Uncovering The Cloak Problem

Cloaks do not drop in the Dragon Soul raid.  There are a whole bunch of cloaks that are Firelands tier or better which we might have.  But really only three of them look good.  (And I don't mean for transmogrification.)  Those three are the following:

1: Lord Rhyolith's Dreadfire Drape.  It's old Firelands and item level 378.

2: Lord Rhyolith's Heroic Dreadfire Drape.  It's pretty pimped at item level 391.

3: The Batwing Cloak.  It sounds great and has the highest item level at 397.

Okay so what's the problem to uncover?  They all do look pretty good.  They do, but the Batwing Cloak has less agility than not just the heroic FL cloak, but the normal FL cloak drop.  If we assume non-heroic gemming, then the stats work out like this:

1: Lord Rhyolith's Dreadfire Drape: 312 agility, 138 hit, 95 mastery

2: Lord Rhyolith's Heroic Dreadfire Drape: 341 agility, 158 hit, 113 mastery

3: The Batwing Cloak: 301 agility, 162 crit, 176 haste

Agility aside for a moment; The trick here is that the Rhyolith cloaks are laden with mastery, while the valor cloak has large amounts of good crit and haste.   My napkin math says the valor has 338 points of good secondary stats, while the normal Rhyolith cloak has only 138 hit, 57 mastery, and 38 crit ... call it maybe 200 good points.  So we have a difference of -11 agility and +140 good secondary stats if we use the valor cloak.  The highest item level agility cloak has the least amount of agility.  Agility is our primary stat and generally worth 3x "crit/haste stats".  Because 33 is less than 140, then it is of some benefit to upgrade to the valor cloak.  It certainly isn't something to do any time soon.

The heroic Rhyolith cloak however is something to write home about.  The biggest issue here is that heroic Rhyolith is a pain in the ass.  The napkin math looks like trading -40 agility to get around +85 secondary.  Because 120 is not less than 85, the valor cloak is not even close.

The mediocrity of the Batwing Cloak is shown a bit more if heroic gems are used, but the results are the same.  Upgrading to it from a Dreadfire Drape is either a very low priority, or a bad move.

The Raiding Hunter's Valor Ring Upgrade!

The valor ring, mastery aside, looks quite nice.  It is a good deal and a great item for most hunters.  For the population of hunters possessing the exaulted-with-Firelands ring, upgrading it is not very compelling.

The FL ring: 286 agility, 181 haste, 134 mastery.
The valor ring: 291 agility, 184 haste, 148 mastery.

Now of course you can use two rings!  But if you've got a nice raid or LFR drop then you may have a better place to spend valor.

Time for Heroic Modes

So, the nerf seemed pretty huge.  I was away for business last week, but the group did everything except Rag in one night.  That isn't new.  We usually got that with our normal group.  The big part was that the group had two or three people in the ten man that hadn't been on [m]any runs before.  So last night we went in and kicked Rag's belly and got him in the first hour.

Of course on the kill I got killed by a few un-healed Ragnaros lava bolts.  But again, that was because we barely knew what we were doing with the meteors and were using way too much of the platform.  But a brez fixed the problem.

In any case, if you're guild is like ours you'll be looking at which heroic modes to try out.  Our raid leader posted these stats on heroic boss kill order.  Unfortunately, I don't know exactly where to credit the numbers to.  Heroic Shannox is one hunters have a good role in.

H: Shannox: 12087 (34.13%)
H: Lord Rhyolith: 8393 (23.70%)
H: Majordomo: 6338 (17.90%)
H: Alysrazor: 5812 (16.41%)
H: Baleroc: 4876 (13.77%)
H: Beth'tilac: 4679 (13.21%)
H: Ragnaros: 312 (0.88%)

Easy Hunter Epics

If you're in solid 359 gear, this list can help you. If you're in all green gear, this list can help you. Firelands is a bit of a gear reset. You can grind unlimited Justice Points and buy all sorts of gear using those points. You can get three of your Tier-11 set (chest, legs, and hands). You can get tons of epics by running just normal and heroic dungeons. Then you can start accumulating Valor points and Valor gear. But before all that, the below list shows you the super-easy gear that's a step up from the old 359 iLevel world.

Rings

Matoclaw's Band
RATING: SUPER-EASY
Take note: 365 does not equal 359!  Even if you have one of the four or five nice iLevel 359 rings, this is an upgrade for you.  What's it take to get?  If you've done the basic quests in Hyjal, then it takes maybe 40 minutes of running around doing the quests leading up to the Firelands dailies.  They made it so you can get to the Molten Front in the first day of doing these quests.  (You used to have to spend three days doing it.)  Go inside the cave in the Molten Front and pick up this nice ring.  Along the way, you'll also pick up a fair amount of questing gold.

