of my settings in Watcher. I won't do another full post, but I'll take another screenshot of it and post that. I also still need to add some functionality to my interface - pretty much watching for the longer cooldowns to come available. I think I can do that with Watcher too, though, so that's cool.

On an unrelated "yay, Cataclysm!" note, I'm sort of frozen with indecision right now. Which is fine because it's not coming out until December 7th, but I'd really like to have reached some sort of conclusion by then. Essentially I want to add a third real alt to hang out with my hunter and priest, not least because I really (really!) need an herbalist/miner. I am considering three directions to go for this:

1. Dwarven male enhancement shaman.
2. Worgen female druid.
3. Worgen female fury warrior.

Option 3 wasn't on my radar at all, but for some reason when I mentioned the things I was thinking about to my boyfriend (in addition to being sad about not being able to have a troll druid), he said "wouldn't a female Worgen fury warrior look really cool?"

And I was like dot dot dot while imagining a badass wolf-lady cuttin' off heads with two enormous axes.

And then I was like "yes, yes it would."

SO. I have no idea. One of the tangles in this particular knot comes from the fact that I have all the heirlooms necessary for an enhancement shaman or a feral druid, but I have zero of the heirlooms for a warrior. But I'm almost done re-doing the whole Argent Tourney thing (just a couple-three days of valiant dailies left to go) and I have a fair amount of champion's seals, so I could absolutely buy the plate heirlooms with those if I wanted to. And the advantage of starting up a Worgen character would be getting to see the Worgen starting area. And then, since you can mail heirlooms cross-faction, I could make a little goblin rogue and take a look at their starting area. So yeah. I'm leaning towards the fury warrior option, I think, but still firmly in the clutches of indecision.

More Lich King practice tonight. Sadly, since my BF has an unavoidable work thing, I'll be coming on my priest to heal instead of on Pradzha. I mean that's fine - the priest, after all, has all the initial kill achievements from like April and March - but I'm just not as confident on her any more as I am on Pradzha. We're actually having to fill in two of our regular spots with, er, irregulars though, so it probably won't be a kill until Thursday anyway.

Finally! Veritas Aequitas of Thorium Brotherhood - US is recruiting for T11. The website is obviously a work in progress and isn't really in use yet. I promise we do have people in guild chat though, and we are making our raid nights happen.

Archery and Alchemy

Today's MMO-champion update on alchemy has some exciting stuff for me, personally.

• Turning into a dragon and carrying friends around will be pretty cool (although it makes the pressure to buy 310% speed flying even greater). 
• Having a pure agility flask means that the profession bonus from alchemy will be just as good for raiding hunters as the bonus from jewelcrafting or blacksmithing, which is awesome.
• However, I'm seriously going to need to level an herbalism/mining alt, because I'm going to have to have stacks and stacks of the 1200 agility potion so I can add it to my cooldowns macro.

All in all, I'm really looking forward to it. I started playing after (I think) patch 2.3, and I stopped playing for several months a month before Wrath was released, so this will be the first time I'll have been actively playing when an expansion comes out. Jumping in to leveling, and then trying to get a small guild assembled and ready to raid is going to be a challenge.

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!

Publicity!

Man!  It's been an exciting couple of days in terms of "woah my blog thing exists".

1. I've gotten a couple comments!
2. And an email!
3. And been linked twice in one day on WoW Ladies!

The email was a short one asking for my thoughts on focus.  In short: I'm totally excited about the focus change.  Hunters are a physical DPS class, and having our mechanics depend on blue rage has just always been weird.  I've heard it rumored (although I can't back this up) that the original hunter design used focus or energy of some sort.  They couldn't figure out how to balance it (not that vanilla was balanced) before release and the use of mana was a kludge.

I mean, what other caster has a white-damage swing timer?  What other class in BC was required to DPS with a macro such that its casting-time ability didn't interfere too much with its auto-attack?  Who else had to farm and chain-chug Fel Mana Potions?  Which other caster mortal strikes its own damage as a mana regen mechanic?  It's all just weird.  Our mana management technique consists of "max DPS until you're out of mana, then viper for as little time as is possible".  It's not fun and it doesn't add anything to the class.

From what I've heard/read, they're thinking of maybe changing steady shot to grant you a short-duration buff that increases focus regeneration.  That alone is way cooler and bodes for way more dynamic DPS button-mashing than anything we do right now.   Like rogues and warriors we'll be able to blow our potion cooldown on haste or crit pots instead of mana  pots, while long fights won't punish us uniquely.  Resource management will be an ongoing mini-game for the course of the boss fight, rather than hitting a brick wall and having to awkwardly heave ourselves over it with AotV.

I am excited about the next expansion overall, and for me, the focus change is just another example of everything they're talking about doing right.  It's always possible to screw things up, of course, but so far it looks great. Here's a great thread with a bunch of posts from GC explaining the vision behind the focus change.  I agree with pretty much everything he says here and I think his posts provide a ton of insight.

