Tag Archives: hunter

Movie Mog: Brave

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I keep seeing entries for Matty’s Movie Mog Contest around the blogosphere during my tidying of the Reader and blogroll adventures and thought it’d be fun to join in!

I spend a lot of time just playing with MogIt ((I’m planning to do a guide on how to use it soon as I’ve had a lot of questions about this)) so piece of cake.

My favourite movie is non-existent. Not only am I not a big movie watcher, but when I do I tend to keep adding to the list of favourites so I thought I’d go with one that made an impact on me recently: Pixar’s Brave. Yeah, it took me this long to watch it but Merida is an amazing character, the exploration of the bond between mother and daughter is utterly amazing, and the Celtic fantasy world it is set in had the fantasy and history geek in me jumping up and down.

While I know the rules said three characters, I wasn’t entirely sure how to mog the three little brothers or the gigantic dad so have two. I’m also aware that this particular mog would have looked better with a cloth robe but Merida would have to be a Hunter mog and so it had to be mail. This is also how I managed two characters!

Merida and her mother

A better image to base Merida’s transmog on

- For the robe look I’ve combined Wave of Life Chestguard with Kilt of Spiritual Reconstruction and popped on a Blue Workman’s Shirt for the sleeves.
- The bow is Satyr’s Bow from Dire Maul.
- Sadly I can’t add in a quiver but I have used Fortified Belt for the tan strap attaching the quiver to her.
- And the cloak is Blackmetal Cape. The only cloaks I found any plainer were too short or golden edged so I thought the Celtic-styled pattern suited the character quite nicely.

As for the bits I’ve not included in my image, but just to complete the mog for folk who might like to wear this I’ve gone with Grunt’s Pauldrons for the shoulders which both match and can be reasonably ignorable. Fastfuse Gloves suit the set quite well and don’t hide her hands completely. As for boots, I’m not 100% sure what boots she’s wearing so go wild and pick something brown. I equipped Plane-Shifted Boots at random trying to go for a basic look.

If only Gnomes could be ginger… This image of the family inspired me to complete Merida’s mother’s human outfit

For Merida’s mother I was able to use cloth – woohoo! When it comes to weapon, I’d go with something gold but her mother isn’t seen wielding a weapon so I haven’t included one in the image.

- For this robe I thought Conjurer’s Robe has the right pattern to make it look as though it flares to match the characters’ dress. Sadly the sleeves aren’t flared so I had to make do with coupling it with a Cerulean Filigreed Doublet, which is available from Dalaran. The colours aren’t perfect but the look is much better than without. And trust me when I say the sleeves are flared ingame, WMV is just stubborn.
- The belt took me a little bit of browsing but Ruthless Gladiator’s Cord of Accuracy is the best I could find to suit her golden chain-belt style. With the pattern on the robe, it gets away with not having the chain hanging down at the front.
- The crown absolutely has to be Eye of Theradras.
- And I threw in the Mistyreed Gloves as well. They don’t cover the sleeves and hide reasonably well too.

The shoulders not featured in the image I think suit best are Green Silken Shoulders. Again, they match with the colour scheme without standing out too much. And shoes, again.. go nuts. I’m not sure you ever really see Merida’s mother’s feet but I just went with Boots of the Mourning Widow.

I’d love to see more entries for this contest, it’s a lot of fun!

Move Aside Apathy

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I promised one Miss Kaitz that I would blog on the Menagerie. Okay so that was a week ago and I was supposed to tell you about the adventures of Pinky but I thought it might be nice to talk a little about what I’m upto right now, because what I’m upto often seems to elude many.

Honourary picture of Pinky on the fish bike

I suppose I’d grown bored. Dailies had killed my spirit and all there was was raiding and the endless grind so I’d backed away a bit. Again. I’d even considered cancelling my payment until I wanted to play again but thankfully I didn’t and over Christmas I actually did a few dailies because I felt like it. When I got back home in January I was all ready to carry on watching through Supernatural and I figured why not farm Skyshards while I do that? So I did. I got one then decided to do dailies with that time instead. Then I had a brief addiction to the Walking Dead game.. I say brief because I played it until I reached the end (I still owe you guys a blog post on this game, it’s absolutely amazing). Then decided I really should level my Death Knight if she’s going to be doing transmog runs.

Levelling

Soupdragon had almost gotten to 86 before being pushed aside and abandoned for the apathy so it was only natural that I came to her first of my two 85′s. I ran through Jade Forest, Krasarang Wilds (which finally netted me Loremaster of Pandaria yay!), Valley of the Four Winds and finally, Dread Wastes where I died.. died.. and died again. I had to force myself but I got her to 90 and then decided I was happy and wanted to gear my Hunter.

Huntering

Kaitz runs a fair few transmog runs on her wolf-lady Death Knight and asked me one night if I’d like to come along for the Illidan bow so I did. It was a lot of fun! Kait met Snowflake and Baskilisk, we talked about politics and cookies, and discovered that I am in fact a glaive magnet. (Grats Kait on your glaive! Our mine, if Toman’s gtmod is to be believed xD) Yep, a glaive dropped! Woo!

