You Wont Want To Wear Leather Anymore

You wont want to wear leather anymore.  You'll strive for all mail because your class likes it like that.  I'm glad they put down the stick and handed out a carrot.

Cata Talents

I was playing with the new Cataclysm hunter talents. They are starting to take shape.  SV is very expensive.  Their 5th and 6th tier talents need to have their ranks reduced.  There just aren't enough points compared with the other two trees.  Admittedly MM is a bit light, but BM looks right on and it's considerably less than SV.

Secret?

Secret?  I didn't catch the WHU podcast live.  (House repair, pool, BBQ, and then True Blood was my Sunday line up.)  Looks like the linked image was made on Saturday.

Hunter Blog Roundup

Cataclysm changes abound.  The talent trees were announced and a few other cool things.  Here's a quick round up.

• Darkbrew talks a bit about the datamined starter spells for each talent tree (see also at worldofraids.com).
• Mania has info on the pet stable slots, including some screenshots.
• Rilgon is disappointed but not surprised by the fail of the MM talent tree. 
• and finally, MMO Champion has a the current unpolished Cataclysm talent calculator.

Multi-tracking

MMO Champion has a brief mention which has me quite intrigued. It reads, "Last but not least, the Minimap now allow you to track multiple things at once! Hurray!"

As someone with mining as a lame-ass skill (Yeah, OMG, he has mining as a skill?!?)  This change is a godsend if I can use it and track DPS targets at the same time.  Generally these days, I don't use mining for anything.  I'm waiting to see how buff other trade skills will be in the expansion.

Pet-Tanking Set Used For Self-Tanking

RS and PvP Happenings

Tuesday was a bit of a wash.  Got in on just four ICC-10H bosses.  Wednesday was decent.  We had 25, so we finally hit Halion.  It wasn't an ideal 25, but we eventually got everyone with the program and downed him.  It was certainly fun, but also tiring.  THE trinket dropped.  I bid essentially 28 full raids worth of DKP, but lost. 

I found 10man easier and harder.  It was easier to orchestrate phases 1 and 2.  In fact in 10man, I don't think we ever didn't get to phase 3.  But in 10man balancing the damage is harder and you need to have more people flipping back and forth.  In 25man, we had people who had issues with the shadow realm dance.  But balancing the damage was a bit easier.  It wasn't easy, but it was easier.

The heroic version adds all sorts of extra perfection to the boss.  I imagine we could do it in 10man because the dancing element was easier with a smaller group, and the void zones would be less of an issue with a smaller number of people.  Heroic 10man offers shoulders which might be an up for my current MM ones.

I've been trying for a few more PvP achievements.  So far, just making progress.  But some are quite evil.  Overall, the PvP is fairly fun.

I finally visited all the horde cities.  That was neat.  It was a completely and utterly fail group that somehow managed to just barely not fail. It was about 10 new level 80s, 10 not-new level 80s, and 10 level 60-75's.  The level 60 didn't even have Burning Crusade, so he couldn't go to the Blood Elf boss...  Oh!  And me and two others basically took her down.  Even though she kept going into EVADE and resetting to full health.  We spent 20minutes downing her, her guards, the pvp bosses, and killing the occasional real player.  We had no real horde competition though.

It did provoke a strong counter-attack, but they hit IronForge.  IF's throne room is basically a death-trap of a place, and that's what we made it.  It was another 15minutes of hunting down stragglers hiding in all the different rooms there are in IF.

Add in some random battlegrounds and Wintergrasp, and it was a PvPathon.

Holy Shit: Talent Trees

The goal for Cataclysm remains to remove a lot of the passive (or lame) talents, but we don’t think that’s possible with the current tree size. To resolve this, we're reducing each tree to 31-point talents.

Well, that'll simplify a lot I guess.

Talent trees will have around 20 unique talents instead of today's (roughly) 30 talents, and aesthetically will look a bit more like the original World of Warcraft talent trees. The 31-point talents will generally be the same as the 51-point talents we already had planned for Cataclysm.

