Great changes to the CS window

Read the official notice here.

I'm a little nervous for Blizzard with that "make a suggestion" button. I hope they're aware of the flood gates they're opening with that one.

I love that there's a "report player" button though. I really think that will help people be more comfortable when someone steps over the line and it's time to get a GM involved.

That's all! I think this is a great step.

I thought this was hilarious

Reverted a bug fix that caused Bombardment to be consumed by the next Multi-Shot. Fixing this bug proved to be a significant dps loss, so Bombardment once again lasts for its full 6 second duration regardless of the number of Multi-Shot casts. The tooltip will be updated in a future patch to reflect that this change is intended.

From the most recent hotfix notes. And, as always, I'm surprised that no one realized this would destroy MM AoE, since "spamming multishot" is all we do, and we already had to wait a little bit after the first one for the buff to pop up. If we have to multi-wait a second-multi-wait a second, of course DPS is going to plummet.

Changing the tooltip is a far more efficient bugfix.

(Probably) The Last Major Cataclysm Content Patch Is Out

Which means I Should Probably Make A Post.

Breaks like this are what separate professionals from amateurs, I think. Or at least, they're amongst the things that separate pros from not-pros. This month-long posting drought was brought on by a few different things, including lack of anything to talk about, lack of desire to find new things to talk about, holidays, and Skyrim.

I really think this break in content patches was too long. It was getting increasingly difficult to scrape together 10 people for a raid, and in fact the break from raiding for Thanksgiving conspired with a somewhat surprise-patch-release to keep us from putting together a raid for Dragon Soul. I think a few guildies have done the LFR thing, but I really have no interest in it. This is a little bit naughty of me - I could be getting 390 gear! - but playing with 24 people I don't know or care about and will never meet again is just not something I'm going to bother with.

This is going to be a tough patch for the guild in general. We're losing one of our main tanks to major surgery, and I doubt we'll get her back before mid-January. Our enhancement shaman has officially stepped down from raiding, although we hadn't seen her for a bit. Our students are getting nailed by end-of-semester stress and time crunch. I never succeeded in building a healthy off-night social atmosphere, which makes recruiting even more of a bear than it already was. So on and so forth.

It really doesn't matter how tiny and how casual your guild is, or how flat of a hierarchy you try to have: being in any sort of a leadership position takes time and energy, and if you don't put that time and energy in it begins to wither. Much the same as happens with a blog, in fact! Or well, anything else in life, I suppose.

It's been tough to put that time in, though, not least because I haven't been playing much or any WoW. There aren't going to be any more big mechanical adjustments to the game until Pandaclysm comes out. There was that little cowflop a blue dropped in the forums about how hunters just haven't figured out how to play Survival correctly, which is absolutely untrue. The problem with that spec is the same one it's had since Wrath: Explosive Shot damage doesn't scale with weapon damage. End of story. Even if they hadn't nerfed it, I expect top-tier raiding hunters with heroic Arathars would have been MM by now, and they certainly would have been MM with heroic Dragon Soul weapons. A physical DPS spec that doesn't scale with physical DPS is just not going to compete.

In fact, I hadn't looked at the 4.3 patch notes before now and I see that they buffed Explosive Shot damage by 15%. This is hilarious because the original nerf was 25%, and that was too severe so they nerfed the nerf by 10% (making it a 15% nerf from Cataclysm release). Now they're reverting that 15%. Hah! Guys, we could have (and did) tell you this was going to happen before 4.06 came out. Also before 4.0 came out. Tie ExS to weapon damage, dudes!

But in the grand scheme of things that's no bigs, really. The original "you're doing it wrong" comment was insulting and infuriating for the top-tier survival hunters, raiding in the spec because they do heroic tens and don't have an alternative, but balance stuff ebbs and flows. Frankly, the various specs in the game are the most balanced they've ever been, IMO.

Killing Nozdormu in a five-man dungeon is pretty WTF. Also it makes me kind of sad, considering he's still the hottest thing in the game.

But that's it, you know? What else is there to talk about?

I think that what I really need to do is reach out to some of the other small guilds on the server and - as dramaful as this could be - maybe try to arrange some kind of a merger or something. I dunno. I'd be playing more WoW if I had people to play with. As it is, I think my habitual absence means others are less likely to be playing.

