Flying Requirements in 6.2.1ish

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/19800551/dev-watercooler-flying-in-draenor-6-10-2015

It will require these current achievements:

• Draenor Loremaster - Under Quests > Draenor > "Loremaster of Draenor"
• Assaults - Under Quests > Draenor > "Securing Draenor".  If you don't have them you should be able to buy them in your garrison.
• Map Reveals - Under Exploration > "Explore Draenor". Use your feather if you can't find the specific spot.
• 100 Draenor Treasures Found - I don't think the achievement for 100 is in place yet.  Use the one under Exploration > Draenor > "Grand Treasure Hunter" and get your count over 100. There are addons to help and of course you can buy map garrison missions from a guy in Ashran.

And it will require "three new Tanaan Jungle reputations to be at Revered.

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.

Losing Cataclysmic Focus

The hunter preview is covered all over the place. From a DPS standpoint we know they are focused (pardon the pun) on damage. That's the key term for all the mastery benefits. The bummer is that the new abilities are mostly focused on PvP. They threw in tasty gravy, but I don't see any meat.

I suspect focus will actually be a lose for us. Here's why: Today when you want to go all-out burn-them-now, you pretty much know if you can and if you have the mana to do it. You've got a cooldown or two you can pop. But you will be using all sorts of your resource (currently mana) in short period of time. With focus, you will be constrained on how much you can do. There isn't a built-up reserve like with combo points. There isn't a mana pool you've been conserving. There are 100 focus and you can burn through it with just a shot and a disengage. I suspect that when we want to unload on a target we'll be watching our focus and waiting instead of watching the cooldowns of big abilities.

Hall of Shame/Fame

Lassira told us of Mordicai's considerable Hall of Fame achievement. He tamed all four spirit beasts. Pretty cool. I have to think they aren't as camped as they once were, but still quite impressive.

So I went to the armory page of this impressive hunter. I was expecting ... well ... I was not expecting to see another bad hunter. I was sad. I was angry. I was mortified.

It wasn't because they were a blood elf.

It wasn't because they are 450 in jewelcrafting but don't use any jewelcrafter-only jewels.

It wasn't the four pieces of PvP gear. That can be a reasonable crutch. And hell, I think I'm logged out in my PvP gear at the moment.

It wasn't the 12.23% hit chance and him still using the +hit/+AP trinket and nearly worthless +hit/+haste trinket as a solo talent tree BM hunter.

It wasn't the bad and sometimes not maxed out pet talents.

It wasn't the tank gun.

It wasn't the spellpower/mp5 pants.

It was everything.

Am I too harsh? "Maybe it's just an alt with a lot of time on his hands." "He didn't ask for this scrutiny! Mind your own business!" Do I have some personal deficit for being offended at how bad this person looks in the armory? Or was it just whiplash from expecting them to be top notch?

EDITED TO ADD: Ah. This guy was not disappointing. Of course he's an insane over-achiever and a hunter.

New Monitor

My UI sucks. The primary reason is that I just don't have the screen real-estate for everything I want to show.

On Mon Oct-12 I purchased 23-inch widescreen LCD monitor. I got a good deal on it. It is seeming to be too good of a deal to be true. I was given an estimated delivery date of Oct-16. (Excellent!) Well, the date has changed three times. Never have I received any notification of the change either by phone or email. The latest estimate is Oct-29.

I contacted "Order Support" using the form found on their website. I received a reference number and auto-reply email. It said I would be contacted within 24 hours. It has been 72 hours without any contact. I have requested that they expedite my order and upgrade its shipping. No responses from their escallation email address.

I am accustomed to delays. I am a stockholder in their company and so I am more forgiving than the normal customer. However, no information has been provided about any delays. No responses have been made. That is not easy to forgive or forget. But it is easy to blog-rant about.

Why Make Hunters Ranged Rogues Instead of Making Rogues Into Melee Hunters?