Band of Glittering Lights
RATING: TIME-INVESTMENT
Another nice ring from running the second tier Firelands dailies.  Unlike Motoclaw's Band, this requires more than just one day of dailies.  It requires a few weeks.  You should choose if you want Ricket's trinket (listed below) or this ring first.  This ring is better than the 359 rings.  Note though: if you've got a 359 ring, this may only be 0.05% better.  Yes, it's an upgrade, but don't expect amazing returns.  But if you have room for a nice epic ring this is a wonderful addition.

Band of Ghoulish Glee
RATING: SUPER-EASY-IN-OCT
When Hallow's End comes to a dungeon finder near you (as early as Oct-18) you can get this free and super-duper ring.

Cloaks

Mantle of Doubt
RATING: SUPER-EASY
This is the easiest item to grab.  It's a gift from Thrall and Aggra after you do a series of quests to help Thrall out.  Any fresh 85 can do it.  Any seasoned 85 should do it.

Sleek Flamewrath Cloak
RATING: MEDIUM-HARD
If you do have some gear or you can at least put out say 14k dps, then you probably can get into a reputation-oriented PUG for Firelands.  Get to friendly rep with the Avengers of Hyjal and snag this fine cloak.

Dreadfire Drape
RATING: EXAMPLE ONLY
This is not an entry-level easy hunter epic.  But I do put it here so you can compare it to the above cloak.  They're the same iLevel, but one can can easily get to 332 agility and the other only gets 227.  And it's not even the heroic version.

"Guns"

Extreme-Impact Hole Puncher and the Lava Bolt Crossbow
RATING: EASY AS WRITING A CHECK
If you have tons of gold to spend, these are easy.  If you don't then just ignore this section.  The 365 gun is crafted by engineers.  It is listing for around 10k gold on my server.  The crossbow that wants to be a gun is a random drop in the Firelands raid.   It isn't especially common and usually can be found selling for anywhere from 20-40k gold.  Please note its DPS.  It warrants the price.  It will have a very significant affect on your damage dealing.

Trinkets

Ricket's Magnetic Fireball
RATING: TIME INVESTMENT
If you've got the nice 359 trinkets, this one does not work out to be better.  But it's pretty damn close.  The on-use ability may make it better in some situations.  If you have room for a nice trinkets then this will be a wonderful addition.  How do you get it?  Run Firelands dailies for a few weeks.

Coren's Chilled Chromium Coaster
RATING: SUPER-EASY IN SEPT
When Brewfest rolls around at the end of September (Sept-20 - Oct-5) you'll be able to get this freebie trinket.

Bracers

RATING: EASY AS WRITING A CHECK
There are also two flavors of BoE bracers you can pick up if you're flush with the shiny coin.  The valor ones and the raid BoE ones.  Both will cost several thousand gold.  Neither is worth it over say the BWD raid BoPs.  But I know they took forever to drop for me.  And FWIW, I wouldn't have bothered equipping the new raid BoE except that our guild got two and one was already rotting in the bank.

Stat Sticks

RATING: EASY AS WRITING A CHECK
There are many BoE stat sticks available.  All are over-priced in my opinion.  And I'm fairly flush with the coin.  There is a premium raid BoE, a blacksmith polearm, and one of those world 5man bosses drops a BoE polearm.  There aren't any 2h axe or 2h sword options.  You can do the dual-wield thing, but the agility wont work out for you as well.

EDITED TO ADD: The premium raid BoE glow stat stick dropped last night.  Interestingly, our pesky untame-able feral wasn't in the raid so I'm blessed with it.

Alysrazor and the Flying Hunter

Let's be clear: Dwarves like to be on the ground.  Being thrown is right out. Flying is almost okay. It's really the domain of Goblins and Gnomes though.  You know; The little people.  If there's a short mage then this should be their job.  Unless they are scared of heights.

We've been hitting Alysrazor since I got back from vacation.  I guess this is the third time we got attempts in.  Past nights, we had just about every typical problem happen and some weird ones too.

If you're not flying, then you're DPS'ng and interrupting the caster adds and helping the tanks, then running with the cyclones, and then contributing considerable DPS on the boss.  Then you do it two more times.