Dan has the offhand, Kait has the mainhand, I was there for both. I am.. the Glaive Magnet

We did Naxx 10, and on the next reset did it all again along with Mogushan Vaults LFR where I got a hat. It’s mucho fun, but see.. Reliq wants a Mage for raids and I have a Mage.. I would have stuck with my Priest who is very well geared considering all that apathy (aside from her hat) but I believe another lovely guildy is wanting to reroll to her Shadow Priest and there are many Hunters everywhere as is *sad*.

Maging

So next up, I decided to speedy-level my Mage. You have no idea how glad I am to be rid of frickin’ Twylite the Blood Elf Mage who on entering random groups I had to inform them that I named her before I’d heard of the crappy sparkly vampires.. but that Jewelcrafting daily with the sparkles? Yeah, she was often glittering. Sigh. Anyway! Jaedia the Draenei Mage is much cooler. She was never abandoned, her professions are all levelled up and useful, she has some wicked transmog pieces and I really enjoyed levelling her the first time (hi Steve!). She has good memories.

I forget whether I started her in Jade Forest on Thursday or Friday.. Actually I think it was late on Thursday night, I didn’t do very much but I got started then Friday dinged 86, today she’ll ding 90. That might be the fastest I’ve levelled a character from 85-90 without going without sleep and other vital things! The Darkmoon Faire roundabout definitely helped.

“Time for bed,” said Zebedee

And Frost has somehow become an amazing spec! It’s as fun as Fire with all its crits and procs, and I get to play around with transmog again. I was way too happy with my Fire Mage transmog to change it. Dan and Rip helped me through Black Temple and Mount Hyjal for tier 6 a few days ago and I (*cough* jammy git) picked up all 5 pieces and my Draenei Mage looks wicked in it! Last night a few were doing ICC for transmog fun and.. well.. I know I should have been levelling but I can’t say no to ICC sooo I went along and picked up a few weapons including a mad looking wand which I think possibly scares Reliq going by his reaction, so I’ll definitely be using that if I have a wand.

Left to right: Ysaera, me, Rippur, Severiti and Splish

As for now, I’m hoping to give guild raiding another shot. I picked up a bunch of BoE stuff for my Mage when she gets to 90 and she had about 3500 Justice Points leftover from Cataclysm that I’m fairly sure I had been saving up, plus come tomorrow I’ll get in a Sha group pretty easily so I think she’s going to be geared. Note: If any Ghostlands folk notice the intellect Darkmoon Faire trinket for a decent price (less than 9k), please let me know! And can start joining back in with guild raids sooner rather than later. :)

Fantasmical Friday #4

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Honestly guys, this is one of those weeks that has simply passed me by. I start browsing the internet and then “Whoops! Where did the day go?”

Earlier in the week I played my Hunter a fair bit. I’d decided that while she’s still Alliance, I should get Old Ironjaw to save messing around in Ironforge when she’s Horde. I installed Fishing Buddy, configured it and off I went. It took me about 150 casts and then I fancied a bit more fishing, as I’d also tried the STV fishing contest the same day and failed miserably to a Druid who fished in everybody’s pools *grumble*, so I had the fishing bug and went off to try and get a turtle. That didn’t last too long. I tried out Marksman in a couple of dungeons and it was okay but I found it a little frustrating after playing Survival, and I wasn’t completely feeling Survival either, so I tried Beastmastery and hooboy was that a good fit. I wanted something that would quickly kill things while levelling as opposed to waiting “patiently” for Aimed Shot to cast yet again, and this was just.. wow. I love it! Plus I can now use Loque’nahak (or BLUE GLOW KITTY as I affectionately call him) finally who I named Ailuros after a cat in my NaNoWriMo story. So that was some fun.

I also boosted Dan in Blackrock Spire to get us both the two pets and sod it, while we were there, some whelps died too. Kalithe has a title - yay!

And last night as Dan had finally got up to level 60 ish, I did a couple of instances with him on my Mage (that would be ‘Twylite’). I did mention this on twitter but you don’t all follow me there or catch everything I ever tweet, so I’m specced Arcane. I wanted a taste of how overpowered it is before it’s hit with the nerfbat (read: very). I think personally the fun in Mage is actually the utility rather than the playstyle. Having various survival cooldowns, buffs, dps cooldowns, Mirror Images, polymorph (I have an animal lottery macro for that), the ability to make free food, portals, that’s where the fun lies. The great damage is just icing. Anyway so there was this Rogue in the party. He’s doing about a third of my damage and obsessing over how Dan has 10k health on his level 64 tank and basically calling him sad for having 30 stam gems in his gear and such, and suddenly after the first boss tells me that I should go Frost. If there are two things I dislike, it is being called by my class (which he did but I let it slide because I still prefer ‘mage’ to ‘Twylite’), and being told what I “should” do. The guy was very difficult to understand and eventually asked if anybody speaks Swedish and spammed “hor” in party chat about twenty times before he was vote kicked and the Shaman informed us that it meant whore in Swedish.. Whether it did or not we don’t know or particularly care but yeah, he was rather odd. Thankfully the rest of the party was lovely. It was a shame Dan had to leave else we’d probably have done one or two more with those guys.

I’m still focusing on my Hunter though, despite the Maging, I just want her to be a Goblin already! I am quite glad that she already has the Midsummer pet and achievements because we’re going away on the 23rd til the 28th or 29th so we’ll miss a week of it, and probably the beginning of 4.2 as well. I’m not too worried about that though.

