Legion Blabbering

I am not dead yet, still playing, ilvl 893, 45 artefact rank, despite not raiding anymore.  I can now fly in Legion, what a relief!  I like this expansion, probably better than Draenor.

My current build:

Used Wyvern Sting up until last week and decided to switch to Intimidation for one of the quests on the Broken Shore.  Didn't have a chance to give it a try yet though.  Since I do a lot of grinding of mobs and not so much of instances I am thinking of going back to Barrage.

Like the changes to the loot - now you share the loot with you faction mates, the thing that drove me crazy few years back when I had started my blog.

Daily Chronicles

So far I am at ilvl 666, done heroic Gruul and leveled an alt to level 100.  With Patch 6.1 arriving next week I decided to write few thought about 6.0x thread.

Having a Garrison is very cool, I was looking forward to it and still like the idea of a permanent character house.  What I am not so pleased to see is a lack of customization options.  I would like to be able to tell my main Orc hunter's headquarters from my alt Pandaren rogue's house and I can't.  Another thing where I feel Blizzard went overboard with the Garrison idea is the resource/profession buildings.  Right now it basically kills all the social interactions, cooperation,  and trading in the game.  It's fairly easy to stay self sufficient with few adds and players have very little incentive to keep "MM" up in MMORPG.

Game pushes you to check in few times every day for each character.  I, personally, don't like the idea.  My work/life schedule allows me to play 2, sometimes 3 nights a week and I don't appreciate being pushed into tamagotchi-like babysitting rhythm.

I really like Beast Mastery spec, but it had been so bad in terms of DPS in this expansion I had to run raids as a Marksman.  Because of that I didn't feel I needed to be competitive in BM spec and I maintained low-maintenance (i.e. passive abilities wherever possible) build throughout 6.0x cycle.  With changes to hunter abilities in 6.1 I changed my BM build to something I hope I'll be able to use for raiding:

In raids I'll probably switch Spirit Bond with Iron Hawk.

The changes I have made in preparation for 6.1 rollout are:
I am now using Steady Focus instead of Thrill of the Hunt
And Stampede for Blink Strikes.

WoW Armory Mobile App

As an owner of an Android smartphone I naturally installed WoW Armory mobile app on my phone.  Right now I am going through my third phone (and I recall at least couple of app updates) with it and experience never changes:

Here's how it works most of the time:

• Open the App, click OK to use mobile authenticator 
• Go to AH, click Sell tab, select an item to sell, set up price, click Sell button
• Enter the password, get "Login Failed" error
• Say "WTF", click Sell again, type the password, get "Connection Lost" error
• App crashes

• Restart the app, go to login, get "Incorrect password".  It was valid  a minute ago?!
• Wait 3 minutes, start app, log successfully, 
• Go to AH, click Sell tab, select an item to sell, set up price, click Sell button
• Enter the password, get "Password is incorrect" error
• Click Sell button, enter the password get "Login Failed" error
• Click Sell button, enter the password, get "Too Many Attempts" error

• Wait 15 minutes
• Restart the app, click OK to use mobile authenticator 
• Go to AH, click Sell tab, select an item to sell, set up price, click Sell button
• Enter the password, auction posted successfully
• Go back to the list of items, select another one, click Sell button
• App crashes.

Go to the first bullet to continue with user experience with WoW Armory.

And I admit, the error about incorrect password is on me, but I only encounter it once in a while and given the password policies where it has to be exactly 257 characters long with both Chinese and Lithuanian characters no wonder I mistype it maybe once in 20 logins, but "Login Failed" has nothing to do with my password.  And the fact that I have to type it two-three times to sell a single item on AH is not annoying, this is just plain unacceptable.

Patch 6.02 PRT Notes

Reading through 6.02 PTR Patch Notes I, naturally, pay attention to what changes are coming for hunters as a class more than anything else.

So

• Racial traits leveled out - good, not that I struggled with them, but it sounds fair;
• No reforging - ok, I guess it makes gear different again, right now the difference between best in slot and not-so-good in slot gear is negligible, it is probably a step in a right direction;
• Different stats system - I need to play with it to understand how it works and I am fairly sure some adjustments will be made after it goes live;
• Stats shrinking - long overdue, in my opinion;
• Combined AH - nice, more consistent prices and opportunity to buy some items unavailable for Horde right now;
• Healing changes - probably huge, but I never had a healing character, I don't know how it used to be and have no baseline to compare to what it is going to be in WoD.