Bonus addendum! If you look at my achievements, you'll note that I got Stood in the Fire. I have to protest that I did not actually stand in the fire. I tried to use disengage to get across the gap between pillars faster. It didn't work - instead, I fell into the Maelstrom. Definitely not fire. It actually confused the client, which decided that I'd died to elementium bolt and advised me to move next time. No, game! I fell into the Maelstrom between platforms. Did not stand in anything.

Flintlocke's Woodchucker: ugh

I have to say I'm really not a fan of the new scope. If you didn't notice it from the patch notes I mentioned yesterday, don't feel alone: I didn't see it either. I usually skip right to the "hunter" section and didn't see that they'd added a new scope for engineers to make. It's called Flintlocke's Woodchucker and it gives you a chance to (sigh!) fling a critter at your target, doing instant damage and giving a 10-second 300 agility buff. It will of course be mandatory, and it's going to make me sad. I already didn't like the cobra shot animation, so adding a turkey or whatever doesn't really improve things. I do not especially want to be "the class that throws animals at stuff". But it seems like I don't have much of a choice.

Recent 4.2 PTR patch notes

A couple interesting things from the patch notes for 4.2 posted on MMO Champion today. The first is that MM's mastery, Wild Quiver, is getting pretty significantly buffed. WQ procs are already a not-insignificant portion of my damage from parses, so this change is a pretty straightforward buff, probably to compensate for the nerf to Careful Aim. I'm still not entirely sure why the CA nerf had to happen, but presumably they had their reasons.

The second interesting thing is the buff to Black Arrow, for Survival hunters. I've been considering a mini-post on BA for a little bit now, because I've been thinking that it seemed like the ideal place to bring up Survival's damage. It's the tree's 31-point talent, which means that hunters really should want to keep it on cooldown, while in reality hunters are using explosive trap for LnL procs on mobs that don't move. That's a pretty straightforward design mistake, and making BA just Do More Damage not only helps bring the tree more in line with MM, it also makes that top-level talent feel decent instead of crap.

I still think they should tie Explosive Shot to weapon damage. The combination of that and the buff to BA would really address the tree's scaling issues (i.e.: Survival drops further behind with each new tier of gear) and help widen the options for what a hunter can play in end-game content. That, in turn, would be a boon for hunters in 10-person guilds, because Marksmanship is so dependent on having the 10% haste buff that it makes it very difficult to play in the absence of that buff. Being able to turn to Survival as a similarly high-damage alternative would be really helpful.

4.2 Careful Aim nerf

I guess CA is only going to affect damage done above 90% health? Why? It's not like hunter DPS was out of line or anything. Why did they feel that this nerf was needed?  And it shouldn't make much of a difference in PvP either. Opening burst is nice, but it's not what wins matches - being able to burst someone from 35% to zero is far more important than getting them from 100% to 80%. On the other hand, MMO champ says there are changes they probably couldn't get ahold of with datamining. Perhaps there's some other change to offset the CA nerf. Still: bleh.

Dungeon Finder Call to Arms

On April 7, Bashiok announced the possible addition of a call to arms system for the dungeon finder. There has been a lot of negative reaction to it, negative reaction that I personally feel is mostly misguided, so I wanted to chat about it a little bit.

I actually think that this proposal is genius. I could re-state Bashiok's post, but that seems superfluous: if you haven't read it yet, you should go read it. I think the goodie bags, and specifically the non-combat pets and mounts, are an elegant solution to a difficult problem. I use the phrase "elegant solution" here quite deliberately, too. I most often associate that phrase with solutions found for problems in the sciences or engineering. It carries connotations of finding a very simple, yet creative fix for what had appeared to be an intractable problem. And the long DPS queue times really had appeared to me to be such a problem.

There are a couple complaints that I'm seeing a lot about this proposal, both of which seem really flimsy to me. The first is something along the lines of this:

"The only people that are going to queue for these bags are bad tanks and DPS players without any tanking gear, spec, or experience."

To be honest, I don't see a whole lot of need to give this any sort of serious response. It's a bald assertion with no evidence, not even logical evidence. I don't see why anyone would think this. I mean, if the goodie bag incentive is going to work so well on bad tanks and non tanks, why wouldn't it work on decent tanks? Are those players actually aliens or something? I always assumed they were players that were pretty much similar to myself, and I see no reason to change that thinking now.

