Why Aspect of the Iron Hawk is totally the wrong direction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This, my readers, I do for you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll keep y'all posted!

I guess I'm sticking with the CS glyph

Looked through the logs from tonight (6/7, yaaay!). It's sort of one of those times where what I'm doing feels really strange. It feels like I'm constantly pushing that CS cooldown back by over a second. It feels like I'm struggling for focus at the worst times. It feels like I'm doing it all wrong. But it sims better than anything else, and the astonishing part is that the time between my chimera shots is actually shockingly close to the timing simulated by FemaleDwarf.com. I've also maxed out on VP-purchasable gear for Pradzha and lucked out on almost every drop I want from the early farm bosses. The only thing I'm still missing is the boots from Baleroc, which he hasn't dropped yet. Well, and I need to replace my trinkets, but the trinkets I need drop from Staghelm and Rag. Impressively enough, Fandral dropped a Hungerer tonight (first kill trinket, yess) but it went to our rogue. I'm happy he got the item, but I can't help but worry that he'll never drop it again.

This rep trinket is really awful and I need to get rid of it.

Other than that, we've got a couple DPS that are hovering just under that 20k mark, and I'd like to help them move into the 20-21 neighborhood. I think if we can do that, we'll really make continuing progression a lot easier. It'd be even better if we could bring everyone up into the consistent 22k range, although any more than that and I think we'll need the 384 weapons from Rag himself. There are a LOT of guilds on our server that have been stuck at 6/7 for a long time, and I'm worried that could happen to us, with our 2-day raid week. We'll have to have very crisp, fast farm nights on Wednesdays so we can come in totally fresh on Thursdays and get in solid time on Rag.

Phase 1 seems not-that-bad. The sons of flame also actually seem pretty easy to deal with. I think melee on either side will be able to nuke the closest guy easily, and ranged can get the mid and far-away guys slowed, while the melee clean up behind them.

Pretty much the only thing that worries me is the living meteors. I foresee a lot of us blowing ourselves up with these things, and it's going to be a real pain to get to the point where phases one and two go very smoothly and we wipe in stupid ways on meteors.

We can get it though. I'm going to estimate we've got a month to get Rag, and I think we can do that. We might not farm all the gear that the raid wants off of him before T13 hits, but we may even be able to do that if it's late October or even early November.

Sometimes it's pretty tense being a little casual guild! But you know what? I think they did a good job with the normals this tier. There's a fair complaint along the lines of "finishing an instance doesn't feel like it's finished any more," but to be honest? I'm going to feel like it's pretty well finished once we've got Rag down.

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!

Leveling MM in Cataclysm

The subject line is what this post will really be about, but first! I wish to report on how I did with the "physical agility assessment" for the Madison PD: it went relatively ok. Minimum passing scores were: 25 sit-ups in one minute, 15 push-ups in one minute, and a mile and a half run in no more than 14:30. I performed 40 sit-ups, 26 push-ups, and made my run in 12:15. None of these are superlative, of course, and three to four years ago my scores would have been much better. But I've been working on getting back into shape, and clearly it's had some effect.

Moving on back to hunters! First, as soon as Cata drops (and I'm able to log in), I'm going to convert my secondary spec to something like this. Here's my thinking:

• It's irrelevant to a long boss fight, even one with adds because you'd need the killing blow, but when it's just you and yourself out questing, Rapid Killing + Rapid Recuperation will suddenly be awesome. I probably won't even bother using Aimed Shot due to that long cast time, but getting 50 focus every time something dies means I'll be able to spam Arcane Shots constantly.
• On the rare occasions when I want to MD a bazillion things onto my pet, Glyph of Misdirection and Bombardment mean that I'll be able to AoE down some pretty large packs with no problem, especially if I bring out my trusty Crabadin.
• The points in BM may seem strange, but they're mostly there to get me to Pathfinding as soon as possible. Especially if I can manage to farm the five thousand gold to get 310% speed flying, that extra 10% bonus will be awesome.
• I'm not bothering with Piercing Shots (even though I named the blog after it) because having another DoT is not really relevant when you're killing mobs that die within the space of two globals.

