Hunter Log Evaluation

Log evaluation is probably one of the least-practiced branches of WoW nerdery. This is a shame, because it's a really powerful tool both for individual improvement, fixing problems that are stopping progression, and figuring out if that new applicant to your guild is going to be a help or a hindrance. It's also not actually that difficult! World of Logs has some really great summaries and analysis screens that make it easy to find what you're looking for, so long as you know what what is.

We'll start by taking a look at my most recent Ultraxion parse. I won't link to the report itself because it's going to get deleted in a month or so, but I'll have screenshots of the relevant stuff. One thing I won't screenshot, though, is the one screen that everyone always checks out: the summary of damage done, with its pretty bars and its ranking. There are two things that this screen is good for: making fun of your healers for their low DPS, and getting a very rough sense of how you're doing as long as you already know what decent damage output for that encounter looks like. Seeing that you're doing the most damage in your guild really does not mean anything, for a whole variety of reasons.

The trick with log evaluation is to find objective measures of performance. Or at least as close to objective as we can get.

So what's the most important thing for pretty much every spec of hunter? Keeping their signature ability on cooldown. Chimera Shot for Marks, Explosive Shot for Survival, and Kill Command for Beast hunters. This is handy because it's a truly objective measure of an incredibly important part of how hunters DPS. It's also pretty easy, if laborious, to check. The first step is to go to the log browser within WoL:

It's going to have a default query already in there. Go ahead and remove that, then click "Add Query" and fill it out like this:

Click for full size.

Once you've added your query, click "Run." You'll get a list like this:

Next is the annoying, laborious part. You can do this however you want, but for me it's easiest to copy the whole thing into notepad. Then you go down the list and find out how long it took in between signature shots. I'm still playing MM until 4.3.2, so for me that's Chimera Shot. I also have CS glyphed, which means it has a 9 second cooldown. Accounting for latency and similar factors, I'd be pretty happy to have about 9.2 seconds in between my CS casts. The interval between the first two CS is 9.3 seconds (57.882 - 48.559), not bad! The one after that is longer (11.5 seconds), but if you add a second query to see Hour of Twilight casts, you'd see this:

I think it's reasonable to cut someone a little slack for missing the CS cooldown when they're not-dying to encounter mechanics. And then between the 3rd and 4th CS casts, we once again see 9.3 seconds. This isn't the 9.2 seconds I would ideally like to see, but especially as a casual raider I can feel pretty happy with it. Then you just go down the list and see how the signature ability timing looks. You can even divide the total number of seconds by the number of times the ability was used to get an average. Heck, you could even throw out some of the intervals for things like "dealing with Hour" if you want!

Keep in mind that what you're evaluating here is not overall skill with or knowledge of the class. You're just looking at the most basic DPS fundamental. This is the platform upon which the house of good gameplay is built. In order to make further evaluation, you'll have to know some things about the class and about the various specs. For example, you need to know that Deterrence can be used to ignore Hour of Twilight, so you'll want to run a third query, for spell casts of Deterrence and to see when Deterrence fades.

What you're checking for here is to see that not only does the hunter use it, they don't just let it go for the full five seconds of its duration. Ultraxion begins to cast Hour at 7.3 seconds. It's a 5 second cast, so it will have finished casting at around 12 seconds. Deterrence fades at 13 seconds, only 3 seconds after I cast it. So that means I popped it, then canceled it right after Hour hit. These are all good signs. These are the sorts of things you're looking for in your own huntering, and in the logs of any hunter applicants you're evaluating.

You can also see why I like using Ultraxion for this level of log analysis. It's a very basic encounter, with a couple "push a button or die" mechanics, no weird DPS gimmicks, and no role requirements like you'd see with a hunter tasked with kiting Rageface on heroic Shannox. Just good, fundamental class knowledge stuff.

Now, could I have planned out my focus income around that Hour better and put CS on cooldown faster? Sure! But in the case of my guild, a casually-raiding team, that's not something I'd really consider a negative in an applicant. It may be something I work on for myself, but I'm not going to be demanding flawless perfection from applicants to my guild, right? We have some objective measures of skill available to us with World of Logs, but we have to be rational in how we think about them.

Another thing we want to take a look at is the uptime for various buffs. If you go to the damage done summary and then click on someone's name, you'll get this screen:

Click for full size.

If you click on the "Buffs Gained" tab, you'll get a long list of buffs and debuffs. Evaluation here does require some class knowledge. To begin with, for all specs, you want to find the line that says "Tol'vir Agility" and you want to make sure the person has just under 50 seconds of time with that buff on them. The potion lasts for 25 seconds, so if you see 47-49 seconds of the buff, that means your applicant is properly pre-potting and then remembering to use a second potion later on.

For Marks hunters, you'll be looking for a couple specific things. First, you should see the uptime percentage for "Improved Steady Shot" at 90% or better for most encounters, even for things like Yor'sahj. The first encounter I've run into that's really messed with my ISS uptime has been heroic Mor'chok, due to the combination of constant movement and having to move in to melee range to raptor strike for damage reduction. Low ISS uptime isn't necessarily automatically bad, but it's something you can ask someone about. "I noticed your ISS uptime on heroic Mor'chok is lower than it is anywhere else, why is that?"

The second thing you want to see is about a minute's worth of time spent under the effect of Rapid Fire. Marks' reduced RF cooldown plus the addition of Readiness means that an MM hunter should be able to get 4 RFs (or about a minute) into pretty much every encounter. SV and BM hunters should have a second use of Rapid Fire in any encounter that goes longer than about 5:30.

Is this hunter in a raid with a Holy priest that specs into Lightwell? Check the buffs gained for Lightwell Renew.

And that's my rough outline for the things you want to look for, whether you're evaluating yourself or someone else. Start by verifying the fundamentals, then add in checks for things like "are they pre-potting?" "are they clicking the lightwell?" "do they know what encounter mechanics they can negate with deterrence?" "are they using Disengage to move around the encounter space?"

And that's about it! This is a rough sketch, but it gives you a really solid starting point to do some of your own log evaluation. I think that the trick is to keep in mind that you want to look for specific things. Ability use timing, using Deterrence at the right time, etc. Don't just try to stare at a log for a whole night and holistically extract useful information. It won't work.

And for those of you for whom this is all old hat, what do you look for in a hunter's logs?

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.

Overthinking Raid Difficulties

I am now at work, having finished up my interview with the Twisted Nether folks earlier. It was a lot of fun! Presumably I was pretty boring to listen to, but I had a good time. As happens so often with me when I talk with my mouth rather than my fingers, however, I didn't manage to convey all the thinkin's I've been having in my brain parts.

See, it seemed like a good idea to listen to a couple previous episodes before I went on, and the most recent episode was with Kurn from Kurn's Corner. I've been reading her blog for quite a while now, and I think she's awesome, which is why I was kind of saddened at her response to the question "what went right with Cataclysm?" ("nothing!") as well as her pessimism regarding Mists.

I got across some of what I wanted to say about those things in the show, but the big thing I didn't address was her complaints about the raid difficulties.