Even if you weaken the statement to "most of the people that will queue for the bags," I still don't see any reason to think that that's true.

Look, think about it this way. It is an indisputable fact that good tanks use the random dungeon system. You just can't argue with me on this one: I've had too many perfectly decent tanks in random dungeons. Really awful tanks have been a distinct minority, in fact.

It is also true that these decent tanks get instant queues.

Since they're getting instant queues, I don't see any way that they could possibly not be gearing up faster than DPS players. Remember that they're decent tanks! They're clearing most of the instances they start.

Once these tanks are geared up, they have no reason to continue using the queue system.

The goodie bags are there to convince these geared folks to step back into the queues for a chance at some toys, flasks, and so on. I see no reason why this wouldn't work.

The second argument I see most frequently leveled against the goodies is that it's "unfair" or it "devalues" the mounts and pets that people have already ground. Again, I don't buy it. None of these are raid items or real prestige items - they're all things that you can get with varying degrees of patience. And they're all "devalued" as-is, by the relentless march of expansions. Anzu mounts were exponentially more rare in BC, when you had to have a druid that had spent the 5,000 gold in the party and H-Sethekk Halls was relatively challenging. Now any old idiot can wander into the instance and murder Anzu every day. The difference between that and a small chance at getting him from successfully tanking an entire random without any guildies is minimal.

Nothing is being taken from anyone. As it stands, no one gets any goodie bags and DPS queues are 30-60 minutes, depending. If this change goes live, DPS queues should drop and tanks (and maybe healers) will get some goodies. Life gets better for everyone. There is no downside.

I usually try to be charitable when it comes to the motivations of others, but it's getting pretty tough in this instance. It really seems like a lot of people are mad that they won't get goodie bags and are scrambling for justifications for their ire instead of being thankful for a shot at reduced queue times.

I will note that many persons are suggesting the bags and/or the special items in them be made BoA, and I'd support that. The goal of the system is to add tanks and healers to the queues - making things BoA would only help with that goal.

I do apologize for the long break in posts. RL has been pretty active for me recently, and I haven't been logging into WoW outside of raid times. VA did kill the Ascendant Council last week though, yay! We've just got Cho'gall and Nef to go for the regular modes now. I really think we'll be able to clear T11 before 4.2 hits, which should mean that we'll be clearing T12 on a better timeframe. Whoo!

What the February 18th hotfix means for hunters

• Aimed Shot damage has been decreased to approximately 160% weapon damage (at level 80+), down from 200%.
• Aspect of the Hawk now provides around an additional 2000 attack power at level 85.

I'm slightly bemused by the phrasing of "around an additional 2000 attack power". It's your game, guys. You don't know exactly how much AP you've added to hawk? But whichevs, it's fine.

Anyway, I think this change is certainly going to enforce some change in how we play our class. I'm not updating the guide yet, because not only are the hotfixes not yet live, but the mathy people haven't mathematically mathed out the math yet. They've taken the initial steps, though, and it looks like about an 8-9% nerf to Aimed Shot and a concomittant buff to everything else.

I think the best way to make an educated guess as to how this will change the way we play is to look at our own parses and compare damage numbers and then think about how the hotfix is going to affect those numbers. Unfortunately, the big question is "will we go back to regular use of Arcane Shot?", and for the most part we're not using AS any more and thus don't have useful damage numbers. However! I use AS on the poison bombs in the Omnitron encounter, so hooray! We can compare numbers!

Here are the values for my average, non-critical:

• Arcane Shot - 7,367
• Aimed Shot - 28,331

Ok, so there's our starting point. Two arcane shots with the old AotH will be about 15,000 damage: well below a single AiS in damage, which is why the 4.06 changes prompted us to remove it from our priority system, especially when you consider the fact that AiS crits cause a bleed for an additional 30% of the damage done.

If we lop 9% off of that AiS damage, that brings it down to 25,782. That's still well above the damage of two arcanes. Granted, with the buff to AotH, AS is going to be doing more damage, but is it going to be doing 5,000 more damage per arcane? Remembering that AS crits still don't cause the piercing shots bleed? I really just don't see it happening.