While not all of the above is a good news at least it is not a bad news.  Hunter changes, though, concern me.  

Now hunters have no interrupt or silence ability/shot/talent.  Not only hunter does not have any anymore, but all the pets lost it too.  Pets lost all rooting abilities as well.  The only thing that's left to hunter is a Freeze Trap.  So if a mob starts casting anything at me I just stand there waiting for it to finish.  

Hunters also don't have any raid utility on their own anymore.  Hunter's Mark is being removed and I can bet new Fox Stance the way it's described in the PRT notes is not going to be used by anyone in the raid.  Pets still provide raid buffs though but I feel something valuable was taken away from me and nothing was given in return.

Also from the notes looks like Survival spec is going to be overpowered in PvE.  Pandaria was the first expansion I experienced where all three specs were fairly close to each other in damage output and raid utility and I feel my favorite Beast Mastery is being neglected for the Warlords of Draenor expansion.

Daily Chronicles

I have reached iLvl 577, have 4 heroic bosses under my belt now: Immerseus, The Fallen Protectors, Norushen, and Galakras.

I also got the last mount from the Argent Tournament and can finally take a breath not going to do those dailies in a while.  There are some pets I could get for points in addition to the mounts, but the thought of doing the tournament dailies again makes me sick.

Looked at the players ranking site and found myself fairly high up there.  Definitely the best geared player in my guild.  What I noticed is that most of the hunters that are ranked higher than me are Survival.  Even went out to FemaleDwarf page to run Survival spec and found BM being slightly better in terms of DPS.  It must be the gear then.  Dropped Skinning and leveled Enchanting for a slight DPS increase, and, possibly, some additional gold from DE of soulbound items.

At this level I started to just DPS down Warbringers - I just make sure my turtle pet has all the aggro and I mend it through the fight, but otherwise it's just a pure tank and spank routine.  The competition is tough though.  I rarely get a chance to kill one and I miss the good old times when it took me 7 minutes to kill one and then I found another one down the circle and by the time I finish the loop the first one was up...

Soloing Zandalari Warbringers

I found farming Zandalari Warbringers to be very lucrative and, at first, challenging.  They also have a chance of dropping one of three mounts, but those are soulbound and can only be sold to a vendor for 2.5g.

I believe I started soloing Warbringers at ilvl 520 and while it was tedious in the beginning, since they have huge health pool it is doable and can be done at comparatively low levels by Beast Mastery hunter.  The fight is about survival, not DPS.

First,

Build

I selected Spirit Bond as my Tier 3 talent and highly recommend it for any soloing and even leveling.  Makes hunter's life much easier than a lot of other DPS classes.  Please note I chose it over Exhilaration because I think sustained healing is more important while fighting NPCs, than a boost on a cooldown.

Major Glyphs

Glyph of Animal Bond - same as above, healing;
Glyph of Mending - same as above and above, sustained healing;
Glyph of Misdirection - with Misdirection macro that misdirect to pet is one of the aggro mitigation tool with Feign Death being the second one.

Minor Glyph

Glyph of Revive Pet - this allows me to revive my pet without interruption even if Warbringer is banging on my head.

Strategy

Pull up a Turtle, set it to passive and turn off the automatic Growl.  Engage Warbringer, bind it to the pet and make sure it ignores you.

General tips

• Stand behind and away from Warbringer at all times;
• Monitor threat levels to make sure it targets pet at all times;
• Watch out what it casts (see Abilities).

Warbringer Abilities and Mitigation

Each Warbringer has four out of five abilities:

• Thunder Crush - frontal cone of damage.  Make sure you're not in it, Mend Pet.
• Meteor Shower - meteors are dropping all over.  Dance to avoid a hit (you may survive a hit or two), I believe you may be able to stay outside of the affected area and still DPS the Warbringer, but I never bothered to prove it.  Mend Pet often.
• Horrific Visage - keep Bestial Wrath on cooldown to interrupt, but even if you don't it is usually not critical, except for the Warbringer in Krasarang Wilds which tends to reset if you allow it to scare your pet too far away.
• Scarab Swarm - bunch of scarabs tries to get you or a pet, I usually Multi-Shot them down as soon as they appear or Glaive Toss through them if they are already on me.  If you miss them, don't sweat, they hit like kittens.
• Vengeful Spirit - Summons Vengeful Spirit.  This thing hits like a truck and can 2-3 shot your pet.  Fortunately it is extremely slow, so use Distracting Shot as soon as it shows up and step away, if it gets too close - change position.