The BM buff and Tier 10

Now that I'm done with my four-part guide, I was sort of panicking trying to think of something to write. Then I realized that there were a few super-obvious things to prattle about, like the new raid tier's set bonuses for hunters and the semi-recent buff to BM.

I'm slightly ambivalent about the change to the Beast Mastery tree. I know from reading over blue posts - especially GC's posts in the DPS forum - that they've been struggling with how to buff BM damage for a while now. Most suggestions revolved around some sort of signature shot for the BM tree to fire, but it seemed like the dev team didn't really like that idea for a number of reasons. What they eventually went with was a change to The Beast Within. In case you're unfamiliar with the old TBW, they reduced the length of the ability's effect and added a passive 10% damage increase.

There's an extent to which I like this change. I'm certainly glad that BM got a damage boost, the tree needed it. The BM raiding population was minuscule compared to either the Marks or SV raiding populations. I think this change will certainly go a decent ways towards repairing that imbalance. From all reports, it doesn't eliminate the damage gap, but it does reduce it, to the point where a raid leader isn't doing her raid a disservice by bringing a BM hunter. Ferocious Inspiration isn't really ever going to replace Sanctified Retribution (for the same reason that TSA is preferable to the DK or Enhancement Shaman versions: auras have 100% uptime), but for a 10-person raiding guild especially, having that be an option is a real bonus.

The thing that I don't like as much is that, while I can certainly understand why they chose that implementation, it's kind of boring. It gives the tree a needed buff in damage while at the same time giving an answer to the complaints about BM being an "I win" button in PvP, and in that respect it's an elegant fix. It doesn't actually change play style at all, though. I guess it just feels tacked-on, in the same way that the 5% from Improved Tracking does. On the other hand, I guess that's one of the game-wide complaints that they plan on addressing in Cataclysm. Pretty much all the specs of all trees of all classes in the game have a few super-boring but required talents that just add a flat percent to damage, healing, or mitigation. Doing away with those sorts of talents is definitely one of the things that I'm really looking forward to in the next expansion, even though I never thought there would really be another expansion after Wrath.

Before Cataclysm happens, though, we're going to have to clear Icecrown Citadel. And, thank god, the hunter Tier 10 set bonuses are a great recovery from the embarrassment of T9's bonuses. T10, if you haven't seen yet, is boasting these pretty lines of text:

• 2 Pieces: Your Auto Shots have a 5% chance to cause you and your pet to deal 15% additional damage for until cancelled.
• 4 Pieces: When your Viper Sting, Serpent Sting, and Wyvern Sting abilities deal damage, you have a 5% chance to gain 20% attack power for 10 seconds.

First, let's all take a few seconds to bask in these bonuses. Let their clear, golden light wash over us and through us. Let us revel in their unequivocal awesomeness, frolic in their originality, and be refreshed by the sparkling brightness of their numbers. Ahhh! Delightful.

Good stuff, huh? Since the Burning Crusade, hunter tier armor set bonuses have had a proclivity towards being boring and borderline useless. For tiers 7, 8, and 9, the 4-piece bonus provided no meaningful boost to damage. Harsh proc chances and standard internal cooldowns made the underwhelming 600 AP proc of 8 and 9 a sadly rare occurrence (and 9 put the proc on the pet, a step down from T8's bonus), while the aspect of the viper-only haste of T7 is better left forgotten. For the first time in this entire expansion, then, we've got a really outstanding 4-piece bonus. A raid-buffed hunter in 245 gear has somewhere North of 5000 AP right now, and 20% of that is 1000 AP. It's a truism of WoW that the best buffs are the buffs that scale with your gear, and this bonus does that.

You might expect the two-piece bonus to be crap to "pay" for the debt incurred by that fantastic 4-piece bonus, but there too, T10 shines. Auto Shot is a far more reliable proc trigger than steady shot, especially for Survival hunters who fire so few steadies, and 15% additional pet damage is crazy. I mean, in T8 gear my wolf - and wolves are used for Furious Howl rather than their own damage, which is worse than cats or raptors - is good for about a thousand DPS. That makes the T10 bonus worth 150 DPS in out of date gear. Scaled up to the item level 260-something gear that's going to drop in Icecrown, we're looking at 225-275 DPS from that bonus. Just nuts.

Its appearance leaves me a little cold at first glance, but I'll reserve judgement. I found the early screenshots of T9 disappointing as well, but in-game it doesn't look bad. Neither of them look as good as T6 or T8 in my opinion, but that's alright. I like the glowing purple highlights on the bottom version of the skin and I think I see hints of a sinister black smoke, which is neat. I certainly won't be enabling the hat, but T8 is the only hat I've ever enabled, so that's fine. All in all, Citadel is looking like an exciting place to be a hunter.

Next week I'll be talking some more about Marksmanship. Specifically I'll be looking at a better way to determine if you've reached the point where you should change your spec and playstyle to drop Arcane Shot and taking a second look at glyphs.