However! My average non-critical Chimera Shot was 21,589 on that same encounter, and CS crits do cause piercing shots, and I think this definitely could change our behavior. I think it may turn out to be worthwhile to use CS off cooldown, instead of holding on to it and trying to sneak in another AiS before using CS to refresh the SrS duration. This, in turn, makes MM DPS a little less fragile, since you're not struggling for the focus and haste to refresh SrS before it drops off.

So those are my thoughts! We'll see how everything turns out.

Edit: Zeherah has done some initial in-game testing as well as out of game simulation and the patch notes as posted don't make any sense to her, especially the change to AotH (especially with its vague wording). So again, any predictions made right now are very uncertain and more than a little at the mercy of a very mercurial Blizzard.

Anticipation and dread

I'm looking forward to 4.06, not least because I'm going to be swapping back to being Marksmanship mainspec, I think. The longer I have to see it, the more I dislike the cobra shot animation, and I like all the tools and toys that marks gets (hooray for the disengage sprint!). I'm also dreading it a little bit, though, because I'm going to have to learn to play marks at least decently in a very short period of time, since we raid again on Wednesday.

I've been doing a lot of reading on how to play the spec, most especially of Whitefyst's excellent guide on the EJ forums. Cataclysm marksmanship is unquestionably a more complicated spec to play than Survival, especially since the spec enforces a playstyle that splits the fight into three different phases, each of which require different priorities dependent upon your choices for haste cooldowns and glyphs. Of course you don't have to keep all the possible permutations in your brain during an actual encounter: you've already made your glyph, spec, and cooldown use choices by the time you pull the boss. It's still a little intimidating to look at all the possible "cycles" as he describes them and try to imagine myself going through them in the middle of an encounter (and the beginning and the end, yeesh).

Not only that, but one of the goals I've set for myself with this blog is "making it easier," and looking at Whitefyst's post I'm having a hard time imagining how to simplify it without making it less correct. That may be the tradeoff I have to make, though.

To look at it more positively, though, I've definitely found that there's a difference between how people work out the theory and how DPS actually happens in-game. Ability use during an encounter is much more organic than static cycles, and I've found that as I get more comfortable with how I'm playing a spec, my natural playstyle evolves into the correct priorities because those priorities are constrained by focus.

I'll explain that with the example of the Survival spec that's currently dominant. When I first started playing Survival, my ability use was kind of scattered and I often felt like I was playing catch-up with cooldowns. As I played more and more and got used to tracking boss and mob mechanics will continuing DPS, I found that, hey: I'm just naturally squeezing three cobras in between explosive shots. And, since that means that I'm in a focus-positive state over time, I regularly reach a point where I have enough focus to cast only two cobras, replace one with an arcane, and still have enough focus for the ExS as it comes off of cooldown. Neat!

So in part I'm banking on that happening with the Marksmanship playstyle. I'll get a sense for how frequently Chimera shot comes up, how often the ISS haste buff falls off, and just naturally find myself using arcanes to burn excess focus. Then all I'll need will be adjustments to account for Careful Aim and the execute phase and I'll be set. Hooray!

Hopping on the new bandwagon will also hopefully make me excited about writing a marks how-to post, because I would guess that there will be a lot of people that are excited about rediscovering the spec.

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!

The painful sting of the nerfbat

Well, they're just nerfing everybody everywhere with 4.06, it seems. Heroics are getting nerfed, which I'll talk about in a bit, but oh my god the Survival nerfs are painful to see:

• Black Arrow damage has been reduced by 25%.
• Explosive Shot damage has been reduced by 25%.
• Hunter vs. Wild has been increased to 5/10/15% Stamina, up from 4/8/12%.
• Serpent Spread can now only affect up to 4 targets per Multi-Shot, down from unlimited

Oh god. It's like some hateful Guido with a backwards ballcap, gold necklace, and shoulders swarming with steroids and beer just took an aluminum baseball bat to my gut. Ok, not really, but those are some serious, serious nerfs. Explosive Shot is our most damaging ability and Black Arrow tends to be my third most damaging ability when kept on cooldown on a boss. That BA nerf is in fact so severe that I'm afraid that optimal Survival DPS is going to revert to using explosive trap for LnL procs on stationary bosses, which I really don't like doing. I hope the math doesn't end up in that direction, but I'm afraid it may.

