Fun With Stampede

Or “What 5 pets could I put together for my amusement?”:

5 tallstriders, for 5x the annoying SKREEEEEE noise.

5 devilsaurs, for 5x the OMG WTF DINOSAURS. If this alone wouldn’t make BM the best spec I don’t know what would.

4 devilsaurs and a raptor, because c’mon, that’s just kinda funny.

5 spirit beasts, because fuck you, we camped all these sons of bitches for DAYS.

5 shale spiders for 5x the adorable yet annoying chittering noise. Note to self: tame Jadefang 4 more times.

5 chimaeras, for no, you can’t see a fucking thing through their wings!

5 spiders, for AAAHHH GOD NO you know what never mind this one. Have you been in a park during tarauntula mating season? I have, okay. No.

5 wolves, for the obvious WOLF PACK. Take that, shamans.

5 corehounds, in case the previous wolf pack didn’t have enough slobber for you. Or to be your own mobile MC trash pack, I don’t know.

5 rhinos, for an honest to god stampede.

5 silithids, to cause Silithus flaskbacks in all of the vanilla era folk.

5 crabs, or what this Baltimore native calls “dinner”.

Tips for Taming Ghostcrawler

Tip #1: If you skipped doing any quests in this zone at all, do the Sealegs one.  No really. Ghostcrawler is REALLY FAR DOWN IN THE WATER.

Tip #2: Failing tip number 1, bring those Nagrand Cherries in your bank that you kept for some reason not even you can explain.

If you fail to do one of those two things, you may end up felling quite silly if you spot the spirit beast but then have to go back and do the quest real quick in order to NOT DROWN.

No, I’m not speaking from personal experience, why are you looking at me like that?

Your Optimal Isn’t Mine

I was going through my feed reader’s backlog when I ran across this post from Blessing of Kings. This is always a topic that will get my knickers in a bunch, so let’s get started, shall we?

High-skill players almost always use the optimal spec or strategy. There are a few exceptions, but they are very rare. The vast majority of the time, someone with a non-optimal spec turns out to be a low-skill player.

Encouraging medium or low skill players to feel that they are a “special snowflake” and don’t need to use more optimal builds dooms them and their group to mediocrity and failure. You have enough trouble with lack of skill, why further handicap yourself with a sub-optimal build?

And even the high-skill player with the sub-optimal spec does her group a disservice. If the high-skill player switched to the optimal spec, odds are she would play at an even higher level.

I always resent the whole “you’re holding everyone else back” flavor these discussions take on.  Sure, in a situation where you’re doing hardmodes, I can understand, and there’s truth to it–in that situation.

But, ladies and gentlemen, World of Warcraft is a game. We play games to have fun.  If I love raiding but the spec/class I enjoy most is (we’ll go with my favorite example) Beast Mastery Hunter, and BM hunter isn’t the current top spec, does that mean I shouldn’t have get to raid?

Of course not.

Does that mean that because I happen to enjoy something not the Flavor of the Month, that I am a less than stellar player?  Not at all.  I  know several people that are very excellent players and chose, at some point or other, sub-optimal specs. If you haven’t been so lucky then you’ve been looking in the wrong place, for there’s plenty of them–in guilds like mine.

My guild is full of people playing non-optimal builds.  For a guild that raids only twice a week, we’re still clearing content at a reasonable rate. I dare you to ask anyone in SiB if they think they are doomed to an existance of mediocrity and failure. 

We may not have a place in your Epic Guild of Awesome Leetness and Hardmodes, but we are not lesser players for it. We’re just over here enjoying playing our game the way we find most fun, and collecting shiny purples for it.

You’re more than welcome to play your perfectly valid interpertation of the game over in your corner, but the holier than thou attitude could do with a nerf.

My pokemans, let me show you them.

Named Softpaw, after that thing my cat does to my face when I'm not petting her.

Named NotLoque, because...well...he isn't.

AYearLate, because he is. Mother fucker.

Fuzzbutt. What ELSE was I going to name a bear?

I never fucking see that damned spirit b–OH SHIT

I really should have been editing my novel last night.  Instead I was derping around WoW, leveling my shaman (53!), and digging on my Other DK (almost 73!).  Elemental shamans shoved into that many BoAs are just WRONG. 

I logged onto my hunter to check the two Loque spawns I keep her at, then logged off.

After staring at my log in screen a moment (psst, Blizz, can we hurry up and make it so I can rearrange my character list NOW, thanks!) I logged back in and decided to check the other spawns.

