Hunter's Prowl: May 2008

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Hit 70, now what?

My druid is 70 now (idk why the banner won't update). But her dps sucks majorly. One thing I found was that the gear was all bad. I went to the AH and bough a bunch of greens and they were mostly upgrades.

Further the spec is bad. This is the proper spec.

I may go balance or something to get through dailies quicker. My plan is to get enough money to make my epic LW gear and tank a bunch of stuff to get tanking gear.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Whats new

Well, wife and i decided to spend much of the weekend playing WoW. It was fun and a relief from worrying about job interviews and the like. She is gone today and tomorrow, and again sunday/monday. I am gone Sunday/Thursday for conference. So now we are getting busy. Anyway! What got done:

Started sorta playing my lock with Faradhim . He has this idea of two-manning instances. Sounds like fun. We have two tanks, and two dps, and we can even sorta heal the tanks. We managed to do Ulda pretty easily after we figured out the swing of things. Being 6-7 levels above everything helps alot. Anyway it was fun! Bottom line. We next want to tackle ZF (level 44 mobs). We are now 48/47, so in the lines of doable. Other than that, i'm real bored with the lock, idk why. She's slow to level, has truoble with multiple mobs, things take a long time to die, etc. I look forward to getting to 50 and the new zone (not ungoro, i refuse to step into that place again).

Druid. Spent alot of time on the druid, getting some group quests done, doing the SMV quests. They are all hard to me. Finally I'm hitting my cap. I think i need better gear (i probably do actually). I haven't had any dps upgrades in a long time to be honest. When i ran instances i usually got healing upgrades. Quest rewards? Healing upgrades. Very little in the way of feral dps upgrades out there. Wife and i played a bit in nagard, finishing some of the "kill x mobs" quests. Let me tell you, when she and i play, stuff dies fast, real fast. We burned through a bunch of quests quickly. Druid is now 69 (just hit), i want to get to 70 quickly and get some tanking gear so i can start doing the 70 instances. Kara? Maybe, maybe. Not sure if i want to go back to 20 hours of kara wipes a week (actually, i dont, and i dont have time for it).

Hunter. Even played with the hunter alot. I logged on Sunday for the normal raid, and ended up going to ZA. No drops, but some badges and some quests done. And!!! At around midnight we decided to storm heroic Shat halls, the toughest in the game. And we blitzed through like it was candy. God heroics are easy with T5 geared people. So i finished 1/4 of my Champion of Naaru quest (4 heroics and Mag). Logged in Monday and got into a heroic fest. We did UB (daily, woot), and hSV (so now 2/4 for Naaru quest). Then wife and I went to see Indiana Jones, which was enjoyable but not a omg must see it flick.

Every time i get sick of the raiding guild and the raiding life i login and do raids and its easy and fun with well geared and skilled people. At the same time I look forward to being able to say 'yes, i can do that heroic' again on my druid's guild.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Growl unchanged in 2.4.2

It looks like from all the PTR testing growl is essentially unchanged. Boars are probably nerfed (due to the removal of growl's ability to scale with pet AP), but i haven't seen confirmation of this.

Anyway this is a recap of the issue plus solutions.

1) *something* changed in 2.4, that something was probably the fact that growl no longer fires first. 2) That lead to the charge/growl uncoupling, thus boars got hit hard with 2.4. 3) That lead to Hortus saying that growl will no longer stack with pet AP, thus nerfing boars. Fine. I have no idea if this nerf has still taken place or not. I'm guessing it has. All pets are doing less aggro due to #1. 4) Hortus claims that pet growl now stacks with hunter AP. The reports are not so clear but it doesn't look like it.

The upshot of this isn't that the hunter class is broken, but we need to readjust. Boars are no longer supreme. I went out and tamed a skettis owl (plus another owl to get max screech first). With this owl at loyality 2 (screech trained). I could down the skettis tree giants just fine.

For grinding, you will now need to do the following.

1) Pet attack, wait for growl to fire first. Then steady shot/autoshot. 2) Misdirect whenever its up. Doing this initially will almost guarantee you will not pull aggro. 3) Intimidate when up. Again you won't pull aggro if this is done. 4) FD at mob's half health mark (usually when you are about to pull aggro). 5) If all these are on CD and you are still having threat issues at the beginning, you need to go back to #1. 6) If you pull threat half-way through and all CDs exhausted, hit disengage or just autoshot. I almost never get to 6.