Bare Minimum

So at the bare minimum a BM hunter needs to use:
Mend Pet
Misdirect to pet (I use macro which I use in place of the regular Misdirection)
Feign Death for threat mitigation

And, if Warbringer has Vengeful Spirit ability:
Distracting Shot

Week's Progress

Last night I decided to run the last LFR where I could get the Secrets of the Empire and then, unexpectedly, was invited into guild's Flex run.  By the end of the night I had 10xSecrets in my bag, much better than I was hoping for two days ago.  I also upgraded my Assurance of Consequences to the Flex version and replaced a bow with Death Lotus Crossbow. This brings my item level to 543 and in terms of DPS I increased my output by at least 10% this week.

Overall this has been a terrific week even despite the fact I still struggle to get a Primal Egg on the Isle of Giants after grinding over 6,000 Giant Dinosaur Bones.  I even approached one of the hunters grinding in the area and asked if he had any eggs dropped for him and he said he had two in the last two days, so I guess eggs have not been removed from the game it's just RNG.  Or me.

World of Warcraft Tools

Decided to list websites and tools I use to enhance my WoW gaming experience.  I like freebies and think I am already paying enough for my WoW account to use paid services on top of that, so sometimes I have to find workarounds or just suffer.  Still, I collected few sites I visit regularly.

FemaleDwarf - DPS calculator, imports WoW armory data, in theory allows you to compare different configs/setups for min/maxing, but feels too cumbersome to rebuild the whole setup, including reforging for comparison, so I only use it as a common sense validation after I reforge.

AskMrRobot - great tool site for reforging (free) and gear upgrades (paid services).  As much as I like what these guys provide I am not paying (at least yet) and only use free reforging advice.  I also don't like their stats weights as they put Haste way too high on the priorities list versus most of the other sites that discuss Hunter's stats' priorities, but since there's no alternative I am aware of I am sticking with them for a time being.

Curse - one of the number of sites where you can get WoW addons.  I like their client and try to use it to keep my addons up to date using it as much as I can.  I also scan its database of addons for useful tools to try from time to time.

Wowhead - ultimate WoW database and a thriving community.  Place to find information on everything WoW: quests, NPCs, achievements, gear, bosses and more.

Icy Veins - has some useful guides, I go there once in a while, but mostly from Google searches.

Retired:

• WoWReforge is dead (not being updated).  I used them a lot in the past, AskMrRobot does the same, however I feel stats weights were more to the point on this site.
• Huntersloot is dead (not being updated) - great tool for quick and dirty gear comparison and finding upgrade options.  Still looking for a replacement to this one.
• WHU (Warcraft Hunters Union) is (almost) dead, too bad, it was a great resource, dedicated to hunters with more useful information than icy-veins.

The Build

So it's obvious I play a hunter.  My primary specialization is Beast Mastery.  I keep my character properly gemmed and reforge every time I get a new gear piece.  I don't transmog.  My Build has been stable for a while:

I chose Thrill of the Hunt and Blink Strikes because they are passive and don't require additional button clicks.  I feel my hunter has too many already.  Spirit Bond as well as Animal Bond and Mending are there for soloing which I do a lot.  And Glaive Toss coupled with Misdirection to pet makes wonders when I need to get adds off my back in a hurry.

For misdirect I use the following macro:

#showtooltip
/cast [@focus,help][help][@pet,exists] Misdirection

which misdirects to the player in focus (I set focus on tanks in instances) or to pet if there's nothing in focus.

Overall I want to be able to solo high-level instances, such as Firelands, in my primary configuration even if I lose some DPS.  Survivalability of the pet is the number one priority as I pet-tank pretty much everything, including Zandalari Warbringers.  And most of the time I tank with a ferocious pet, only toughest mobs force me to pull out a turtle or a direhorn (for primals on the Isle of Giants).  As for my own protection I simply try to avoid damage using Feigh Death, Deterrence, and Disengage.

