Kheldul on Episode 189 of the Hunting Party Podcast

I'm the big eye beholder guy.

Kheldul on The Full Hunting Party Podcast #177

It was quite fun to geek out.  I'm the big eye-ball guy. ;-)

PvP Dailies

I took the PvP option last week after I capped valor early.  It was pretty interesting.  There were quite a few horde, but I suspect they were all PvE players because I could take two at a time.  When I went over to their base I was pretty sneaky.

Overall it was a lot of fun doing PvP outside of a BG context -- but with some goals to push you and your opponents together without a the cat-calls and clock ticking.  It reminded me of the older 4 hour marathon AV runs where being crafty is fun.

PTR OUCH

Ugh.

Bestial Wrath no longer grants Hunter pets immunity to crowd control effects, and instead now breaks existing crowd control effects when activated.

If this actually goes through, this is a pretty ridiculously heavy nerf to PvP.  I can't burst at all with my beloved SV spec and MM is pitiful and useless.  So BM is the thing.  But my pet is my damage.  My pet can be CC'd and indefinitely chain-feared .  Except during the small window of time I can Bestial Wrath.  Well, no more. Now it's a trinket that I can use if I'm not CC'd.

This is a huge nerf.  Yes, there's bullheaded.  But really, it's like we're multi-boxing with all these counters for our pets instead of driving our damage through our pet.  BM has a ridiculous number of buttons to press compared to other classes.

RS and PvP Happenings

Tuesday was a bit of a wash.  Got in on just four ICC-10H bosses.  Wednesday was decent.  We had 25, so we finally hit Halion.  It wasn't an ideal 25, but we eventually got everyone with the program and downed him.  It was certainly fun, but also tiring.  THE trinket dropped.  I bid essentially 28 full raids worth of DKP, but lost. 

I found 10man easier and harder.  It was easier to orchestrate phases 1 and 2.  In fact in 10man, I don't think we ever didn't get to phase 3.  But in 10man balancing the damage is harder and you need to have more people flipping back and forth.  In 25man, we had people who had issues with the shadow realm dance.  But balancing the damage was a bit easier.  It wasn't easy, but it was easier.

The heroic version adds all sorts of extra perfection to the boss.  I imagine we could do it in 10man because the dancing element was easier with a smaller group, and the void zones would be less of an issue with a smaller number of people.  Heroic 10man offers shoulders which might be an up for my current MM ones.

I've been trying for a few more PvP achievements.  So far, just making progress.  But some are quite evil.  Overall, the PvP is fairly fun.

I finally visited all the horde cities.  That was neat.  It was a completely and utterly fail group that somehow managed to just barely not fail. It was about 10 new level 80s, 10 not-new level 80s, and 10 level 60-75's.  The level 60 didn't even have Burning Crusade, so he couldn't go to the Blood Elf boss...  Oh!  And me and two others basically took her down.  Even though she kept going into EVADE and resetting to full health.  We spent 20minutes downing her, her guards, the pvp bosses, and killing the occasional real player.  We had no real horde competition though.

It did provoke a strong counter-attack, but they hit IronForge.  IF's throne room is basically a death-trap of a place, and that's what we made it.  It was another 15minutes of hunting down stragglers hiding in all the different rooms there are in IF.

Add in some random battlegrounds and Wintergrasp, and it was a PvPathon.

On The Road To Being a Marksman - Detour to PvP

It was probably just some luck of getting PvPers who will buff and maybe kill healers first, but I think I like silencing shot better than wyvern sting.

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.

Improv Pet Tanking in 3.3

Hunter pet tanking doesn't need to be a huge undertaking anymore. If you have a tank gear set, a BM tank spec and a turtle pet spec'd to tank, that is great. It is pretty awesome.

But now you -- yes, you -- can with very little preparation go ahead and tank some minor bosses or adds.

Improv Tanking
Put your pet on growl. Turn off cower. Toss on your PvP set. Get your resilience to 460. If your resilience is high enough then you don't need a tenacity pet to make him or her un-crittable. The advantage of using a DPS pet is that they will have a little easier time with threat generation. Note: the tenacity pet talent Guard Dog really just helps for the tenacity pet's lack of dps-threat.

Mob Level	Chance to be Crit	Hunter Resilience Needed to Avoid Crits on a DPS Pet	Hunter Resilience Needed to Avoid Crits on a Tank* Pet
80	1%	410	82
81	1.2%	427	99
82	1.4%	443	115
83(Boss)	1.6%	460	132

Tank* refers to a tenacity pet with 2/2 pet talents in GotM.

