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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

On hunter's pets in Patch 5.1

I did some research on what people are saying is the best hunter pet in Pandaria.  While I agree with those who say for raids you need something that provides buffs missing for the group, i.e. complimentary abilities; I feel majority of the commentators are wrong when they say either pet is good for leveling/soloing.  Others suggest Shale Spider as a slightly better pet because of 5% buff to the major hunter's stat - Agility.

Small note on a side: I do a lot of soloing and in Pandaria, except in extreme soloing cases, you'd do just fine with ferocity pet, no need for tenacity pet.  

So I decided to use Zehera's Hunter DPS Analyzer to check some numbers against these theories.  I loaded my build from the armory and calculated DPS with different pets.

Generic Ferocity Pet (no buffs):

Ferocity Cat:

Cats used to be hunter's favorites in Cataclysm, providing the highest DPS boost when soloing and decent buff for groups too.  Now, with mastery buff, they are not as good as, say, Shale Spiders.

Ferocity Shale Spider:

As expected Shale Spider's buff  of 5% Agility fetches slightly better DPS than a cat.  Note this option is only available to Beast Mastery hunters.

Ferocity Quilen:

Then I decided to check out Quilen as a pet.  Quilen "Bacbka" is my recent favorite for LFR because of its Eternal Guardian battle rez ability.  It also provides 5% crit buff which, to my surprise, turned out to be better option than 5% Agility provided by shale spider.

I understand simulation has its limitation and crunched numbers do not necessarily translate into real-world DPS increase.  However I did this exercise for two reasons.  First, I wanted to see what I am missing in raids in personal DPS when using Quilen as a pet compared to other options.  Second, I observed better DPS with Quilen in LFR and wanted to see if simulation agrees with that.  Turned out to be for my particular build and case Quilen is the best choice.