I also have Marksmanship spec as a secondary and tried to maximize DPS on that spec.  Never got close to what I am able to pull out as a BM in that spec though, I guess it just doesn't fit my playstyle, although self-healing shots are supposed to be useful I stay alive longer in BM spec.  Plus in BM spec I am able to use my exotic pets, such as quilen with battle rez Eternal Guardian or a strider with water walking.

Back to Work

My server had been merged with another one a month ago and now I feel like living in a city.  Everywhere I go I see players, people camping Warbringers have to stay in line to get one and AH trade is crazy.  Overall I don't like it, too much competition for resources; not only my Warbringer business went sour people who do get to kill them consistently drive AH prices down, so for me, working on the mats for Geosynchronous World Spinner mount, it's a hassle to make gold I need.  I discovered The Isle of Giants, have no idea where I've been all that time, but now I am grinding bones and looking for eggs to drop.  After 2 eggs (both hatching into Red Primal Raptor) in the first week I am running empty for the last two weeks.  Not sure if it's a bad luck or something is broken since the last hotfix.

I have used Wowhead profiler to compile the list of mounts I don't yet have and found about a dozen I could buy outright from vendors which I promptly did.  I also completed the list of my Honor Points mounts recently by running Heroic Dungeons and converting Justice Points into Honor Points.  My mounts count stands at 147 at the moment.  I am grinding bones for one more, hope to get two more from the eggs on the island, which would put me at 150 (and that's a bonus mount).  Plus I am getting ready to pull the trigger on the engineering crafted mount (see above) and in a few days might work to get Darkmoon Fair mounts too.

On the gear front I finally collected four Tier 16 LFR pieces. I dropped Timeless hands and chest in favor of the LFR Tier pieces (even if it lowers my ilvl and I lose some stamina) because of the DPS boost. And since I hit the ceiling of the items I can get out of LFR I decided to look into legendary cloak questline I abandoned a while ago because it wanted me to do PvP battles.  After hesitating for a few months I finally went and won both battles I needed in about 20 minutes all in my PvE gear and no performance enhancing substances.  Should've done it years ago!   Although being ilvl 541 and having 4-piece gear helped.  So now I will be looking for 20xSecrets of the Empire.  Ran 4 LFRs last night and 4 of the secrets dropped.  Nice feeling of being overpowered in ToT LFRs, and even in SoO LFRs I show up in the upper floor of the DPS charts consistently.

Daily Chronicles

I finally switched to another guild, time will tell, but for now I enjoy more company and some benefits I haven't experienced in the past.  For example, one of my guildies made me a Panther mount from my mats and I am looking forward to send him mats for the second one to complete the set of four.  I might even go for the uber-Panther.

I am still farming Warbringers, but this time I have a company, one of the guidies, a shaman, is looking for the Direhorn mounts, so he joins me and brings additional DPS.  Nice thing about this is that it takes less time to down the Warbringer this way and I can play it safer by spending more time on managing the pet's health and mobs.  The guy is humble enough to not ask for any loot, but I send him some windfall bars later anyway (have to smelt what he can use).  He already got one mount, so his efforts are not in vain.

On the AH front I started to use Auctioneer's Snatch search, instead of getting enormous list from Resale I focus on few things I know and feel like started to generate some gold from resales.  Bean Counter plugin for Auctioneer tells me I am losing money, but my balance grows over time, not sure how it counts profits, suspect it misses sales where gold was taken out of the mailbox using remote agent, so I stopped doing that remotely, but still I can't get a clear picture of what my income from trading is.  TSM add-in looks nice in reporting department, providing exact data in exact layout I expect it to be, but the trading setup in TSM does not fit me.  I am a gatherer, not a crafter, so all these setups with recipes and plans and rules don't really help me.  I want to know how much I can sell a thing for, nothing more.  So I went back to using Auctioneer.  Auctionator is another nice choice, especially when buying stuff, has few shortcomings too.

I started to do "floor sweeping" in AH - some people under-price items significantly and I pick them up for quick buck.  I don't know why they're doing this, but I can see two reasons, first, it's a random item they have no experience with value of and they just want to get rid of it.  Second, they might just try to skew the prices and grab whatever is posted below their benchmark.  In either case I can leverage those to get some extra gold.