While leveling, you will get 1 talent point about every 2 levels (41 points total at level 85). Our goal is to alternate between gaining a new class spell or ability and gaining a talent point with each level. As another significant change, you will not be able to put points into a different talent tree until you have dedicated 31 talent points to your primary specialization.

Pets, Pets, Pets, and More Pets!

More pet fun info:

You have 5 active pets and 20 (or more) stable slots. You can summon an active pet whenever you want, out of combat. This replaces the remote stable spell. In other words, if you have a crab, a bear and a wolf, you can swap from wolf to bear in between encounters.

You must visit a stable master to change which are the active pets though. There are a lot of stable slots, so you can catch Spirit Beasts or rare spawns or whatever you want, even if you don't think you will use them often.

Pets Pets Pets!

• Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.
• Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.
• The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.

Cataclysm sweeeeeetness!

 

Ammo and the Auction House

I play the auction house. I know my market and have made about 100k gold there. I play the AH maybe four or five times a week for 20mins each.  I've bought about 40k gold worth of items for my characters. So I've "given back".  I don't abuse the markets.  I don't scam.  I like to think that I create value.

So when I see scammers I like to crush them.  Observe this picture I took a week or so ago:



See the 300 "stacks" listed by scamming a$$h@ts? That's a bunch of poor hunters who will show up at a raid and be dumb-founded as to why they are OOAmmo. Stacks should not be one arrow or bullet. They shouldn't be 100 arrows or bullets either.

The problem is that 100 and 1000 stack sizes look damn similar in the AH tool. There really just isn't room for four numbers. And stack sizes of one don't list a "1", they just list the icon without a number. So it is actually easy to buy these. I'm not sure if I ever did. And I might not have noticed!

Stacks of ammo should always be the full 1000 stack size.

So I buy a normal stack and send most of it to my hunter. Then I poison the well for the scammer. I list stacks of 1 at my cost, 41 copper in this case. Nobody will buy the scammer's "cheap" stacks. They'll by my "cheap" stacks and that's all they'll see. If they're dumb then they aren't out any cash. But it's also a good "Doh!" moment for them when they see one stack listed for gold and another listed for a few copper.

Below is another night showing me do the same thing:



Until we get unlimited ammo, don't be fooled. And if you play the AH, you can do your server a service and prevent others from being scammed.

Here's the scary part. I sell a dozen or so 41c arrows every 48 hours. I always look ... and they're to all sorts of different people. The scammers aren't buying me out.

Playing with Builds: Readiness

I know all the Cataclysm stuff is way too early to talk about.  I'm confused by one item.  Readiness is still in a prime location on the Marksman tree.  It instantly removes the cooldowns of all your abilities except for BW.  Well, that's nice.  Except only a few shots have cooldowns.

In the current model, a hunter would blow all his big shots and then hit readiness and blow them all again. 

In the new model, a hunter blows two big shots requiring 50 focus each and then he's at zero focus.  He hits readiness and can't do anything anyway.

Is Blacksmithing Useful In Cataclysm?

For hunters, Blacksmithing does not look more useful, than it is currently.  There is a nice epic craftable Elementium Poleaxe for level 85.  That is better than what we have now.  (No level 80 craft-able hunter weapons from Blacksmithing.)  That said, that one polearm appears to be BoE.

RIP Halion

Once again, real life intervened and left our 25man raid quite short.  I think we had about 17.  So we formed a 10man and visited Halion.  About half the group had been there on Tuesday.  (Tuesday is our official 10man night.)  We got him very close a number of times.  We got to phase 3 each time.  Keeping the damage even was a bit tricky.  We had one floater and then a death.  I was happy to have gotten killshots on her in both realms. We finally got the smack-down on her not too late in the night.

I was running as Survival for the only source of replenishment.  It wasn't a bad thing not needing to try to do steady shots in the shadow realm.