In conclusion, it's looking like leveling a hunter will continue to be the easiest thing in the world. And I honestly think this will be faster and easier than leveling BM. A really substantial pet tank is nice, but entirely eliminating downtime (and killing things as fast as the GCD refreshes) will be even better.

But wait, there's more!

Sorry, the post was going to be over when I finished talking about that spec, but I just noticed that MMO-champ put some updates up. Most importantly, there are now pictures of all the race/gender combinations with the new tier.

• I still hate hunter T11, but at least with the hat turned off (who the hell makes all the hats in the game? Lawd hammercy!), Pradzha will just look a little goofy.
• Goblin hunters will just look like murlocs.
• Worgenlocks with the helm enabled will look like goofy dogs that got stuck in a silly hat.
• Female orc warriors will look totally righteous.
• Although my BF continues to adore priest T11, I am mostly indifferent. Once again, I would never enable the hat. I guess it's sparklier than T10 though, so that's good.

Ok, done for real.

Marksmanship Test Night

Well, I think I may have to eat my own words, here. I realized I would be remiss if I didn't try out the new Marksmanship, so I respecced my BM spec to MM and did a little reading. I did actually find it as fun - or perhaps more fun - than Survival, a conclusion that was helped by finding out that the game has gone back to a state where it's more efficient to launch explosive traps on a boss than it is to use black arrow.

MM has the same central starvation-versus-surfeit resource model that all three specs share now, but I really like its twist. Survival has to watch two dots and keep an eye out for LnL procs. BM has to keep on top of using its DPS cooldowns, hopefully stacking them with focus fire and similar effects. MM has to maintain the Improved Steady Shot buff, which is just a little longer in duration than the (glyphed) chimera shot cooldown. That means you're juggling trying to find space to fit in two steady shots in a row, arcane shots when you can for extra damage, and the occasional free instant aimed shot from Master Marksman.

There's a little bit of leeway here. Under the effects of rapid fire, especially, you an let the ISS buff drop off because you can pretty easily just spam arcane and chimera shots. And I've just realized that if I were a competent hunter, I'd be misdirecting under rapid fire, popping readiness, and misdirecting again right at the start of fights - this would be an insane amount of bonus threat for the tank. So I should be doing that. But anyway, that's the new MM (as I understand it) in a nutshell. I do have one thing that bothers me, though.

The interaction between Resistance is Futile and Marked for Death is very non-obvious from the tooltips as well as dissatisfying. Apparently, for PvP reasons, targets marked by the MfD talent will not proc free kill commands from RiF. This means that I honestly can't think of a reason to take the MfD talent as a fairly strictly PvE hunter. I raided for years without needing to have my hunter's mark automatically applied and its duration is still five minutes - I can keep a mark on the boss, and regular hunter's mark will proc RiF. So then what do I do with those talent points that went into MfD? The only thing I can think of is putting them into Bombardment for trash convenience and the bosses that summon packs of adds.

So yeah, I'm not totally happy with that. The wording on the tooltips absolutely doesn't imply that RiF wouldn't work with MfD, and I seriously think it should. Ghostcrawler is I guess worried that it would be too powerful in PvP if not, since you can have multiple targets under the affect of MfD, but even that seems doubtful to me. It lasts fifteen seconds and is a fairly low proc chance, and anyway all it's doing is giving MM free kill commands - not a big deal. And Kill Command has a cooldown anyway! So... so what? Sigh.

Other than that, I picked up these bracers and they're disappointingly awful. I really don't need the hit, and they actually have less agility and crit than my old bracers from ToC25. But they've got a lot more stam! Again: sigh. So, still wearing the 245 bracers. Fester also failed at dropping boots again. Ah well. We did miraculously find a really good feral/resto druid in trade who seems interested in being a regular member of our runs, so... that's totally awesome. Having someone that's happy to DPS the first 10 bosses and then swap to a healer for the final two is really tough, and a druid fits into our raid composition very well, so I'm excited.

Focus on Survival

Oh man check out that post title. I am so clever, just like a journalist!


Ok, not actually clever, but you know. You've got to title the posts something. Anyway, I just wanted to reiterate that I'm really, really enjoying the new focus-based survival.