I think that you have to establish some background before you start talking about how satisfied you are or are not with raid difficulty in Cataclysm, because the game totally and completely changed the way it addressed difficulties over the course of Wrath of the Lich King.

In classic WoW and Burning Crusade, when you'd killed a new boss you had killed a new boss. Full stop, end of story. You weren't going to clear the instance and come back later and kill a different, more difficult version of that boss. You either killed Illidan or you didn't. Ok.

This approach to raid difficulty is intuitive and viscerally satisfying. It feels totally awesome and great to come together and work as a team and get that first kill on Lady Vashj or Kael'thas or Archimonde or Illidan. Man it feels good. And then you've done it! You've cleared SSC or TK or MH or BT and no one can gainsay that.

There are some problems with this approach, however, because it means that you're going to pour a really staggering quantity of development resources into assembling and tuning content that single-digit percentages of your playerbase are going to see, if that.

That isn't even the biggest problem, though. The biggest problem is that there is no cap on player skill and no cap on guild teamwork. I loved Lady Vashj and it remains one of my favorite encounters in the game, but if the modern top-10 guilds were doing SSC and TK, they would have laughed at T5. They would have just wrecked those encounters with a violence that would be sickening and terrible to behold, yes, even before they were nerfed. We were starting to see this with vodka's pre-nerf kill of Mu'ru, an extremely brutal encounter. There were, what, 6 or 7 guilds that were able to clear that before it got nerfed?

The thing to keep in mind, then, is that they did in fact clear it. The gulf between someone like me and someone in those top 10 guilds is much wider than the gulf between me and someone 10k DPS behind me in the raid finder. And then you have to remember that that gulf continues to grow wider.

I think the best way to think about this is to look at some illustrative examples.

I think I'm pretty good at WoW*, and I'm in a casual guild with people I like and a raid schedule I can live with. We're totally average, the perfect target market for normal modes. Roster difficulties in T11 meant we never cleared Nef or Al'akir before the nerf, but we got everything else. We went 7/7 normals in Firelands and never touched a heroic mode. We're the scrappy little kid in the school hallway, with a heart full of fierceness that's at odds with our awkward, uncoordinated exterior. We are currently 4/8 Dragon Soul normals on 10 and Ultraxion is looking like a formidable challenge on normal difficulty.

Kurn is the GM of Apotheosis. They went 7/13 25H in T11 and 6/7 25H in T12, which is awesome and amazing. They are some straight-up swaggering brutes, covered in rippling muscles and arcing with fearsome eldritch power, heirs to the eleven fatal secrets of Shaolin and masters of the most deadly arts. They are currently 7/8 Dragon Soul normals on 25 and will almost certainly be working on heroics within a couple weeks.

Beru is an officer (or perhaps GM? Not sure) of Monolith, who went 13/13 25H in T11 and 7/7 25H in T12. They are nightmares risen from the depths of a fevered unconscious mind, the formless given a form which is death unending. They are the coming of chaos and the rending of the world; from their manifold mouths issues a ululation that sunders flesh and from their uncountable eyes issues a light that sears all it sees to ash. They have already killed their first heroic boss in Dragon Soul.

The top guilds in the world are 6/8 25H in Dragon Soul.

The very best players are continually just getting better and better, inching farther off to the right-hand side of the bell curve. Any encounter which presents a challenge to them is rapidly approaching the state of being an impenetrable citadel to the rest of the world. Two encounters in this expansion have prompted Beru to write posts asking "is this fun?" and coming to the answer that no. No it is not fun.

Unfortunately, any encounter difficult enough to present the gentlest of speedbumps to those top guilds is pretty much doomed to make her give the same answer to that question.

So I can understand Kurn's disappointment that she's almost cleared the normals already, but I really think she underestimates the unbalancing effect of her own skill and the skill and teamwork of her guild. Presenting her guild with normal modes that challenged them would mean my guild banging into a brick wall at Zon'ozz, while presenting Beru's guild with normals that challenged them would have Apotheosis hitting a wall in the same spot. At the end of the day, if the normals are too easy for you, blow 'em up and move on to heroic modes.

I totally get that all of these difficulties sort of dilute the raiding experience. I agree with that. In fact I think she's one of the people that got the short end of the stick: normals are too easy for her to really feel satisfied at clearing them, but she's also not necessarily clearing the heroic modes. That's not very satisfying either!

What it comes down to, though, is that I think the choices were between dilution and destruction - the one-lockout model did not and can not scale with player skill, and just ignoring either the hardcore or the casual segments of the subscriber base would have ended up scuttling the ship. The very fact that there are millions of casual players is part of what gives meaning to the hardcore being hardcore, and without the accomplishments of the hardcore to admire, the casual playerbase loses interest.

*I think that a guild around the level that Monolith plays at would be happy to have me, even if my current progression doesn't reflect that.

Pugged players and personality conflicts

I have about as much affection for priest healing as I do for hunter DPS. My hunter was my first character, and she holds a higher percentage of time as my main character, but I have mained my priest in a raid healing capacity, and it was a lot of fun for me. It's actually a little unfortunate, because there's no way for me to heal without feeling twinges of "I wish I were on my hunter," and I can't play my hunter without getting similar twinges of "I wish I were on my priest."

Since I do main my hunter, this means I keep my eye out for opportunities to take my priest through current content. Somewhere in, I think, September I saw someone posting ads in trade looking to recruit a healer for their Firelands progression raiding. I sent her a tell saying that, while I couldn't be a permanent person that could make all their raid times, I could help out with their Friday raidtimes until such time as they found someone that could better fill in and was she interested in a discipline priest?

Her response was "no," which was fine, but then she gave me the reason for that no and said that it was because they already had a holy paladin.

I could go in-depth as to why this was an incorrect opinion to hold at the time, but I think it's enough for my purposes here to simply state its incorrectness. Having a holy paladin is just absolutely not a good reason to turn down a discipline priest with the current game balance, and it was an even worse reason before 4.3 was released. But this person Knew What She Knew and nothing was going to change her mind, certainly nothing so petty as the game's actual mechanics.

And you know what? That's fine. I shrugged and wished her luck and went on my way.

Earlier tonight, I posted a recruitment notice in trade and actually got a response from it, which was certainly a first. I'm not sure if this particular person is going to work out, but it'll be nice if he does, and since he didn't server transfer to play with us I won't feel any pressure to try force it to work if he's not a good fit with the guild.

Shortly after I'd invited him to the guild, he mentioned that he was pugging Firelands with the guild that I mentioned above. My sleep schedule is totally weird right now (totally weird) and, although I'm completely burned out on sick of Firelands, I could still use the trinkets from Domo and Rag. More importantly, it would be a good opportunity to hang out with the new recruit and see how he did, so I said sure, I'd come.

The raid essentially had one person in it who hadn't cleared the instance on normal before, and yet they felt the need to do full-length boss explanations on vent. Once more, that's fine. It's ok. Not everyone has my particular bias against pre-pull boss explanations going longer than a minute (maybe two minutes), and I get that.