On the other hand, they're theoretically buffing MM and BM, so maybe I'll be able to swap over to one of those if I don't like where Survival ends up. I'm still really surprised at the scale of the nerf to explosive shot, though. 25% nerfs to our top and third damaging abilities are just really, really severe. That's going to work out to somewhere between a 10-15% reduction in total damage done on an average boss fight. Or in less abstract terms, I'm going to be doing 1,200-1,800 less DPS, depending on boss fight. Raiding hunters are going to see an even bigger number, in absolute terms, lopped off of their damage. Brutal. Really brutal.

In general, I think the people working on class balance for WoW have proven themselves to be pretty smart, so maybe this is warranted. I suppose that it's worse to have something taken away from you than to have never had it at all. Even that only goes so far, though: if they nerf BA to the point where it's not worth using, that's a mistake (and incidentally, that's a mistake they've made before). I should also remind myself that these changes are just on the PTR, though, and they won't necessarily make it to live in their current form. It seems like the nerf to into the wilderness alone probably would have been sufficient, so hopefully they'll back off on the destruction of the spec's two signature abilities.

Moving on, the numerous nerfs to heroics are both surprising and not surprising in light of this blog post by Ghostcrawler. Surprising because the meat of the post is a spirited defense of the current difficulty of heroics, and largely I agree with him. I've been having a lot of fun with the Cataclysm heroics, and the guild has gotten to the point where we can reliably clear all but the longest instance in 45 minutes, and the longer ones in just about an hour. I'm personally at 11/28 of the achievements for Glory of the Cataclysm Hero, and our Wednesday/Thursday instance times are obviously today and tomorrow, so we should be able to make a bunch more progress there. I think the trash is a little easier than BC heroics, but the boss design has been worlds better, with the exception of Grand Vizier Ertan, who is dumb and boring. "This boss has two phases. In phase 1 you damage him. In phase two, melee stands around pointlessly but ranged still damages him. The party is zapped with a lot of lightning it can do nothing about." Um, ok. But like, Altairus? Slabhide? Azil? Barim? There are a lot of cool, involved boss mechanics in the Cataclysm heroics, the sort of fun and engaging stuff you don't generally get to see until you're raiding, and there was honestly very little that cool happening in the BC heroics.

I suppose the guy in Mechanar that gave you positive/negative charges was mildly interesting. And mini-Kael from heroic MgT was awesome. But the Black Stalker, Kalithresh, and... those other guys. I dunno. I just don't remember the bosses being all that entertaining really until you made it to Netherspite or the other dragon (Nightbane? I don't even remember) in Kara. And then the dragonhawk boss and Zul'jin in ZA were both pretty cool, Vashj and real Kael were awesome, etc.

So yeah, the nerfs to heroics are a little sad for me. On the other hand, I certainly can't argue with the sentence at the end of his post: they definitely have historically nerfed content once it's been out for a bit. Not necessarily because they think it was overtuned - indeed, the people that clear it pre-nerf have always worn that as a badge of pride. I never even raided sunwell, but I've talked with steely-eyed veterans on messageboards who stand a little straighter when they get to mention they killed M'uru before it got nerfed. But those people already have their volcanic stone drakes and are working on heroic Omnotron. They want more people getting heroics cleared. So I understand why they're doing it, and hey, I got my Cataclysm Dungeon Hero achievement before they did.

Predictably extended maintenance

Dammit. I was really looking forward to making my dorf shaman, but I doubt the servers will be up before I go to bed tonight. Kind of a bummer, but pretty much to be expected. I'll have some time to play with it tomorrow.

Hunter gear for 3.2

It's been almost exactly a week since WoW patch 3.2, Call of the Crusade, was released, and I've finally gotten around to putting together my semi-definitive loot list for the new raid instance. I've been sticking to normal mode loot so far, although much to my chagrin I've had to include a ring from the 10-man. Luckily it's from the second boss in there, but I was still hoping to avoid having to raid different lockouts on off-nights. Three days a week is the max I want to raid, really, but I get so bothered when I know there's a really good piece in that other lockout and I could have it if I just went to the off-night raids.

Anyway, on to the items with thoughts to follow. Anywhere that says "Triumph T9" refers to the item level 245 tier pieces, purchased with a Trophy of the Crusade and a number of emblems of triumph.