World of Ponycraft

Designing and sharing ponies on the pony creator (enjoy your new addiction!) became a bit of a thing on twitter last week and since then Norm has written a post over at Flavor Text which fantastically looks at the comparisons between our ingame characters, why a lot of us choose fanmade art, and the pony creator. Kamalia made a response post as well.

I also made my Blood Elf Death Knight, Kalithe:

I don’t want to make Fae as her Draenei self because I don’t want to get too attached to her before she goes Goblin, but trust me, she’s on her way to being short and green.

Screenshot of the Week

Somebody always has to get in the way of the perfect picture. Always.

Linkies

Another handful of awesome posts!

And finally, a blog I came across this week that’s worth following:

  • Tome of the Ancient – A fun blog to read! I also happen to think that [they] are great with photoshop.

Happy Friday!

Fantasmical Friday #3

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Well this week has been a little.. different. Well.. I say different.. it really hasn’t. I spent a lot of it gearing up my Death Knight. I did some normal dungeons until she could enter heroics, I did some heroics, I finished the Deepholm quests and I’ve been doing dailies. I’ve also been making a fair bit of gold which isn’t necessarily relevant, but it did take up a chunk of time. When it came down to it, I’ve really, really enjoyed playing my Death Knight this past week and I did get very lucky while in Deepholm. (Hooray and squee!)

The trouble is, the guys in the guild invited a friend of theirs who also happens to be a Death Knight, as does my friend, and with a 10 man group and 3 Death Knights? It’s very unreasonable for me to think I might possibly not cause issues by wanting to raid on my Death Knight. The problem is, Death Knight is currently my favourite class. I really do love it, and I’m incredibly bored of casters right now, especially Shadow Priest, and I’m not at all interested in healing or tanking. ((I have a history of panic attacks when it comes to those roles so I just avoid them these days aside from the odd bit of healing while I’m levelling up.)) So trying to roll a melee is a problem, the guild desperately doesn’t need melee, and I desperately don’t want to play a caster, so what does that leave? Hunter, of course. The move will be expensive as she will need a faction change and a server transfer, and we’re going to have to do it in bits, but it will be nice to have some previously farmed mounts/pets/achievements, rather than starting from scratch, and be playing a class that’s both needed and I can stand to play. Even with the Hunter becoming my main again, I still prefer the Death Knight and she will definitely be a main alt, or a second main. I will do the Firelands dailies on both characters, however insane it will make me, and I’ll probably slowly work on my Death Knight’s pet collection as well as Fae’s because I’m just that crazy. But Fae will again be my achievement hunter, and main pet and mount collector. She will finally have the name Fae back (big yay!), and as I have soo many Blood Elves and aren’t a big fan of playing Tauren, Trolls, Orcs, or Undead, plus because they kick ass, she will more than likely be a Goblin (though I hear they can’t do the Argent Tournament quests at the moment?). So I may need to collect a few RSS links for decent Hunterish blogs and read a couple of guides to get me up to speed with Hunters again, I haven’t really played one properly this expansion yet. My only problem now is that it looks as though my guild have decided to start doing heroic mode raiding, for which I don’t have the gear (I’m level 82), and I’m not particularly interested in it at the moment either, but I’ll see what happens.

Ooh, and this week our guild did this:

I’m not exalted yet, but it’s nice to have Mass Resurrection and all.

The Week in News

The lion mount, the ‘Winged Guardian’, went live this week. A lot of people have been outraged over it, just as they did over the sparkly pony last year, but it’s really no big deal. It’s just a mount. I must admit though, when I first saw it I thought it looked absolutely ridiculous, since seeing it ingame I’m persuaded – it’s pretty cool looking.

There are also 8 new tameable rare pets available to Hunters in the Firelands. These are all very rare and require you to use particular tactics, different for each rare, in order to tame them. For example, one of the spiders dies when its’ rage bar empties, this rage bar fills when it is in lava, and you can only tame it when it’s at quite low rage, so you need to balance things and such. It’s supposedly quite fun. As for the models, 2 Gondria style spirit cats, 1 spirit bird, and 7 spiders. This thread links to images, videos, and information about them. I’m not sure if I’m too bothered about these models personally but it is an interesting idea to add.

Screenshot of the Week

Never trust Orcs with cauldrons, you can almost guarantee that they’re upto something.

Linkies

As usual, there are more great posts shared in my reader, so do check those out, I’ve tried to link to people I haven’t linked to before as well. Enjoy!

  • Manalicious – Heroic Chimaeron (10): Vidyala’s posts always deserve a mention and I haven’t mentioned her properly yet. A lot of effort go into her guides and even if you’re not interested in raid strats, her chibis are wonderful.
  • Oddcraft - OMGWTFITZSOCUTEBBQ?!: This post deserves many internets just for the use of “man police”. Bravo! That and the murlocs are pretty cute.
  • red cow rise – The Innkeeper’s Daughter: A well-written piece of fan-fiction about the artifact, a lovely read.
  • World of Saz – Through Your Interface: I found this one through a tweet from Windsoar. Could be fun!
  • WoW Insider – Real Life Jewelcrafter Creates Horde Pendant: Vid mentioned this in a Livestream last night and I had to link it because despite it being the “wrong colour” and “upside down”, it is a beautiful piece of jewellery and very well crafted. I love it.