I was thinking about this last night (as well as talking about it a bit with the BF), and I think there are two things going on that make me like it a great deal.

First: you're still using a lot of things with cooldowns. BM really gets most of its damage from its pet and from arcane shot, and those are both always available. Survival gets most of its damage from Explosive Shot, a short-cooldown ability, as well as watching two dots. So what you end up doing is planning your focus usage around when those two dots are coming up for re-application and how close to that time your next explosive shot is. If serpent sting, black arrow, and an explosive shot are all coming up at roughly the same time, you're going to need to save up a lot of focus (but be careful not to cap it out).

On the other hand, if you're looking at a lot of open time before you next need to fire explosive and your dots are both fresh, then you can find an occasional opportunity to sneak in an arcane shot. Those little moments are my favorite, as I feel like I'm finding space in the resource system to eke out a little extra damage.

Second: survival's proc is just way more entertaining. BM has an ability that eats your pet's focus and gives you haste, but there's not too much interaction happening with that. When the built-in power auras go off, you use the ability. That's it. You also have the proc that makes the occasional kill command hit harder, but you're using KC on cooldown as BM anyway, so it doesn't change your behavior at all. Lock and Load is still pretty much the same talent/proc that it used to be, but that's a fundamentally satisfying proc. You have a chance to proc two free, no-cooldown explosives off of black arrow damage ticks. When you get 'em, you need to drop whatever else you're doing to fire three explosives, but you need to make sure not to clip the last tick of the dot.

Awesome!

So in summary, new survival involves the fundamental decision making of wanting to always keep explosive shot on cooldown but also wanting to keep your dots up and finding spaces for an extra arcane here and there. This is made more fun by reacting to a proc that requires you to alter your ability use to react to it properly.

I've done a little thinking about gear as well. I have to say the changes make me happy, because they mean I don't have to feel embarrassed by my crit/haste cloak from heroic beasts any more, and they make things like the JP-purchasable belt a much more attractive gear option now. It'll take roughly a zillion heroics to really gear my chicka up, but that's ok - and maybe I'll pug an ICC or something here and there.

In general, I think I'm going to hitcap again by shuffling gems a little, then reforge haste for mastery. Haste is certainly good now, but I think crit is still a more generally valuable stat, so I'd rather keep that. Other than that, the downside to "the bad gear is good now," is that gear priorities pretty much amount to "lay your claws on the highest item-level crap you can." There's really just not a whole lot of comparison worth doing. I'm assuming that will change with the cataclysm raids, though, with things like mastery appearing on gear without needing to reforge it. Until then my little inner excel nerd can nap, I guess.

Well well well

Preliminary findings from the research staff here at Piercing Shots indicate strongly that focus is fucking awesome.


So that's good.

You can take a look at the specs I've gone with on my armory page, linked to the right, and especially with so little wiggle room I'd say they're mostly right. I'll probably re-do the BM spec and shift points from Kindred Spirits into something else, but other than that, I feel pretty good about them.

I'm mostly going on intuition, of course, but I think I've got a pretty good plan for both BM and SV worked out so far. BM feels, I dunno, clunkier? Maybe it's just that arcane shot isn't very interesting, and the lack of cooldown on it makes focus management annoying. The focus fire proc is also fairly uninteresting - you just kind of use it when it's up. Anyway, what I eventually settled on with it was:

Send in the pet and Kill Command.
2 x Arcane Shot
2 x Steady shot
Kill Command

Repeat ad nauseum. I think in a boss fight I'd probably wait for the first focus fire before I blew my cooldowns for the first time, then I'd just blow them on cooldown for the remainder of the fight.

Survival was a ton more satisfying for me. It just felt like it all clicked together like a kid with Asperger's and a new Lego set, you know? You're almost always either using your big focus dumps, generally Explosive Shot, or saving up focus with Steady Shots. I felt like very occasionally I could sneak in an Arcane, which made me feel awesome, but I also had to be careful for times when Serpent, Black Arrow, and Explosive were all coming up soon and I'd need a nearly-full bar of focus (without, of course, letting it cap out).

