Transmogrification!

Oh, since I've reached a point where I'm pretty happy with my transmogrification set, I thought I could let people see what it looks like:

Click for bigger!

Hat: disabled
Shoulders: Fortified Spaulders
Chest: Val'kyr Vestments
Back: Cloak of Fiends (no longer available, sorry!)
Gloves: Silvered Bronze Gauntlets
Belt: Ironspine Belt
Pants: Cormorant Leggings
Boots: Southfury Greaves
Polearm: Lotrafen, Spear of the Damned (oh how I wish I could turn off enchantments!)
Ranged: Bristleblitz Striker

I think she looks pretty freakin' huntery!

Old and Busted: Haste Plateaus

The community of WoW players often seem to be to be very slow at changing attitudes. Even after the 4.3 buffs, you'll see folks saying that MM is "higher DPS" or that Survival DPS is "more forgiving." Neither of these statements is strictly true. In my gear, I sim about a thousand DPS better as Marksmanship and I just feel more comfortable with it and we have two good sources of the 10% haste buff in the raid, so I generally play MM. But most of the top parsing hunters are playing Survival right now, and I've had at least one Survival hunter beat me in LFR. I think the two specs are almost identical in damage capabilities, and your comfort with one or another spec will make more of a difference to the damage you do with it than anything else.

Further, at high gear levels (average item level climbing past 385), I think MM just gets easier and easier to play, while SV tends to get more difficult. As you get better gear as an MM hunter, you prioritize haste as a tertiary stat, and it just kind of makes everything easier. It makes it easier to keep ISS up, it makes it easier to cast AiS if you play that style, it makes it easier to keep CS exactly on cooldown, it makes it easier to squeeze one more AiS into your Rapid Fire duration, on and on.

Survival, on the other hand, gets swamped in focus and procs, making it very difficult to keep up. Whenever I play Survival, I find myself frequently capping out on focus and then a few seconds later either spending so much focus on Arcanes that I can't immediately use Explosive Shot or just pushing past the ExS cooldown by using one too many instants of one sort or another. When LnL procs you have to decide if you should wait a heartbeat between your first and second ExS, use Kill Command, or use a CoS; let's not even mention the number of times I've pushed the ArcS button right as LnL procs.

Accepted wisdom that carries numerical weight is even more difficult to change.

When Cataclysm was new and Survival was kind of king of the heap of all DPS in the game, it was pointed out that with around 20% haste including gear, Pathing, and Hunting Party, you could easily fit exactly 3 CoS inside the ExS cooldown. This came to be considered the optimal Survival DPS haste and gear point, and that accepted wisdom has never really been questioned.

It seems to me, however, that as soon as one obtains the T13 2pc bonus, that haste point becomes obsolete. Like I said above, modern SV DPS is completely frantic. At no time is there a period that allows you to calmly chain three CoS in between ExS. This just gets more pronounced as you pick up more gear such as the T13 4pc bonus, any of the haste proc trinkets, and then place yourself in a raid situation where you're getting Bloodlusted and using Rapid Fire as often as you can. If you look at your logs, you're probably spending at least 30% of the time under some sort of haste effect! What good does it do you to gear for 1.67 second CoS when you're going to be casting an array of 1-second to 1.5 seconds CoS?

No, I think it's time to retire the 20% haste point as an useful concept for end-game Survival hunters. The days of stringing three Cobras in between ExS are simply over. It's time to go back to basics, start thinking more about your priority, and do a few million damage to the target dummies. Look for patterns in your ability use, but don't be too surprised if you don't see any. Get used to doing things like ExS -> ArcS -> ArcS -> CoS -> ExS and get used to the feeling of waiting through the dead time at the end of that CoS unless you've got a haste proc up.

The same goes for MM, by the way. With T13 gear, I've started doing things I never did before this tier. I've DPS cycles that look like this:

CS -> AiS -> SS -> SS -> AiS -> SS -> CS

That orphan SS before the second CS is crazy! What is that little guy doing there? Well, he's giving me just enough focus for CS. Before 2pc, I'd've used that SS and still been starved for the focus to put CS back on cooldown. With the two piece, I can do crazy things like that shot sequence and keep glyphed CS on cooldown with 1815 haste rating. It's madness.

Haste plateaus don't exist any more. The concept is no longer of any use. Just know that the more of you have, the more focus-generating shots you can cut in favor of higher-damage focus dumps.

Or at least that's what I think!

I haven't looked at EJ in ages. Is there something there I've missed? Do you see a flaw in my reasoning? I'm eager to hear what anyone thinks!

4.3 Survival, haste, and focus income

I saw a really intriguing post on the Blizz hunter forum the other day, from a highly progressed hunter (6/8 Dragon Soul heroic) who wanted to ask Zeherah (the female dwarf behind FemaleDwarf.com) a question about haste. Specifically, she wanted to know how much haste she would need to bring her cobra shot cast down to 1.5 seconds.

As it happens, Zeherah has included a super-handy haste calculator that made the question really easy to answer. In fact, I doubt the asker would have even asked her question, but I think she probably didn't see the small-text link to "haste calculator" in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. It turns out that you need 33% haste (including the 10% buff and 3/3 Pathing) to bring your CoS to 1.5s, which translates to a minimum of 2264 haste rating for most hunters. It'd be a little less for goblins or hunters that get Dark Intent, but again, you just need to see at least 33% character-sheet haste.

Ok. the interesting bit is why this hunter wanted to know this.

As mentioned before, the T13 2-piece bonus for hunters is amazing. It's actually better than the T12 4-piece or possibly even the T11 4-piece. It is really good. It dumps so much focus into your bar that with it you can probably do a tight Survival DPS cycle with two cobra shots and two arcane shots per explosive shot, rather than three CoS. A 1.5s CoS fits all of these shots neatly within the six second cooldown of ExS.

Just in case you're not sure of that, it's easy to check: 1 second GCD from the ExS + 3 seconds from cobra shots + 2 seconds from arcane shots = 6 seconds total. That is of course the ExS cooldown. Looks good!