So This Hunter Alt

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We’d been saving the name Fae since I transferred Fae the first off to Terenas, just incase I ever brought her back and I really love the name. Dan held on to the name for me because I didn’t have a space, but I did have a Rogue I wasn’t sure about. It’s quite nice having Fae the Hunter on Vashj again, even if it isn’t the real Fae. I decided to make her a red haired Blood Elf (who looks scarily like my Rogue, the one on Argent Dawn, in Hunter gear) instead of a Goblin, which was my original plan, purely because I knew I’d feel more comfortable with her. My Warrior and Shaman are both Goblins so no worries, eh?

The first thing I did was sort out her heirlooms. I had the sword and a dagger lying around, so she got those. They were enchanted with Crusader so I switched them both to +15 agi. I sent her the leather shoulders and chest to start with until I can get the mail stuff, which I figure is worth getting because I can then use it on my Shaman too. So far I’ve managed to get the chest but I still need about 2k points for the shoulders. I grabbed the helm and cloak from the guild vendor, and farmed a few points which got me the bow, which I can use on my Warrior afterwards, and chest so far. I threw on a few enchants (+15 agility on weapon, 8 agility and 8 dodge on cloak, +3stats on chest because I can’t do +4, +2 damage scope on bow) and got her a guild invite (we’re level 22). That’s a 45% experience increase, plus with the bow and all of the awesome stats, I’m basically one-shotting everything in my path. I have never levelled so fast.. I went from level 8 to level 18 in just a few hours. It’s nuts! So basically, my pet is there to look pretty and be awesome in instances. At the moment I’m mostly using a cat because the buff they do is nice.

I’d already known I wanted to get her the rare fox from Loch Modan, and Dan had mentioned the polar bear in Dun Morogh which we’d gone and got for Fae the first when she was a lowbie Hunter, and he offered to dragon me off to get it again. I checked Petopia for any other pets I might like and spotted an awesome rare cat from Darkshore, Shadowclaw, and asked if we could pop off to get that too. He threatened to drop me on a random mountain when I started RPing on his back (Fae the second really doesn’t like dragon turbulence), but you know, give a guy the evils and he wouldn’t dare. The polar bear is named Patrick after my beloved, giant cuddly polar bear that lives on the bed. The cat is named Shadow, just because it was originally called Shadowclaw so, why not. And the fox is called Sashi, as I realised I’m not using the name for a pet any more and it’s a lovely name.

So last night I decided to level a bit more, to catch up with Dan’s Goblin, and I got 21 to 27 (very close to 28) in a couple of hours. Started off by heading to Hillsbrad. There are some nice rewards there if you do a fair chunk of the zone, however, I also decided I might as well instance. The trouble with instancing is how much experience it gives, especially if you haven’t done the quests, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to skip past every questing zone I start. Each one is giving me one or two levels. I headed off anyway after getting my mining up to Tin level and some of it was nuts.

There was the SFK run that was just the last boss and we almost wiped on him but the dps was high enough, thing is, the Rogue (who at the beginning was spamming ‘go’ on every line while we waited for the Warrior to catch up) then started demanding a res… from a Warrior and a Hunter.

Next I got a Stockades. This one actually managed to confuse me a bit. The healer was called “Nksgfdhsfslksnksk” or something to that effect and was afk-ish. The Rogue felt the need to announce, “this is a random” okay, congratulations? I never did work out why they said that. The Mage started pulling and calling the afk, apparently gold farming, healer a fag. I made some comeback about him pulling without the tank, and he replied about the fag name Fae. Yeah, okay, I’m also a Blood Elf. At least I’m not called ‘Borntbwild’.. The Warrior whispered me telling me not to help him kill, he was trying to get him killed. It took us 5 minutes to get started and then the healer didn’t have water and went oom a lot, and I realised the Mage and Warrior were in the same guild. We’ll just brush that one under the carpet..

I specificked (ok, I know that’s not really a word, but how the hell would you spell it?) an SFK to do my class quest and the instance quests, picked up the bracers from the [4th?] boss, oh and one of the cow Paladins was called Chezus. He totally got plus points. Hope he knows I was thinking of Glee’s ‘grilled cheesus’ when I complimented his name. After that I got a BFD in a random that had me flailing about because the tank wouldn’t stop pissing moving and I was trying to Steady Shot my focus back ._. However, we got the place done pretty swiftly and I did the first couple of quests in Northern Stranglethorn and then decided to give it a rest for the night. One of these days I’ll level her Engineering and give her more bank space, honest.

Perhaps she’ll get upto more interesting antics soon, who knows ;)

*Small Wave*

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‘Ello :) So it’s been pretty quiet around the menagerie the past couple of months, eh? Those of you who still follow me on twitter and over at The Rant Page will probably know by now that I resubbed to WoW, but don’t worry, The Rant Page will still be my main blog. The main details of my unsubbing from Rift and subsequent resubbing to WoW are in my post here, if you’d like to know, but I’m not going to be repeating myself because the TLDR of it is that I wasn’t having enough fun and decided to see what was going on in WoW, and honestly, is it really that important?