I decided to tame one of the Spirit Porcupines, namely Hutia and after few unsuccessful tries cried out for help in the guild chat.  The guild master promptly got me someone who helped me to tame, although I'll probably won't allow her to do it again.  My problem was with the beast self-heal - I couldn't interrupt it with whatever default interrupt shot Beast Masters have right now.  One of the guides I found on the Net said you need to use Silencing Shot which I thought was retired, but looks like it can still  be used by MM hunters, but I didn't know.  The guy who came over to help me used Scatter Shot to interrupt and I feel that if I could get this hint I could've tamed the porcupine myself instead of relying on someone else.  So I didn't like the aftertaste.  Oh well, I am too lazy to abandon the pet and tame it again solo, I am keeping her.  I named her Dyxless, however I don't think anyone around gets the reference.

By the way I have few pets with special names:
My latest addition, Spirit Porcupine: Dyxless
Quilen: Bacbka
Panther: Mypka
Boar: XpIOH
Corehound: TEPbEP
Chimera: XuMepa
Water Strider: BODOMEPKA
Bear: TonoTyH

New mounts in collection

I keep killing Zandalari Warbringers occasionally and acquired the last Direhorn mount from them.  Unexpectedly ran into Huolon and it dropped me the Thundering Onyx Cloud Serpent mount.

Still can't get over the mistake I made: I had been collecting Tier 16 pieces from LFR and accidentally sold them to a vendor and didn't notice it until it was too late.  Could've had 4-piece bonus.  I am iLvl 539 with all the Timeless pieces, but Tier gear provides a significant DPS boost compared to Timeless.  Since my guild is not very active lately (only see 2-3 people online at any given time) I think my chances for running full-fledged raids are pretty slim for the foreseeable future.  Oh, well.  Nevetheless I consistently top LFR DPS meters this week, so it's not that bad.

New Mounts

I had been grinding Zandalari Warbringers and received two of the Direhorn mounts, like this one: Slate Primordial Direhorn.  I think I have Slate and Amber and Jade is outstanding.  Along the way I have completed some achievements for Pandaria champions (killing rares), except for the Glorious!, where I have one guy outstanding - people are camping him in stacks and I just can't catch him alive.

Since my AH business is going ok I snapped Sky Golem mount from AH for cash.
I am also running Firelands for the Avengers of Hyjal reputation, but it's a slow process and I am still working through trash, don't feel like I can solo any bosses, especially given the fact that I never killed any bosses in FL before.

Transportation and Financials

I purchased two new mounts, one being Sunstone Panther, and another Panther, the red one, I also finally had Drake of the North Wind dropped in Vortex Pinnacle.  So my stable increased and finances plunged.

Since I am done with the grind I started to look into ways to make money.  My primary character is Herbalist/Skinner and the current alt does Mining, so I can get fair amount of raw materials.  Recently the prices have shot up on my server, could be because it was linked to another one (not sure if it has happened, I don't care if it did enough to check it).  So I made one panther cost back in a week and continue to replenish my currency reserves.  Mobile App with Remote AH is a huge help, I started to list auctions for the shortest duration possible (12 h), so the prices get corrected faster if items are not sold.

State of the Union

I finally reached Exalted status with Emperor Shaohao last week, while grinding reputation I looted few Burden of Eternity items and used valor points to upgrade resulting Timeless pieces, so overall my ilvl is 533 now.

Looking for additional challenge I went to hunt Zandalari Warbringer.  As it turned out I chose the toughest location (Jade Forest) and failed few times.  Went on to read how people kill it and finally brought one down in Towlong Steppes and then, eventually every other location.  Everyone says you need to kite Warbringer, which doesn't work for me, I got the glyph and tried to kite it, but it always switches to a pet.  Finally I gave up on whatever people say and did it my own way.  I pet tank warbringer with a regular turtle.  I switch off the Growl and switch pet into Passive stance, misdirect to pet and that's usually enough to keep warbringer on the pet at all times.  The only thing that can bring pet down is the Vengeful Spirit, so I have to make sure I use Distracting Shot as soon as it's up.  Most of the time spirit goes after me anyway, but it can kill the pet in two-three shots, so I don't want to risk it.  Spirit is very slow, I am able to kite it with no speed boosts, so I maintain my Hawk stance to maximize DPS and able to kill warbringer in about 8 minutes, give or take.  The other annoyances are passing mobs that engage with me or pet once in a while.  I have to make conscious effort not to redirect to pet and deal with them one on one.