If you are flying, then you're flying through hoops while DPS'ng the boss, running with the cyclones, and then contributing massive DPS on the boss.  Then you do it two more times.  If you're doing it all night from various wipes ... well insist on a bit of a break between attempts to stretch your hands and brain.  It's a bit like doing the Heigan dance in 3D.  The fire cyclones are often the relaxing change of pace.

Flying means you really really want to get every flame hoop acknowledged as having gone through.  I've gone through them too fast and not gotten the little fireworks effect.  I had the camera following my feet through the ring and nada. So pass through it and linger on the other side until you get the effect.  Move as soon as you get the firework effect in anticipation of a new hoop appearing.  They disappear quite quickly.  If they disappear just after you go through it you probably wont get credit either.  They can appear quite far to the side or be obscured by the flak.  Don't go into the flak.  It's easy not to.  When Alysrazor drops down to shed more feathers, you'll have rings above her.  She'll molt twice and then the third decent will be to start the cyclones.

Try to keep a reasonable dps rotation going.  While flying you can do Aimed Shots.  Think of it as Aspect of the Fox with a triple espresso.  It's a nice shot to reach for while you're paused after a hoop.  You really can't afford to miss more than one hoop in a row.  You want to be at 25 stacks of the hoops ASAP.  This gives you a +75% crit buff.  If you do the hoops correctly, you'll be at 25 when she comes up from her second molting.  Again remember that you can see yourself go through the ring but not always get the buff.  And if you miss three or four in a row, your flight wings will disappear and you'll plummet to the ground.  Death is bad.

When you land, you must land close -- but not too close -- to the center.  If you land in the second-to-outside or outside cyclone lane you will take a insta-kill shot for being "too far".  Even though you really aren't.  Go figure.  To counteract that from happening, I land towards the middle and have a /cancelaura macro for my wings.  I suspect landing more centrally than outwardly is the key.

After landing, you need to run with the cyclones and you really want to crab a ring or two.  They will appear on the ground.  Don't die to get them, but if you can get one or two it will refresh your crit buff time and leave you sitting pretty for the P3 burn phase.  Summon your pet if they despawned, click your rapid fires and pot and lay into her after the cyclones end.  Here's what I got last night:

You'll notice the DPS drop just before the spike.  This is the cyclone phase and mostly just auto-shots ringing.  Then following the cyclones is the burn.  I was "only" doing 60K the first time around.  I think this is because I was doing a fairly normal DPS rotation.  In the second and third burns, I was laying in as many "hard-cast" aimed shots as possible.   I don't have the cast time of them, but it felt like it was 1 second if not trying to be less. While "focus" is not specifically mentioned as a refund item, focus was hardly ever any sort of problem, so I suspect it is refunded at a fantastic rate.

After Alysrazor gets up to 50 focus she'll get up and start tossing some serious damage.  You should be grouped up and getting AoE heals.  She wont still have her burn phase debuff, but you will still have some of your buffs.  Crank what you can.

Then repeat all this.  Three times.

That means you roughly want to take her down 1/3rd health each round.  If you're MM, you'd ideally like to have her at less than 66% if you're the one flying.  You do a lot more damage to her when you're in the careful aim range.  Ideally, you'll have her down below 93% health before even the first cyclones.  Toss in a hero on the third time through the burn phase and you probably want her around 63% health at the end of the first round.

Lord Rhyolith and Baleroc

In a nutshell, hunters don't do anything different than any other ranged DPS for these fights.

With Rhyolith, you want to get those adds down but still keep enough focus handy if your wheelman asks for burst DPS on a particular leg.  I've used SV and MM and don't see a big difference.  I think I prefer MM because with SV I have an almost uncontrollable urge to drop frost traps.  Snake traps are okay with SV but I feel that frost traps obscure the ground on that fight too much.  Save your Rapid Fire for burst dps on a leg and/or when he's entirely a tank and spank.

Baleroc is a bit of a breather for DPS.  The movement is minimal so MM hard-cast aimed shots are fine and SV sniper training comes into play plenty.  Just don't get tunnel vision on your DPS rotation and miss your turn with taking the crystal.  It's approximately a 5m50sec fight so you'll get to use Rapid Fire twice (or four times for MM).

Beth'tilac and the Hunter

In phase one of the Beth'tilac fight, SV Hunters are great.  We bring excellent AoE dps and you have two types of traps that can slow the little spiderlings.  Toss a frost trap and in a pinch, toss a snake trap.  Entrapment is a great SV talent here.

Set your beast tracking to on and zoom your mini-map so you can easily see where each large pack spawns from.  You'll be relying on the mini-map to turn and toss out traps.

