The Calculation: Switching to Marks

I am interested in switching to an Armor Pen Marksman Hunter. No, that's not quite right. I'm interested in the number crunching to determine on paper if I would rocket my DPS through the roof. The calculations don't look that favorable. I could increase my DPS, but not like a rocket. And I'd give up a lot of utility.

I have an armor penetration rating of 419 from gear. That doesn't sound like a large number when our hard cap is 1400. That is usually from prioritizing Crit over ArP.

I have 20 regular gem slots at the moment. 17 of the 20 slots are slotted with agility. If I swapped 19 of them over to ArP it would land me with a total 799 ArP rating. It would only cost 3,800 gold if I got the raw gems and had someone cut them.

I only have the crappy ArP proc'ng trinket. I probably can't get the raid one, but I could fairly easily get the better five man one. Even still, that is only the soft-cap on-proc world. Not exactly stellar.

And there's that 3,800 gold buy-in with a 3,800 gold reversal fee...

EDITED TO ADD: Oh! And I'd probably feel compelled to put on two of my T9.5 pieces again. I haven't studied it vs the T10x4 bonus.

Tank Set Remade

I spent some time and bought, assembled, re-gemmed, and re-enchanted a pet-tanking armor set. It isn't as well-balanced as I had before, but it has a bit more oomph!

I also used it in a random 5man when the tank got booted (I actually voted to not boot him...). It was pretty easy.

Interesting BM 3.3 Buffage

FI goes from just buffing arcane shots by 9% to buffing arcane and steady shot by 9%. Meat and potatoes nice damage boost for BM. Not enough for even the word parity to be spoken aloud, but nice.

Frostheim's Great Trinket Article

Please give Frostheim's Hunter Trinket article a read over at wow.com. I was going to make a post like it. It wins.

EDITED TO ADD:

I do agree with Rilgon that the Herkuml War Token is completely not worth buying.

I also would point out that some hunters do pet tanking and turn the whole trinket thing on its head ... forget about the use.

Getting Uber Skillz

The next big consideration for Kheldul is if he will drop his mining profession in favor of a more dps-oriented profession.

Here's the thing. I hardly ever bother to put up my ore tracking anymore. I strongly suspect that if I do, I'll forget to flip it back to a "dps" tracking type. I don't want to accidentally take a -5% dps hit.

I'm also not in love with my "main" tradeskill, Blacksmithing. Back in the day, I could choose to create epic mail. And as a Master Axesmith, I could and did make nice BoP epic two handed stat-axes. Click on this link and see them all. Kinda pathetic these days eh?

So I leveled my Blacksmithing skill up so I could add slots to my gloves and bracers. And I only mine if I stumble over an ore pop.

Skinning would make a lot of sense given the slaughter-fests I sometimes do for farming meat. But that's not really fun. And the skinning minor buff isn't going to do much compared with the mining buff.

Jewelcrafting would be very nice to have 3 special gems. But that's pretty much all it would be for me. I already have an advanced JC alt that makes decent cash "creating value" for people via the AH. The alt has about half the epic and most of the blue patterns. It would be a very long and expensive haul for just 42 agility.

Is there a more fun route? One that has decent buffs too?

Going Uber in One Night

Last night's raid was kind to me. I got the Snowserpent Mail Helm which set aside my only T10, the entry level Ahn'Kahar Blood Hunter's Headpiece. Then I dropped a majority of my DKP on a VoA drop, the Sanctified Ahn'Kahar Blood Hunter's Handguards. This of course put me in a weird position. Do I use the lesser helm for the set bonus, or do I use the nicer one and skip the bonus? On the face, it appears to be better to go with the set bonus. Well, to make it a little more complex, after the raid I was left with over 60 Emblems of Frost. 60 allow you to buy the T10.0 shoulders or belt. Both were nice upgrades. I was working on it for over an hour of what to do.

Now, I could have just used the spreadsheet. But there was something else going on. My gearscore was one of the lowest in the raid. This doesn't really speak to how well anyone plays or how much anyone contributes. And I personally do perform well. But it has been one of the lowest gearscores. And by low, I mean 5200ish.

So I decided to go with the T10 shoulders for the set bonus, and to park the T10 helm in favor of the non-set 264 helm.

Then I looked at my other junk. I have iLevel 232 bracers. The crafted 245 are not any sort of justifiable upgrade.