After you've improv pet-tanked a few things, you'll probably want to grab a better pet, spec the pet as a tank for the big pet talent advantages, and maybe even put together a tank gear set. You can also want to go off the deep end and try a BM hunter talent spec and glyphs for a lot more pet survivability including the extra four pet talent points.

Common Hunter PvP Abilities You May Have Forgotten

Casual PvPers may not remember half the abilities that are at their disposal. PvE abilities have pushed them out of your mind. Without dipping into special PvP-talent-only, or even discussing BM, MM, or SV-specific abilities let's review the extreme basic abilities that are useful in hunter PvP.

In Battlegrounds, information is power. You can fake out druids and other hunters with Humanoid Tracking. Just flip on Aspect of the Beast. It's especially useful if you are holding onto a flag in Warsong Gulch. When was the last time you used it?

Hunter's Mark is fairly brilliant in BGs. Flag someone for execution. Make them show up on everyone's radar. Don't let somebody skirt around a battle and cap something. Point out the healer in the back of the group.

Wing Clip is useful when things get sticky. Use my one button melee macro if you think you're short on keybinds. You probably want to follow it up with a Disengage.

Flare is always nice if you're defending.

You've used Feign Death tons in your PvE existence. You used to pull to the tank using it before you got Misdirect. If you hit FD then the opponent will stop targeting you. If you don't attack them again first (or say have your pet attack them before you do), then they'll be targeting and attacking someone else until they retarget. If they bother. It's especially nice to hit right near the end of a mage's long cast time.

You got Scare Beast at level 14. Maybe you used it in Kara's Wizard of Oz opera event. Maybe you use it on the Faction Champions hunter pet. It's nice in PvP on other pets and feral druids. It used to really suck. Now it works up to 30 yards so you can cast it early. Just don't cast it in front of a hunter actively hitting you. That just wont play.

Eagle Eye rocks. It's not as good as Tracking Humaniods. But information is power. You can check out opportunities for capping things. Sure rogues and feral druids can spoil the day. But if you see them elsewhere then you'll know they can't be in two places at once. This is best for Arathi Basin when you're at the Blacksmith's or the Lumbermill. Call out the things you see. Watch for troop movements.

Concussion shot and Frost Trap are both your friend. PvP isn't all about maximum DPS. Look at the gear you get. It's about mitigating that damage. Slowing opponents is a critical step. Use these on melee as much as possible.

Serpent Sting is usually is part of our max-damage rotations because of many abilities, but it also is good for annoyance. Nobody likes to have a sting on them. Viper Sting is also nice. If you're Marks, Scorpid Sting may be a good one with Chimera Shot. (Though I wasn't going to talk about BM, MM, or SV!) Don't forget you can sting multiple opponents with stings. And really don't forget to serpent sting rogues and feral druids. The DoT will keep them from disappearing.

The same annoyance factor applies to Snake Trap. And who doesn't grin when you see it go off? What's not to like? It poisons the victim and gives them something else to cleanse if they can.

Tranq Shot FTW. See my tranq shot mouse-over macro for using it. Remove one buff. Some can't be removed, but many can.

Okay, so Aimed Shot does require you to take a talent. It however is a not so un-common talent to take for PvE people. And it isn't exactly limited to just one talent tree. (It's not like Entrapment!) So let me say this: If you have it, please use it. You can bring down targets that are getting heals.

Kill Shot is a wonderful thing. If you're good with it, you'll get your KS off early and it won't even be the killing blow. That's when you know you can hit it quickly. Of course if you pause too much with it, you will probably miss out on the window of opportunity.

Master's Call is available to everyone. Try it out if you haven't. Read the description.

Freezing Arrow was meant to be fired while you are moving. Practice doing it. Then practice doing it with a dueling opponent. Then consider how great it is. I typically will use it while riding (it does dismount you when you fire it) and placing it where I think someone may appear.

Nuts and Bolts of Beast Change Math for 3.2 PTR Build 10433

Nuts I say!

Hunter
Beast Mastery

• The Beast Within now lasts 10 sec (Down from 18 sec) but now also increases all damage you deal by 10%. (Apparently at all time ... Would have to check in-game)
• Bestial Wrath now lasts 10 sec. (Down from 18 sec)

If this is true then BM is dead as an option for PvP arena folks. It's all Survival. That's nuts.