When  you have a spare moment, use a Distracting Shot to pull down spinners from their strands.  There are a limited number of taunts available in the group and you have one.  Note that those adds don't do much damage, so pull them down and continue to dps the spiderling packs.

You will not be able to solo dps down the spiderling packs.  Don't try.  The first priority is to get them slowed.  Toss your LnL explosive shots on drones if you have time.  Multishot, cobra shot, multishot.  Sounds easy but it gets a little dicey.  You will have help AoE'ng.  Your target will go down quicker than the rest of the pack, so make sure to have mob health bars up.  Always try to cobra shot on the highest health spiderling.  You need that shot to fire to be refunded focus.  At times you may need to break away from spiderling packs before they are dead before the other AoEer(s) do.  You need to get those traps out to slow the next wave.  Also, don't forget that you are casting a DoT on all of them.  If they're low on health they may go down without any more help.

Just before phase two starts you need to have all the spiderlings dead.  A new pack may just have spawned, which can be trouble.

In our fights, we either were experiencing a bug or horrible timing situation.  The first time, the boss came down directly in a pack that had been out for about 5 seconds.  Okay.  So we thought 5 seconds may be too long during the special transition.  But the second time we did it, a new pack had just spawned from a far away wall.  I already had them trapped and had at least one multishot in.  I was at 41' and Beth' was behind me.  But then somehow Beth' reached a yellow beam at one and ate it.  Maybe she ate three in one beam.  But it was from at least 55 yards out and it was one beam.  She had been around 72% health when she came down.  After the beam she was back to 100%.

We burned her from 100% to 0%.  Our healers and DPS shined.

Went Back and Got Shannox

Third time in with as many different groups of tanks.  I think this time it was helped greatly by setting out raid markers to visually cue tanks on where to generally go, where to move to when the spear is thrown, and what boundaries not to exceed.  The only flaws we had were some healers getting crystalized.  I chalk that up to them not all having the latest DeadlyBossMods installed.

I don't usually raid on Mondays.  I'm glad we did go back and nail him.  Seems easy now.

Our strategy was fairly ordinary.   Position one tank with Riplimb ~50 yards from the tank with Shannox.  Put raid markers where they are generally tanked.  Put a raid marker inbetween those positions.  Ranged is spread out between the Riplimb and middle position.  Then put another raid marker out another 20 yards so you have room to shift if you need to.

When the spear is thrown, the Riplimb tank carefully runs to the middle with Riplimb.  A crystal trap may be used then or spaced for when he goes for the spear.  We had a DK DPS on Riplimb the whole time to be able to apply chains.  I would intersperse concussion shots.  We didn't use slowing traps to help avoid accidental raiders stepping on Shannox's traps.  The Shannox tank strafes left or right to extend the time.

DPS burned the hell out of Rageface.  If you can be Marksman, you should for this fight.  You need to hit hard and break Rageface's face.  His stunning damage attack is random on a player.  But he'll attack (non-stunning) the player that snaps him out of his humanoid-feast.  This will likely be you, mages, and elemental shammies.  Luckily, you'll crit a lot when he's face-down into one of your friends.  When he comes after you, throw deterrance if it's up and drag him through Shannox's explosive traps (not the crystal ones).  You can get some space to fire off some shots, but don't disengage.  You'll screw up your fellow DPSers, healers, and that's if you don't land in a trap yourself.

After Rageface is down, I nuked Shannox from 100% to 90%.  It was damn quick.  Then the other DPS kept on Shannox, while I joined the DK on bringing down Riplimb.  We had it fairly balanced so Riplimb went down as Shannox was at 30%.  That's fairly ideal.  Generally, you will want to get Shannox down to 37% or so and nuke Riplimb and then burn Shannox.  We lucked out on DPS balancing.

Then it's burn phase on the boss.  You go from 30% to 0%.  There still isn't any taunting.  Carefully move to a more open space.  If your healers aren't OOM you're golden.  If the tank goes down, then there's no recovery and it's a 9 minute fight that you lost.  So don't take any stupid damage in this phase.  Stay in range of heals, but don't count on them.  Use your healthstone after everyone takes spear damage.  Blow all your DPS cooldowns.  Don't chatter in vent thinking it's a sure thing.  Enlarge this image if you need help visualizing that. ;-)

Tears Before Bedtime

Sure the DoTs might have got him, but he laughed and went to his happy place instead.

Hunter Valor

We're in a weird time. We hunters need to be maxing out our Valor per week, but 40 minute queue times ain't making it easy.

Valor and You

There is a lot of iLevel 378 gear available for purchase from the valor vendors.  It is very nice stuff.  You want it.