We have a ton of aggro management tools under our belt. We can still grind fine to do dailies and what not. With lower level pets its very painful due to lack of max growl rank. It's always been that way. Hunters are not broken, we just need to readjust our playstyle.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Signs that indicate your PUG is going to be bad

1) Where's the instance
2) Two healers
3) Hunter: What's chain trap?
4) Hunter in rogue blues and a tanking gun / 20 level old gun
5) Hunter who doesn't believe in pets.
6) Did anyone bring water?
7) Ranged dps: Oh i don't believe in drinking, i just autoshot until my mana comes back up.
8) Corpse run: Help I can't find the instance.

Tanking PUGs

I talked about PUGs previously here and here on my hunter and here on my feral druid.

As Resto4Life (and others) have mentioned there is a paucity of tanks for PUGs. Here are my thoughts. TL;DR, so far PUGs are entertaining for me, I raid in a serious guild, and this is my fun char. I never know what to expect with PUGs. As long as we can get through the instance fairly easily, it remains fun. But I like being able to switch from healer, to dps, to tank, depending on gear and spec. My previous thought was I would do healing for kara, but now I'm thinking i'll keep feral gear so I can do the odd tanking job, once i hit 70.

I occasionally tank. I tanked all saturday, I believe. I just got started in outlands, we're in zangamarsh. I play with my wife, she doesn't like groups much. For her WoW is a mostly solo adventure. Anyway, my experiences.

1) SP (of course not heroics, i'm 63). This group had a hunter in level 60 blues and purples. But the blues were rogue gear, and the purple was a level 40 gun. And no enchants. That's fine, you can go with appropriate greens and no enchants. But they need to be appropiate. Then we had the two healers. holy paly and a resto druid. Add to that a fury warrior I believe. Anyway, just about anything would work in below 70 instances. So we chugged along and did fine. Until we got to the 3rd boss, and we wiped.

No problem. We run back, but one person had to leave and left, the other (the hunter) said they had to go and clean their house and take a shower. No problem, we removed them from the group to get on with our lives. 5 minutes later, the hunter comes back. Lots of cursing. I apologized 4 times, was under the impression they were leaving. Others had same impression. Didn't help. Finally I put him on ignore. THen he proceeded to cuss out every other group member, until everyone had him on ignore. Then he proceeded to cuss out our guild on Trade chat. I submitted a petition to a GM at this point. I have no idea what happened. Hopefully he got a ban.

So to replace this guy,we found another hunter via LFG. He was a solo hunter, didn't believe in pets. We all laughed a bit (my main is a hunter, been playing for a year, i know the class quite well). Okay, whatever. Its a RP server. Fun enough guy, didn't have any problems. (but what's with hunters anyway?). Turns out this guy RPs that he's a bounty hunter, anyway, a fun, strange person. We finished the instance fine I believe. Well, I would inevitably die when the boss was at 10%. I blame this on healers. I may be wrong :)

2) UB. We did it with a shammy, resto druid, a lock, someone else. Me tanking. We get to the 3rd boss, the hunter. I tell the lock to sic their pet on the bear add. He said fine. Sure enuough, felhunter was on the main hunter boss. We wipe. I asked what happened. He got confused between the two bears (me and the mob). That was funny. Take two, was fine.

3) Ramps. This was a mostly guild event, fun. Again a hunter, a prot paly, a level 70 raiding holy paly who insisted he had some good thing to get from one of the bosses here (whatever), me and another feral druid. After several trash pulls I realized that we had a prot paly - he tanked the rest. I could dps well but his was lacking for obvious reasons. We lived mostly because of healing uberness. I had to explain chain trapping to the hunter. The prot paly never heard of LOS pulling. We didnt' wipe at all, it was great. The last boss was fun though, two of the party members (inc the tank) accidently fell through the place you jump down to exit the instance quickly. So we finished with the uber healer, one dps, and me tanking, and standing in fire and not realizing it (because i'm an idiot, but also because I wasn't taking any damage thanks to the heals).