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.

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.

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.

Current Add-Ons

Since I got the new hardware, much more capable and my resolution is 1600x1200 now I revised the list of add-ons I am using.

Shestak UI - is here to stay, I tried Tukui and ElvUI and still can't get away from Shestak.  (By the way Shestak himself is credited for the Tukui contributions.)  "Everything you need, nothing you don't".  And I mean it.  Has threat meter, Titan Panel functionality, auto-repair, auto-sell for grey items, bulk mail collection button,  integrates multiple add-ons (Skada, Recout, BigWigs etc), and has uncluttered interface, scales beautifully, tons of settings and automation.

GTFO - Useful for raids

PetTracker - helps with Battle Pet achievements, even I don't really care for them, sometimes I just capture a pet I didn't have before here and there.

BigWigs_Bossmodes - cooldowns for raid bosses.

Skada - provides better information than TinyDPS, at least I like their numbers better, because bigger is better, right?  Seriously, my Skada numbers are much better than I used to see in TinyDPS and it provides better breakdown by abilities.  I need to play more with the settings, but it feels much better.

Auctioneer - still trying to master AH.  

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?

Reputations

I hit 55 Exalted Reputations last night with The Klaxxi reputation.  As a side-effect, or, more precise, end-effect, I completed the end of the line quest and received Seal of the Windreaver.  Nice update which lifts my iLvl to 477.
I still want to raise reputations with The Anglers, The August Celestials, and Dominance Offensive to Exalted.  Also I do have plans for raising my reputations with Avengers of Hyjal, not exactly sure how, I may be able to solo some trash, but to get to exalted I need to down bosses.
And with two more factions at Revered from Classic I may even hit 60 reputations later on.

Battle.net error #112

Yesterday when I started the World of Warcraft game client it downloaded a small update and then when I tried to log in threw "Battle.net error #112" at me. Judging by description my game files had become corrupted. I did a quick search through WoW forums, but didn't find anything valuable. So I just went to C:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\Updates and deleted the update file from that folder. At the startup client redownloaded it again, this time successfully.

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:

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.

Ding 90!

Reached level 90 yesterday, also ran couple of dungeons, got nice 450 helm [Crest of the Clan Lords], bringing overall iLvl on the character to 433, just 2 shy of being able to run heroics.  Still haven't spent talent point, thinking of [Glaive Toss]. In a meantime purchased [Wisdom of the Four Winds], what a relief!

The instances I ran were easy, but I was probably overleveled and overgeared for them. I liked the fact they were somewhat short, but the waiting time of 35-40 minutes is outrageous. Next I'll be finishing quest lines and finishing exploration of Pandaria. Need to gear for heroics, but don't want to grind dungeons at this point.