From 2004 to 2009, I've played a hunter in World of Warcraft. Not only that, I've played the same hunter I rolled on day one. I did not play in the beta where hunters did not have mana. For some reason they couldn't seem to make it work right and they launched hunters with mana. So for five years, I've balanced the need to dps with the need to manage mana while weaving shots and watching cool downs.

Hunters are what we are. We are sustained ranged dps. I almost said "sustained ranged physical dps". Damage type is beside the point. Or at least it should be. We are not ranged rogues any more than rogues are melee hunters.

Rogues don't manage mana or watch cooldowns (at least like we watch our cooldowns). We don't have combo points or even watch our pet focus. Skipping the stigma of a melee hunter, why are we being made into ranged rogues instead of rogues being made into melee hunters?

So we are headed for a massive re-design from the ground up. It's not clear what it is based on. Maybe it's based on a failed initial effort five years ago to have hunters not use mana. But we know that everything about us will change. I'm not talking about every stat on our gear. I'm not talking about set bonuses. I'm not talking about the glyphs. I'm not even talking about every talent in all three talent trees. I'm talking about how we fundamentally go about dealing damage with our hunters.

Can Blizzard pull it off? Is this a good and exciting idea? That's the easy question to answer. Everyone knows that they can not make it work and it probably isn't the best use of Blizzard's time. Well, everyone except those at wow.com. I doubt they can do hunters in a year given that; a) they couldn't figure out how make ammo no longer consumed, b) they spent six months balancing and re-balancing hunter talent trees, c) they couldn't figure out how to make it work when things were much simplier back in the beta.

If Blizzard wants to re-invent a nicely balanced perfectly functional existing class from the ground up, why wouldn't they want to instead spend their time inventing a new class from the ground up?.. their second hero class. The thing everyone wants. The Bard? The Demon Hunter? The "fun" healer. There are many forum threads since DKs came out with lists of possible hero classes. Why fix something that doesn't need fixing when they can make something brand new with the same effort?

EDITED TO ADD:

I wrote the above other day and queued it for release this morning. Of course last night Blizzard fell on their face again. Half our guild spent 30mins in vent complaining that our realm was listed as "offline" after login. The other half was online in our realm. Fun eh?

Well, add to that some people having 2500ms+ latency (myself included until I zoned into an instance where it returned to normal). So we had to call the raid.

Then I join a heroic daily and what should happen? I DC. I try to log back in and I can't even get past the "Connecting" part of the login.

I went to their support forums and they were down. (Although advertisements on their main site worked fine.)

Ah! This inspires confidence.

Did You See This on Patch Day?

Huntard

Huntard is clearly a syntax construct of Wow. And as such game-slang, it carries the label "it's just a game". Perhaps it's that reason, that calling a hunter a "huntard" is accepted. I however read it directly as "retard (who of course is a hunter)".

I find the word, "Huntard" offensive. Calling someone a "retard" is pretty extreme in my book. And as the gamer populations matures, that seems to be a more common feeling.

So why is "huntard" accepted? Am I thin-skinned?

(And no, for the record, I don't have any family or friends with any cognitive deficits.)

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 Time Lords Won

Sadly this is as "close" to the first boss as I got. We pulled Leviathan and got him down a bit pretty damn quick. But then the server froze everyone in all 25man instances in time for over 40mins before we called it quits. I could at least drive around in my chopper and snagged this shot of two active turrets on top of him.

Oh and I DC'd over 20 times. And I use an authenticator too. (Whee!)

All that, it was pretty fun. I like vehicles in PvP. I like them so far in 3.1. It would be kinda cool if they carried the iLevel concept back into PvP for vehicles. I like having a buff vehicle.

Born to Annoy

Random DCs ensuring raids fail.

Pet Cower Random-Auto-Cast never getting fixed.

Pet Prowl Auto-Cast-On-With-Zone-In never getting fixed.

Auto-Target-A-New-Target-On-Attack-Button-Press for CC-less fun.