I wasn’t sure whether I should pop back over here and say hello while I’m playing, or whether I should leave it be and just let my WoW blog lie, but I don’t see the harm. So for now, I’m cleaning off the cobwebs. I’ve updated the links in my sidebar blogroll, and I’ve been trying to sort out my out of date plugins, but for some reason I have to do it all manually so it’s proved to be a struggle and some I just can’t update because the automatic updates won’t work and a fair few have gone premium. So.. if plugins are missing, it’s because I’m too lazy to find new ones to replace them and tough!

As for what brought me back, not only do I get to play with Mr Ryyu, the boy shaped one, and some other friends (even the ones I just chat to on Real ID from time to time), but there is more than enough to do. The thing that really turned my head, if I’m being honest, is the WoW Hunter class. I adore Hunters, and I really enjoyed Ranger/Marksman in Rift, it felt comfortable, but nothing feels to me quite like the WoW Hunter, so as I don’t have £30 lying around for Fae’s transfer, a new Fae is born on Vashj for the purposes of fun. She was going to be a Goblin but at the last minute turned into a Blood Elf. Well.. what do you know? Yes I’m terrible, shutup, I’m not even particularly in love with Blood Elves I just didn’t want to be short or hairy. We all know that Draenei are the superior race, after all ;) *cough* But yes, I may blog a little about her antics. She’s already level 18 with a handful of rare pets.

Aside from Huntering, I’m also playing my Priest a fair bit. Though I say I missed the Hunter class, I’m not rerolling this time. Seithir is my main, and I doubt that will change. I have done and collected a heck of a lot on her and I will always be slightly attached. I’ve been gearing her up in heroics whilst farming Justice Points for my Hunter’s (and later on, Shaman’s) heirlooms. I don’t want to raid, and I don’t plan to or need to either. Zul’Gurub is awesome! Though not so fond of Zul’Aman.. that’s mostly because of bad memories of failed bear runs, scout-based wipes, and so on.. *shudder* I’ve been carrying on with my pet collection (which I have updated Warcraft Pets with, and I’m praying I find the money for a Cenarion Hatchling because I have wanted the baby hippogryph pet since I first saw it but no way I could afford a TCG card) and the odd auction, and last night finally got around to doing a chunk of Archaeology, I’m finally past 450! I also got the Vrykul Drinking Horn, which is .. interesting. I have been enjoying playing with friends, and Softthistle even came over, which is lovely!

I have been tidying my blogroll as well. I mentioned the sidebar blogroll, and I’ve gone through my main blogroll as well as my reader, removing blogs past, and updating urls. It’s nice to see so many of you are still going! (Yes, I still like exclamation marks and bracketed text). I am wondering though, as I’ve been away for 3 months and didn’t pay too close attention just before I’d quit the game, are there any new and/or awesome bloggers that you think I’ve missed? I don’t plan to add to the blogroll, but if they aren’t on there now, they aren’t in my reader, and I’d like them to be. Please leave links in the comments, or poke me on twitter, I will keep my eye on Akismet.

All in all, despite the immature and selfish behaviour you tend to find in this game, and I’m not sure how long for, I’m glad to be back. :)

Hunter Cheat Sheet

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This post has been on the backburner for quite a while now, I figured it’s time I got it out there. I want to use this to give a few tips to other Hunters, whether they’re just starting out, struggling a little, or not. Hopefully this is going to help a few people. You’ll be able to find most of this information on my Hunter Guide pages, but I’ve condensed the information into one post for ease. Disclaimer: I am not claiming to be the best Hunter out there, or that I know everything. This guide is aimed at those who can get something out of it.

Speccing

To start, you’ll want to decide which spec you want to play with. It’s important to note that in high end gear, MM will come out on top.

The 3 specs, according to Elitist Jerks, would be something like this: Beast Mastery, Survival, Marksman.

I’m currently rocking a Marksman spec more like this, because I have quite a lot of hit on my gear. I also like using Trueshot Aura as I’ve often found myself to be the only one in a raid with the 10% attack power increase, if you raid regularly with somebody else who has this buff then you don’t need it in your spec. Focused Aim is an awesome talent which you should use, not only does it give you the chance to grab items with little to no hit, but it reduces the pushback received from damaging attacks for Steady Shot, I remember this being nice on phase 3 Anub’erak. When I can, I will probably drop 1 point in Rapid Recuperation and 1 in Improved Barrage to gain more in Focused Aim. If you’re just starting out and don’t have much ArmorPen, then you’ll want to be using Arcane Shot and as a result, your spec will look more like this one.

Survival is a great spec to start with and can be pretty decent at later gear levels too, although it doesn’t scale as well with ArmorPen as MM does. This is the Survival spec I was using before I specced into MM. If you’re using the 2pc Tier9 bonus, then you can remove 2 points from Resourcefulness, and 1 from Exposed Weakness to max out Improved Stings. If your raid doesn’t need you to take replenishment and you’re using the 2pc Tier9, then you could switch to something more like this, switching Improved Stings for Improved Aspect of the Hawk if you’re not using the 2pc Tier9 bonus.