Bolts?

If it really is +10% of the hunter's damage -- all the time -- what does that mean for BM as a viable raiding spec? Well. Let's look at the stratospheric best possible gear ever and most ideal buffs, situation, etc-everything numbers right now:

Best BM Template:

Total DPS: 9457,14
Hunter DPS: 5455,90
Pet DPS: 4001,24
AP: 9651
Crit: 57,80%
Hit: 100,00%
ArP: 566
Shot Queue: KS/Sp/MS/AS/SS
Wait Delay: 0,00s
Spec: 54/12/5
Race: Orc
Pet: Devilsaur

Best MM Template:

Total DPS: 10781,46
Hunter DPS: 9530,54
Pet DPS: 1250,93
AP: 8978
Crit: 58,58%
Hit: 100,00%
ArP: 1230
Shot Queue: KS/Sp/CS/AiS/SilS/SS
Wait Delay: 0,00s
Spec: 7/57/7
Race: Orc
Pet: Wolf

Best SV Template:

Total DPS: 10106,81
Hunter DPS: 8650,25
Pet DPS: 1456,56
AP: 11676
Crit: 77,33%
Hit: 100,00%
ArP: 526
Shot Queue: KS/ES/BA/Sp/AiS/SS
Wait Delay: 0,00s
Spec: 2/18/51
Race: Orc
Pet: Wolf

EDITED TO ADD: So now we do some math. We can't just add 10% to the BM hunter's dps.

The loss of 8 seconds of +10% damage from normal Beast Within needs to be accounted for. It doesn't sound like a lot, but take Longevity, the BW Glyph, and the original hunter BW and calculate its damage boost uptime over ten minutes. Then multiply that uptime percentage by the 10% to see what the base damage boost is. Then do something similar for the loss of pet damage from a reduced uptime of its Bestial Wrath. Here are my calculations:


























So what does this mean for BM hunter dps in ideal conditions? Well, their pet does a little less damage. They do a little more. The combination of the two do an extra 1% damage.

So BM is still far far below MM and SV. Nuts. But what can you expect if they are completely redesigning our class from scratch? Honestly, I'm surprised they're making any changes. What's most surprising is that this looks like this is just a big nerf to BM hunters in arenas. I don't understand what the heck they're thinking.




EDITED TO ADD: New News => New Math.

My World of Raids

Life in Table for Ten is certainly different than Blade of Honor. It's smaller. I still know everyone and am friends with everyone. But there's no doubt it's smaller. We had a guild meeting and got the lay of the land. I now have friends all over the place. Many of these folks are in 25man raiding guilds. It's a little strange to think that I may know a lot of people in a guild that I've never done anything with.

We ran some stuff last night after the guild meeting. The Faction Champions continue to be a problem. I have to think it's because many people just don't have a PvP hat to slap on. Either that or we're missing something. And I can't dig through details because my auto-combat-logger addon wasn't configured to save for the 10man instance. I would like to see if we have enough purging, decursing, spell-stealing, etc. going on. I think some of it is just that some may not think about helping out others. The roles in PvP are a bit more overlapped and fluid than in PvE. We also seemed to lose dps off the bat a lot. For some reason in their canned mob logic, I rarely got CC'd and was usually the last alive. I'm not sure how many attempts we made, but it was about an 80g repair bill.

With an hour left to raid, we went into Ulduar and got a few achievements. Unbroken and Shutout was kinda nice. We'll do another one for towers up. I suppose we could have tried them together, but that probably should be a different stacked achievement. We also did Heartbreaker. Got it on our second try without reading strats, so I'm guessing it's pretty damn nerfed. The gun did not drop. The silly ring did.

Experiences in 3.2 so Far

So when the server wasn't crashing, I dashed in and made some purchases that I had saved up for:

• Argent Crusader's Tabard 50 Seals - for easy access to the new content
  
• Argent Pony Bridle 150 Seals - so I can stay out in the field longer
  
• Champion's Deathdealer Breastplate 40 Emblems of Heroism - for leveling my Shammy alt
• Tome of Cold Weather Flight 1000g - for leveling my Shammy alt

There are some other items that I noticed which have some appeal. The new Wintergrasp Titan equipment looks quite good. I may pick up a few pieces. They aren't in wowhead's DB yet, otherwise I'd link to them. They were on par with the Furious PvP gear, and not too many Wintergrasp marks.