I haven't installed Recount yet, so I don't have a clear picture of the damage I'm doing to training dummies, but Survival just feels like it's doing more damage than BM. A lot of that is, I think, the same problem that BM has always had: your pet is doing so much of your damage, you can begin to feel like you're just kind of chaperoning him around. Survival feels like it's actively slinging death down range.

Its icon is also way cooler.

Haven't reforged or re-gemmed anything yet, but I have to say it's kind of nice how the disappearance of armor penetration means I don't have to feel bad about things like my cloak from heroic Beasts any more. On the other hand, it's tough to know what I should really be striving for on my gear. I'm thinking in general I'll re-hitcap myself and then reforge for mastery.

I also think it's interesting that the official hunter forums have been really concentrating on MM and how to play it now. I mean, guys, come on. It's wide open now. You can play MM, sure, but why not experiment with the other two?

Maximizing Marksmanship

I was taking a look at the Marksmanship thread on EJ and saw someone recently suggesting that, even for a Marks hunter still gemming agility, it's pretty easy to reach the point where it's worthwhile to spec out of imp arcane and drop arcane shot from your rotation.  Further, it was suggested that glyphing for Aimed Shot and True Shot Aura and then moving Aimed Shot's priority above Chimera Shot would yield better damage.

The tests that one person posted looked interesting, so I wandered over to FemaleDwarf.com and plugged the changes in just to see what it looked like.  Surprisingly, at least according to a simulated model, it looked like the EJ poster was right.  I switched glyphs around a little bit, but it looked like the highest DPS option was to keep the Serpent Sting glyph and then use the other two glyph slots for the above glyphs.

If you're curious, the reasoning for the priority change goes something like this: if you glyph AiS, you're going to have that cooldown and CS's cooldown run into each other every so often.  CS is always going to do more damage than AiS but it also has a longer cooldown.  This means that when you push it back by the length of a GCD, you create room for more Aimed Shots.  Over the course of a boss fight, this means that you get more extra Aimed Shots than you cost yourself Chimera Shots.  The extra crit chance on Aimed Shot (10% is a ton) also means that the Piercing Shots debuff gets more uptime and more of that uptime comes from Aimed Shot crits instead of Steady Shot crits.  AiS hits harder than SS and that means dot ticks generated from it are bigger.

I also thought that it was a little odd that I would be dropping AS from my spec and rotation with under 500 armor penetration rating.  The usual reasoning behind that change is that, at a certain point of armor pen rating, a Steady Shot plus the bonus damage from the Piercing Shots dot will do more damage than AS, even though AS will always hit harder than SS on their own.  I wasn't aware that I had already reached that point, but I can't say that it was an unpleasant discovery.  Getting the talent points refunded from Imp AS meant that I could put those into Improved Hunter's Mark, which should be good for the raid as a whole.  Of course, simulated models are only so useful, and everything going on in an actual boss fight could negate whatever gains the model says you should see.  It's always going to come down to spending the gold to test out the changes on actual raid bosses and see if they pan out.

The results of the testing have been really encouraging so far.  To begin with, I should note that the bug with the TSA glyph isn't totally fixed.  They have fixed it so that another hunter with TSA on won't overwrite your own aura and break your glyph, but Unleashed Rage and Abominable Might both will.  Luckily, you can deal with this with a macro.  For example, here's my AiS macro:

/cancelaura unleashed rage
/cancelaura abominable might
/cast aimed shot
/cast silencing shot

As you can see, I've also got my silencing shot in there.  That's because silencing does some damage and doesn't activate the GCD, so as long as you've got it macroed to something you use frequently, you can make sure it's kept more or less on cooldown.  It's worth a few extra DPS.

It was really interesting to see how the glyph change altered my damage breakdown.  Northrend Beasts is a pretty solid "stand there and shoot the boss" benchmark fight, so looking at my numbers from it was a great way to verify that the changes I was hoping for actually happened.  The first thing I noticed is that Piercing Shots shifted from 5th-6th on my list of damaging abilities up to 3rd.  What this means is that dropping Arcane and buffing AiS meant I got a lot more uptime on that dot as well as increased the size of the dot ticks.  The next thing I checked was the critical strike rate on AiS to see if my TSA glyph was working as it should.  My baseline, auto shot critical strike rate was about 51%.  I have 3/3 Improved Barrage, which should bring the AiS crit rate up to 63% just on its own.  My actual AiS crit rate was 74.5%: pretty much exactly what you would expect if the glyph was working properly.