What I don't get, and where I think I again have to say that I think they were just incorrect, was insisting that their raid leader be the only person to discuss encounter mechanics ever, in any capacity. Even on an AFK break, when said raid leader wasn't present, and someone not in their guild had asked a question.

I understand that it can be rough to bring in players from other guilds. Everyone does everything a little bit differently, and a lot of people have this notion that any difference from their method is wrong, rather than merely different. They feel like they're clearly better, and they have this weird misplaced arrogance happening, and they want to change the way you're comfortable doing things.

This guild leader pretty much instantly jumped to feeling like I was doing this, because the first time I mentioned anything her response was "we've been here countless times before." I could see the gear they were wearing. I could see the rote facility with which they went through the encounters. It was already obvious to me that they'd cleared all these places before and were just here to farm stuff for their mage's staff.

There was eventually some bad feeling about this, which is really unfortunate, and to be honest I think she's looking at things with the wrong attitude.

I've learned a lot by pugging myself into other guild groups, and I've learned a lot from people we've pugged in. We improved the way we did Valiona and Theralion, we improved the way we did Ragnaros, we got little tips for weird trash packs, etc. It is not necessarily disrespectful if someone mentions the way they're used to doing something. It is not necessarily confusing to have someone bring up an idea, especially if it's someone that's not doing things like talking over the raid leader. I think you run a very real risk of missing out if you declare that there shall be No Discussion of the Encounters.

So, I did get lucky. Domo dropped his trinket and I won the roll on it. Awesome. I don't think I'll be pugging with that particular guild any more, but I do wish them luck. I just think that things could be a little easier and more fun for them.

Dragon Soul so far: pretty great, actually!

I think I spent maybe 6 or 7 hours logged into WoW for the entirety of November.

It just wasn't something I was really very interested in doing. I mostly logged in to farm the nerfed Firelands normals, but we pretty much gave up on trying out heroic progression. Killing the same stuff over and over again in hopes that the few things we needed would drop was extremely tedious. Beth'tilac was the first boss we killed in Firelands and she never did drop a single tanking sword. On the other hand, our rogue got kitted out in his BiS for every slot, so that's cool.

The point being that I was pretty much totally bored with WoW and couldn't be bothered to log in. Patch 4.3 has done a lot to address that, at least for the meantime.

Part of that has been the raid finder, and I'm forced to admit that I was completely wrong about it. Basically my thinking was that all mechanics would have to be nerfed to the point of irrelevance, thus robbing the encounters of any sort of inherent ability to be engaging. Socially, the raids would be poorly organized and raid chat would be the linguistic equivalent of the pus drained from a festering, poisonous boil (sorry for that image).

The first of these predictions was correct, but I've underestimated my fellow humans when it comes to the second. I've done a few different LFR jaunts, both on my hunter Peregrina and my priest Andaviel, and more than anything else it's been pretty quiet. To be honest, I do most of the talking! I do things like try to engage with other people there, make jokes, what have you, and I haven't had much luck with that. But it hasn't been a whirling cesspool of misspelled epithets and and trash-talking about overall damage done, so whatever! Well done, population of the raid finder queues in my battlegroup.

I've also been enjoying the new heroics. I don't have a whole lot to say about them: they feel easier than the troll heroics did on release, but whatever. They're pretty fun, and generally visually engaging. I like the mechanic for the shade of Sylvanas the best, requiring as it does some modicum of organization and halfway competent DPS.

The real meat of it though, the normal-mode raids with the guild, has really been the big bonus for me. Raid nights this week have been fun, damn it! I'm looking forward to logging in next Wednesday night and clearing out the first four and then taking more shots at Ultraxion. There's been more chatter in vent, discussion of how we're doing the different boss encounters and dealing with specific mechanics, teasing each other about stuff: all the fun parts of raiding in World of Warcraft.

The difficulty curve is really strange. We wandered in and killed Mor'chok the first time we pulled him, and I think we wiped 4 or 5 times total between Yor'sahj and Zon'ozz. Hagara took another 5 wipes on her own, and then we ran into Ultraxion and he is a really surprising brick wall of a gear check. One of our raiders was actually really upset about this: we're raiding Dragon Soul normal modes with Firelands normal modes gear, and our best pull got him to 14%. That's a pretty significant debt to make up.

Now, I think we'll kill him next week, but I think the way we'll do it is by going to two healers. I don't like making my healers take on roles that aren't really the ones they want to play, but I honestly don't see another way to do it. I talked a bit with someone in raid that had killed him, and they were sitting at almost 170k raid DPS (for a 10). We seem to be averaging around 140k raid DPS. And I really don't think we're doing bad with the 378 gear we've got. Our DPS mains seem to be pulling between 20 and 26k, with an average around 24. I think the drops to 20 are in large part due to bad RNG with fading light, but I should check that in the logs.

Anyway, as you approach that 5:00 mark, it seems to me that the damage very quickly ramps up, such that you're going to be wiping at around 5:30 regardless of the number of healers. Dropping down one healer shouldn't be a huge deal.

The important part for me is that we were having fun, even with the wiping to the gearcheck boss. I've also cleared the place out in the raid finder - the last two encounters are pretty fun. I don't think this particular guild is going to clear out Dragon Soul on heroic, but I think we'll finish our rogue's daggers and I think we'll get a few heroic modes down. I'm pretty happy with that.

I recorded a video of the Hagara kill, which means I'll need to finally find a video editor I like and address the compression issues. It was the first encounter that really seemed at all worth a video though. I will try to have that up in a week or two.

Oh yeah! I'm also going to be - gosh. I'm sort of embarrassed to say this? Like it seems silly that anyone would want to listen to this. But on the off chance someone would, I will mention that I'll be chatting with Hydra and Fimlys on the Twisted Nether Blogcast Saturday night, 10:00 P.M. CST. So if you're super bored I guess you could have a listen!

If only I'd had FRAPS running!

Had a fun little Disengage moment clearing out Firelands last night. We were killing the two worms on the bridge right before Rag and I kind of spaced out and stood in the fire that launches you skyward. If you've never stood in that particular fire before, it's actually pretty fun! It launches you a really substantial distance into the air and then, at the apex, another fireball comes from somewhere or other and knocks you off to a side. This typically lands you in the lava, resulting in death.

Disengage, however, doesn't require that you be standing on anything to be used. Hunters are so awesome that as long as we're in combat we can just sort of fling ourselves around for fun. Whee! So, without the time to look and make sure, I tried to orient myself with my back towards the stairs and then as I began to fall, I tried to guess the right time to disengage back onto the path.

As it happens, I guessed correctly!

Peregrina just kinda alighted nimbly at the top of the staircase and then ran back down to resume shooting at the wormies. It felt pretty awesome. I'm also glad that this game can still put a big grin on my face from time to time, even if I have to stand in fire for it. My only regret is that I wasn't randomly taking video of it. It would have been neat to show that off.

Other than that, I have to say that I want it to be 4.3. Like, now. For a lot of reasons.