I like some of the undocumented changes.

I won't talk much about my Shammy alt here, but I do want to say that the new totem mechanism is really nice. It's a pain to hit a totem drop button four times. Now it's just once for up to three presets.

My guild raids on Tuesdays for good or evil. Patch days are often evil. This was no exception. We had all sorts of issues just in Ulduar. We started about an hour late with people trying to get things working.

FL took three tries with just one tower up. DCs were pretty nuts. Halfway through the kill, my Demolisher lost its ability for me to use the 1 and 2 keys. They'd insta-cycle and not actually fire anything. Needless to say, it was a little difficult to roll pyrite. In normal FL takedowns, I'd heartilly recommend not having a demolisher try to ram FL. It was all I had and somehow we didn't die.

Then the server crashed for 30 minutes or so. It was a long death spiral of a death.

Then we hit XT-002. And boy was it a surprise. First the good news. It appeared to me that I was getting more Lock and Loads per minute than ever before. With trash, I could of course cause it to proc. That was kinda nice to use BA and be able to slow and snake trap. But that's not what I was noticing. When I was doing a normal survival rotation on XT, I was seeing LnL procs just from BA. A fair number. We'll need to see more, but I'm optimistic there may have been something fixed. In 3.1, it seemed to proc once or twice a 10min fight. Which of course is terrible. Previous to 3.1, I could get it to proc every 30 seconds by trap-dancing. ("Wow! Remember trap-dancing!") Now it seemed like it was about once every minute or so -- outside of traps proc'ng it.

Of course all the XT fun was short-lived. As soon as the adds came out mid-heart phase we got our surprises. First, you can't put him against a side wall anymore. They'll come from all four corners now. Second, it's hugely bugged. There are 12-18 bomb bots per wave. Each wave comes out all at the same time from each location (not staggered), and there are 40-80 of the things. I recall seeing maybe one bomb-bot per pack before. In the current state, it appears to be 6 per scrap-pack.

We were up to the challenge, but it got a little ridiculous with additional DCs so we called it.

I did a few dailies, fixed some add-ons, and hit the new BG.

The new battleground is similar to Alterac Valley, in that many people don't have a clue what to do. (Myself included!) That said, I planted bombs on their base, killed some tanks, killed a lot of people, and we won. I got a couple achievments out of it, which aren't listed on wowarmory or wowhead yet. I think I really like it.

Then a late night group got together for a 10man attempt in the Coliseum. It was interesting although difficult. Some of it was thanks to DCs. Some of it is just quite difficult. Between bosses, there is no downtime to chug water. With the mana regen and replenishment nerfs, the healers have no chance to get their mana back betwen the big guys. There is a fair 15 second window when it should be possible, but it isn't out of combat. Other than this it seems reasonable.

Example Hunter PvP Gear and How To Get It

I'm not a hard-core PvPer. You can tell with wowarmory.com. You see, I don't have a talent build specially for PvP. If I was a hardcore arena competitor, I'd have a special PvP talent build as one of my dual talents. I don't do arenas. I do PvP as a non-scheduled mostly-solo event. I do BGs. I've done them a lot. I've reaped their rewards and felt their pain. I did them at level 60 when you had to visit the battleground entrances out in the world. I did them at level 70 when you had to visit a battlemaster. And I do them at level 80 with the 'H' key.

My 'H' key shows it all this quite starkly. It also shows a frequent situation I fall into. I get honor-capped a fair amount.

BTW, the 'H' key has one stat that doesn't seem to be available through wowarmory's stats page, Lifetime Kills. I also kinda wish it showed Lifetime Honor. ;-)

In any case, let's talk about hunter PvP gear.

The best route IMHO for a hunter to get some fine PvP gear is to play all forms of PvP. Do what you like of course. For me, I haven't found a good arena team mostly due to scheduling and my current in-ability to commit to a time for arenas. I did a little arena stuff in the first and second seasons. I haven't since. If you can find a couple partners and schedule time for them, do it. You'll want to pull a 1600 rating at least. Hunters do have to work a bit harder in arenas than others. And you don't want to walk into an arena without some decent gear already.

Why would you want to go into arenas? You can buy outstanding PvP gear with honor as long as you meet the minimum arena ranking.

