Luck!

Thorium Brotherhood's alliance PvPers unexpectedly took control of Tol Barad yesterday afternoon, which is awfully amazing. Friday afternoon is a pretty highly populated time, and those are usually the times when Horde defends successfully. I wasn't there because I was off farming primal airs (and more on that later!), but I asked in guild if people had interest in killing Argoloth and lo, they did! It took a few minutes for everyone to finish doing they stuff they were doing, but we pretty quickly had a core of (I think) six people, so we pugged in some random DPS from trade and hopped over to stab the pit fiend until he died. Or shoot arrows at him, whatever.

I felt much more confident in my playing of Marks than I did for the raids last week where, although I wasn't terrible, I wasn't doing very well either. 4.06 changed the spec a lot in addition to making it viable, to the point where we're now glyphing and hard-casting aimed shot even when we don't have 5 stacks of the MMM buff. I'll go into more detail on the priority system when I write a guide for it, but it's pretty intuitive and satisfying, I think. Anyway, this was the first time I actually killed Argoloth, since we've never really had TB at a convenient time for me before. What did he decide to drop but hunter T11 pants, and me the only hunter in the raid.

But that's not all! You'll remember that I was farming airs beforehand, right? Well, one of the Scions of Al'akir was ever so obliging and decided to drop Design: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond for me. So I handed that to one of the guild's JCs along with some metas from the gbank and now all of our agility-using DPS raiders have the good meta. All I need to complete that is for the agility to bracers enchant to drop for me when I'm farming volatiles today (I've ever so slowly been making a couple hammers for my gathering alt to play with in PvP).

Finally! We also decided to do a heroic DM last night, since we still had some upgrades for various people in there, and what should poor Vanessa drop but a replacement for my last 333 item! Pretty exciting! VA is also 5/12 normal modes of T11 now, and our re-kills are getting more efficient every time (although our first kills tend to be pretty hilarious - that is the nature of first kills, though). It's pretty tough to clear a 12-boss tier in 2 nights per week, but we're making great progress. We may eventually have to start extending lockouts to get in enough time on the more difficult bosses, but I'm hoping we don't have to resort to that (and the attendant loss of VP) until we're working on heroics.

Edit: good god, things are moving quickly. Now they're thinking of nerfing Aimed Shot? What in the world. I suppose if they're compensating for it through AotH that's relatively ok, but I guess it's their intent for us to not hardcast Aimed? If so, why did they reduce the casting speed at all? Having hardcast AiS in the priority was really cool for me - I liked not having to bother with arcane and I especially liked when I'd get a 5th stack of MMM while an AiS was casting, so I'd get two of them within a global. Very satisfying.

I don't think anyone at Blizzard has any particular animosity or affection for a given class, such that they'd treat the class differently in balance discussions. But I wonder if maybe the game has gotten too complicated? Kurn's most recent post on the Light of Dawn nerf is another example of this. It seems like the nerf and buffbats are just being swung blindly, without much consideration of the context of changes they've made in the past or bugs that are currently affecting abilities. The game's various classes and specs are pretty much being treated as pinatas that they can smash open, spilling QQ all over the forums.

I dunno. I just don't see a point to nerfing Aimed Shot. Yes, well-geared hunters in BGs can blow 0-resilience people up in PvP, but... so what? Our PvE damage is not out of line, and equally-matched opponents in PvP do not fall apart against a hunter.