Focus, please!

I promise I'll get around to posting about faction champions eventually, but the Blizzcon class panel yesterday had some pretty huge news for hunters. Copied and pasted straight from MMO-champion (with typos fixed):

• Hunter's mana is GONE!!!
• Hunters now use focus, no longer care about intellect or mana regen.
• Focus regenerates contunously, Steady shot improves the rate of getting focus back.
• Rogue energy comes back at a 10/sec rate, Hunter focus comes back at 6/sec (12/sec with steady shot)
• A shot costs 30 to 60 focus.
• Hunters will have fewer cooldowns on abilities
• Ammos will become an item, not a consumable.

Just to be up-front about it, I think this is fantastic news. I dislike mana as a mechanic for pretty much every class out there. I played Warhammer online for a brief stint and spent my time there as a healer. Every class in the game uses action points instead of mana, and it's a way more enjoyable mechanic for pretty much everyone involved.

Consider how hunters raided in Burning Crusade, for example. To begin with, we wore a lot of rogue leather because it just had way more agility, crit, hit, and AP than most of the mail in the game. We used Elixirs of Major Agility and Elixirs of Major Mageblood for buffs and then chained Fel Mana Potions every cooldown. The amount of farming necessary was just awful, but more importantly, it just wasn't a fun mechanic. We aren't healers and can never make a choice between throughput and longevity - we just do as much damage as we can as fast as we can and hope that our consumables keep us out of aspect of the viper. That's it.

The problems have been reduced today, but on fights with a lot of target switching, or in a 10-man that's missing a ret paladin to judge wisdom, we're back in the same boat. Mana usage is never a choice or a strategy for us; the most we can do is viper sting someone other than the primary DPS target. So if there's no JoW on whatever it is we're hitting, and if the single mana pot per fight doesn't suffice to keep us going, then we're out of luck and have to cut our damage in half to regen some mana. There's no choice or skill involved, and that makes it a bad mechanic.

Accordingly, I'm thrilled with the focus announcement. It's looking the current plan is for steady shot to give you a focus-regeneration buff, something that's unique as far as I know. I think it will also open the doors for skilled hunters that can really track and plan their damaging ability priorities to outshine their compatriots.

Ammo becoming an item rather than a consumable is a satisfying change as well. I imagine they'll function something like totems or librams, and I also imagine that they'll be bringing back quiver graphics with this change. I liked rolling the quiver haste bonus into the class itself, but I didn't like losing how cool my troll huntress looked with her dual mojos on her hips, her striker in her hand, and her quiver across her back. And let's not kid ourselves: a lot of the appeal of playing an MMO is seeing your character's look change and evolve with the effort you put into her.

The new expansion is looking pretty good so far, and the notes for other classes and about some of the gamewide changes to mechanics are making me quite optimistic. It looks like they're doing the "complete overhaul" thing that people keep asking they do to individual classes, except for everything. This may finally be the last expansion for the game, but it's looking like a good one.

Cataclysm official

I was going to post about the Faction Champions encounter today - and I still may - but for the moment, the official site for Cataclysm, the next big WoW expansion came out. It includes a cinematic trailer that's worth waching, although the voiceover guy hammed it up a little bit too much for my tastes.

The new race/class grid is interesting. As predicted by MMO champ, the undead hunter looks like it's going to happen. Everyone has their favorite and their least favorite of the new combinations, and undead hunter is definitely my least favorite. Hunters are all about life, connection with their pets, and the dynamism and finesse needed to use ranged weapons. I think the undead make fantastic warriors, with their immunity to pain and the brute strength of the zombie. They make great priests, both in that they're connected to the religion of their previous life as well as having passed beyond that initial life into a second one. They're great for mages and warlocks, with their grim determination to accumulate power. Hunters? I just don't see it.

The boyfriend actually made a great point about a couple of the new race/class combos when they were first getting bandied about as rumors: if Tauren are getting paladins, how is it that the undead aren't? Squish a warrior and a priest together and what do you get? A paladin.

My favorite race in the game remains the trolls, however, and it looks like we're finally getting troll druids. I'm totally excited about this change, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Trolls have always been jungle and forest dwellers whose religious traditions have revolved around a variety of natural and animal spirits. Along with the announced streamlining for 0-60 leveling, I'll definitely be rolling a troll druidess. I'm not sure how serious I'll be about her, but it'll be neat to have the option to play with her.

The other stuff looks interesting one way or another. I look forward to heroic Shadowfang Keep, seeing the inside of Uldum, flying over the sundered Barrens, so on and so forth. The Worgen look neat and I'll probably roll one to play around with. Not sure what class it will be - I've never played a warrior (or any class capable of tanking), so that seems like a possibility.

All in all, I'm surprised it even exists. I was fairly convinced that Wrath would be the last of the WoW expansions, especially with the Blizzard next-gen MMO in the works. I guess I'm just glad I don't live in Azeroth, I think the apocalypse has been happening there for the last 30 or 40 years.