Head: Triumph T9
Neck: I'll come back to this slot shortly
Shoulders: Pauldrons of the Devourer from Emblems of Triumph
Back: Cloak of the Untamed Predator from Northrend Beasts 25
Chest: Triumph T9
Wrist: Bracers of the Silent Massacre from Faction Champions 25
Hands: Triumph T9
Belt: Waistguard of Deathly Dominion from Anub'arak 25
Legs: Triumph T9
Feet: Greaves of Ruthless Judgment from the Twin Val'kyr 25
Ring1: Dexterous Brightstone Ring from the triumph emblem vendor
Ring2: Planestalker Band from Jaraxxus 10
Trinket1: Death's Choice from the Twin Val'kyr 25
Trinket2: Darkmoon Card: Greatness from the Darkmoon Faire
Melee weapon: Hellion Glaive from Anub'arak 25
Ranged: Death's Head Crossbow from Jaraxxus 25

Total hit: 260
Total armor penetration rating: 553
Total sockets, counting belt buckle: 12

First, that neck slot I said I'd come back to: sadly, no loot list I've seen has mentioned any neck pieces other than the Collar of Unending Torment from Northrend Beasts 10. Now, the new neck has a few more item levels than the Broach of the Wailing Night, but it's one of those pieces that's a little better in one stat, a little lower in another, and is just altogether unimpressive. For that reason, unless and until someone finds an item level 245 neck piece with agility in the game, the neck slot is absolutely the last one that I'm going to worry about upgrading. What I've got is roughly as good as anything else from the new instance, so I'll worry about other slots first.

The cloak is another troublesome spot. Haste has simply fallen behind as a stat for hunters since the 3.1 armor penetration buff, and honestly I would prefer to wear Drape of the Faceless General over the new crit/haste cloak. Unfortunately, I haven't been in a guild that's really been able to consistently raid off-night 10s, so the farthest hardmode I've advanced to was the Freya+3 fight. A Drape of the Faceless just isn't in the cards for me. Luckily, with so much of a marks hunter's damage coming from autoshot and steady shot, haste is a substantially better stat for us than it is for survival or BM hunters, so Untamed Predator is a perfectly decent cloak.

This will be the first tier ever where I plan on wearing all five pieces of it, and the reason is pretty simple: there's just not a whole lot of choice. If it were possible, I'd love to replace the tier haste/armor pen gloves with some offset crit/armor pen gloves, but there's nothing available. In fact, there's not a whole lot of choice for any slot. The only reasonable physcal DPS trinket is Death's Choice. If Mjolnir Runestone had ever dropped for me, I would pair it with that. As is, I'll be pairing it with the nearly identical Darkmoon Card: Greatness. If the two trinkets turn out to share an internal cooldown, I'll run the new normal 5-man for the armor pen trinket with an AP proc there. That's pretty much it for gearing decisions.

Total absence of an actual bow is a little sad too, but at least the crossbow drops from an early boss, so I'll (probably) have it sooner rather than later. The polearm is regrettably ugly, but there's simply no dual-wield alternative. The Blood Fury axe is itemized well, but two of those somehow have fewer stats on them than the spear.

The hit total is also quite awkward. It's 3 points off the cap, which means I could definitely see an occasional miss, but hit is such an expensive stat in terms of itemization points that I don't want to slot a yellow hit/agility gem and and waste 7 points of it. Either way, a single hit piece from either heroic raid will clear up the hit disparity.

On the upside, all that armor pen on un-gemmed gear is pretty fantastic. I'm a blacksmith, so I'll actually have a total of 14 sockets. A nightmare tear will go in one of those to activate my meta gem, which leaves the rest of those sockets for fractured cardinal rubies. That's an additional 260 armor pen. Elixirs of armor piercing plus the 50% bonus for being an alchemist will add another 67 rating and hearty rhino will add another 40. That's a grand total of 920 armor penetration rating, only 312 rating off of the cap of 1232. That means that even without runestone, it will be absolutely worth it to spec out of improved arcane and drop it from my rotation and go with pure physical damage.

Hm. Now that I think about it, dropping those points from improved arcane would free me up to possibly put some points into focused aim, and that would let me pick up Pauldrons of the Devourer, so at least there's a little gear wiggle room at the end of the tunnel.

That's all for now! Plans for future posts include guides on hunter mechanics for both marks and survival specs, new hunter gear guides, hunter guides for various boss fights, and all kinds of other ruminations on being a PvE hunter in a progression guild.