But first you should have some PvP gear. You can get honor gear pretty easily by doing battlegrounds (BGs). I find that Strand of The Ancients generates the biggest bang for the buck. That's followed up by Alterac Valley (AV) and Eye of the Storm (EotS). Arathi Basin (AB) and Warsong Gulch (previously WG) tend to yield less honor per hour. This all shifts a little bit to the "Holiday BG" if you're playing Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. You may also want to speak with the battlemaster for a daily pvp (win) quest. It's worth honor and gold. And if you do a mix of BGs you can turn in a token of each for extra honor as a repeatable quest from the battlemasters.

World PvP zones like those in EPL, various parts of Outlands and Icecrown are not worth doing on a PvE server.

Wintergrasp (WG) on the other hand isn't too bad for honor, especially with the weekly quests. Beyond that, you should do WG every time it is up. You don't necessarilly do it for the honor. You're doing it for the wintergrasp tokens. They can purchase excellent PvP trinkets and a nice four piece suit.

Here is your complete list of honor mail armor items that do not require an arena rating to purchase. They cost a variety of currencies. Some are from heroism emblems, some are from wintergrasp marks, some are from honor and nothing else, and some are from emblems of valor and emblems of conquest.

If you aren't like Kheldul and have managed to get a nice arena team and rating, then you have access to a large array of items for purchase. Thankfully, you can also get some of these (sans arena rating) through the the VoA raid and emblems.

Now the list doesn't end with just mail armor. The rings, neck pieces, trinkets, cloaks, and weapons are all quite nice too. Trinkets should come from Wintergrasp. Skip the honor-based ones. Rings should come from honor. Also grab a decent neck and cloak.

The first and last items you need are weapons. You'll need to use something from PvE to start. You probably will do better with something from PvE anyway. Why do I say this? Well. There are only two classes of PvP ranged weapons available. One requires an arena rating of 1850 and the other 2350. You can get a bow, crossbow or gun. (Dwarves, go gun. Trolls go bow.) 1850 is realistically achievable. But you'll need a good ranged weapon to get there. And it will probably be better than the 1850 rated weapon!

Hunter Q&A Link

Interesting stuff.

What Has Kheldul Been Up Two?

[A followup to What Has Kheldul Been Up To?.]

Kheldul is now an official Crusader. I had thought that crusaders didn't necessarily have any particular expertise -- that the title referred to their journey and not how far along they were in that quest. But hey.

My PvP set has improved. I'm now over 800 resilience. I've actually already peeled some of that resilience down for more crit and agility. I've been replacing purple PvP pieces with better purple PvP pieces. I've also been max-honor-capped at 75k honor for a while now. Unless I start arena battling then I'm gonna stay there. :-/

The Unwanted PvP

I am on a PvE server. Somehow I ended up PvP flagged and couldn't seem to turn it off. It stayed on when I got on a taxi. It didn't /pvp toggle off in five minutes. Having zero addons didn't have any effect. Right click on my character portrait showed it disabled. It would stop when I zoned into an instance, but sometimes it would manage to flip on inside and cause the old pvp disease. When zoning out of an instance I'd immediately be flagged PvP. It happened everywhere and anywhere.

This went on for almost a week.

I somehow figured it out by myself. It was thanks to this quest.