Sadly, 2264 haste rating is a pretty steep requirement, especially since you're still going to want to reforge for crit first. You absolutely want critical strike rating on every single piece of your gear, and you never want to reforge out of it. Then you have to make sure to reach 8% hit, and there's little enough hit on T13 gear that you'll probably end up reforging into it. Finally, you don't want to go any lower on mastery than a 5:1 ratio of crit:mastery. I actually don't think you're likely to run into a problem with this last one (if you have 600 mastery, which is not much at all, you'd need to go over 3,000 crit rating before you were worried about it), but it is something to keep in mind.

Basically it's just going to be tough to reach 2300 haste rating even in 397 gear. It might be more reachable in 401 gear, but by the time you've reached the point where you have 401+ in every slot, you've completed all the heroic modes anyway, right?

All is not lost, however!

There are a lot of haste effects in the game right now. Rapid Fire, Bloodlust, The Hungerer, Arrow of Time, and Starcatcher Compass will all bring almost anyone over 33% haste. So if you're playing Survival with the 4.3 buffs, I'd recommend having some way (probably Power Auras) to track all those effects and procs so that you can know when you can switch to a 2 cobra/2 arcane DPS cycle.

And if you don't have T13 2pc yet, get working on it! Get into those LFR queues and start rolling need on tokens!

Oh, editing in a bonus question that just occurred to me: do you suppose that this DPS cycle might mean Kiril is not BiS for Survival? It is a mystery!

Hooray! Ultraxion down.

After last week and getting to 14% at our closest, I was pretty worried about Ultraxion. This week we walked in, pulled him, and down he went! With three healers! According to WoL I clocked in at 30,973 DPS.

I think I got relatively lucky with fading light (only got it twice). I also lucked out and got a T13 chest token from LFR and a T13 leg token from Hagara this week, and the insane focus income from the 2pc bonus is a huge help with DPS. I parsed better on it than three better-geared hunters in the server's top raiding guild, anyway (yes I'm petty and went peeking at their logs). Although to be fair I think I've got a nearly-ideal buff setup in my raid. The only thing I personally was lacking was the trauma debuff, and I should be able to get that more frequently once our prot pally is able to come back to raiding.

I'm just generally pleased with my own performance and my guild's performance tonight. By the end of the night (and this is our first raid night of the week!) we were getting clean trash phases on Blackhorn, so we just need to iron out cooldown usage and shockwave survival for Blackhorn and we'll have him down. We recently had some roster shakeups that allowed a frost DK to return to raiding, and he was really awesome on the Blackhorn trash, every sapper wandered into DnD, got chainsed, and got gripped if it got too close to the cabin. I think we let one through all night. The only thing we kind of still need to work on with the trash is avoiding blade rushes.

Man! T13 has so far done a world of good in terms of rekindling the fun in raiding. I'm really feeling confident about getting the normals cleared out in a reasonable timeframe and being able to get a few heroics down. And considering we're a guild that started the expansion without clearing the T11 normals, that feels really good.

In more huntery mechanicsy news, I'm not sure what I'll do about T13 4pc. My first inclination was to glyph arcane and swap to using that as a focus dump, but dumping with AiS has been working really well on most encounters. Part of the "I'll have to use arcane" decision was based on the assumption that the T13 set bonus was, like the T12 bonus, without an ICD. Comments on the wowhead page suggest it has around a 60 second ICD though, which possibly encourages really awkward stuff like trying to somehow track the elapse of each minute and briefly swap to using arcane every time the bonus has come off of its secret cooldown. I'm not really excited about that idea. I should have a while to think about it though, so that's fine.

Now I think I'm going to go try out some of the candy cane hot cocoa someone got recently.

Oh, I forgot to mention! If you wanted to listen to the recorded interview with Twisted Nether blogcast, you can find it here.

Should I break my T12 4pc for T13 2pc?

YES.

Sorry. Not yelling at anyone, I just actually found myself asking myself this question the other day, and then I went "oh yeah, duh, of course I should." T12 4pc bonus gives you free focus in different amounts at random times. T13 2pc gives you a predictable, never ending flow of free focus. It's a huge DPS increase and gets you that much closer to getting your T13 4pc, which is appropriately righteous for an end-of-expansion tier set.

Of course, luck being what it is, the LFR runs I did on my hunter dropped conqueror tokens, and the runs I did on my priest dropped protector tokens.

Zeherah's Dragonskull Crown!

Zeherah, in case you didn't know, is the super-hero behind Female Dwarf. She is also, in my experience, a uniformly kind and helpful individual. I honestly can not think of a single other person that has contributed any single resource as important for hunters as her DPS simulation site. It has an intuitive interface, it's highly customizable, you can easily import your own character's information into it, the list goes on to the horizon.

And it looks like she's getting an item named after her in the Dragon Soul: Zeherah's Dragonskull Crown.

This is completely excellent and I'm just thrilled. Congratulations, Zeherah!

Oh RNG loot. Sometimes I hate you a lot.

It's true that I got bracers and a crossbow on the guild's first night in the Firelands, but I'm also getting really, really bitter about T11 shoulder tokens. Last night we'd organized an off-night T11 raid to try to clear the tier to get people credit for that and maybe those last couple drops that people might have wanted. Hunter T11 4pc is good for MM hunters. Really good. Like, so good that you don't even replace it until you've got 4pc T12. I was hoping that Cho'gall might drop a protector token, now that the content is no longer relevant. You know, maybe he'd finally relent, since he didn't drop one single solitary protector token before 4.2. But nope, he just keeps dropping conqueror. One of our conq people picked it up for her OS, which is I suppose nice. Sigh.

Wanna know what Al'akir dropped?

A conqueror shoulder token.

I think it went to someone for a third spec they were thinking about trying at some point. Or something. Sigh.

SIGH.

I'm not sure how FL is going to go this week. We have 3-4 of our core team that can't make it both days, which means bringing people that don't usually come, raiding in offpsecs, raiding on alts for progression stuff, and maybe even pugging. None of these things lend themselves to success. But! Hopefully I'll have opportunities to do video of Shannox and Rhyolith.

Oh look, set bonuses!

