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.

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.

Daily Chronicles

I  ran new LFR for 5.4 Patch Tuesday night and amazingly collected 4 pieces of gear.  Not sure if it is happening for everyone, but it is definitely the first time something like that happened to me.  I got Quarantine Shoulderguards shoulders, Puddle Punishers boots, Reality Ripper Ring ring, and an amazing trinket Assurance of Consequence which I upgraded right away.

I also bought the last Shado-Pan reputation item I needed and overall my iLvl is bumped up to 520 now.

My major pain at the moment is Emperor Shaohao reputation, I'll reach honored shortly, however it is irritatingly slow to solo the rep.  And I mostly play at ungodly odd hours when most of my guild mates and friends are not on.  I group with people, but random groups are not as good and people tend to just go all over the map or try to get a free ride on my back. And this is in the case I find anyone playing Horde.  Server is over flooded by Alliance players, everywhere I go there's Alliance in PvP mode just running into my AoE shots to get as easy 3 on 1 kill when I accidentally hit any of them.

On add-ins front, after playing with Skada and Recount I went back to TinyDPS.  I found out I don't need that much information and TinyDPS provides me what I am looking for without bogging down my laptop in instances.  I am still using ShestakUI, which fits my playing style perfectly.  I looked at the JSBH and WeakAuras to enhance my experience if not DPS and found out Shestak has all the functionality I need from those add-ins built-in.

Gearing Thoughts

One of my usual tools is Zeherah's spreadsheet which tries to calculate (simulate) DPS based on a current or desired build and gear and also has export capabilities for other optimization tools. I noticed couple of error messages while working with the tool and after some investigation decided they were not previously reported so I just wrote an email to Zeherah describing what I encountered. I got a quick response back, she (I assume, at least in terms of WoW character) promptly updated the tool for one of the issues and noted that the other issue popped up was due to the fact I was using non-hunter trinket [Carbonic Carbuncle]. The only explanation I could come up with for why it had happened is that I wanted to bump up my ilvl at some point in time and completely forgot about it.

So I immediately went out and acquired [Hawkmaster's Talon]. It boosted my DPS significantly, like 3K, at least in theory. And my ilvl went from 471 to 474. I also upgraded couple of rare items with justice points. I do need to reforge, but decided to postpone it for a little bit since I am close to getting another valor points item and one more justice points upgrade. So after making these changes I went back to Zehera's and ran a quick and dirty test: I imported my current build and gear: