Monday, February 22, 2010

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.

Friday, February 12, 2010

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?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

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.