Haha, woops. I made my music video post, then opened up my feed reader and everyone was making posts about the new set bonuses. Here are the hunter T12 bonuses:

• Hunter 2 Pieces - Your Steady Shot and Cobra Shot have a 10% chance to trigger a Flaming Arrow, dealing 0% instant weapon damage as Fire.
• Hunter 4 Pieces - You have a 10% chance from your autoshots to make your next shot cost no focus.

2pc is as boring and passive as they usually are. Just a damage bonus. It's of course hard to say how much damage it will be worth, but I would guess somewhere in the 50-100 DPS range. Just a nice little nudge upwards in damage done with no extra effort, so hey, that's fine.

4pc will be interesting. The way to make set bonuses engaging for DPS classes is to have them alter our priorities or cycle in some way, and this will do that. The current priority systems as MM already requires cycle to cycle alteration sometimes, at least for me. There are times when I'll want to tack a third steady shot onto the SS pair between chimeras and other times when I'll want to put a third arcane shot in there instead, depending on how high or low on focus I am.

I'm quite curious as to what will end up making the best use of the procs from the bonus. On the one hand, I'm inclined to feel like it would be wasted on arcane shots, but on the other hand, chimera shot is generally on cooldown and aimed shot has such a long cast time that I'm unsure if making it free will make it something you're free to use. Especially since the need to keep the ISS buff up 100% of the time means you can't just cast the free aimed and then two arcanes and a chimera, because if you do that you're going to lose the ISS buff. The bonus may just end up being a thing where if it procs before a pair or trio of arcanes, it forces us to use a trio? I'm not sure.

I suppose the problem with it in general is that MM hunters are already so tightly constrained in our cycles. We are bound by duration of the ISS buff and further circumscribed by the chimera shot cooldown. The T11 4pc is good because the reduction in steady cast time makes the DPS cycle looser. T12 4pc is perhaps not so great because it's difficult to cram more stuff in there.

This is less of a concern for SV hunters, for whom it will pretty much translate into free arcanes. I mean it will mostly get used on explosive shots, but the excess focus that creates will get dumped into arcanes. So it's a good bonus for them. BM as well will just get free arcanes out of it.

Also: why is there mastery on EVERYTHING in the firelands? Gah! I mean it's not a terrible stat, but not as good (for any hunter spec!) as haste or crit.

Cataclysm Huntering at 85: Gems, Enchantments, and Reforging

Updated December 18, 2011!

I have, in the past, called item enhancement my favorite mini-game in WoW, and this is still something that holds true for me. I think the satisfaction is similar to the satisfaction from a well-played game of Bejeweled, or maybe a crossword puzzle. You need to know what points you want various stats at and arrange your gems, enchants and so on to achieve the maximum benefit from your available configuration of stuff. Sometimes you just get lucky of course: I got two upgrades on the same night once and equipping both of them put me exactly at hit cap. Exactly. Situations like this are rare, though, and you're usually going to have to shuffle around some combination of reforging and enchants to get your gear where you want it.

The sort of basis of item enhancement is stat weighting. This sounds like a scary term, but it really isn't. All this means is that, when you're considering your gear, you give some stats more weight in your consideration than you give others. This is pretty intuitive at its most basic: as a physical DPS class, we're giving spirit no weight at all because we don't want any. Conversely, we give agility a lot of weight because we want a lot of it. The difficulty comes when we're comparing things like crit vs. mastery vs. haste.

Unfortunately, there's no always true for everyone all the time stat weighting. Depending on the gear you already have, what stat is best for you might change, sometimes pretty drastically. This can lead to misunderstandings when people do things like look at the armories of hunters in world-first guilds and then try to emulate those hunters' reforging even though they're raiding in a totally different environment.

There are tools to help us decide on our own stat weighting, with FemaleDwarf being amongst the most popular. Even this isn't as easy as some would like though - you have to be careful to enter your raid's buffs and debuffs as well as making sure the shot priority and settings match the way you play. If you're using a playstyle where you use Aimed Shot as your focus dump and never cast Arcane Shot and run a FD sim without changing the settings to reflect that, then just click the "best raid buffs" button even though your raid is missing the 10% haste buff, your stat weightings are going to be incorrect.

Now that I've made all of my caveats, though, I'll make an admission: for the most part, I don't do any of this stuff. There's a sort of default stat weighting that will generally be mostly true for most hunters, and I pretty frequently just go with that. Here it is:

Agility > Hit Rating to cap > Critical Strike Rating > Haste Rating > Mastery Rating

Again, this may not actually be your ideal stat weighting, but honestly? If you use these as your stat priorities, you'll generally be doing OK. Hit cap is, of course, 960 rating for most and 841 rating for Draenei. In general, I'd prefer to be a few points under the hit cap than be a few points over. This is because there is a finite amount of stats on your gear and hit rating over the cap is doing zero damage and is thus entirely wasted. Missing 1-5 autoshots out of 10,000 is preferable to getting no benefit from some of your gear.

This stat weighting will also be reflected in the sort of gear you choose. I strive to get all my hit from pieces that have both crit and hit, and my hitless pieces I prefer to be crit/haste. Further, I try to not have any piece of gear without any crit whatsoever, which results in most of my mastery pieces being crit/mastery. That means that when I'm reforging off my least-valued stat, mastery, the only thing I can reforge it into is haste. Some people see all of the haste I'm reforging for and think that I'm "stacking haste," and this just isn't so. I have far more critical strike rating than I do haste rating. It's just that haste is the best thing to reforge to on the pieces I'm reforging.

Gems and Gem Sockets!

Gemming is actually pretty simple these days. Agility is far and away our best stat, which is in line with it being considered a primary stat by Blizzard. Further, the requirement to activate our metagem is "socket at least 3 red gems". Therefore, we're free to socket straight agility gems, and as a general rule this is what you'll want to do, ignoring most of your socket bonuses.

Consider, however, the Wentletrap Vest. This piece has two sockets, one red socket and one blue socket, with an attached 20 agility bonus. If you were to socket two 40 agility gems in it, you would be gaining a total of 80 agility from gems. If you were to socket one 40 agility gem in the red socket and one 20 agility/20 hit gem in the blue socket though, you would have 60 agility from gems, 20 hit from gems, and another 20 agility from the socket bonus. That's a total of 80 agility and 20 hit, which is just more stats than you get from the two red gems.