Well, a Wintergrasp battle was about to begin and I figured I could use some honor and forget about some of the gear issues. When I was done in WG I was left with 65k honor. My PvP gear is around a 4000 gearscore. I haven't upgraded in at least an arena edition. I also had 340 emblems of triumph and could fill out my sub-Furious PvP gear easily. So I went browsing. What I found was interesting. I got the Wrathful Gladiator's Wristguards of Triumph bracers. It was a nice upgrade for my PvP set and will continue to be. I'm not one to lightly use PvP gear for PvE. It has that wasted resilience stat and often favors stamina. But these are a fairly sweet upgrade for PvE and will use them until I get an ICC upgrade there. I also picked up a new Furious helm and chest, bringing my PvP gear up to at least Furious, with some Relentless and Wrathful.

Then I looked at my last lagging iLevel 200 piece. It probably should be every raiding hunter's last lagging iLevel 200 piece (if they could afford it). It's still excellent for me. But I went and bought a dumb Mark of Supremacy. I won't use it except for very special short fights with a guaranteed immediate burst time. It was cheap and I had over 200 triumph emblems left.

I could justify the trinket purchase with claims about flipping to my high iLevel set for buffing my vehicles. But honestly, I just wanted to get a +100 to my gearscore. So now I flip to my high iLevel set before I log out. How pathetic am I?

5,687.

More Human Stuff

After I dislocated my shoulder, I didn't slow down on wow. But then my boss left for a new job and my workload kicked up a bit. That stole some wow time. And then last week I was in Las Vegas for a small conference. (BTW, incredibly cheap airfares and 5* hotels can be found.) I was on a panel discussion about scalable web infrastructures. I also gave a talk on how and why businesses can and should open source innovative software they develop. I was out most nights for dinner and fun. And my hotel network connection liked to appear as 50ms, but somehow lag horribly.

I could declare I'm back and posts will flow like rivers. But my boss's boss already tagged me with a trip into NYC on Tuesday. We shall see.

Armory Fun

Kheldul's Human

1) My shoulder is almost working. Call it 60% back to normal.

2) I'm a bit swamped at work and haven't had a chance to play. And my boss quit, which just adds to the meeting load.

I'm hoping for both items to improve by next week.

Oculus Prizes Make it Fun

Blizzard sees the pattern and will be giving rewards for sticking with it if it's the randomly chosen dungeon. I have gotten Oculus as random a few times. Some dungeons I have never gotten. Perhaps it's the random element. Perhaps it's some line of logic in their assignment system that says "Oculus is hard so slot high iLevel people for it." I suppose I could put on my Santa suit with a nice low gearscore and queue up. Unfortunately, I suspect the experiment would land me in a group with people with green gear. And the just the random daily takes a DPSer in my battlegroup at least 10mins to get slotted. That's 10mins of not doing any PvP or playing the AH market on my AH toon.

On Monday I got Oculus. I had lead. Three people dropped immediately. The next three came in and two dropped. Then those filled and we were g2g. It was probably a decent thing that they dropped if they dislike it or can't handle it. We cleared it in 15-20mins.

The biggest issues with the instance I see are:

a) You have to know where to go. They could add arrows like in CoT... they'd need to have up and down there too though.

b) If you're not doing an achievement, you need to have someone on a green drake who knows how to heal a ruby drake.

That's about it. IMHO, it's completely a three-man-able instance. I wouldn't mind a chance on another drake. So maybe if two people do drop next time and we can tank, heal, and dps with three then maybe we'll just run it that way.

EDITED TO ADD:

OMG. They made it even easier-easier. Craziness.

The Oculus had some additional changes made. The Planar Anomlies during the Eregos encounter will have a shorter duration and do reduced damage, some of the drakes above Varos’s platform have been removed, and the drakes controlled by players will move a little faster.

EDITED TO ADD MORE:

1) OMG. Wow.com has a Guide to the Oculus. It has direction maps too.
2) I got Oculus on my shaman healer on the random. I got a little sack with three nice red gems. Nice in that they sell well. ;-)

Welcome Back Kheldul

I had a great Christmas vacation in the back woods of northern Vermont. Picture perfect hikes. My brother-in-law's friend had a two-horse-drawn open sleigh that we galloped around. Even pulled a kid sled behind us. (Fast!) The day after Christmas I tried a couple runs on a "Jack-Jumper" ski. It's a backwoods creation of an old ski, a vertical piece of wood and a horizontal piece on top of that which forms an improvised seat. A dislocated shoulder and incredible new levels of pain later, I know that I'll stick with two skis. I'm still waiting to see if my ligaments and rotator cup will need surgery.

It was still a great vacation and good time away. Since coming back I've played a little wow with my arm in a sling.

Kheldul Brings You Tidings of Joy - Happy Winter Veil!

Merry Christmas! Happy Winter Solstice! Happy Festivus. And all that stuff!