I look forward to clearing out the new heroics with guildies, and then even doing some tanking and healing in them on my alts. I'm actually planning on making video from those fives, if there's anything interesting in them (and it looks like there will be).

Even moreso, I'm looking forward to making videos of the encounters in the Dragon Soul raid. I never made videos past Beth'tilac for firelands because I kept dithering about not wanting to upload videos with me making huge mistakes in them and I was extremely disappointed with the results from Windows Movie Maker. I got Sony's amateur video program, but I've still had some difficulties finding a way to render the final videos that looks decent without taking up more hard drive space than the original video took up!

I think I've mostly solved those problems, though, so I'm really hoping to make some quality videos for everyone in the coming months.

Just need that freaking patch released.

On the other hand, my boyfriend is only about 350 seething cinders into the questline for the legendary, so it's kind of nice to minimize the amount of off-night raiding we'll have to organize to finish his staff. The raid is also crazy geared at this point, so it's mostly just been laziness keeping us from doing any heroic modes. We'll probably do some of those next week.

Anyone else excited for Cataclysm's last patch?

The MOST IMPORTANT raid consumable

All raiders are responsible for their consumables. Even if you're in a guild like mine (or just in my guild!), where we supply 100% of your consumables, it's your responsibility to ask for them. Scandalously, however, if you were to poll the world's WoW raiding population and asked them what the single most important raiding consumable is, you'd be lucky to get a single correct answer. It's time to address that failing.

The most important raid consumable is your coffee.

Frankly, I am almost beyond disappointed that this even needed to be said. This is really basic stuff, guys. I don't think it's that big of a deal if you have trouble with haste rating, or even if you're doing things like gemming pure crit rating to get a socket bonus (although really, don't do that). But I mean, not getting your coffee right? Inexcusable. So, since a guide on the subject is clearly sorely needed, I've taken it upon myself to write one.

The good news here is that this particular guide is spec-independent. And class-independent. And game-independent. It is also independent of gaming. Just remember that even though it can be used outside of raid time, it is absolutely necessary during raid time.

When I was in the fencing club in college - don't worry, this relates back to the post, I promise - our coach was a really neat guy. Let's call him Mike. Mike had worked in a fair number of occupations, but they tended towards the sales side of things. This made sense, as Mike was this really friendly, chatty, and personable guy. One of the sorts of things he'd sold had been audiovisual electronics. Stereos, TVs, that sort of stuff. He always said that one of the things that drove him up the damn walls was when some over-monied idiot would come in with a budget of five thousand dollars for a home stereo system and spend forty-three hundred on the receiver, two hundred on scam cables, and five hundred on speakers. This bothered him so much because the most important part of your stereo system is the part that makes the sound. If you're getting a fancy home theater setup, spend the majority of your money on the speakers and the TV, ok?

This happens a lot in coffee. Like, almost always. Someone will decide they like coffee and want to enjoy it in the privacy of their home. Wonderful! Me too. So they'll spend $500 on a drip coffee maker with its own built-in water filtration, digital water temperature setting, a carafe rated for atmospheric re-entry, wifi connectivity, and cool blue LEDs. Into this contraption they will dump hazelnut-flavored coffee they got from the grocery store pre-ground. Or maybe, and this is in some ways worse, they'll actually get pretty decent bean and then grind it with a seven-dollar blade grinder.

No. No! Bad. Bad. Do not do.

On the left is nothing too special. That's a very basic conical burr grinder from Capresso. You can get it for around seventy to a hundred dollars, and it'll give you a pretty darn even grind. Sure, a thousand-dollar commercial unit from Ditting would be better, but this little grinder is totally sufficient for your typical raider. The coffee is, as you can see, from Dogwood Coffee Roasters. They're local to me and they print the roast date on the bag, so you can make sure you're not getting stale coffee.

Actually, I should back up a bit here. When you taste coffee, it should not be bitter. It should be rich and flavorful and complex and mouth-filling and warm and fortifying but it should not be bitter. It would take a while to go into all the whys and wherefores of this, so I'll try to reduce it to a couple simple statements. The first is that most of the wonderful flavors in coffee come from very volatile compounds. "Volatile" means they react strongly with just about anything, including air, which is why an air-tight storage container is important. Even with that, however, if your bean was roasted a long time ago, the flavor will have sublimated right out of it.

Secondly, bitter coffee is burned, over-extracted coffee. If the hot water has sat in the grounds too long, chemical reactions happen that produce some truly unpleasant flavors. Further, the definition of "too long" changes with how finely you grind the coffee. The finer the grind, the less time it takes to over-extract and convert a brilliant light roast into bitter muck. This is why it's so important to grind at home and have an even grind from a burr grinder. Blade grinders leave your bean ground into a gradient of particles, from too large shading all the way down to too small, regardless of how you're brewing. Good bean and a good grinder: these are the most important elements of good coffee.

This is my preferred method of brewing: french press. You may have noticed that that's a Frieling stainless-steel presspot, and you may think it's a little too expensive. You may point out that it retails for around ninety dollars, the price for three perfectly serviceable Bodum presspots. And you'd be absolutely correct! I know this because I bought and broke three such glass presspots before I decided to get this one. So if you can use the glass ones without shattering them every other month, then by all means: go glass. If you're an irredeemable clutz like me, though, you'll save money in the end by getting a nice stainless one.

If I were really hardcore, I'd have a scale so I always brewed with exactly the same ratio of bean to water. But we're casual raiders here at Piercing Shots, so we use the "2 tablespoons of unground bean per eight ounces of water" rule, and it's worked pretty well so far. Here's how it goes:

1. Bring water to a boil
2. Coarsely grind appropriate quantity of beans
3. Place grounds in presspot
4. Pour just a few ounces of water on them and wait for the bubbling and fizzing to subside*
5. Fill to top, like so:

Set a timer for four minutes. When it beeps, dongs, or buzzes, come back and scoop the "cake" of grounds off the top with a large spoon, then press it. Finally, pour yourself a mug of brain-nutriment before resuming your assault upon the Firelord's throne (or whatever):

*This is called the "bloom". You only really need to worry about it with bean that was roasted 2-5 days ago. It has something to do with carbon dioxide, I guess? If you skip this step with really freshly roasted bean, you'll end up with the bloom taking up too much room with froth, not having enough water, and thus over-extracting.

Trying out fringe setups

Following on the heels of my previous post on haste ratings, I'm trying something super-wonky tonight. I'm going to be eliminating arcane shot from my standard DPS priorities and hardcasting AiS a lot. Since I'm using less ArcS (basically only when I have to dump focus while moving), I'm getting rid of the glyph for it. There aren't too many viable alternative options though, pretty much just the CS glyph and the kill shot glyph. CS glyph sims as an improvement in FemaleDwarf, so... I'm going to give it a shot. I did some testing of how it felt on a target dummy earlier, and to be honest it didn't feel good. I keep watching CS come off of cooldown right as a steady shot starts casting, and it feels like I'm just wasting that glyph slot. There's no way to really determine if I actually am wasting it other than just using it for a raid night and seeing how it goes. And hey, if there's something hilariously wrong like doing 15k DPS on Shannox, I can just swap glyphs again and go back to the comforting arms of arcane shot.

