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.

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.

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.

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.

Officially Insane

I was working on the Insane achievement recently.
Bloodsail Bucaneers reputation is a tough one now, because Blizzard bumped all the guards at Booty Bay to level 90 and they are hard to kill.  So I used phased event mechanics to get to Honored and stopped at that since this is all that's required.  This eventually plunged all of the goblins' towns reputations to Hated and given mixed responses out there whether I need all the reputations to be leveled at the same time or not I decided to have them all done simultaneously.

So after that I went to level Everlook, Ratchet, Booty Bay, and Gadgetzan reputation.  Goblin factions' reputation is just killing pirates at Ratchet and Tanaris over and over again.  I did it when I got bored or didn't have quality Internet connections i.e. airports, coffee shops etc.  Pirates drop some cloth that sells nicely, not that I made tons of money, but I looted corpses whenever I felt like it.

I accumulated Darkmoon reputation over time with no significant effort put to it, I got a bit impatient towards the end of it and purchased some cards to make decks, but easily could have done without it by doing dailies and turning in dungeon artifacts.

For Ravenholdt reputation I farmed rogues in Arathi Highlands until it capped at Honored and then started on Heavy Junkboxes.  I leveled a rogue to level 60, so she could fly, discovered fly hubs of New Kargath and Chiselgrip and set my main at Tarren Mill.  New Kargath is the closest Horde mailbox to Blackrock Stronghold, where I farmed junkboxes, it also provides a flight path from Tirisfal Glades, where zep from Org falls ashore to Burning Steppes zone.  So my rogue would farm boxes, hop to Chiselgrip, take public transportation to New Kargath and send mail to my main.  Main was stationed at Tarren Mill, short fly from Ravenholdt Manor, where boxes are dropped in exchange for the Ravenholdt reputation.  I tried Blackrock dungeons for farming and didn't like them  much - a hassle to get in and out, farming outdoors is much more convenient.  Full round of 4 mob groups and scattered singles got me between 9 and 22 boxes.

For farming I used the following macro found somewhere I don't recall where.  I tried half a dozen before found this one worked best for me.  It picks up a pocket of the mob under mouse and marks it with a star to indicate this one's done:

/cleartarget
/cast [@mouseover] Pick Pocket
/script SetRaidTargetIcon("mouseover",1)

Overall not an exciting experience and requirement to have a rogue really annoyed me.  I know I could have just buy junkboxes from rogues, but I didn't have enough luck with the guildies and didn't want to go to trade channel.  I guess I am more of a DIY guy.

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.

Legendary Weapon

While I was working on raising my reputation with Hydraxian Waterlords by soloing Molten Core I got two halves of the legendary sword as a windfall.  It also required 10xEnchanted Elementium Bar which on a good day runs about 1,000 gold each on AH, but as soon as I got my pieces jumped to 5,000 gold apiece.  I just went out and farmed some of materials for the bars and bought the rest of the mats on the Auction House and  one of my guild-mates smelted it for me, so my overall cost was about 4,000 total for the whole package.

The quest is confusing, you return mats and halves to the NPC and nothing happens.  Good thing someone was floating on a magic carpet right above me, I figured his target was a boss right behind me, so I turned and killed it, returned the drop to the NPC, got the sword back and received a guild achievement.  Amazingly, level 25 guild with 400+ members and I was the first to get it.  Now, I still didn't get the personal achievement until I actually equipped the Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, which I was able to do, even given the fact hunters are not allowed to equip melee weapons anymore.  Or are we?

Blink Strike

Couldn't resist a temptation to link one of the posters from:
WHU Hunter Moar Posters



And just one more, dedicated to the recent Growl hiccups:

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:

Patch 5.1

Since Patch 5.1 introduced "free" entry to older raid instances and promised to make it easier to solo them I went back to Black Temple last night. At first I died at the very first boss very first boss because he stuns you with no break in sight, like you're in a permanent coma, as always happened before and thought nothing had changed since I last tried it some time back in Cata. But unexpectedly on my second attempt I got a breezer between stuns for about 10 seconds and it was enough for me to be able to finish the sucker. There's another challenging boss another challenging boss, but that one is not nearly as bad. So all in all I have successfully cleared BT all by myself, like a big boy.

Daily Chronicles

Grinding reputation and running LFR brought me to ilvl 471 so far, I am still working on The August Celestials and Shadow-Pan reputations. Last week I just noticed tracks on the ground while doing Shadow Pan dailies and, after almost giving up twice, tamed Portent which has nice exotic ability Eternal Guardian (battle resurrection), so now he is my pet of choice (instead of female black panther I used for a while).

I also realized I overlooked [Glyph of Stampede], a mistake I promptly corrected. The nice thing is I don't have to carry 5 pets with me (and I typically don't since I like having an empty slot to tame a pet if an opportunity comes by) - it still spawns 5 pets even if I don't have all five slots filled in.

I leveled my battle pets to 25 and defeated a bunch of pet trainers until I hit Major Payne. Decided I need to level specific pet classes to beat him, so I went back and captured couple of rare pets of the right class at level 18 and I am bringing them to 25 which will take me a while, since it is not my first priority at the moment.

Side note: earning valor points takes a lot of time, even with dungeons and LFR being somewhat shorter, since base earnings were reduced significantly. Dailies do not provide enough points to hit the weekly ceiling and overall maxing out on valor points requires too much time investment in my opinion.

Alleged Stealing

I was reading a post on WHU page today and decided I'd like to reply to it. And I did. Then, after giving it some thought ,I decided I am going to write a post about a larger issue.

So the original post was about people snatching items from you while you fight mobs that guard it. From how I understood the post and comments to it most of the people do not see a problem with it, saying if you need an item then make it a priority and make sure you grab it before you finish off a mob. And, note, that this is a hunter community page. Hunters can misdirect threat to their pets and deal with mobs at a better time. So I wrote something like:

Being a hunter puts you at advantage against some of the melee classes that don’t have luxury of misdirecting mobs to a pet. I can see how it could aggravate people that can’t get away from the mob to pick up an item because they get either get interrupted or item is not even lootable in combat (the latter is true for hunters as well).

I had seen people sitting on flying mounts just above an item waiting for someone to aggro a nearby mob and snatching it right after I land before I had a chance to misdirect. This is a common thing I encounter when I gather herbs – druids don’t even have to land and dismount to pick them so they wait until you aggro a mob and then take it on a flyby.

I do not appreciate it personally. I don’t complain about it, it is what it is, WoW is not a community-building game, it promotes a-holeness in people and punishes cooperation and friendliness.