What if the Wentletrap had a yellow or a blue socket instead of that red socket, though? Well, then to match the bonus you'd need another hybrid gem, bringing your total agility down to 60. People have done pretty extensive math on this and, for all specs, the extra crit and/or hit you gain from those hybrid gems doesn't outweigh the 20 lost agility. Your rule of thumb, then, is to only gem for socket bonuses which reward you with 20 or more agility per non-red socket. Here are the actual gems you'll want to use:

Metagem:

Agile Shadowspirit Diamond if you can afford it,

Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamond otherwise

Red: Delicate Inferno Ruby

Orange: Deadly Ember Topaz

Purple: Glinting Demonsye

Item Enchantments!

Finally we get to the enchantments. There's not a whole lot of choice involved here, and all of the choice that is involved is budget-based. A lot of the top-shelf enchantments cost maelstrom crystals, and for most of us those are still out of reach. We probably won't be using all the best enchants until sometime in T12. I'm still going to list them here, though, because eventually there won't be an economic justification for using anything else.

Head: Arcanum of the Ramkahen

Shoulders: Greater Inscription of Shattered Crystal

Chest:

Cadillac enchant: Peerless Stats

Hyundai enchant:  Mighty Stats

Back:

Cadillac enchant: Greater Critical Strike

Hyundai enchant: Major Agility

Wrists:

Cadillac enchant: Agility note: this should be the first enchant you spend crystals on

Hyundai enchant: Critical Strike

Hands:
Cadillac enchant: Greater Mastery
Hyundai enchant: Major Agility

Waist: Ebonsteel Belt Buckle

Legs: Dragonscale Leg Armor

Feet:

Cadillac enchant: Assassin's Step

Hyundai enchant: Earthen Vitality

Melee Weapon: Mighty Agility

Ranged Weapon:
Cadillac enchant: Flintlocke's Woodchucker does not chuck wood
Hyundai enchant: Gnomish X-Ray Scope

I'll just finish up with a couple quick notes on these. You may have noticed that a few Wrath enchants snuck in there, and that's fine. Maybe at some point they'll add a better glove enchant to the game, maybe not, but until then we're best off just adding the 20 agility. I also noted that the agility to bracers enchant should be the first thing you use your maelstrom crystals on, and I think this will be true for most of us. Replacing an enchant of 0 agility with one for 50 agility is just such a huge upgrade that it's hard to justify doing anything else first. Especially since the cloak and chest enchants are such minor upgrades from their budget versions, I'd let those slide until you and everyone in your guild had all the best melee weapon enchants, bracer enchants, etc. Like, I'd only really get those once you reached a point where there's a stack and a half of crystals sitting in the guild bank with no one using them, you know?

I haven't addressed profession perks in this post, and unless someone specifically asks about one I don't really plan to. Your professions are your professions, and taking advantage of your perks will generally result in a bonus of 80 agility one way or another. Other than that, I would pretty much expect any given person to know their profession bonuses pretty well, so it's up to you to make the best use of those.

Finally: please please just do the dailies and put on the tabards until you have the good head/shoulder enchants. It really really really doesn't take that long to finish those rep grinds, and using the crappy versions or the last-expansion versions is pretty much disrespectful to everyone else in your raid.

So that's it! It's taken me a couple months to actually write this thing, but hopefully it helps clear up any lingering doubts you had about gearing your hunter. Have fun!

Facebows

Bows in this game are a little strange. Crossbows look mostly like crossbows and guns look mostly like guns, but bows? Roughly 2 out of every 3 bows has a face as its central element. The "Cataclysm blue-quality bow" model, used for Amber Messenger amongst others, has sort of a random scarred dwarven/earthen face on it. My trusty old Bristleblitz Striker has Archimonde's face as its central visual design element (as well as a pretty wtf name). And now I've got this:

I guess his chin serves as a wrist guard?

But hey, finally I've got a 359 weapon, yaaay! Atramedes is a pretty fun encounter, and I was proud of a little raidleading moment I had in it. Our first attempt stayed alive pretty well but used too many gongs and we died to searing flames. Further attempts had peoples' sound getting high to the point where they fell over dead from unhealable amounts of damage, and one raider suggested we use more than one gong per ground phase.

I had a moment of resistance, because I was like "but what if we run out of gongs!??" But then I reminded myself of one of my own maxims: Fix The Problems You Have. And the problem we had was people dying to too much sound. So we used the raider's suggestion and killed him fairly cleanly on the final pull of the night. Hooray!

Pradzha looks a little strange right now because she's T11 from the waist down and pre-raid blues from the torso up. That'll sort itself out over time, although shoulders are going to have to wait until Nef is dead, and he's going to be the last thing we kill, so it'll be a bit. I'm confident we'll get it done before T12 hits, though, which will be pretty neat. We'll still be behind the top progression guilds on the server because we'll have little to no heroic gear, but we'll at least start at the same time as they do, whereas we started T11 about a month and a half behind everyone else.

I'm still coming to grips with the February 22nd hotfixes, so I haven't updated the MM guide yet. I'll try to have that done within a week or so, though. It's tough to get a feel for them, as you can't really just go test or practice things on the target dummies, since they all activate careful aim and we don't supply ourselves with the very important 10% haste buff. Still, it feels like maybe the suggested cycle of dumping focus with arcanes either doesn't have enough room to squeeze everything in between Chimeras or wastes a lot of focus. Let's hope I'm just doing it wrong!

T11 Gear Post

Well, VA is still three weeks out from our scheduled resumption of raiding, but that still means I need a post up on our guild forums that lets people know exactly how loot lists work. That, in turn, means that I need my T11 list done to serve as an example. So! Here it is.

Head: Lightning-Charged Headguard, purchased with a token dropped by Nefarian in Blackwing Descent

Neck: Necklace of Strife, dropped by Valiona in the Bastion of Twilight

Shoulders: Lightning-Charged Spaulders, purchased with a token dropped by Cho'gall in the Bastion of Twilight

Back: Viewless Wings, purchased for 1,250 Valor Points

Chest: Voltage Source Chestguard, dropped by Omnotron Defense System in Blackwing Descent

Wrists: Chimaeron Armguards, dropped by Chimaeron in Blackwing Descent

Hands: Lightning-Charged Gloves, purchased with 1,650 Valor Points

Waist: Coil of Ten Thousand Screams, dropped by Cho'gall in the Bastion of Twilight

Legs: Lightning-Charged Legguards, purchased for 2,200 Valor Points

Feet: Boots of Vertigo, dropped by Atramedes in Blackwing Descent

Ring1: Signet of the Elder Council, available at exalted reputation with the Earthen Ring

Ring2: Lightning Conductor Band, a zone drop in Blackwing Descent

Trink1: Tia's Grace (heroic), dropped by Siamat in Lost City of the Tol'vir

Trink2: Fluid Death, purchased for 1,650 Valor Points

Melee: Malevolence, dropped by Halfus Wyrmbreaker in the Bastion of Twilight

Ranged: Themios the Darkbringer, dropped by Atramedes in Blackwing Descent

This gear set has 1000 hit rating, 1127 haste rating, and 9 gem sockets, not including the meta socket. That means it's in for a lot of reforging, but that's fine. There are a couple caveats, though. I haven't actually put this list into Femaledwarf.com yet, and things like especially trinkets could easily change after having done that. I would also suspect that, unless you're a troll, you should really be looking for the crossbow from Valiona instead of the bow, but I just really like bows.

In general, I tried to avoid items with hit on them, since the base hit rating is so over-cap. There's just a lot of hit on the raid gear for this tier, and very often the choices that I found on wowhead were minimal. This might change over time, but for now we'll have to accept a lot of reforging. I also tried to pay attention to socket bonuses and socket colors when making this gear list, but I did put it together pretty fast, so I may have missed a couple very nice agility socket bonuses or something. As always, this and everything else I post are subject to change.

85 and a shiny thing

Well, Pradzha has made it to 85. She actually dinged on like the second or third turn-in for the new arena in Twilight Highlands. On the way to 85, she utterly cleared out Vashj'ir, Ul'dum, and Deepholm and just scratched the surface of the Highlands. She's going to have to do a little more questing there at some point, just to activate the portal from Stormwind and back, but that's not very time sensitive.

I've now tried one 85 normal pug on her, a random which went to Grim Batol. The tank got itself killed on a trash pull, so I offered to CC and mark. The first boss is pretty straightforward (think Icehowl), yet somehow I was the only person in the party to move out of his charge. He dropped non-heroic Skardyn's Grace and I won the roll, which is absolutely unheard of. I used my Darkmoon Card: Greatness literally throughout the entirety of Wrath and I used the Hourglass of the Unraveller throughout BC. I'm serious: Illidan had to face the unmitigated fury of that trinket's proc. The danger here is that I'll be working on Deathwing in a year's time and still using the trinket I got yesterday.

Anyway, the second boss in Grim Batol pats and the tank let it walk into him without especially noticing. Even then it needn't have been a wipe, but when the yellow messsage flashed across the screen saying "THE BOSS HAS EQUIPPED A REALLY BIG HEAVY WEAPON IT IS SO BIG IT MADE HIM WALK SLOWER," the tank didn't think to kite and was of course squashed to paste. Not even my frantically typing into party chat "kite the boss kite kite kite" seemed to help. Although why I'd think he'd notice that and not the 93-point font in startling yellow in the middle of his screen I'm not sure.

On the run back we explained things and - I'm serious here! - no one was rude. It was all very understanding, this is a new expansion, here's the mechanic in play, let's kill the boss, shake it off etc. This somehow prompted the tank to run in, pull that same second boss again, and then drop group in an attempt to wipe us.

Sometimes the behavior of my fellow primates is just a mystery to me.

I'm hoping to convince guildies to play in some heroics this week, as I think skill and teamwork will be more than sufficient to compensate for not being utterly dripping with 333 blooz. Pradzha, for example, can CC two things at a time and has been anywhere from two to five thousand DPS ahead of pugs on any given boss. Some guildies have been neck and neck with her, but for the most part I'm averaging 40% of party damage done. Which is why I'm thinking that a party of people similarly shifted off to the right side of the bell curve shouldn't have too much of an issue running heroics even before we're totally geared up from normals.

Finally, some of my favorite people from our Wrath raiding team have returned, so I am super psyched to resume raiding on February second.

How embarrassing!

Prompted by a comment on the previous post, I did the research I should have done before putting the effort into the list. It looks like haste/mastery is a better secondary stat pairing than crit/haste, so I'll be updating the previous post within a day or two with a new list and editing some of the text to reflect the research.

Welcome to 85: The Hunter Pre-raid Gear List and How to Make It

Updated December 18, 2011!

One of the lesser-known facts about this game is that it can make spreadsheets fun.

No I'm serious, making gear lists is one of my favorite parts of the game. And since "what gear should I wear?" is such a common question for every class, let's walk through how I go about making these lists. The first thing any DPS player has to do is figure out their hit cap. A quick stroll through the EJ Cataclysm hunter FAQ thread yielded the following two numbers:

• General hit cap is 960 hit rating
• Draenei hit cap is 840 hit rating

I annotate those numbers on my spreadsheet near the bottom, and then I'll use that same file throughout the expansion. Any time I forget what my hitcap is, I just open up my gear sheet and there it is. Then I format my spreadsheet with 5 columns: slot, item, hit, haste, sockets, and source. Slot is where the item goes, item is the item's actual name, hit is how much hit it has, haste is the amount of haste rating on it, sockets is the number of gem sockets it has, and source is where it comes from: JP vendor, rep, or boss it drops from and instance or raid that the boss lives in.

