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?

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.

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.

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:

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.