All the while I’m on vent, babbling at Pix about how I HATE THE HUNT FOR SPIRIT BEASTS and how whoever decided to make 7 spawns for Loque needs to be kicked in the balls, and how it was annoying because I’d found ALL OF THE OTHER SPIRIT BEASTS and even ALL OF THE OTHER SHOLOZAR RARES while casually derping around but not Loque, nooo.

I overshot a spawn and circled back.

Waaait a minute, that cat isn’t yellow–

Do you know that adreneline dump you get when you’ve been hunting something FOREVER and your NPC scan/Silver Dragon/whatever flashes across your screeen?  If you don’t you clearly don’t play a hunter.  Anyway, I SPAZZED. 

Oh man, where the fuck is my tame button?

Trap? What trap?  Oh god.  I simply dropped down and started taming, no trap, aggroing other cats, what the fuck ever oh my god.

And now, an expansion and some later, I have Loque.

…I guess I should level my hunter now, huh.

…and come up with a name.

Camping Loque, FOREVER

I want to find whoever thought it would be an awesome idea to give spirit beasts multiple spawn points and beat them soundly.

Back in The Day, I camped Humar.  He had a 7 hour spawn timer but only appeared in one place.   He was easy to camp–you sat under the tree and waited.  If someone else tamed him, you knew it and could wander off until later. 

You don’t have that luxury with Loque.  Maybe he spawned somewhere else and was killed, or was tamed, but you’d never know.  You just know that you must do laps around Sholozar, forever, because when you leave is when he will spawn.  You know it. 

I spent a good 5 hours of my snow day doing periodic laps around the basin between camping my favorite spot.  Once when I was tabbed out reading I heard SilverDragon ping.  Oh my god! He sp–

No.  No, King Krush apparently spawns in that location, too.  Hopes dashed and anger riled, I tamed out him of spite.

Just in damn for another hunter to swoop down and say “Gwuh”.  Oops.

I’M SORRY I HAD TO TAME HIM ME MADE ME ANGRY.  NOW HE SHALL FOREVER BE FORCED TO DO MY BIDDING.

By this point, years into my casual hunt, it’s comically exasperating.  I have tamed–or passed up the chance to tame–every other Wrath spirit beast.  I did exactly one pass searching for Gondria and found the other two by accident.  I’ve stumbled across the other two rares in Sholozar.  Yet the beast I actually search for eludes me.

/wrist

ETA:  Psst!  Mortigan the lock is back, and he’s not even a dirty hordie anymore!  Go say hi!

BM Huntering: Spec Experimentation

I’m not a math person.  I’m far more likely to slog through the mathy guides and try to “translate” them into something more palpable (and amusing) than I am to try to generate numbers myself.  These are trying times, however, as the math gods of EJ are distracted by the shiny numbers at 85 and I cannot rely on them to do the hard work for me.

So!  I slapped an alternative spec into my other tab and decided to test it on dummies FOR YOU.  Don’t you feel special?  You should.  I’m normally too lazy to do anything so technical.

The BM portion of the spec is relatively standard.  Two points should go into Go for the Throat–nothing has changed there.

But what about the other points?

There.  That is my spec.  Effeciency was also tempting, but I opted to play with Improved Serpent Sting and…and um, whatever the other box is, that gives you haste.  In my “haste = more focus regen = less fail?” line of thought I was curious to see if putting full points in that would help.

It didn’t.

Now haste value is one of those subjective things.  How much latency do you have?  How much haste is already on your gear?  it could be that you’ll hit one of those magical sweet spots and it will do uber magical things for you but generally speaking…eh, go for full ISS and be done with it.

(The difference was ~100-200 DPS, if you’re wondering.)

And you might have already known this or it may be patiently obvious to you more mathy types but WHATEVER, I TRIED FOR YOU.

Four Point Oh Noes: The BM Hunter

Updated 10/20/10

 

For now this guide is going to be primarily regurgitation.  I’ll update it with my own information and findings after I get in some testing time tonight (as I had to wait until it hit live because the PTR hated me).

Specs
These specs are tuned for boss damage–at his point we’re still raiding, so soloing builds can wait until Cata proper.  My post on builds, including my spec, is here.

Other options: 31/5/0

Rotation
BM used to have a proper rotation, but now it’s joined the Priority Club.

Start off your shots with Hunter’s Mark and Sepent’s Sting.