Then I go to wowhead and navigate into the appropriate part of the database. Armor, for example, lives in database -> items -> armor -> mail -> chest (or hands or waist or whatever body part you're looking to gird). Non-mail items are under the broader "armor" menu, while the various weapons are, of course, in the "weapons" menu. Once I've chosen a category of item, I set up the following filters:

• Wearable by: alliance, hunter
• Agility > 0
• Expertise <= 0
• Resilience <= 0

Here's what these filters do, in the order that I've listed them:

• "Wearable by alliance" means that I won't see anything that's Horde-only. I'm also not picking the "Wearable only by alliance" option because most items in the game can be worn by both.
• "Wearable by hunter" just keeps the shaman tier gear out of the list
• "Agility > 0" means "agility greater than 0," because frankly, armor without agility is useless to us.
• "Expertise <= 0" means "expertise less than or equal to 0," which keeps all the non-tier shaman gear and rogue/feral druid jewelry and cloaks out of our list. Expertise, if you're wondering, is a stat that reduces the chance your melee attacks will be dodged or parried. Not so useful for a ranged class.
• Setting resilience to zero just keeps the PvP gear out of the list.

There's only one real exception to these filters, and that's trinkets. For trinkets I pretty much look at everything that's out, since their equip effects and procs vary so widely. Setting those aside, however, once I've applied all my filters I click the "Level" column header, which sorts the list from highest item level to lowest item level. This means you're always looking at the most recent stuff. Then you just go down the column until you find an item you like and copy it into your spreadsheet, along with the relevant information (amount of hit, number of sockets, and where it comes from). I've also got my spreadsheet set up to calculate the sum of the numbers I've got in my "hit" column, so I always know how much hit rating I've got with my current list.

The release of the successive content patches in Cataclysm has made maintenance of this gear list increasingly complex. I think that now, with the release of patch 4.3 and the gear reset that accompanied it, I have to split this into four different sections. The first section will be all the gear that's easiest to obtain for a brand new 85 hunter, which at this point means farming heroics for thousands and thousands of justice points. Don't just blow off the 346 blues that drop while you're farming JP! If you're wearing 317 green bracers and Van'cleef drops her 346 blue bracers, roll need and put 'em on. I wouldn't suggest enchanting them since they'll be replaced with a 378 item in a week or two, but make use of what's there.

Your rule of thumb for drops should be: if it's mail (if applicable) and has more agility than what you've got and doesn't have expertise, equip it! Don't worry about crit vs. haste vs. mastery or reforging or whatever. If it has more agility, take it. If it has sockets, throw some green-quality gems in those. Then go back to farming heroics.

The second section will be a gear list of what stuff to look for once you've raised your item level to the point where the troll heroics (Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub) start popping. This should happen pretty quickly, because the 378 equipment you can buy with JP will elevate your average item level past 346 extremely quickly.

The third section is for when you become eligible for the Dragon Soul heroics. Once you reach this point, you should stop queueing for random Cataclysm heroics and start queueing just for the DS instances. These instances will fill in the holes left by your JP gear. This is the stuff you should be enchanting and putting blue-quality gems in.

The final section of the post will have considerations to keep in mind once you're eligible to queue in the Looking For Raid queue, but by the time you reach that point your gear will absolutely be sufficient to step up to a normal-modes raid guild and start contributing DPS in the high 20s to low 30s.

On to the lists!

Section 1 - available at item level 333

Head: Worgen Hunter's Helm, dropped by Lord Godfrey Shadowfang Keep (heroic)

Neck: Necklace of Smoke Signals, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Shoulders: Bloodpetal Mantle, dropped by Ammunae in the Halls of Origination (heroic)

Back: Mantle of Doubt, quest reward from Elemental Bonds: The Vow

Chest: Flamewaker's Tunic, purchased for 2,200 Justice Points

Wrists: Bracers of Forked Lightning, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Hands: Flamewaker's Gloves, purchased for 1,650 Justice Points

Waist: Hail-Strung Belt, dropped by Altairus in Vortex Pinnacle (heroic)

Legs: Flamewaker's Legguards, purchased for 2,200 Justice Points

Feet: Treads of Malorne, from exalted reputation with the Guardians of Hyjal

Ring 1: Matoclaw's Band, purchased for 88 gold from Zen'vorka in the Molten Front

Ring 2: Splintered Brimstone Seal, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Trinket 1: Fluid Death, purchased for 1,650 Justice Points. Note: make this your first JP purchase!

Trinket 2: Tia's Grace, dropped by Siamat in Lost City of the Tol'vir (heroic)

Melee Weapon: Seliza's Spear, from General Husam in Lost City of the Tol'vir (heroic)

Ranged Weapon: Amber Messenger, dropped by Obsidius in Blackrock Caverns (heroic)

There are a few notes that go with this list. The first few concern trinkets, as it's always notoriously hard to get the RNG to play nicely with you when it comes to them. My first choice for an alternative trinket would be Grace of the Herald from Corla in heroic Blackrock Caverns. Another alternative is Key to the Endless Chamber from Corborus in heroic Stonecore. Alchemists can make themselves a Quicksilver Alchemist Stone, which is really an excellent trinket.

The big limiting factor for your DPS with this starter gear is definitely going to be your weapon. Don't worry too much about it though: you'll be zooming through troll heroics in no time, and the 353 weapons that drop in those will be a nice boost. You can also keep your eye on the AH and see if anyone lists a Ranseur of Hatred or a Lava Bolt Crossbow for cheap, but I wouldn't hold your breath. Most of the people that would be pugging Firelands are going to be in doing the Dragon Soul heroics and LFR instead. And keep in mind that 378 weapons drop in those heroics, so you don't want to spend more than a few hundred gold on a 378 BoE.