The other cool thing about this change is directly related to dropping Arcane Shot.  All of my arcane shots have been replaced by Steady Shots.  Now: on their own, they do less damage.  They increase piercing shots uptime, though, and more importantly for the glyph changes, firing more Steadies means getting more ISS procs.  The glyph of Aimed Shot and glyph of TSA combination then means that I'm channeling more of those ISS procs into Aimed Shots that themselves have a higher critical strike chance, making the Piercing Shot dot ticks even bigger.

The whole thing is an example of what's cool about playing a DPS class: getting to see your gear, spec, glyphs, and playstyle all work together intuitively for big yellow numbers.  Totally enjoyable.

I should mention that Glyph of the Hawk and Glyph of Hunter's Mark are both possible alternatives to the AiS glyph.  It's not quite as aesthetically satisfying, and the numbers seem very close, so I will very possibly keep the AiS glyph, but I do feel duty-bound to test it.  At a guess, it works in a more brute-force fashion by just pumping out more auto shots.  The lowly white damage attack remains the Marks hunter's top source of damage and is one of the few things that's very, very difficult to haste cap, so I could certainly see a straightforward buff to it being effective.  I'll keep testing and post my results here.

Next week's post will be a more in-depth look at configuration of the Watcher addon - complete with screenshots!

A little more about 3.2 gear

I realized that I missed a neckpiece yesterday, undoubtedly due to the fact that MMO-champ has it and wowhead does not: the Charge of the Eredar. This little guy is in the same unenviable position as the cloak from Northrend Beasts, it's entirely lacking in armor pen. Compared to Broach of the Wailing Night it would net me:

+13 agility

+7 stam

+17 AP

+18 crit rating

-46 armor pen

+44 haste

So overall, clearly a DPS gain, but one that's going to remain my lowest priority. Axiom uses a loot list system to distribute its loot, and there are only so many spaces available to list items. I'd rather spend those precious spots on things like the new crossbow and things itemized with crit/armor pen.

That said, for anyone saddened by the cloak situation yesterday, there is hope: Sylvanas' Cunning drops from the heroic tribute chest. That means it's amongst the handful of items most difficult to acquire from this content patch, but the hunters wearing one are going to be pulling somewhere in the 9-10k DPS range for Icecrown, I'm sure. And hey, having something to look forward to is never bad.

All of the armor penetration on this gear had me making a prediction yesterday that we're going to see the disappearance of survival as a high-end raiding spec by the time Icecrown is released. I made this prediction on a message board, and one person pointed out that the 3.2 change to survival's Lock and Load mechanic were actually a pretty substantial buff. If you're unaware of what those were, they added an internal cooldown to the talent and increased the proc chance. This meant no more strings of 2 and 3 back to back procs, which was a little sad - it was pretty fun firing 6 explosive shots in a row when that happened. On the other hand, you're nearly guaranteed a proc out of every Black Arrow duration, and that's an overall increase to damage.

Still, I don't see survival keeping up. I haven't simulated it or done any math or anything, so I could very easily be wrong. Nonetheless, survival just doesn't scale with the new gear as well as marks. For one, Explosive Shot doesn't care about weapon damage, so those new crossbows firing Mack trucks instead of arrows aren't doing much for SV. For two, marks makes use of all the stats on gear much more efficiently than survival. Both specs are in love with all that delicious agility and crit on the new stuff, but survival is semi-indifferent to the haste and armor pen. Most of its damage comes from ExS, an instant-cast, non-physical attack. Most of a marks hunter's damage comes from autoshot and steadyshot, both of which benefit from both haste and armor pen. Not only that, but marks hunters have been hitting 8k DPS with top-shelf Ulduar gear, and that's with an armor pen proc. When they've got that much armor pen just passively, I just don't see survival matching it without some other sort of buff.

Of course, there's always BM. It was still top dog when Wrath came out, and there's at least one blue post saying that they think they nerfed it too hard with 3.08. It's possible the iconic big red pets will make a return at some point.

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.