Beast Mastery is a spec which has come under much scrutiny, however, if you play it right it can be a viable raid spec. In fact, according to Elitist Jerks, at high gear levels, it’s about on par with Survival. I haven’t played as a BM Hunter since the Naxx days, but some people have stuck by the spec quite loyally.

Glyphing

It’s safe to say that Glyph of Serpent Sting is a required glyph for every spec, though the rest depends on your spec, gear, and situation, i.e. are you raiding or heroicing? Glyph of Kill Shot can be a decent glyph for all raiding Hunters too, though this depends how long the boss is alive. If the boss is at 20% health or below for long enough for this glyph to be affective, then it may be a worthwhile glyph, otherwise don’t even bother.

Survival Hunters will be looking at the Glyph of Explosive Shot and Glyph of Steady Shot for their other choices, Steady Shot perhaps being a second choice to Kill Shot.

Beast Mastery Hunters will be looking at Glyph of Steady Shot and Glyph of the Hawk, although Glyph of Bestial Wrath is another choice that could be considered.

Marksman Hunters will be looking at Glyph of Steady Shot, and as a third choice, Glyph of the Hawk, Glyph of Trueshot Aura, or Glyph of Chimera Shot.

Gearing

If you’re just starting out, then take a look at my Pre Raid Gear List. I’ve done my best to list every item available to you before raids, including craftables and Frost Emblem gear, and marking which pieces have hit. To check how much hit you need, have a look at the Hit Calculator.

The ArmorPen cap is 1400, so with a trinket with an ArmorPen proc you will need roughly 700 armor pen from your gear if you’re Marksman. If you’re not, don’t aim for it, but it will be on a lot of your gear anyway, that’s unavoidable. Haste keeps Steady Shot at roughly a 1.5 second cast time, without haste, it’s a 2 second cast time, and 523 haste rating is the soft cap needed to lower Steady Shot down to the 1.5 second cast time. Also remember that there is no crit cap for hunters.

Note from EJ, posted by Echo:

“Haste is considered to be a poor stat for all hunter specs. The only shots affected by haste are autoshot and steady shot, and as MM you take Improved Aspect of the Hawk which means your Steady Shot speed will be capped whenever it procs. Additionally since all the shots affected by haste are adversely affected by movement, the value of haste will be decreased beyond what is predicted by the spreadsheet. Some haste on gear doesn’t hurt but don’t value it highly compared to other stats and never gem it.”

When choosing a ranged weapon, you should look primarily at its dps, and the high end damage. If there isn’t a huge difference, you’ll be looking for a slower weapon, with decent stats for your spec or an awesome proc like the one on Zod’s Repeating Longbow.

When you start thinking about set bonuses, first of all, don’t bother with the 4pc tier9 if you’re Marksman, it’s a bit crap. I don’t really know how good it is for Survival and BM, I assume not very, but have a look for yourself. Do get the 2pc bonus, ideally you’ll be looking at getting the legs and helm, though I’ve known people to go for the shoulders and grab the Helm of the Brooding Dragon instead of the tier helm if they needed a bit of extra hit. The 4pc tier10 is quite nice, but keep the tier9 2pc bonus until you have 4 parts of Sanctified (tier 10 + tokens) and the Leggings of Northern Lights from Lady Deathwhisper preferably. That’s the rule if you’re MM, at least.

Gemming

In trade chat, I have seen new Hunters asking, “What should a Marksman Hunter gem?” And trade replied, “ArmorPen.” The fact is that this isn’t always the case. If you’re just started out, you won’t have good enough gear for ArmorPen gemming to really be all that beneficial, and if you’re using an ArmorPen proc trinket, Grim Toll, Mjolnir Runestone, Scorpion, then you won’t need to gem for ArmorPen anyway, although bear in mind that the Scorpion has terrible uptime because it’s based on your ranged crits, not attacks like the other 2. It cant be decent if you have about 700 on your gear and no trinket to fill the gap to capped. If you’re Survival, don’t even consider gemming ArmorPen.

If gemming Agility, you should use Deadly gems (agi/crit) in yellow sockets with a high agility bonus, 4 or more. Ignore blue slots for the most part, however you should use a Nightmare Tear to activate your Relentless Earthsiege Diamond meta. This Tear should go in a blue socket with a decent bonus, preferably your highest agility bonus, the same as the yellow slots. It doesn’t have to go in a ‘prismatic socket’ (aka, the belt buckle), as I have seen many people do, in fact I’d outright avoid doing that, as I would with a red socket with a decent socket bonus too. This would be a waste.

Another thing I will advise you to avoid is using any gems aside from the ones I have mentioned and perhaps hit if desperate, though preferably agi/hit if you feel you have to. I’ve seen a lot of Hunters gemming for pure haste/crit/stam. Please, please avoid doing this, you will gain dps by gemming agility instead, or ArmorPen if you choose to. My last word, if you’re a Jewelcrafter, only use your Dragon’s Eyes for your main red gem choice (agi/arp/attack power).