Raidleading vs. Rageleading

And of course in writing the previous post, I totally forgot something else I wanted to talk about. Someone made a thread on the bnet dungeons and raids forum recently where they linked to a video of a raidleader losing his damn fool mind on vent. A few other people linked to similar videos of raid leaders screaming at their raid or specific members of their raid or both at the same incoherent time. And of course there's the infamous "50 DKP minus" video.

At first I just laughed, in part due to discomfort and the nervous laughter that spawns, and in part because it seemed genuinely funny that people were getting so angry. And then I thought about some of the stuff from Kurn's most recent post and I imagined someone treating the people I raid with that way and I actually got angry.

Just so we know what I'm talking about, you can take a look at a couple of the videos in question (caution - all audio NSFW):

"A Nicsnock Meltdown"

A guy angry at a Kel'Thuzad wipe

More from the Nicsnock guy - seems like a real champ I guess

Anyway, this is the sort of behavior I'm talking about. I'm gonna go ahead and say that if you think you have the right to treat other people like that, then you have experienced an ethical lapse of which you ought to be ashamed. Absolutely disgraceful.

I guess part of why I'm actually upset about it is that this guy and people like him get away with it. They get away with it in game and they get away with it whenever they get the tiniest sliver of leverage over another human. They abuse the waitstaff when they go out, they abuse their family, and god forbid they become supervisors at work because you can be damn sure they abuse their subordinates. And, like torture, it doesn't even work.

Just screaming at your raid does not address the issue.

If something needs to change, there is no way in hell someone is going to speak up to tell you.

Further, people do not perform well when they are scared, or tense, or feeling poorly about themselves. You need sure fingers, clear vision, and mental focus to raid normal modes, much less heroic modes.

I in fact read an article in - I think? - Scientific American some time ago about a particular sort of pattern of brain activity that seemed to be common across mammals, emerging when they engaged in the activity that most directly defined their ability to survive. For rats, they entered this state when exploring; rabbits entered it when frozen in a state of abject terror. The interesting part was that this profile of brain activity could be seen emerging in humans in a whole variety of activities. Performing arithmetic, running a 100-meter dash, running a marathon, writing a novel, or indeed: playing video games.

This state of calm, loose focus is what we need to get new encounters down, to learn them and commit them to muscle memory. This is the state where you're moving out of the puddle of bad before the animation has fully appeared, not missing a single GCD of your DPS rotation, and monitoring the position of the rest of the raid at the same time so you can be in the correct place in 10 seconds. This is also the feeling I've experienced at fencing tournaments when I've done really well.

I can not see any way that someone could enter and maintain this state in a raid where the RL is screaming like a petulant, spoilt child.

Which is not to say that it would be alright to act like that if it helped. It wouldn't. I'm just being clear that there is not even the slightest excuse for it.

Closer to Rhyolith video, but...

I've been playing with Vegas' export functions, and I've gotten my filesize to a much more manageable point. The videos it's producing are still larger than the original fraps capture, though, which is a little strange. I'm playing with codec and compression settings to try and get a smaller filesize without turning it into a blurry soup. We'll see how it goes.

Other than that, people in this game confuse me sometimes. I'm not always right about things, but I generally have reasons for what I'm doing. I decide to spec or play in a certain way because I've read tooltips, or read comments on wowhead or EJ, or observed some in-game behavior, and I decide something based on that. It often seems to me like a lot of players decide things for no reason. They don't think about it or read tooltips or anything - they just decide a thing is true.

I read and sometimes post on the official WoW forums, and there was a thread today from a guy confused about marksmanship hunters and haste (by the way, these threads are posted daily - haste is the armor penetration of Cataclysm). There's a small cadre of very knowledgeable, highly progressed hunters that try to help people out, but none of them had posted to that thread by the time I saw it.

Who had posted was some guy that just copied and pasted the links to WHU's old "haste plateau" posts that are problematic for several reasons, not least the fact that none of them actually explicitly state the haste breakpoint that most hunters are going to be looking for. They just sort of state rating numbers in a vacuum.

This person declared that the links he posted contained "everything any hunter would need to know," which just isn't true. But this guy had for some reason decided that, without even reading the OP's question, he could answer them by posting links that could as well have been from a recipe site for all the good they did.

Very frustrating.

A little later on, I offered to heal on my priest for one of the extremely common T11 pugs that started showing up with the 4.2 nerfs to that content.

Now, I realize that it's rude to offer advice to someone who hasn't asked for it, but... Sigh. Their hunter - who is a main raider in their guild, and seems to be of an officer rank - is not specced into any points in Bestial Discipline or Frenzy, but has 2/2 Improved Serpent Sting. For a Marks hunter especially, those two talent points are going to get you extra damage maybe 3 or 4 times in an encounter where you switch several times between large-healthpool targets; despite this, he dismissed Rapid Killing as "too situational". His raid had several druids and a paladin and yet he put a point into True Shot Aura and both points into Termination. He has over 16% haste and has put the new scope on his 378 crossbow (about a 20 DPS upgrade), but has neglected to put the 50 agility enchant on his bracers.

Perhaps most tellingly, at one point he said on vent "oh yeah, I forgot I was playing with my wolf now, 5% crit is nice" and summoned his wolf. I mentioned that the feral druid supplied the 5% crit buff, and he said that they were unique buffs and they stacked.

It was at this point that I heaved a heavy sigh. To his credit, I noticed shortly after that I'd gained the furious howl buff, then gained it again once it wore off. He'd clearly opened up his character sheet and was looking at it and seeing his critical strike chance not change. He then brought out his fox (without saying anything, natch).

I don't expect everyone to know everything about the game - I sure don't. But there's no reason for you to only be testing out how buffs work in a raid. If you'd read the tooltip for improved serpent sting you'd know that it's borderline useless for MM. If you thought things through, you'd realize that if you're putting talent points into Go for the Throat and Sic 'Em, maybe your pet is worth the talent points in Bestial Discipline and Frenzy. If you paid attention to the constraints placed on your DPS, you'd think maybe Termination's extra focus would be pretty much wasted.

These are all things that people can mostly reason through and test for themselves. The exact haste breakpoint to squeeze the maximum DPS in between Chimera shots: sure, that's finnicky. But we all know that other people have already done that finnicking for us, right? You just have to do a little looking.

The alternative is just sort of slapping talent points down based on the pictures in the icon, and I think our fellow raiders deserve better than that. This guy's fellow raiders certainly deserved better than his 13-15k DPS with a 378 weapon.

As is often the case, the lesson for me personally is "be thankful for your guild, dummy." I've had a couple of these moments recently, where I've looked at parses from people in the Dungeons & Raids forum hitting Baleroc's enrage, or struggling with other encounters, and I really have to be grateful. Everyone in VA has put in more effort than a lot of people ever have.