Kill Command > Focus Fire (when pet has full Frenzy) > Serpent Sting > Arcane Shot (focus dump) > Steady Shot (to regen focus)

Make sure that Kill Command is available for Beastial Wrath (nothing new here, you should have been doing this all along).  BW is now for Arcane Shot spamming, apparently.

Remember that you never want to sit at 100 focus, because then you’re wasting your focus regen!

Note that BM hutners do not yet have our “signature shot”–Cobra Shot isn’t available until 81, so I’d hold final judgements on this spec until Cata proper.  We can’t fully judge how awesome we’re going to be when missing a key shot.  My understanding is that it will replace Steady Shot.

The Cata thread on EJ posted this, but it made my brain hurt just to look at it.  If you can make sense of it though, kudos to you.

if HM is not on target or running out in less than a set time and there´s no MfD on target and focus/cooldowns/target heath don´t allow for KS or KC
–> cast HM
if KS is off CD and target health is at or below 20%
–> cast KS
if KC is off CD and enough focus
–> cast KC
if SpS is not on target and enough focus
–> cast SpS
if focus over or at 75 (modified by Efficiency)
–> cast AS
none of the above
–> cast CoS

Glyphs
Prime:
Kill Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot
Also an option: Kill Command, Serpent Sting
ETA: My personal testing has revealed that I actually have higher DPS replacing Serpent Sting with Steady Shot, so I have revised the post to reflect this. Serpent Sting topped out at about 4.7 on a dummy, where SS was usually at 4.8/4.9 with spikes of 5k.

Major:
Beastial Wrath
Also an option: Whatever the hell you feel like.  Frostheim lists disengage, but if you’re anything like me and trying to avoid disengaging off cliffs to your death, you might not want to go there.  Since I’m trying to afford re-glyphing eleventy billion alts right now in multiple specs, I’m acutally not rocking any Majors aside this one.

Minor:
Mend Pet, Feign Death, Revive Pet

Notes on Stats
We only need 248 hit.  Pet hit no longer rounds down.
Crit > Haste?  Haste > Crit?  What about Mastery?  I’d love to answer this question for you but I don’t fucking know.  Research to come.  Haste is said to contribute to focus regen, but how much?  EJ is still working on this one.  So far it seems to 1% haste =1% focus regen.  I’m currently experimenting with trying to get more haste to see if this helps my “omg not enough focus” issue, or if I only fuck my rotation up more.  Ha.

From EJ:

… It’s unclear at this time whether agil/crit or agil/haste is preferable for yellow sockets but this is most likely relative to how high your crit and haste are. Keep in mind that although the crit and haste caps are very high, pet melee crit will cap out at a much lower amount, and haste’s value has sweet spots based on how it allows your shots to flow and keeps your focus in balance. Mastery can only be obtained at the moment from reforging. The theorycrafting on it isn’t clear at this time on whether it will outperform haste and crit.

As for old set bonuses, eh.  T9, even the 4 piece, is no longer as appetizing as it was.  I’ve opted to ditch my t9 entirely (keep in mind I killed LK rocking 4 pc T9 still) and wear what was once my survival set.  The higher crit/haste numbers on the higher ilevel gear gives me more room for reforging stuff.

Gems
Nightmare tears are now silly for us as we only benefit from agi.
Red: +20 Agility (Delicate Cardinal Ruby)
Orange: +10 Agility +10 Haste (Deft Ametrine) |  +10 Agility +10 Crit. (Deadly Ametrine)
Blue: +20 Hit Rating (Rigid Majestic Zircon)
Purple: +10 Agility +10 Hit Rating (Glinting Dreadstone)

Pets, Pets, and More Pets!
Hunter pet was normalized with 4.0, so now it’s a matter of personal prefrence/buffs.  While browising the EJ MM 4.0 thread I stumbled across from handy graphics (originally from Petopia?) that I shall now share:

Pew pew moonfire kitty now heals?  What?

Sources:
Warcraft Hunter’s Union (www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2010/10/bm-hunter-patch-4-0-1-talents-rotation-and-glyphs/)
Elitist Jerks (http://elitistjerks.com/f74/t106028-mm_hunter_4_0_1_a/ & http://elitistjerks.com/f74/t97229-cataclysm_hunter_changes/)
MMO Champs: (http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/770793-4.0.1-Hunters)

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Jamthera’s Devilsaur, Omnomnom meets Ambrosine’s proto drake Grinz and doesn’t quite know what to think.  This was “bad art” done for BellBell in exchange for a cute drawing of a blue pony.  XD

This is what happens when Cranky Tank gives me a tablet.