Enchanting

Enchanting your gear would be more or less what you expect, if it has agility or attack power it’s probably the best one to use. Of course, there are exceptions of sorts. If you have profession only enchants, such as wrist enchants for Leatherworkers, cloak and glove enchants for Engineers, shoulder enchants for Inscriptors, use them. Boot enchants are often overlooked, so I’ll be very clear: Use run speed on boots unless you’re an Engineer with rocket boots. The best boot enchant is Cat’s Swiftness, but as this is a rare drop TBC enchant it can be expensive and difficult to find an enchanter who can do it. In this case, Tuskarr’s Vitality will be your boot enchant.

Using Cooldowns

It is best to save your trinket cooldowns for Bloodlust (Heroism /sigh), however, it may be best to use haste cooldowns outside of Bloodlust to avoid having too much haste simultaneously. I usually use Rapid Fire at the beginning of the fight, and use Readiness when it is finished and my shots are all on cooldown to reuse it again before Bloodlust is popped. I tend to use a haste potion after the second Rapid Fire, or after Bloodlust. If BM, personally, I’d keep using Bestial Wrath throughout the fight, especially if you’re using the glyph.

Rotations and Macros

See my Rotations & Macros page.

Using Female Dwarf

Everything I’ve said is situational, and I urge you to use this excellent tool, the online dps analyzer, to check that you have made the best choices for you personally. First of all, register your account so that you’re able to save things and come back to them later. Second of all, import your armory settings and fiddle with options such as raid buffs that an armory import would miss, update dps and save your character. Now you’re able to change things such as items, gems, enchants, to see what is better or worse for your specific character, update dps and see how big a gain or loss it would potentially be. Check Rilgon’s post on this, he says it much better than I can.

Cataclysm: Hunter Preview

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(See, I’m doing my bit to make this blog spoiler friendly!)

I’ll be honest, this preview has left me a little worried about the Hunter class. The change from mana to focus is going to cause the class to change a lot, and I’m currently trying out Rogue, the energy mechanic frustrates me somewhat. I’m a little bit scared that I’ll go into Cataclysm and find that I dislike the Hunter class, and what then? Would I just quit after seeing the new content, or reroll? Anyway, that’s me getting a little ahead of myself because this is, after all, just a preview and things are subject to change. Though from what we’ve seen already, Beast Mastery looks to be a strong contender for most interesting talent tree.

For starters: Cobra Shot: “A new shot that deals Nature damage instead of Physical damage. This ability will share a cooldown with Steady Shot. This will give hunters an alternative to Steady Shot on heavily-armored targets, and we will have talent incentives in the Beast Mastery tree to make this a signature shot.” This could either make or break Beast Mastery, giving them an entirely new shot to use instead of Steady Shot. My prediction is that it will hit like a train for a while, but I’m definitely interested in this one. One thing I wonder is how the nature damage aspect will work. Does this mean that Hunters will scale with spell power (or.. intellect I guess now) the same way that Unholy DKs don’t exactly suffer from it? What of hit and resistances?

Trap Launcher: “When used, the next trap can be shot to a location within 40 yards. This provides the current Freezing Arrow treatment to all traps and, as a result, we will be removing the current ability Freezing Arrow. 1-minute cooldown. No global cooldown.” Nice. Freezing Arrow has been a pretty useful tool, this means that we can plonk down an Explosive/Frost/Snake trap in a bundle of enemies in PvP without dragging ourselves into the thick of it at all.

Camouflage: “The hunter enters an obscured state that prevents him or her from taking ranged damage. The character would still be subject to melee or area-of-effect attacks, and dealing or taking damage will break the Camouflage effect. The hunter can move and set traps when under Camouflage, and will receive a damage bonus when attacking while under Camouflage (which will then break the effect).” At first glance, I thought, “what the hell?” and I looked again and I suppose this could be a nice tool for the start of a rotation, especially when used with the new BM talent, Careful Aim which “increases the damage of the next Steady Shot or Cobra Shot, but also increases the cast time of these abilities.” I can live with that, it’s a nice boost for BM.

The new focus mechanic worries me. I get frustrated at Rogue energy which regenerates at roughly 10per second. Focus will regenerate at around 6 per second. Eep. BM has always seemed to me to be the spec which focuses the most on Steady Shot. Steady Shot and Cobra Shot will be the focus regenning shot, thus I can see BM being much better for focus regen. Not to mention BM will receive mastery (which I still haven’t worked out /blush) talents for Haste, which will increase focus regeneration rates.

The pet changes could be just the thing I’ve been asking for! For starters, the mention of active and stabled pets, enabling us to keep pets that we may have certain attachments to but only carrying around the pets we plan to use, has been further confirmed. The amount of active pets allowed to us will probably be 3, though BM hunters may be getting 5 active slots. To switch a pet from passive to active and vice versa we will need to visit a Stable Master, which makes sense. The other pet changes I am particularly fond of? “Additionally, hunters will now start with a race-appropriate pet at level 1 and will be able to tame a different pet at level 10. We are also changing many pet family abilities to provide important buffs and debuffs. The intention is to allow the hunter to be able to swap pets and fill a position if a certain role is missing from the group. The goal is to have all pets provide a damage increase that is very similar and no greater than any other pet. Some examples of the changes we are making to the pet families are listed below:

  • Wind Serpents: Will provide a debuff that increases the amount of spell damage taken by an enemy (similar to a weaker version of the warlock ability Curse of Elements).
  • Ravagers: Will provide a debuff that will increase an enemy’s Physical damage vulnerability (similar to a weaker version of the warrior ability Rampage).
  • Hyenas: Will provide bleed damage (similar to a weaker version of the druid ability Mangle).“

