Totally wonderful video.

Everyone should watch this. It is unrelentingly righteous. Its veins course with the most purified forms of awesome. I do not have enough likes for it.

We play this game for fun, right?

There are a few recent posts out there in the WoW blogging ether whose intersection I want to talk about a little bit.

The first is Cynwise's post on motivation - and I highly recommend watching the presentation by Chris Hecker that I linked in a comment on that post.

The second and third posts are Karegina's post about LFR and Windsoar's response, touching on mental illness more broadly.

What I think is important about looking at these three posts together is that if you find a good answer for Cynwise's problem, I think you're well on the way to having a good answer for Karegina and Windsoar. I shall tell a short story to illustrate what I'm getting at.

To begin the story, we'll have to go back to the Burning Crusade. The raid guild I was in at the time was working on Mount Hyjal. I don't think we'd yet begun progression on Archimonde. In those days, Cursed Vision was the best hunter hat (and rogue hat, ret hat, cat hat, enhance hat,...) in the game, but obviously we weren't at Illidan yet. The second best hat was the season 3 PvP hat.

At the same time, my boyfriend was playing a holy paladin and the best healing gloves in the game were the PvP gloves.

The solution seems obvious, right? Obvious and, if you did arena PvP at all during season 3, pretty horrifying. It's hard to imagine a worse pair of classes to arena with at that time, and it's especially hard to imagine a worse pair wearing mostly raid gear.

I won't go into the process in detail, but we did get our PvP items, at the cost of sinking a lot of time into doing an activity that wasn't fun for either of us and made us fight and like, really? Fighting with the person you love over WoW arena losses is pretty unpleasant. And so we swore it off foreverrr-r-r-r-r!

Until, you know, Cataclysm. Kinda. Independently of other things going on, I started to do some PvP on my priest, just random BGs, and it was a lot of fun! It was even more fun when I did them with guildies, because as few as 2 or 3 of us working together could really dominate a BG. And one of the guildies I was doing them with was my boyfriend (on his DK), and we weren't fighting! Yay!

I don't remember who initially brought up the idea, but at some point it was suggested by someone that myself and my boyfriend and one of our guildies do 3v3 arenas. I thought that two factors would keep us from fighting. First, now it was me healing instead of him, so I figured he'd be less stressed by watching healthbars drop. Second, we were doing it with another person, which I thought would be better. I'm not sure why or how.

Instead we ended up in the same place we'd been before, in BC. We stopped queueing for arenas, and honestly since then I haven't done any WoW PvP.

Looking back, I think that the core mistake we made was forgetting why we'd started doing BGs together: they were fun! It wasn't particularly fair of us to (mostly) steamroll uncoordinated random BG teams, but we were having fun playing as a group, and we didn't need to have a full raid of 10 people online to do it.

So once we'd kitted ourselves out in honor gear - which took no time at all with a 85%+ win percentage - we said to ourselves "we could do arenas! We could get rating and better gear and titles and stuff!"

Right?

We shifted focus from the intrinsic fun of wrecking BGs with friends to the extrinsic carrot of titles and rating and stuff. And part of what tripped us up is that we were right about some things. We were all individually pretty capable people! But it takes a while to pick up the specialized skillset for arenas, and even then you're still vulnerable to hard counters. More importantly, the MMR system does its best to give you a 1:1 win:loss ratio, and if you're chasing rating then every loss is like "ugh we lost rating points" and it just feels crap.

Similarly, when we were doing arenas for points in BC, we wanted those points to buy things with. Every loss meant we'd have to queue one more time for the necessary points to buy the things we thought we wanted.

If you're going to be doing arenas, you should be doing them because they're fun for you. Not because you want gear for your raid toon or a cool title.

By the same token, if you're going to be queueing into LFR, it should be because you want to do LFR. Sure, when I'm in there on my hunter I'm partially doing it for gear, but it's also fun for me to do things like compare my damage done with others and just sort of watch the on-screen chaos of 25 totally uncoordinated people flailing away at nerfed versions of the encounters. For my priest and now my warrior, LFR is a way for them to do what they do in a raid-like setting.

I have encouraged my raiders to do some LFR for the gear to help with our normal-mode progression but I have also (I hope!) been clear that I totally do not require them to do so. I have tried to emphasize that I've had fun with it, and getting free purpz is a surprising side effect of that (seriously, every time I win a roll I'm astonished).

The flipside to this is that I think some guilds might require people to clear LFR weekly until they can't get anything more from it, and I think that's ok too just so long as the guild as a whole agrees to that.

