Wow 5.0 Raids Available as Cross Realm

Ghostcrawler recently reported that when 5.2 releases, 5.0 raids can be run in a cross realm raid group.  So this begs the question: What 5.0 raid bosses could be taken down in an all-hunter 25man group right off the bat?  Which would require us to completely over-gear them?  Which would be impossible?

Late in Cataclysm, the Warcraft Hunter's Union (remember to pay your dues!) ran some over-powered cross-realm all-hunter raids.  They were great.  I tanked a few and healed a few.  It's fun to have a challenge.

We can heal.  We can bring every buff.  We can DPS like crazy.  We have some self-heal abilities and decent defensive CDs.  But can we adequately tank?  Just ticking through bosses, I'm not sure which if any we'd be able to stand up against.  Long boss fights with lots of raid damage don't favor us.  Sure we'd have 25 people and pets doing some form of damage instead of a normal raid with healers, but the fights aren't that short.  Taunt trick bosses don't favor us because we don't have a true taunt.  Some of that we could get around with clever pet runs and coordinated FDs.  But then there are tank-only gimmicks (e.g.- Feng).  And then there are role-based things (not the raid frames identification -- but the actual talent spec).  If there is no tank or no melee then the encounter might bug in weird ways.

This is an exciting thought experiment that we could marshal enough people to participate in.

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.

All Hunter Raid

Head on over to Arth's post at the WHU
http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2012/06/hunters-conquer-bwd/

Hunters are Healers Too

Updated for Mists of Pandaria here.

Spirit Mend is a nice little spirit beast heal with an Achilles heal.  It has a 28 second cooldown.  An anonymous commentator suggested chaining those pet heals by using multiple pets.  I spent a few days off and on checking and Kheldul now has five spirit beasts.  Spirit mend is based on ranged attack power (RAP) and he has about twenty-three thousand RAP.  This lets him get up to about 4,800 HPS.

It took me about half an hour to get a nice elegant macro that accomplishes what we would need to make a mediocre healer.  It uses mouseover macros for the heals.  This mirrors how I work on my healer alt.  Use raid frames and hover over a name and click the macro button.  You'll want to start out with your first pet already out (and attacking!).  Adjust the castsequence for the number of spirit beasts you have and which stable slot they're in.

#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()

I was stoked enough about this to grab the demo version of Fraps and ffmpeg -- made a movie clip.  Unfortunately my mic died a week ago and hasn't been replaced.  Otherwise, I would have been more motivated and gotten the pay-for-version of Fraps...  In any case, I hope you enjoy.  The video is when I only had four spirit beasts and it has been noted that I was suffering from a bug.  (Details below.)

In the above video I cycle through the pets pretty quick.  There is a drawback that hits a Blizzard bug; Like a pet's stamina, the pet doesn't inherit the hunter's RAP immediately.  If you wait until the pet has full health and then hit the heal you will get a much bigger heal.  The problem is that it's not a fixed amount of time for the pet to inherit the hunter's stats.  It can be 80ms, 500ms, or even two seconds.

If you have five spirit beasts and you pause a little bit while waiting for your pets stats to snap in you can pretty much cycle through all five pets without needing to wait for the 28 second CD to return.

You can check the numbers I ran on spirit mend with five spirit beasts for healing hunters with spirit bond and for non-hunters.  It shows a hunter with 23,000 RAP can sustain around 4,800 HPS on a non-hunter and about 10% more for a hunter with the spirit bond buff.

Chain Spirit Mending

I did some more work and have amended all my previous remarks.
Here's the new story.
Here's the update for Mists of Pandaria.

Spirit Mend

Updated for Mists of Pandaria here.

Because of talk of a cross-realm all-hunter raid, I started asking myself, "How good is Spirit Mend?"  I have four of the exotic spirit beasts that provide that pet ability, so I did some experimentation.

First off some basics.  I had my normal raiding gear on without any buffs.  I was of course BM-talented so there are a few tweaks there.  Most notably the BM bonus of Animal Handler, the BM-only talent of Longevity and the trans-tree mandatory talent of One With Nature.  This gives me 22,771 Ranged Attack Power (RAP) and makes the cooldown of spirit mend 28 seconds. The formula for Spirit Mend is:

(1237 + ((RAP * 0.35) * 0.5)) plus an additional (475 + ((RAP * 0.35) * 0.335))

So filling in for 22,771 RAP we get:

5,222 plus 3,145.

Now of course I did some practical tests.  Those tests demonstrate that I am missing a few components and that I don't understand HoTs.

I consistently got more than the initial 5,222 heal on random people in the city.  (Specifically, not me or my pet.)  I got 6735, 6469, 7200, and 6546.  They are around 30% better than expected. The only thing that I can think of is that the RAP shown on the character sheet doesn't include Animal Handler or One With Nature, or they are double-dipping somehow.

The HoTs I got were 4159, 3945, 4436, and 4033.  Again more than expected.  What I don't quite understand is that those numbers are per tick and it ticks every 2 seconds for ten seconds.  So five applications of a 4K+ HoT.

I was able to go a bit nuts.  If I popped an agility trinket (worth +2290 agility) and cast it on myself (with the healing talent buff Spirit Bond, I got a nice crit for 14402 + (4435 x5).  The initial heal appears to be a crit and the HoT is not.

When I added in roar (+549 agility) on top of casting it on myself, and popping a long CD trinket I got two decent numbers and a crit (exactly double one of the values):

18028 + 5650x5
7552 + 4671x5
9014 + 5650x5

In the best of circumstances and pulling all the plugs, Hunters have very very weak heals.  If the heal is applied to a pet-tanker pet they'll get +10% from Spirit Bond and +40% from Blood of the Rhino.  Those are nice bonuses and mixed with Mend Pet will keep a pet-tank up for a nice long time.  The problem is that a Spirit Mender will only kick out those heals once every 28 seconds.  So they will usually be on the pet-tank or themselves.  The rest of an all-hunter raid will need to be self-sufficient with Marksman self-heals.  A 6.5K heal with a 4K 5 tick HoT every 28 seconds will not be helping much at all on a raid-damage fight.