The Isle of Conquest

Vaneras Blue Poster

# 0 - 12/06 The Isle of Conquest Preview - June 12, 2009, 10:18 am An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. But as insignificant as it may seem, this is no ordinary place. A sound of thunder as waves crash endlessly against rocky cliffs; a sound of fury as swords clash on the blood-stained fields of this island on the edge of forever. Welcome to the Isle of Conquest. The ongoing struggle between Horde and Alliance has turned many once peaceful (and some not-so peaceful) places into theaters of constant war. The Isle of Conquest is the latest such place, set to be the location of a battle of epic proportions over the island's precious resources. An Alliance and a Horde general are fighting for dominance, overseeing the action from the safety of their keeps. Whichever side manages to eliminate the enemy general first will triumph on the island; failure to protect your leader will bring shame, dishonor, and defeat. There is no peace accord here, and it’s an all-out war between the factions. Once More into the breach... Isle of Conquest, a new battleground scheduled to make its debut in the upcoming content patch, Call of the Crusade, will pitch teams of up to 40 players against each other in a massive battle over this small island off Northrend's northern coast. To win, your team will need to make use of the island's unique strategic locations including an oil derrick, a siege workshop, and a fully equipped airship hangar. You will deploy devastating siege weaponry on the field; Light have mercy on anyone caught between you and your ultimate target, the general holed up in the enemy keep. There are five points of interest on the Isle of Conquest for the factions to battle over. Each one offers its own benefits and strategic value. Which one will you claim for your side, and will it be enough to ensure victory? Capture Locations Consider your options before storming out of your keep to confront the enemy head-on. Spread throughout the Isle of Conquest are several capturable locations (as seen on the map), each granting a unique strategic advantage to your team. The Oil Derrick: Located on the northwestern end of the island, this smudge in the Frozen Sea produces enough black gold to run a thousand siege engines. Taking this resource garners precious reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it. The Cobalt Mine: This snow-covered assembly, located on the southeastern end of the island, hides untapped supplies that must be harvested. Taking this resource grants reinforcements and a continuous flow of honor to the side that controls it. The Docks: The western shore's docks will further expand your selection of siege weapons with the devastating new Glaive Thrower and the Catapult. Unleash the destruction of the Glaive Thrower upon the walls of the keep, or launch your invading party over the walls to assault the keep from within. The Airship Hangar: This sturdy steel structure stands on the peak of Mt. Conquest overlooking the eastern side of the island, allowing players to board the airship docked there. This devastating weapon of war is capable of raining death upon the heads of your enemies and destroying enemy defenses. Once onboard the airship, players will find it comes equipped with parachutes enabling a strike team to drop into the enemy keep from above. The Siege Workshop: Situated right between the Alliance base and the Horde base, this siege workshop occupies a strategic hot spot. Seizing it grants the controlling party the ability to utilize an arsenal of siege vehicles perfectly suited to reducing the enemy keep’s walls to dust and ashes. Graveyards: There are five graveyards in the Isle of Conquest that are attached to different points of interest on the map: the Horde base, the Alliance base, an oil spill island in the center of the map (attached to the siege workshop), the northeast corner (attached to the airship hangar), and the southwest corner (attached to the docks). Main Objectives The Keeps: The Horde and Alliance keeps sit at opposite ends of the island. These citadels host four easily accessible defensive cannons set on the ramparts, capable of unleashing hot fury onto oncoming attackers. Additional explosives sit safely stowed in the base of the keep along the back wall. At least, they’re safe as long as they don’t fall into enemy hands. If they do, though, they can be employed to bring the stone walls down from within. The General: Holed up behind the keeps' massive walls, the generals command their forces from a position of relative safety. Should the keep fall and the general be slain, the Isle of Conquest will fall to the victor. Reinforcements: Isle of Conquest uses a reinforcements system similar to that of Alterac Valley. The clock is ticking and every individual counts. If too many of your comrades fall to the enemy the battle will end in defeat. Killing enemy players will reduce their reinforcements by one for each kill, Once your faction’s reinforcements reach their limit, so too does your bid for control of the island and the wealth of resources you’ve fought so hard over. An island somewhere off the shores of Northrend. A rock, hardly worth a second look. A test of strength. A chance to prove your might, to crush your enemies, to make a difference, a chance for endless glory and conquest. Will you seize it? Community Team - English The Epic Mug of Vaneras - The Alebringer: http://i194.photobucket.com/albums/z57/Vaneras_bucket/EpicMug.jpg

The Off Night

I login. Tons of afk-outs for the raid. Okay so a night off.

I do all my dailies. Like okay only 15 dailies, but that's tons when I'm not doing any ones for reputation anymore. Did my food daily. Did all the tournement dailies.

I'm in LFG for an Ulduar run as I'm not locked and not likely to do a raid until next Tuesday. I get an invite from someone I know. Turns out it's for Naxx. They're on Thaddius and rebuilding a raid. People that join PUGs often see that. Thaddius is where people just coasting end up tearing down a raid. Endlessly. Well, there were a couple guildies there too and we one-shotted him. Even with TWO people not grouped up at all and healing from the upper terrace that you jump from. It turns out they only have one wing left to clear. We march down to Razuvious get him to 30% health and the priests can't manage to MC. No +hit I'm thinking. They also don't seem to put up the armor buff before taunting. Well, then the raid folds. So one boss. Okay.

Port back to Dalaran. See an OS-25 in /General. Okay. Sure. Bing bang boom. Done. No, still no trinket for me. 'sawlright.