What is definitively not ok is a guild that says it's fine with people that don't do things like farm the TB trinket or farm LFR but then puts a lot of pressure on members that don't want to do those things. Especially because for some of our fellow raiders and friends there are issues that magnify and compound the flaws of extrinsic rewards, totally wrecking their enjoyment of the entire game:

A couple of  years ago during a depression, I almost completely disappeared from the game. I felt too pressured to do anything but group activities, and I just couldn’t handle it. When I screwed up my courage and started telling people not now I found that, not only did my guildmates not despise me for leaving them high and dry, but I could handle playing the game on a regular basis again.

From here.

We all choose this hobby. We choose to fork over our $15 every month. We do it because we want to. It's surprising, then, that it can be so hard to keep an eye on why we choose to do that. I actually think that keeping up with this blog has helped a lot with that, for me at least, because when I get really excited about something I write about it.

I've always got a record of the things that have made me happy.

So hey - has anyone else tried that? Especially if they're feeling crap about the game at a given moment, either written down or gone back and read a previously-written bit to remind themselves about why they're in Azeroth? If not, it might be worth a shot.

And if you're considering doing something that you dread, or simply have no desire to do - I say just let it go. Concentrate on what's fun. Jettison the rest.

4.3 Survival, haste, and focus income

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All is not lost, however!

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

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

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

Emailed Questions!

Hooray! I love emailed questions, they make post topics so easy. So here are some questions I got recently, regarding having multiple hunters in a group:

What's the best way to handle the Hunter's Mark?  Mine will cancel theirs and vice versa. Does only the shooter get the benefit from the Mark or does any shot fired after the Mark is place benefit any shooter? If it's not a boss and there are multiple adds, is it appropriate to go ahead and select a secondary target and fire away? Or should I keep my dps on the tank's focus that has already been marked?

Luckily the first part of that is easy: both the standard hunter's mark and the mark from Marked For Death give their AP bonuses to all hunters attacking the marked target. So you don't have to worry about who's putting the debuff on the mobs.

As far as target switching, in general I just single-target one mob after another. Having all the DPS kill one trash mob is the fastest way to get it to stop hurting the tank, which can be a real issue with some high-damage mob packs. This was also more important before the threat change, when targeting a mob the tank didn't have targeted was likely to pull it off her, but that's way less likely at this point.

And here are a few more questions from the same email:

What about traps? If my Hunter friend places a Frost trap to slow down the mob, can I place an Explosive trap to help proc Lock and Load and Sic 'em? Will one trap negate the other? I know that some mobs are immune to fire damage, so I'm assuming that if that is the case, I won't get the proc on the talents. Is that correct?

Yep, different hunter traps can definitely all affect the same target (or targets) at the same time. Heck, you could drop your own frost, explosive, and snake traps on a group and they'd all do their respective things to the mobs.

Also, especially with regards to LnL procs, I should point out that explosive trap is the preferred use of your fire trap cooldown for Survival hunters right now, even on bosses. Black Arrow does more damage, it's true, but it costs over three times as much focus as a glyphed trap launcher and ticks only half as many times. So as long as you're engaging a boss that can be kept in the AoE of an explosive trap (and you're confident that the tank will in fact keep it there), you should definitely be using explosive trap to fish for LnL procs*.

Finally, you're correct that explosive trap ticks on a mob that's fire immune will not proc LnL for you. Luckily, there are very few elemental-immune mobs at this point in the game, as they've realized that problems like this aren't very fun to deal with.

Thanks so much for your email!

It also reminds me that I need to go back and update my gear guides and my survival guide for 4.3. At this point with the gear guide especially, I wish I'd held on to my original recommendations for Cataclysm release. That way I could have easily had several successive steps of gear so that new-85 hunters could easily bring their average item level up to the point where they can queue for the DS heroics, which would shortly get them into the LFR queue.

I think just a paragraph saying "take it if it has more agility than what you're wearing and use your JP to buy item level 378 stuff" should be just about as good, though.

*This is another one of those things that keeps happening that totally mystifies me. How do the very smart class design teams at Blizz not remember that this happened before (even before trap launcher!) and is going to happen again as long as BA is an inferior method to proc LnL?

Hooray! Ultraxion down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

YES.

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

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

I am now a social media maven!

Ok not really. But I did sign up for twitter. The second... thing to "follow" me was porn spam.

I looked through the default widgets and stuff on blogger, but I didn't immediately find a good one to easily provide a link on the sidebar for people to follow me on twitter with a single click. Not sure how to do that, but I'm sure I can figure it out with a bit of googling.