Target Dummy Bosses

I'm not really a fan of the design of the Baleroc encounter, but I get why it's in the tier, and I think I would actually like it quite a bit if I were still raiding on my priest as my main character. It would be fun to really feel like I had the healer rotation down, was building stacks of vital spark, and seeing really hugely big green numbers on the tanks (our resto druid was getting 40k lifebloom ticks, for example).

As a hunter, however, I don't even have to watch the rotation on the purple crystals - I just stand motionless, 40 yards out, and cycle through my DPS abilities. Even our melee don't have too hard a time of it - once they'd had a few pulls to practice, they didn't even have to say very much at all on vent. It was a very silent boss kill, just the occasional tank notification of a taunt or me asking for bloodlust at 40% (next week I'll wait 'till 30, I think).

The very simplicity of this boss makes it popular amongst the more epeen-conscious DPS players, though, and I'm sure that there's a thread in the DD forums right now asking for peoples' Baleroc DPS. Within that thread I would imagine there's a range of claimed DPS between 20,000 and 35,000, in addition to a number of people making fun of the 20s and calling the 35s liars.

I felt pretty good about my number from last night, even though it's 4,000 DPS behind the median MM hunter DPS from the top 100 Baleroc 10-normal parses on raidbot. I think that for my gear and raid, it was pretty good and probably the best Baleroc hunter parse on the server. And that, of course, is why people like the target-dummy bosses that pop up every so often: they like to be able to compare themselves. Shannox DPS is going to vary widely depending on how much target-switching you have to do, Rhyolith and Beth have a lot of AoE and/or damage reduction, Alysrazor has the flying buff that hunters will probably never get, so on and so forth. People like to say "I can do this much DPS when nothing interferes with it." So, you know, I get that. I'm still not going to look forward to the encounter every week.

I'm going to try very hard to get my Rhyolith video done today and uploading over the night tonight. No promises, though! Those things take a while.

0.1%: the cruellest wipe

It's an off week for the guild this week. On both of our raid nights we've got not one, not two, not three, but four people who can't make it. This has meant people playing offspecs, people that don't usually raid coming in to raid, and even a pugged-in DPS whose performance was fine for heroics but whose DPS wasn't really sufficient for Firelands, especially going for first kills. We did manage to get Beth'tilac down again (and I'll have a little more to say on the spec I used for it in a moment), even with a seriously wonky raid, but it took a few pulls.

We brought Shannox to 0.1%, but our healers had all run OOM a few seconds previously and people were falling over dead each time he AoEd the raid. There were a few things that were especially heartbreaking about that:

• Personally, I'd forgotten to swap out my practice/heroics cooldowns macro for my "real" one, so I didn't use an agility potion on that pull. Maybe that 1200 agility during a rapid fire would have made the difference
• I was taking video of it and I had a REALLY COOL raid-saving moment when the first tank died and I deterrence-tanked for a bit, giving people time to dump threat so our Riplimb tank could pick him up (he's immune to taunt). It was really neat and would have made for an exciting first-kill video!
• No replenishment. Wiping to OOMed healers makes me really sad when it's due, in part, to all of our usual sources of replenishment being gone. Not only that, but our shadow priest and our ret paladin are both pretty excellent DPS, so in addition to more mana for the healers, everything would have died faster. With our usual raid team, Shannox would absolutely 100% positively been dead.

Tonight we're still going to be without our usual raid team, but we'll at least have replenishment, since our resto druid will be back again. And instead of healing - even though he's a great healer - my boyfriend will be back in shadow, and I'm sure multi-dotting on Shannox will have him in the 25k DPS range, which will be a huge help. Shannox should die pretty handily, and then we'll be off to see Rhyolith.

Going back to Beth'tilac, though, I was trying out a spec that I was introduced to by the WoW hunter forum. It's a marks spec that's really great for kiting lots of little adds, like the spiderlings on Beth'tilac. For me at this moment, it looks like this: 3/31/7.

Dropping silencing shot is easy, since any time I'm using this spec I've definitely got more important things to worry about. The points in improved serpent sting are kind of a bummer, but the only other option is more stam. I may end up doing that anyway, just because imp serpent is so, so crap for Marks, and having a little longer before I fall over is never too terrible. Finally, the single point in Rapid Killing (which I've got in my normal spec as well) means that any time I get a killing blow, I get 50 focus, and that translates to infinite multi-shot spam on spiderlings. It kills them really, really quickly. And having the daze from concussive barrage on there means that I can reserve my traps for emergencies, and that means that not having the reduced cooldown from resourcefulness isn't as big a deal. Yay!

Finally, since it's Marks, it still does better single-target DPS in phase two than Survival does, making things easier for everyone. Awesome!

The only problem now is that I need to figure out if this spec should get it's own mini-post or if I should try to cram it into my ever-more-bloated MM guide post? I did a quick edit of that yesterday, and it's getting really long. Ideas or preferences? Add another paragraph to an already-long thing, or start splitting up the guide into different posts?

More thoughts on Beth'tilac

My computer seemed to be able to handle video capture during the Beth'tilac encounter just fine, so maybe next week I'll have hunter POV video of a Beth kill. We were close this week - 15% - but didn't quite get there.

It's a troublesome encounter as a hunter. Having entrapment and reduced cooldowns on traps is really, really, really nice during phase 1, as is having serpent spread.

I guess I should maybe back up and explain the encounter for the folks that haven't necessarily had a look at it. There are a couple phases, with phase 1 being all about controlling and killing a lot of adds very fast. There are drone, which are big hard-hitting melee mobs the tank has to pick up. There are spinners the hang from the roof on threads - you taunt them with distracting shot to get them to fall down, creating the threads that other raid members can climb up on (the roof is a web that Beth'tilac stands on, and you need at least a tank and a healer up there with her). Finally there are spiderlings that have to be slowed and killed before they can reach the drones (and the drones, of course, should be kited away from them). Beth herself will periodically use an ability that kills anyone that stays upstairs with her, causing those people to jump down, let her cast it, and then climb back up. Once she's cast that three times, she hops downstairs and gives herself a stacking buff to her own damage, so you have to kill her before she wipes the raid with unhealable amounts of damage.

Guilds that had cleared 13/13 T11 are laughing at her and calling her undertuned, but for an appropriately geared guild (i.e.: 359 stuff), she's tough. I feel like she's also perhaps more difficult for a 10-person raiding guild, as it's harder for us to distribute enough people around the encounter space. In order to feel really comfortable with our control of the adds downstairs, we haven't had any DPS upstairs, which means we're trying to bring her from about 95% (or 100% if she eats a spiderling when she lands, which can happen if some happen to be right under her when she jumps down) to zero, and that's just not happening.

So I'm not sure where the issue lies. If our people killing drones were doing a little more damage, maybe drones would die faster freeing those people to help me clean up the crowd of spinners that accumulates on the ground. Or maybe we should be two-healing it? Or maybe I should be sending the rogue instead of the warlock upstairs.

I think that last option is going to be the one I'll try next Wednesday. I also think that Shannox isn't going to be as difficult to get down, since the apportioning of DPS will be a little more traditional. The up/down split really makes it sort of difficult to guess at the right places to put everything.