Wintergrasp starts in 30 seconds after OS-25. Fly over and parachute in on their walls. Sniper a few victims and take out two guns. Stay inside fighting with Beast Aspect on to at least not draw in hunters to me. Scurried over to the RPGs. Grab one of theirs and then hop in the back inside operator room of the Goblin tank shop. Fire off 5 RPG rounds. It seemed to maybe sorta have an effect. The most noticable effect was three guys piled in and nuked me. Rez, get a tank and roll on in. Bing-bang-boom.

Get in on a successful WG-25 run. Nice. Emulon down. Hurray. No, no loot. Okay. Everyone is running out. Hearth. Say thanks. Drop group. Get a whisper from a healer. "Umm. Archivon?" "Doh!" Whisper raid leader. Let raid beat me up. /Humble. Brain-fart. Get lock summoned back right before the pull. Get the 3rd damage spot with zero raid buffs.

Hit up some PvP when I run (/sigh) out of the Vault. The daily is EotS. I give it a shot. I haven't been there in a while. Oh-noes! At the start it's 5 alliance vs 13 horde. I have Leader. I get killing blows on three guys trying to take mage tower. More alliance join. We have good call-outs. Good covers. Good movement. We keep two towers, threaten their two towers and consistently capture the flag. I was pretty happy and screenshotted the final tally. Bing-bang-boom. Turn it in for a reward. Hmm. Looking it over, it appears the Warlock below me on the list got more honor than me because he health funneled his pet. Am I reading that right?

Hmm. Back at Wintergrasp's vault. Join LFG for 10-man. Hop in a Strand BG. Try out the tank scaling with gear deal. My tank gets up to 81.6k or maybe it's 816k. I'm off by a factor of ten, but the basic I had seen before was 80 (err 800). So that's neat. I did tweak my gear using a new Outfitter set auto-optimized for high iLevel. Decent. I'll need to tweak it so it's always the PvP versions though.

Get a whisper for what my dps is. Ah! The LFG channel. "10 man?" "Around 3.5k." Score. "How many people in, as I can't see raidframes while in my BG." Neat, still have five open slots so I get to finish up.

Hit AH for some more raid consumables. Get summoned to Wintergrasp again. One wipe on Emulon. And then the add tank gets it. Boss down. No T8 love. I almost brain-fart and leave again. Almost. Managed to remember. Didn't ask for it, but got a downgrade Hateful chest master-lootered to me. Mmkay thanks. Loot! Wheee. /DESTROY

Overall, not a bad time at all. Would have loved to see a Ulduar boss though. I did feel a little like a mercenary. I guess that's why "loot" was an important evaluation criteria of each run. o.0

Snipers Nest

I was in the vicinity of Wintergrasp and wanted to check out the vendor. So I flew over. On the way, I decided I wanted to see some of the rooftops. This is the goblin garage. You can get up into the middle of the roof pretty easily.

While I was checking out the vendor, I came across a horde warlock doing something evil; sniping people looking at the vendor's wares. So a friend and I killed him. Unfortunately, his warlock transporter helped him get back to his sniper spot easily. So I got a priest to levitate me so I could get to where the warlock was.

It's a truly evil spot and, from my perspective, it seems to really abuse what warlocks can do with that transporter thing they have. Essentially, they can put the transport location up high and then jump down to a lower wall, kill some people, and then transport back up and bandage/drink. You have to camp both the transport destination and where they are. Plus the damn transporter destination stays around for them even after they are dead.

PvP Trinkets

Wintergrasp has a slew of nice new iLevel 213 trinkets. Half of them have +resilience and nice Use: abilities. The other half have a nice PvE stat plus the "get back in control of your character" Use: function. All of them are available for only 25 Wintergrasp tokens. No honor. That's between 9 and 25 Wintergrasp battles.

I picked up the Platnium Disks of Battle Wednesday night. I'm now at 700 resilience, which isn't too bad given that I'm not nerfing my dps very much.

I was considering going for something like this to replace my Grim Toll and give me a constant trinket-out-of-Cc. But I probably don't want to use it in PvE much -- certainly not more than the proc of Grim Toll. And I would have been replacing my medallion with the shared CD and not picking up more resilience.

I incorporated the use of the new item directly into my every-day Steady Shot macro. Works like a charm whether I have it equipped or not and whether it is available for use or not:

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/use Platnium Disks of Battle
/cast [target=pettarget,exists] Kill Command
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1
/cast !Auto Shot
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

No, I don't use my Steady Shot too much. I could and probably should make a similar macro of Explosive Shot.