Yes, yes, yes! This could be just the thing to bring back a bit of variety in pet choices, and enforcing Hunters as a ranged class as early as the 1-10 bracket. Good. Those of us who’ve played for a while can manage okay with kiting mostly, though some players struggle with it, and even more so for newer players who may get used to meleeing as normality. Not to mention this is exactly what Razorstorm commented about in my last post ranting about pet mechanics. Nice call :P

TL;DR Conclusion: I like a lot of these ideas. I think I’m drawn more towards Beast Mastery as my Cataclysm spec from the sounds of a lot of the changes (and I don’t tend to enjoy BM as much as MM or Surv as it stands now). The pet changes might well be just what the doctor ordered, and if these go through I’ll be happy with it. I’m terrified of where focus will lead the Hunter class, as I struggle with energy classes, I’m worried it might lead to me rerolling if I really don’t like it (probably Shadow Priest or Warlock if it came down to it), though of course I will give it a try because I will probably be completely wrong and it will make the Hunter class just a little bit cooler. Of course, if you want to read the full changes, MMO Champion has them up, this post is purely a recap.

You might notice I haven’t kept up on Cataclysm changes too much, but I’d like to have a rough idea on how to play my class when it does come around.

My Thoughts on Hunter Pets

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Pets are possibly one of the biggest selling points of the Hunter class to new players. When I first started playing WoW, I was told that Hunters were “kinda like Rogues but they use bows and have pets that you can tame.” My slightly girly, non gamer head went ‘oooh, pets’ and then chose Warlock because they were magic users.. but Hunter was my first alt! I just ended up deleting her because I wasn’t a fan of the female Orc model (this was pre-TBC, no Blood Elves, and I was Horde). Some people like pet classes because you get yourself a little companion that you can fight with, some because of the variety, and some just because they like cute animals.

Stable Slots

Whatever your reason for liking Hunters, you probably like to have several pets in your stable. First pets, flavour pets, useful pets.

My first pet was the polar bear from Dun Morogh when I was level 11. Dan ran me there from the Undercity on his Mage, and on my first attempt I died. I called it Gwynarth (white bear in Welsh, okay, Dan named it, I wanted to call it Pokey) and I loved it, levelled most of the way with it. My next pet was a white stripey cat from Winterspring called Sashi, who was my raiding pet at 70. When WotLK was released, I tamed a Rhino, first thing I did, I loved them to bits, and I called it Steve. Later on, I decided to tame Pitch in Scholazar Basin as my raiding pet, and called him ChairmanMeow. My point? I’ve had to delete every one of those pets to get others. I had to close my eyes when I found Skoll and the only pet left that I could release was Gwynarth, I still feel a little horrid for that! My stable currently has: Wolf, Turtle, Spirit Beast (Skoll), and a pink Dragonhawk. I’m running around with NomNom, the blue rare cat from Winterspring. I wouldn’t have had to if Hunters had more stable slots, which I think would improve the Hunter class without making them overpowered.

Dev Chat

So, the developer chat pops up on Twitter, I’m around so I asked “Are hunters likely to see more stable slots for their pets in the future? With the current variety of pets, the amount they have right now seems too small.” and I was answered!

“Arm-waving here, but a model I would love to see is dramatically expanded slots (so you can store all those Spirit Beasts) but have a smaller number of “active” pets, like 3. You could summon an active pet from anywhere in the world, when outside of combat. You would swap a pet from active to the stable at the Stable Masters.“

You know, I think I’d be okay with that if it happened. That would mean we could keep the sentimental pets, and just carry around the pets we’re most likely to use.

Variety (or Lack of)

Another thing I think Hunter pets could use is a little rehaul of their abilities perhaps. As it stands, there is a pretty large variety of tameable beasts, and a heck of a lot of those tend to go unused. I like the talents, Cunning/Ferocity/Tenacity, that gives a little choice depending on what you’re doing, but I’m not sure I’m a fan of each beast having a different ability when that leads to there being a clear choice for ‘best raid pet’, ‘best pvp pet’ and so on.

You join a raid or instance or even just wander around a city and any Hunter you see with their pet out will 9 times out of 10 be using the same boring Northrend wolf model, occasionally the demon style wolf from Zul’Drak, which originally was really cool, but these days it’s BLAND. When I raid, I try to min-max a bit, I try to do the best I can do. I like to compete with the other DPS and if I turned around and said “screw this, I’m using a moth tonight” I wouldn’t be able to compete. I would, but I wouldn’t be as successful at it as if I used the ‘best’ raiding pet. I use a wolf when I have to, but I don’t like it. I’d use a cat.

I really think it would be nice to have a little more variety. Yes, make the choice cosmetic, that’s what makes us different. Especially after the Trial patch.. who wouldn’t like that? There would still be some limitations in terms of the spec of your pet for the min-maxers, for example, a bear wouldn’t be a brilliant pve pet, but this would still give a lot more choice! That’s the only thing I can think of that could work, and I’d like it a little more, personally. Can you guys think of any other ideas to give Hunters more pet choice aside from ‘sod the math, use the cat’?