Personally, I think that with the rogue going upstairs I'll stick with survival for the encounter. It gives me really great control on the spiderlings and means I almost always have a trap available. I'm doing less damage during the burn phase, but if my being survival lets me have a rogue upstairs the entire time, then that should more than make up for the personal DPS loss. I think I'll also change DPS priorities - I think all of the downstairs DPS are going to be concentrating on killing drones ASAP, and having bigger time windows where 0 drones are alive should make it easier to clear up and kill the accumulated spinners, who after all only melee for under 3,000 damage.

Ok!

Talking this through in a blog post has been helpful. It can be difficult in the middle of attempts to step back and see what needs to be changed, but I'm feeling pretty good about this plan. Beth'tilac and Shannox will die next week for sure! And hey, maybe I'll even have a video of it to post.

First night of Firelands: pretty OK

Well we started in on the Firelands last night. We decided to work on Beth'tilac first and didn't quite get her down. It was pretty much always the same problem though, coordinating the upstairs tank and healer. I probably should have paused for longer between pulls and really talked with some of our upstairs healers, since there must be something going on that was causing them to not go back upstairs and heal the tank, but I'm not sure what it was. I wonder if maybe the healers didn't have a good sense of how short the smoldering devastation cast is and were trying to help the raid healer downstairs. That would be an easy trap to fall into, especially since the boss starts spitting fiery poison on the raid the second the cast is done. Tonight I'll consider having them set Beth as a focus or something, so they always know when she's done and they need to get back upstairs. I'll also have them try to stay right next to the upstairs tank so they've always got an eye on her and can see when she goes back up.

It's kind of a frustrating encounter as a hunter. Our taunt is on an 8-second cooldown, and the spinners only melee for about 2,700 or so, so we spend a lot of the time tanking spinners that we have to wait for others to kill. We also spend a lot of time struggling for the focus to use trap launcher to frost and explosive trap the mobs of spiderlings. I'm considering swapping to Survival for the encounter tonight, since that will help with trap cooldowns, serpent spread will help kill the spiderlings, and entrapment will be just as handy as it was on Cho'gall.

That is pretty much my hunter guide for Beth'tilac by the way:

1. Taunt Cinderweb Spinners
2. Kill Cinderweb Spinners that are at range from you, and raptor-strike the ones next to you for the damage reduction
3. Trap Spiderlings
4. DPS Drones if you have downtime

I also had some pretty bizarrely good luck with drops from the trash. The BoE bracers dropped and I actually whined about them not being the crossbow. So later on, the crossbow dropped too. You would think the loot gods would punish me for my impertinence, but I guess not!

I usually play with sound off, but I guess it has gun noises because it used to be a gun? Also it's bugged such that I can't reforge the mastery on it, which is truly annoying, since the bracers brought me back under the hitcap (they bizarrely have less hit than my old bracers from Chimaeron). I guess this is because the mastery is actually haste, and since the tooltip doesn't match the actual stats, you can't reforge, which means that the most elegant method by which I could hitcap myself is off the table. Sigh!

In other news, I downloaded the trial version of Fraps just to see if my system can support a WoW raid and video capture at the same time. I'm not sure that it can, but it would be neat to make some hunter videos if possible.

I haven't been totally idle...

...I just haven't felt like I've had much to say on this blog. I think part of the posting slump has been because the end of the school year ate 30-40% of my raid for the last three weeks or so, and it's been really disheartening to go from progression with a stable group of good people to fishing in trade for pugs and wiping on farm content. Thankfully, last night the prodigal raiders returned, and it was completely delightful clearing content with them. Very few wipes and some great progression on Cho'gall - I am about 90% confident that we'll get him tonight. And he seems like a really farmable encounter, very repeatable once you go back with a group that already has experience with him.

I suppose it may be worthwhile to chat about playing a hunter on Cho'gall. I think that unless you're in a raid where someone else - a frost mage, maybe - has the same sort of control options available to them, you should absolutely have a Survival spec for this encounter, and I think you should have entrapment in it. The reduced cooldown on traps and the 4-second immobilize is so useful.

What we do is we have our add tank pile up the corpse-puddles as closely together as she can, then I lay a frost and an explosive trap directly on that, then a snake trap about 10-15 yards in front of those. As soon as the slimes appear they get frozen in place while all the ranged unload on them with AoEs including serpent spread, which is really phenomenal AoE DPS. Once the entrapment period ends and the slimes get off the frost patch they hit the snake trap, which immobilizes them again. Hammer them with more AoE. If you timed that first frost trap well, it should be coming off of cooldown just about now, and you should be able to chain a third entrapment proc on the slimes right at the end. If you do this well, and your raid is lined up so the slimes aren't blobbing off to the sides of the room, you should be in really great shape and they should really die by the end of the third entrapment proc.

Awesome, huh? It actually makes the encounter really fun. I mostly leave my pet on Cho'gall himself to help the melee push that phase transition into phase 2. Once we really get set with his positioning in phase 2 and kill the tentacles with a quickness, we'll be set. Yay!

Other than that, my concerns with the T12 4-pc remain the same. I'm also not looking forward to questing out Hyjal on my hunter, as I've done it in its entirety once on my warrior and about a third of it twice on my priestess. I guess I should make some gold, at least.

Other than that, I've written a few thousand words of the first novel I've started that I've felt pretty confident about finishing a first draft of. I've also been futzing with Starcraft 2 a little bit again. And I quite possibly have a new job. And with the coming of Spring I've been running again. So I suppose that all in all, things are pretty decent 'round these parts.

Anthem of the Casual Raider

This came on the radio yesterday while I was on my way to lake Harriet for a run, and it helped me chill out a little bit about my progression anxiety. And hey, it's a good song in its own right. Totally void of autotune too, which makes me wonder why he uses it ever? He's got a nice voice!

Distractions and diversions

It can be a little strange having a gaming blog, especially one so narrow as a class-specific WoW blog. Things will happen in the real world, like tsunami or the death of bin Laden, and you're not sure whether you ought to comment on it. Does it seem weird that you haven't mentioned it? Or would it seem weird for a WoW hunter blog to suddenly start talking about SEAL team 6 in Pakistan?

I guess all I'll really say about that is that, while I'm glad the guy's dead, I wish it had been Army Special Forces that did him in. Just a little vestigial branch loyalty from my time in.

Now that my priestess has also made it to 85 and done a few heroics, I really must admit that I like healing a lot more than I like tanking. I've been playing her as discipline, and for me there really aren't any tanking moments comparable to popping wings with a full stack of evangelism and then casting penance into an inner-focused greater heal. It's pretty feasible to bring a nearly-dead tank back to almost full health, and just the juggling and triage in general is more satisfying for me than rounding up mobs. You do have to be willing to dive into your combat log to prove things though. I had a group wipe a couple times on Karsh in H-BRC and you could tell they were winding up into "blame the healer" territory.