Unfortunately, you can't have it.  At least not much or very fast.  You only can get a maximum of 980 valor per week from all sources, be they random heroic rewards, Firelands raids, or heroic BoT/BWD/T4W.  If you're downing lots raid bosses, you'll cap your valor pretty quick.  If you're not then you need to get on the stick and start running random heroics and random Zuls.

Every purchase-able valor piece costs more than one week's worth of valor.  Some cost more than two weeks worth.  And that's if you're capping your valor.  If you're not, it will take a lot to catch up.

Getting That 980 Valor Cap

You can run random Zul instances 7 times a week - one right after each other if you are into punishment.  This gets you 980 valor (140 * 7).  You can also run 7 random heroics.  But that only gets you a max of 490 valor a week (70 * 7).  When Occu'thar appears as the new loot pinata in Baradin Hold, he'll be worth the same as killing a Firelands raid boss: 120 or 140 valor in a ten-man or 25-man raid respectively.

What You Might Be Tempted To Get

• Nice Bracers (1250 valor) upgrades to Very Nice Bracers (with a heroic boss kill token)
• Nice Ring (1250 valor) upgrades to a Very Nice Ring (with a heroic boss kill token)
• Nice Neck (1250 valor) upgrades to a Very Nice Neck (with a heroic boss kill token)

But What You Really Should Want

• T12 Chest (2200 valor)
• T12 Legs (2200 valor)
• T12 Gloves (1650 valor)

Of course if you're raiding, there are a lot of drops and crafting options that may come much faster than valor gear.  If you're not raiding, I wouldn't count on the leatherworking hands and feet becoming available any time soon.  They require raid drops to manufacture.

Recommendation

I would recommend you always cap your valor every week.  Find a healer or tank and run the trolls.  I would recommend you run BH every week starting July 5th.  It can provide a tier piece or two if you're very lucky - which is a huge amount in un-capped valor. I would also recommend you don't spend valor on anything except tier pieces and buy the chest first.  The legs or gloves may drop in BH.  Or you may get the helm or shoulders in a bad-ass raid.  If you have T11 bonuses hold onto the valor until you can at least get a two piece T12 bonus.  Oh, and you can get a cape, belt, trinket, and ring upgrade from Avengers of Hyjal rep vendors from running or farming Firelands.  You might also get a nice BoE 2h weapon or crossbow.  ... although they reduced the drop rates of those BoEs!

Our Buggy BoE

I shelled out 40,000g for a shiny crossbow that really wants to be rifle.  It was once called the Lava Bore Blunderbuss. It's now a rather ugly Lava Bolt Crossbow.  What's funny is that when I fire it, it sounds like a gun.  It's also a little bit bugged.  I went to the reforger.  You can not reforge -30Mastery into +30Haste.  It only suggests you can reforge Crit or Mastery.  Time will tell.  The 744.1dps is king though.

What's Up With Traps?

Traps now scale with hunter stats such as hit, expertise, spell penetration and attack power as intended.


What does this mean?  Better AP damage?  Worse?  Gearing for expertise?  I have to imagine we don't change anything we do and things work better.  That's the pattern Blizz hunter changes have impressed upon me in the past year.  I do hope they continue the good job.

Account Security

This is opening up a bunch of loopholes.

If you use an authenticator – and we hope you do – you may soon notice that an authenticator prompt may not appear with every login. We’ve recently updated our authentication system to intelligently track your login locations, and if you’re logging in consistently from the same place, you may not be asked for an authenticator code. This change is being made to make the authenticator process less intrusive when we’re sure the person logging in to your account is you.

We hope to continue improving the authenticator system to ensure the same or greater security, while improving and adding features to make having one a more user friendly experience. If you don’t already have a Battle.net Authenticator attached to your account, don’t wait until it’s too late.

Firelands.  Soon.  June 28th.

The Summer Bleh

The end-of-school summer drag has been bleeding off all the 25mans on our server.  We've got 10s running, but it's rarely progression stuff in our guild.

We have a couple more hunter mains gearing up, which is nice.  I'm hoping for some more energy to be pumped in with the release of Firelands.

And an old (slightly younger) friend of mine passed a couple weeks ago.  It's put some things in perspective for me.  I haven't hung up my gun or sworn off WoW.  But the lack of gun drops in Firelands isn't helping..

The addition of new hunter pet "taming challenges" is very interesting from the standpoint of Blizz doing something special for hunters.  Of course you have to "look a gift horse in the mouth" and see that the rewards aren't special.