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.

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.

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.

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.  

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?

World of Warcraft add-ons

A big part of WoW is its add-ons that extend out-of-the-box functionality, revamp user interface and provide alerts and extra information. I am running World of Warcraft on a laptop with an integrated Intel HD1000 card, so my FPS struggles sometimes even on low graphic settings, especially during raids. So I try to minimize add-ons footprint and only run things I really need at the moment.

Here's the list of add-ons I find useful:

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.

Looking for a new Look

I appreciate minimalistic design in general, use my laptop with 1366x768 screen resolution, and default UI eats too much space to the point where recently I decided it hurts my game because of the poor visibility of the game play field.  So I decided to give а try to some alternative UI add-ons, among them I installed and configured nUI, LUI, SpartanUI, and ShestakUI.  First, I have to say, and it goes for all of the above, even it says they all support horizontal resolution from 1280 and above - they don't.  On smaller resolutions UI elements are so small they are not usable, some add-ons allow you to scale it easily, others require you to manually adjust each and every element's position to the pixel.

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.

Daily Chronicles

Completed [Loremaster of Pandaria]. With grinding heroic dungeons it brought me to ilvl 449. Lowest LFR requirement is 460, so for now I will be doing dailies. Also found out I should've worn [Huojin Tabard] to earn reputation (sigh), ok, now I will.
So far I only have Lorewalkers and Forest Hozen reputations at Exalted. Still trying to make sense of new Cooking skill - looks like it's six different reps to grind plus I observe some of them fall back to the base after I made progress. Not sure if it is something I do wrong or just a bug. Started to work on Fishing and Archaeology on the side, but this is not priority at this time.

There Was Light

I was looking for some entertainment while traveling on business. I don't watch much TV or YouTube, always had been an avid PC gamer and I wanted something that lasts longer than just typical PC game where you get bored when you get to the final screen. And, honestly, sometimes you get bored well before that. MMORPG genre looked promising and I tried couple of games before joining World of Warcraft community. Primary reasons were legacy (i.e. ability to deliver high quality product year over year), large community (read - help, add-ons, additional information available), and some feedback I found online. I am not sure if any of my real life friends play it (I highly doubt it) and I really do not care.

First character I created was a Warrior, which I liked, because I do like breaking things and doing damage, it's just a stress-relief outlet for me. But I wasn't happy with the Warrior, it felt repetitive and, in some sense, confined. I did some research and second time around I chose a Hunter class. This is much better personal fit for me. I don't do PvP (Player vs Player) and I play when I can and I don't play when I can't, which means I do a lot of soloing and while I would like to get into a raid I cannot commit to any specific times with the guild. I also feel perfectly fine doing things on my own and on the other hand waiting on others aggravates me.

So the Hunter class was a much more engaging choice for me from the very beginning. In WoW hunters tame and use pets in a battle, which allows them to diversify their attacks and avoid damage, sometimes completely. It is not rare where I am the only guy in a group surviving the wipe. Leveling and soloing is much more fun, at least for me, with this class. There are couple of things that I can point as advantages over pure melee class. First, hunters have ranged shots. Much easier when your prey runs to you instead of chasing them down. Second - pets. You track them, tame them, name them. They have various special abilities and raid buffs. Sometimes I release my pet and call another one to my side just because I feel like it. Most of the times though I run with my black panther Mypka.

One of the reasons for choosing Hunter class was its ability to do some tanking with pet, basically running as a one-man raid group with pet tanking, hunter damaging and some healing abilities this tandem provides. I will probably discuss my build choices and preferences in a later post. I am far from being one of the extreme soloing guys but I had done a lot of lower-level dungeons and raid instances solo. Unfortunately a lot of raid instances in WoW have boss mechanics that prevent me from completing them. Sometimes I can go around bosses (Naxxramas), sometimes it's a dead end (Black Temple).

I like playing a hunter and at this point this is the only character I play, although I am thinking of creating a panda Rogue to be able to complete [The Insane] achievement.

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.

Michele Morrow is a WoW Hunter?

There's some buzz about casting Michele Morrow for a World of Warcraft movie.  Looks like she is (has) a hunter.  Nice.  Just wondering if the girl from Hunger Games is a WoW rogue.