Hunters are Healers Too, Part Two

Many good things came too MoP.  A big one is the bug fix where hunter pets are now called with 100% of their health and stats.  Many other things changed.  Pets no longer have a pick-list of talents and hunters can no longer tweak a long list of little things to be better "pet-tanks" or "healers".  MoP takes broad brush strokes and different spells.

I'm thankful that the Hunter Healer macro I put together still works.  I'm impressed with the results.

In order to use this macro without change, you'll need five spirit beasts all in your callable stables.  If you don't have five, don't worry.  You can still enjoy the knowledge and you can modify the macro to your needs.  The trick with having five is that Spirit Mend has a 28 second cooldown.  But the cooldown is specific to the pet and the cooldown continues if the pet is active or not.  So we cycle through each pet: casting spirit mend, dismissing, and calling the next pet.

#showtooltip
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/petattack
/cast [@mouseover, pet][pet] Spirit Mend
/cast [pet] Dismiss Pet
/castsequence Call Pet 2, Call Pet 3, Call Pet 4, Call Pet 5, Call Pet 1
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Each dismiss takes two seconds and if you are cycling through and not attacking anything and just healing then you'll hit the cooldown.  If you burn through your first five pets and heal as fast as possible then when you're back to the first pet Spirit Mend will be on cooldown.  But if you're attacking, and letting your pets attack as they come in, and moving around, then you'll never hit the cooldown.  Of course if you're attacking then you'll get more +RAP things to proc so your healing coefficients will be better.

Spirit Mend heals (1371 + ((RAP * 0.35) * 0.5)) plus an additional (527 + ((RAP * 0.35) * 0.335)) over 10 sec.

Here's Kheldul showing this off in an updated hunter healer macro video.  In it, keep an eye on the buff bar as the pets heal Kheldul.  You'll be able to see spirit mend HoTs rolling.  Three separate HoTs are certainly shown.  Four HoTs seems possible.

Knight Mail Transmog Set

On my hunter, I have a transmog set that looks like plate. Not so coincidentally, it happens to be my pet-tanking set.

The base components of this set are from the "Knight's" set:
Knight's Breastplate
Knight's Legguards
Knight's Boots
Knight's Gauntlets
Knight's Girdle

The true gems are from other sets however:
Champion's Helmet
Ornate Pauldrons (shown) though if you want a softer look, the Ancient Pauldrons are nice.
Gossamer Cape

Now come your accessories and trimline:
Ranged - Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle (shown) though Rifle of the Platinum Guard is a very close second.
Tabard - Stormpike Battle Tabard (shown)
Shirt - White Tuxedo Shirt (shown).  The shirt does show through in many places.
Bracer - Any bracer. Color can show as a short banded cuff above the gloves.

Hunter Fetch Macro with AutoLoot

Frostheim has a nice article that has many areas worth considering for hunters leveling up.  I do disagree with many of the points, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth considering.

I want to do maximum damage with the spec, talents, and glyphs that I'm most comfortable with.  I may switch a talent up if I am stopping to heal up, or respec a pet to tank on the fly, but I'm going to plow damage with SV.

I am going with a different set of Glyphs for leveling.
Glyph of Mending - to keep my DPS pet killing
Glyph of Camouflage - sometimes its easier to get XP from quests and skip the mobs
Glyph of Marked for Death - for fast kills (I normally have this one)

I'm also going with the Glyph of Fetch.  I spent a long while trying to get a macro to work smoothly with my play style, that didn't get hung up in weird ways, and that didn't require me to turn on auto looting from the general menu.  Here is all that in one macro:

/console autoLootDefault 1
/run if not _Y then UIParent:HookScript("OnUpdate",function() if _Y>0 and GetTime()>=_Y then _Y=0 SetCVar("AutoLootDefault",0) end end)end _Y=GetTime()+5
/cast [@target, exists, dead] Fetch
/targetlasttarget
/cast fetch

Now if you normally walk around with AutoLoot on, then you can go with a much simpler macro and forget about those first two lines.

Because there is real time between when Fetch is cast and when the loot window comes up you need to have a delay.  Getting any sort of delay logic into a macro is convoluted at best these days.  It took me three hours to figure out the issues, crawl down dead ends and get it all to fit in 255 characters.  I hope you enjoy.

I recommend you keybind your new loot command to something easy to hit.  For me, that's F2.  Here's a simple view of it working.

Oh! and if you're in a group with group loot on, you'll need to target a lootable corpse instead of just the last one you targeted.

Edited to add: Slightly newer more verbose video of it working.