I went into my combat log and found the last tick of heat wave that I'd eaten was for 28k. The damage from those climbs the more stacks of the debuff he's got on him, so if you're leaving him in the fire long enough to get 4 or 5 new stacks of the debuff, that's 20,000+ damage ticking on everyone in the party every second, in addition to melee swings on the tank. There's no way a healer with an average item level of 333 is healing through that, you know? People were falling over dead even when I popped PI on myself and spammed prayer of healing.

Some boss mechanics are a little bit better at illustrating to the DPS that they have responsibilities past "DPS the boss real hard". I haven't yet had a group clear Drahga in Grim Batol without a single wipe, because DPS are just loathe to swap targets. Having a fire elemental ram into them and blow up, insta-killing them, is a pretty good wake up, though. Well, sort of. After a couple wipes on him last night, the PvP-geared arms warrior bailed to be replaced by the most delightful rogue, who made the encounter trivially easy. She also kicked casts on later mobs! When I remarked on how many DPS don't seem to like to use their interrupts, she said "they do no damage," then had a whole little comic monologue about "y i use if no damage, i no waste golds on training it" and stuff. So that was great.

In raiding news, I feel like I'm pretty sure that we're not going to clear T11 before T12 launches, which is a shame. I guess once we out-gear it we can come back later and clear it. Maybe I'm being pessimistic? I hope so. Part of it's my fault, as I've known I need to do some recruiting for... a while now and I haven't gotten around to doing so. Recruiting is a lot of work, and especially for a small casual guild with poor progression it's tough to attract the people that will really help with that.

I've had some experiences in the past couple days that have made me sorely tempted to post spittle-flecked rants that are not at all related to WoW, so you should (all 0 of you) be thankful that I've resisted the urge to do that. I've also sort of considered posting a couple stories from my 2006 deployment to Afghanistan. Or well, less stories and more ruminations. I feel like that's starting to turn into a really unattractive clinging to an increasingly irrelevant past, though. A person is defined in part by their past, sure, but also by their present and future.

VA continues to work on Cho'gall. We've been extending the lockout, but being the guild we are, our weekly raiding time is still pretty limited. I do think I'm pretty settled on the strategy we've chosen to use for him, and I think it will work for our raid, but it's requiring quite a bit of practice. I think that's ok though - we're not really that far out of the norm of what a lot of guilds have had to put in on Choggsington, and apparently once it clicks it's a very repeatable boss. Then we go to work on Nef, and once he's dead we'll clear out Throne of the 4 Winds. There's still no solid date for 4.1 and T11 doesn't became old content until 4.2, so we should be ok to get it all down in time. There may be a couple of holes in the raid's gear in terms of what people would ideally like to have, but in general I think our progress through T12 should be quicker than T11 has been. And hey, it's not as if every guild made the transition from Wrath to Cataclysm as relatively unscathed as we have.

Pradzha is down to three last achievements for her Glory of the Hero drake: Headed South, Vigorous VanCleef Vindicator, and Rotten to the Core. They're probably the trickiest three, but we've also got enough good people (and, you know, raid gear) that we can definitely get them. Thanks especially to Jargon and Crapemyrtle, who are always willing to take a shot at an achievement for me.

That said, the endless quest for achievements is one of the things that causes WoW to be an especially potent timesink. There was a period of almost a month where I didn't log on outside of raids, and in that time I read a few good books, played a Dragon Age Origins game almost up to the final battle, and played some Dawn of Discovery and Sims 3. WoW is in many ways a great game, but there are lots of other great games to play, great books to read, and great movies to watch. I sometimes worry that I'll let it take over all of my leisure time, which would be a huge shame. There are so many people on this planet, making so many wonderful things, that we already won't have enough time in any of our lives to experience all of it. And this is all on top of trying to live a life that is in some way at least a small improvement to the life of our fellow humans and other creatures.

I guess that's not really a challenge unique to any particular hobby, though. We all pretty much just do what we can. And for me, right now, that means posting this and then launching Open Office to try to work on a little bit of fiction.

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!

Magmaw and Halfus

Well, as you would expect from the first two bosses of the first raid tier of an expansion, the normal difficulty version of these guys is not too complicated. Well, sort of - the fact that how you do Halfus is going to change from week to week is interesting. And we actually wiped a few times on the two trash mobs before Magmaw, but I think a lot of that was people needing to get back into the raiding mindset. Cataclysm heroics are tougher than Wrath heroics were, but they still don't have too many trash mobs with a whirlwind that will gib melee like that.

But! Mostly I want to talk briefly about these first two bosses from a hunter perspective. Magmaw is, of course, the most interesting: as a ranged player with excellent snares, it's going to be our duty to deal with the stupid bugs. This was even more awful for our raid, since no one in our guild likes playing ranged DPS (although I've hopefully converted one person to playing his warlock eventually). We have four melee and me, which I'll talk about a little more in a second. The basics of huntering for Magmaw are pretty simple, though. The fight starts and the ranged and healers stack up in one spot so you know where flame pillar will be. Start DPS on magmaw, but don't use your black arrow cooldown on black arrow after the first one.

Instead, when that cooldown comes available for the first time, you want to place a frost trap and an explosive trap. That way, when flame pillar happens, you can just skip a few steps to the side and the bugs will set off both the flame and the frost traps and give you a free lock and load proc as a little perk. Multi shot will pick up aggro on the whole pack, then you just kite them in circles around the patch of frost and explosive trap. The best way to do this is to circle in an ellipse away from melee and towards the entrance to the platform. The first couple of attempts, for some reason I kited the parasites into the vicinity of melee and there's just no reason to take that risk.

Luckily, I've had a lot of practice kiting pve mobs recently for the Ascendant Descending achievement. I've now got it to the point where I can reliably solo-kite all three shadows and get the achievement for the party, which feels good. I feel like that achievement is one of the sort of hunter skill benchmark ones, since you have to use a pretty broad sample of your abilities and maintain pretty good awareness of where things are if you want to solo-kite and get it.

But getting back to Magmaw: hilariously, since I was the only ranged player, we had the two rogues helping me kill the bugs, since they could give me tricks of the trade and hopefully keep themselves from being targeted. That's honestly one of the parts of casual, 10-person raiding I find the most fun, though: making the boss work for you even though you don't have an ideal raid composition.

Halfus is a pretty boring fight for a hunter, to be honest. Kill whatever you're killing besides halfus, then kill halfus. Don't stand in fire. As the raid leader it did take me a depressing number of wipes to figure out that, if you've got the whelps and the time warden and the slate dragon, release the whelps and the time warden. I mean, really dude? You could see the raid damage happening. Why would you keep trying to do the slate dragon even after you saw that his stun on halfus was totally useless, insufficient to do so much as let the mortal strike stacks fall off of the tank. Derp.

We were very close on both V&T and Omnotron. V&T I think we've got down and just need a little more practice to get the raid accordioning correctly so we don't have people dying. Omnotron we've also mostly got figured out, with the exception of poison bombs. In the general chaos of that encounter they're not getting seen, snared, and killed correctly, which means we'll have to adjust raid positioning when Toxitron pops up. That should also make it easier for people to see and use the blue circles of awesome from Arcanotron.