Dressed for Success

A couple weeks ago Kheldul came across the Stylin' Adventure Hat.  The concept was good.  A hunting hat.  It's mail.  Transmogrifyable.  He thought it was neat and was taken by the abstract notion until he looked in a mirror and saw a dwarf pimp.  Not a good impression.

The big game hunter hat with wide sun-protection brim.

Then Kheldul came across a very interesting rare spawn and got a very interesting drop.  Very interesting.  So interesting that he decided to transmog his wolfsniper rifle into a steam-punkish zapper and clean up his comb-over.  He now was considering going all steampunk.

A snug fit. Very monogoggle.

Kheldul is not an engineer.  The solution to the monogoggle issue was not at hand.  All mail goggles are made by engineers and only wearable by engineers.  The simple solution would be to drop mining and level engineering.  But that would be too simple.

Kheldul did some research.  He found that the 25man Ulduar Flame Leviathan boss has an interesting and unique drop.  He drops the only mail goggle/glasses in the game that are wearable by non-engineers.  So that's where he was last night.  They appear to fit quite well.  For now.

Kheldul cares about proper eye protection.

SV Gets Its Mojo Back

w00t Ghostcrawler on the black arrow issue I mentioned.

"We agree with you that the redesigned Black Arrow hasn't worked out well yet, and even overlaps a little with the new Powershot talent. We are likely to revert Black Arrow to the 4.3 design."

"We would re-implement Serpent Spread."

AoE damage sucked a bit.  In my MoP beta runs everything except bosses die too quick to notice.

Now all we need is some focus on focus.

Focus Regen in MoP

Next to nobody right now is testing hunters' focus regeneration in MoP.

This is because just about everyone and their mother has the tier-13 two piece bonus.  That bonus completely (completely!) changes focus regen.  I'd say a reasonably large number of hunters participating in MoP have the four piece bonus.  That 4pc bonus is like a little heroism/bloodlust.  Focus regen is through the roof during those periods.

When various class mechanics are polished and testers are in the home stretch in level 90, hunters will experience an "Oh! Wait a minute here now."  It will be an eye-opening event.  I fear that may be too late for Blizzard's taste to put another coat of polish on hunters.

Pre-tier-13 we would gather the extra focus by aspect-twisting to Aspect of the Fox for greater focus regen and twisting back for all true damaging shots.  This was from the One With Nature talent.  But I've never been a fan of aspect-twisting and that talent doesn't exist in MoP.

Next on my list... trying the new Pre-made Panda Hunter.  Hopefully I have enough copies left.

The Madness of Deathwing Bow Is Really Good

Yesterday I got the Heroic Horrifying Horn Arbalest off of Zon'ozz.  It's a item level 410 weapon with over one thouuuussand base damage per second.  My current bow from Normal Madness is only 939 base damage per second.  So I do a little happy-dance, slap on a woodchucker scope, and transmorg it into a gun.

Then something gives a little tug at the back of my mind.  "Is it actually better?"

I hit up femaledwarf.com and plug in everything revert the weapon and... it looks to make my dps better by 0.081%.  Yes. Notice the decimal point?  That's not even one-tenth of one percent better.  And this is of course factoring in all the perfect buffs and debuffs.  Without that perfection the margin would be even smaller.  It is also not taking any movement into account.  At all.  With the movement the proc DoT from the Madness of Deathwing bow will tick while I move.  The higher item level crossbow will not do much.  So if Zeherah's summary modeling of the proc is good, then the Madness bow is better.

MoP's SV Hunter Lacks the Bounce

MoP's SV hunter definitely lacks some bounce.  I don't have my addons ported over but I can easily see how it will play out.  I'll be watching DoT timer bars and getting LnL weaving.  That isn't any different.  What is different is standing around.

Black Arrow currently has a cast time of two seconds and no cooldown and costs 40 focus.  I would really like to see the first two things changed.

The lack of a cooldown is nice as you can toss in a fire trap as well, but it screws with you thinking that "it's off cooldown, I should shoot it again".  So I guess I could take or leave the lack of cooldown.  Its CD aligning with the duration of the DoT makes sense.  The tooltip in MoP (screenshot, wowhead) however confirms that there is no CD and a cast time.

SV must be maintaining BA DoTs for LnLs to occur. (How's that for alphabet soup?) The big issue here is that BA has a cast time.  If you don't like standing around for Cobra Shots, you really wont like standing around for BA.  With Cobras, you at least have the option of doing it in Aspect of the Fox.  Not that Aspect Twisting is anything anybody really wants to do.  But BA is a damaging shot not a regen or just a proc generator.  So even if AotF worked with BA you wouldn't want to do it.

I'd like to see BA with a CD equaling its time of DoT and have the cast time removed.  Being able to fire a few BAs on different targets is just not a good trade-off for a second cast time spell.  Cast times are the land of Marksmanship and taking time to aim.

EDITED TO ADD: I posted a version of this in the MoP class forums.  If you're going to comment, do it over there.

MoP Release Date Thinking

The problem with making release date guesses on Mists of Pandaria is that Blizzard is famous for not releasing until they are ready.  I have to think that some of this principle will be shed away in favor of postponing some content for future smaller releases and tuning class-specs over and over.

I've seen a fair number of bugs in the beta.  I've seen blue and white checkered squares here and there.  There aren't names on any equipment.  Some class mechanics seem out of whack.  That said, I'm surprised by how much does work.

This beta has been problematic for Blizzard.  The engineers and QA folks certainly did not want a million beta testers.  That sucks.  Their only bug reporting mechanism is typed text.  There aren't filter chains or built-in ways of narrowing the bug declaration.  So the current beta could really hurt them.

They certainly have changed a lot.  While we think "OMG they changed all my talents" what they've really done is simplified their balancing.  Almost each class has three specializations which provide all the base spells.  Then there are modifiers from the talents and generally one or two extra spells from the talents.  That is less to balance.  And Blizzard wont care too much about balancing things much until level 90.

There is the issue with producing a box, DVD, and physical product ... getting it into stores ... giving them the lead-time.  The whole industry production sales, pre-ordering, and stocking process.  Blizzard may just screw them a bit and do it entirely on-line.  More head-aches of course.  But really not much more considering the DVD they'd ship wouldn't be much better than the beta is now and it'd have to on-line patch anyway.

I have seen many release date guesses spanning from as early as the end of July to November.  I am thinking they'll go early and iterate with frequent patches.  Very early.  I'm going with the Price Is Right(R) model and low-balling and not going over:  July 10th 2012 is my guess.

SV in MoP

So in MoP SV feels far less bouncy and more cast-time watch-the-bars-align challenged.  More than Marks IMHO.  The 2 second cast for BA and it's wonky ability to hit stuff around the main target is the main cause.

I think I'll take Marks for a spin later.   It is refreshing having an interrupt "as SV" though.