REVISED: Heroic Madness of Deathwing Hunter Tips for 5.0.4

With one raiding week left, Blizzard has made Heroic Madness much easier.  Previous to 5.0.4 it wasn't a cake-walk but it was one of the easiest fights.  Immediately after 5.0.4 it was almost impossible for some 10man raid makeups because of bugs.

It's not clear if they fixed all the bugs or if they just nerfed around the edges.  The bloods start out as normal moving mobs and appear to be slow-able still; It isn't clear if they made everyone's slows work again.  Pet pathing issues are fixed as far as I'm concerned; I didn't have my pet run out of range and dismiss himself on almost every platform.

There are many bugged issues with the current Heroic Madness of Deathwing encounter.  Slowing the bloods still may or may not be a bugged encounter issue.  There were always reports of some slows still working.  We used everything that we could.  Because nobody ever got failure messages in previous bugged attempts we have no idea which -- possibly all -- worked.  We can hope that it gets fixed soon if it isn't already.

I used a completely new talent and glyph setup just for this fight.  I expect that phrase will become cliche in MoP.  We had way more DPS than we needed for the fight, so pulling back on some was an easy choice.  Everything about the spec is to defeat the bloods that heal Deathwing ASAP:

1. Glyph of No Escape and Ice Trap - not sure if the traps slowed them but it's the obvious choice.
2. Binding Shot Talent - also not sure if it worked or not, but I always shot it.  I finally got an immune message on this.
3. Thrill of the Hunt Talent - totally can change your rotation but excellent for more multi-shots.
4. Lynx Rush Talent - great for bloods if you don't have focus available.

EDITED TO ADD: At this point it's not worth really taking #3 and #4.  It can help, but with #3, SV is contending with the 5.0.4 bug that has the instantaneous damage from multishot's serpent spread serpent stings not being applied.  Lynx Rush can help with a little bit and really aMoCs isn't really useful on this fight.  But now the bloods move reasonably slow so you can steady/cobra between multi-shots anyway.

Add to that list these standards:

1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera Talent - I disengage on this fight a surprising amount.  I don't recommend it -- and I probably could argue myself out of doing it.  Except I'd still do it.  But you don't take this talent for the disengage.  Use it for deterrence when you get infected with a blood or when you get targeted with shrapnel - the Dream was bugged last Thursday.
2. Aspect of the Iron Hawk Talent - The standard PvE talent if there was one.
3. Glyph of Deterrence - 50% damage reduction is a nice thing when you're infected with the blood.  You have to pop deterrence on the last platform if you get infected and if you've got your cancel aura set up then you should pop it every time you get infected.  It's only a couple seconds of downtime and takes a lot of sweat off the healers.

You do a surprising amount of standing around doing nothing on Deathwing's platform between each 5% round.

It feels quite rewarding to have finished a tier - albeit terribly nerfed - within that tier.  I suppose not being able to use Dream for Corruption tanking and Shrapnel -- and having incredibly difficult to slow bloods -- compensated for that nerf.  We never had DPS or healing issues.  It would have been more interesting to have those challenges. ;-)

EDITED TO ADD: It still feels rewarding to kill heroic madness.  Some of it is that I've only done it four times so far.  Some of it is that we're cycling in more and more new people for the kills.  And we're challenging ourselves to do it in different rainbow orders to help some other people get more achievements.

Hunters Need To Know

Yes, I actually bought a fraps license and figured out what was wrong with my microphone boost.  All this to bring you a YouTube video describing my new NeedToKnow setup!  My bars show the uptime of our spells and the remaining CD all in one bar.  They're not complete; Call them a first draft.  But they are pretty important.  In order to have competitive damage numbers you need to use new MoP/5.0 hunter abilities mixed in with the old.

Black Arrow N2K Import String:

bv1:{VOn=true,Typ=CASTCD,sIc=true,TF=Fmt_Float,Clr={r=0.80392156862745,g=0,b=0.88235294117647},VCl={a=0.30000001192093,b=0.89019607843137,g=0.87843137254902,r=0.77254901960784},BCl={a=0},Aura=Black Arrow,VEx="4"}

Dire Beast N2K Import String:

bv1:{VOn=true,Typ=CASTCD,Aura=Dire Beast,sIc=true,TF=Fmt_Float,Clr={r=0,g=0.43921568627451,b=0.78823529411765},BCl={a=0,b=0.88627450980392,g=0.85490196078431,r=0.90196078431373},sCt=false,VEx="15"}

A Murder of Crows Import String:

bv1:{VOn=true,Aura=A Murder of Crows,sIc=true,TF=Fmt_Float,Clr={b=0.87450980392157,g=0,r=0.43137254901961},VCl={a=0.30000001192093,b=0.78823529411765,g=0.77647058823529,r=0.75686274509804},BCl={a=0},sCt=false,Typ=CASTCD,VEx="90"}