Section 2 - available at item level 346

Head: Headdress of Sharpened Vision, dropped by Dakaara in Zul'Aman (heroic)

Neck: Necklace of Smoke Signals, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Shoulders: Pauldrons of Nalorakk, dropped by Nalorakk in Zul'Aman (heroic)

Back: Mantle of Doubt, quest reward from Elemental Bonds: The Vow

Chest: Flamewaker's Tunic, purchased for 2,200 Justice Points

Wrists: Bracers of Forked Lightning, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Hands: Flamewaker's Gloves, purchased for 1,650 Justice Points

Waist: Waistband of Hexes, dropped by Hex Lord Malacrass in Zul'Aman (heroic)

Legs: Flamewaker's Legguards, purchased for 2,200 Justice Points

Feet: Treads of Malorne, from exalted reputation with the Guardians of Hyjal

Ring 1: Matoclaw's Band, purchased for 88 gold from Zen'vorka in the Molten Front

Ring 2: Splintered Brimstone Seal, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Trinket 1: Tia's Grace, dropped by Siamat in Lost City of the Tol'vir (heroic)

Trinket 2: Fluid Death, purchased for 1,650 Justice Points

Melee Weapon: Jin'do's Verdict, dropped by Jin'do in Zul'Gurub (heroic)

Ranged Weapon: Mandokir's Tribute, dropped by Jin'do in Zul'Gurub (heroic)

Section 3 - available at item level 353

Head: Dawnslayer Helm, dropped by Asira Dawnslayer in Hour of Twilight (heroic)

Neck: Necklace of Smoke Signals, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Shoulders: Betrayer's Pauldrons, dropped by Archbishop Benedictus in Hour of Twilight (heroic)

Back: Cloak of the Banshee Queen, dropped by the Echo of Sylvanas in End Time (heroic)

Chest: Flamewaker's Tunic, purchased for 2,200 Justice Points

Wrists: Bracers of Forked Lightning, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Hands: Flamewaker's Gloves, purchased for 1,650 Justice Points

Waist: Cinch of the World Shaman, quest reward from To Wyrmrest!

Legs: Flamewaker's Legguards, purchased for 2,200 Justice Points

Feet: Dead End Boots, dropped by the random shrine bosses in End Time (heroic)

Ring 1: Mannoroth's Signet, dropped from the loot chest at the end of the Well of Eternity (heroic)

Ring 2: Splintered Brimstone Seal, purchased for 1,250 Justice Points

Trinket 1: Arrow of Time, dropped by Murozond in End Time (heroic)

Trinket 2: Fluid Death, purchased for 1,650 Justice Points

Melee Weapon: Thornwood Staff, dropped from the loot chest at the end of the Well of Eternity (heroic)

Ranged Weapon: Dragonsmaw Blaster, dropped by Archbishop Benedictus in Hour of Twilight (heroic)

Section 4 - Looking for Raid, available at item level 372

This section isn't going to get a full list like above for a couple reasons.

The first is that if an item drops in LFR, has agility, is mail (if applicable), and doesn't have expertise, it is an upgrade from JP/instance equipment. Roll need on it.

The second is that by the time you've reached this point, you've done a lot of your own gearing. You've been picking up things I don't have listed, using them for a while, and then replacing them. You should definitely have confidence in your own gear decisions by now, congratulations!

I do have some recommendations to make with regards to LFR equipment though! In my opinion, the two trinkets you want from LFR are the Wrath of Unchaining from the Spine of Deathwing and the Starcatcher Compass from Warmaster Blackhorn. It's not that Vial of Shadows is bad or anything, just that the combination of the other two is better.

Should you happen to farm absolutely everything you could possibly desire from LFR, I would suggest the Sporebeard Gauntlets from Mor'chok as your offset piece.

Remember that you've been stockpiling VP from all this dungeoning and LFRing! Go ahead and shop around the VP vendor and start picking up some items there.

And that's it! Everything you need to gear yourself up to step into a progression raid. I've also written a Guide to Gems, Enchants, and Reforging so please check that out as well. Especially as you're applying to raiding guilds, having an armory that shows at a glance that you know what you're doing is a huge benefit.

4.03a and weapon speed normalization

One of the things happening to hunters in the 4.03a patch is that all of our special attacks are being normalized with respect to weapon speed. Let us reflect, for a moment, on the oddity of that sentence. What does it mean to have an attack normalized? What does weapon speed have to do with anything? Wasn't that something only rogues and stuff worried about?

Well, no.

To explain what's going on here, let's first take a look at two different imaginary bows. [Humbert's Mighty Twang-Stick] as compared to [Wesley's Elegant Willow]. Humbert's is a 100 DPS weapon with a 1.0 speed and Wesley's is a 100 DPS weapon with a 2.0 speed. That is: they're both 100 DPS weapons, but Humbert's is twice as fast as Wesley's, firing once a second instead of once every two seconds. It's pretty obvious that Humbert's is going to have to hit for 100 damage every shot to do 100 DPS, while Wesley's is going to have to hit for 200 damage every shot to do the same thing.

So here's the issue: the formulae for most damaging abilities for a hunter look like this:

Platypus Shot attacks the target, doing ([weapon damage] + [N% x Ranged Attack Power]) nature damage and dazing the target by forcing it to consider the inexplicable reality that a creature such as the platypus exists.

What that little formula in parentheses means is that the game figures out how much damage a white attack would be, then adds a number to that by multiplying your RAP by some percentage. If you think back to Humbert's and Wesley's respective bows, you'll realize that the weapon damage the game will calculate for Wesley's is always going to be higher than the damage it calculates for Humbert's because Wesley's is a slower weapon. If you had two otherwise identical hunters shooting at a target dummy and using only Platypus Shot, the one with Wesley's will do more damage because his platypi are envenoming harder.

Or at least, that's how it used to be. With patch 4.03a, hunter weapon speed will be normalized when the game is calculating our special shots. What this means is that Blizzard have picked a speed (hopefully 3.0 or slower), and every time a special shot needs that "weapon damage" value, the game will figure out what weapon damage the weapon would need to pull its stated DPS at that normalized speed.

To go back to our example bows, imagine the game normalized hunter weapons to a 2.0 speed. If this were to happen, the two identical hunters will do identical damage. This is because every time our hunter with Humbert's fires his Platypus Shot, the game will go "if this bow were a 2.0 speed weapon, it would need to hit for 200 damage to do 100 DPS, so that's what I'll use for weapon damage for this shot."

This is overall a positive change because it makes the game a little more intuitive. Without normalization, hunters were using the item-level 264 Wrathful PvP bow over item-level 277 heroic Zod's, even though the DPS rating on Zod's was higher. They were doing this because Zod's was such a fast weapon that the PvP bow's special attacks were still hitting harder than Zod's were. With normalization, the answer to "which weapon should I use in Cataclysm?" is almost certainly going to be "the one with the higher DPS rating."

Woah!

I just realized: now that hit is a blue gem property, we're going to be reforging most of the hit off of our gear. That way we can get as much hit as possible from gems and actually make good use of all of those blue sockets. And that, in turn, might make gemming for socket bonuses a more frequent choice.

Hm.

More gear stuff + a quick tip

Does anyone out there know of a handy way to link or embed bits of spreadsheets - especially Open Office ones - into blogger posts?  Because it would be really handy.  I just finished comparing the gearset in this post to one that swapped the T9 chest and gloves for the crafted chest and the leather gloves from the previous post.  According to femaledwarf, the 4pc T9 bonus beats out the increased armor pen gearset by about 66 DPS.  This leaves me in a rare condition of indecision, because 600 AP for a Marks hunter's pet seems like an underwhelming bonus, while all that armor pen on the other gearset seems awesome.  Heck, I've got more armor pen in my current gear than my non-heroic BiS gearset has, and my current stuff is all kinds of out of date.  It really seems like I should be wearing the heavy armor pen stuff - it is all the rage, right?  And that T9 bonus is pretty bad.  But still, the spreadsheet thinks the bonus is worth it.  Mysterious!

Anyway, apologies for the short, fairly contentless post.  I have been meaning to mention the "stutter run" for a little while.  Stutter running is a technique to squeeze a few more auto shots out of movement-heavy fights.  A good example of when it's useful is legion flame on Jaraxxus.  A lot of people tend to run continuously for the entire time they have the debuff, but the fire only spawns every couple seconds.  So if you watch your auto shot timer, you can move out of the first fire that drops, wait for an auto shot to fire, then move again.  You can use this when repositioning around the moving worms in beasts, moving out of the way of predictable boss AoE, so on and so forth.  It's not really complicated or tough or anything, but it's something you can do to try to get a little more damage out of times you're forced to move.

If you're wondering why I haven't been putting as much time into the blog for the past couple weeks, it's because I've started a new job, and the hours are pretty long.  Hopefully I'll get into more of a rhythm and resume writing posts worth reading!

Quick note before I go to work

I've been looking at the armories of other hunters, especially Marks hunters, and I think I'm going to be eating some of my words.  I do this pretty often, where I see a new piece of gear with a stat I don't like (in this case the haste on the Crusaders Dragonscale Breastplate) and denounce it.  Later I think about it more, and I notice that there are some nice leather gloves from ToC10, and reconsider my stance on the crafted chest piece.  I'm going to spend some time putting together more gearsets to compare tonight, but I'm thinking I could very easily be reversing my stance on the crafted mail and my insistence on 4pc T9 for hunters.  It's really beginning to look like T9 pants + hat with crafted chest and leather gloves from ToC10 may be the way to go.

Also, who knew this was going to turn into a gear blog?  I am a pretty serious nerd, I guess.

T9 Non-Heroic BiS Picks

A discussion on WoW Ladies got me thinking about what my picks are for the current BiS list, not counting anything from either heroic version of the Coliseum.  It's a pretty complicated time for gear comparison, with drops from Onyxia competing with drops from 10 and 25 player versions of the Coliseum and the Crusader's Dragonscale crafted pieces.  Some of the itemization on T9 is lackluster, and compared with the itemization on things like the Dragonstalker Helm and the three sockets on the crafted chestpiece, it's easy to wonder if the 4-piece bonus is worth it.  So I worked up a few variations on gear sets both with and without the T9 4-piece bonus and then compared everything at Female Dwarf.

At least according to Zeherah's model (she's the huntress that runs the Female Dwarf site), the 4-piece comes out on top.  So, here's the gear list that I got the top results from:

Head: Windrunner's Headpiece of Triumph
Neck: Sparkling Onyxia Tooth Pendant
Shoulders: Pauldrons of the Devourer
Back: Cloak of the Untamed Predator
Chest: Windrunner's Tunic of Triumph
Wrist: Bracers of the Silent Massacre
Hands: Windrunner's Handguards of Triumph
Belt: Waistguard of Deathly Dominion
Legs: Windrunner's Legguards of Triumph
Feet: Greaves of Ruthless Judgment
Ring1: Dexterous Brightstone Ring
Ring2: Planestalker Band
Trinket1: Death's Choice
Trinket2: Darkmoon Card: Greatness
Melee Weapon: Hellion Glaive
Ranged Weapon: Death's Head Crossbow

I would be using the agility enchant on the boots and put a Glinting Flawless Ametrine in the yellow socket in the shoulders, as well as the standard Nightmare Tear in the blue socket of the pants, with otherwise standard enchants and Delicate Cardinal Rubies. Again, this is just the stuff you can get without any heroic versions of the raid, not the BiS gear from the entire tier of content.  The list of course changes once you start doing that, although there are still a couple pieces in it that will come from 10-person raids.

A Brief Anecdote About Min-Maxing

"Min-Maxing" is a term that came to the MMO gamer from the pen and paper world, and is often spoken of in derisive tones.  I don't really think this is fair; at its root, min-maxing is just another little puzzle-game that you play as part of the larger game.  I thought I might step through the thought process that I went through with a few different upgrades, enchants, and gems yesterday and today to sort of show what's really going on when people talk about min-maxing.

To begin with, before I did a couple off-night tens last night, I happened to be exactly on hit cap using only  Icewalker.  Then I got a new necklace, the Sparkling Onyxia Tooth Pendant.  The hit on the neck piece meant I was able to replace my Iron-Studded Mantle with the Pauldrons of the Devourer, which was good because those are the best shoulder items available right now, as far as I know.

The change did create a slight problem though: it put me four hit rating over the hitcap.  At first I was going to leave it alone, since Icewalker is a slightly better enchant than Superior Agility.  However, as I thought about it more, I realized that wasting 4 of those 12 points of hit was just too much.  Especially because my new shoulders had a yellow socket with a 4 agility bonus on it!  If I swapped Icewalker to the agility enchant, I would waste two less hit rating and get a four agility socket bonus I'd previously been missing.  I made those changes earlier tonight and was glad to do it - I just feel better if I've gotten every point out of my gear that I can find in it, you know?  And that's all min-maxing is: playing the little gear/enchant/gem puzzle game.  Think of it like Bejeweled.