Doing more dps by trap-dancing than standing at 31 yards.

Devilsaur hitboxes larger than 1.0 Heigan value or 0.75 OS-25 lava wave diameter.

Kill shot still not working under 8 yards.

Not getting to see my devilsaur, Chuckles. /sniff.

Glass Half-Empty

There's plenty of room for disappointment. Talents, spell coefficients, etc. Just wait. Blizzard doesn't let us really try things on the PTR. They told us our PTR testing of 3.0.8 wasn't real. They make hotfix nerfs. I'm fairly convinced that Blizzard's only reliable testing and analysis comes from live production stats. i.e.- "The Big Lab".

In the meanwhile, I hear a lot of hunters have decided to become untalented, dropping to a 0/0/0 spec in a sign of protest following the hotfix nerf.

I can understand the feeling. The amount of change and feeling of persecution after working gathering and preparing and just getting slammed on the head instead of a feeling of some level of progress. It is very tempting -- and mature -- to put your hunters on hiatus until the dust settles.

I seem to still be able to significantly contribute to raids so I'm still probably a straw away from breaking my back.

A fun game to play

Did you play this game?

Rant: Blacksmithing for the Lose

Four years ago, I was trying to figure out what professions would go well with a Dwarf Hunter. I thought mining and either blacksmithing or engineering. Then I thought, naw.. engineering isn't dwarvish enough. So knowing that I could make some decent weapons and some mail in the future, I rolled with it. And blacksmithing could make some decent melee weapons and some decent mail. It was quickly out-classed by drops, but that was the way it was with all professions.

Then along came the run to level 70. Well, I swapped my "sword-smithing" out for "axe-smithing" as I saw the new tastey first, second, and third tier axes I could craft. I did this even though there was decent smithing and armor-smithing mail there too. But sadly, the somewhat elusive first drop in Kara out-classed those craftables. So, I at least felt good as resident blacksmither for guild BoEs, and made some decent coin from sharpening stones.

Now level 80 comes around. Yes, I do like having the ability to add slots to my gloves and bracers. That's pretty cool. But there is hardly any reason for me to go beyond a skill of 400. There is zero mail craftable. There are dozens of plate items. There are very very few weapons.

Should I re-roll blacksmithing as something else?

Realm Down = WWS Analysis Time

Oh joy. I get a few minutes to check on a few things in game, but no. Then again, I really wanted to just get "/played" on Kheldul so I could drop it in a post here. But that'll have to wait. The realm is down for the next few hours. I guess this leaves me open for making some posts and checking some WWStats.

I should say off the bat that every guild on our server has been struggling. Not really with the content, but with the various forms of lag and DCs.

The past two weeks lag has just gotten worse and worse. I think we've had three different flavors of "lag". The elderly realm has:

1) Too many people, two few 25man servers. We've seen this for a while. It's always fun doing farm runs and having your tanks all DC. Right? This is an old problem that has gotten worse and worse. Do a 10man, you're fine. Do a 25man and some DC even if they didn't have bad latency shown on their client.

2) Wintergrasp and Dalaran are hot spots, combined with a queues-worth of people on the server. This isn't particularly new, and "only" affects BGers for the most part.

3) Widespread bandwidth shortfall or failures affecting client latency going into Blizzard's colos. I have 3Mbps coming into my house. The traceroute showed a problem a step or two outside Blizz's colo. If traceroute shows an extra 500ms and dropped packets and it's four hops away from my ISP, "resetting my router" is about as useful as re-installing WoW. This seems like a new problem. The concern here is that it was affecting a LARGE and DIVERSE player-base. Hopefully, this new problem is temporary.

So, yeah, it's the beginning of the third week of having a 25man with maybe 18 connected at any one time.

Anyway, so I can look over a 25man WWS from Tuesday. I'm the top slot hunter. I'd just give the anonymized name, but it seems to change. Thursday, we just barely got a 10man going. But even on Tuesday, we had DCs coming out of everywhere. On Archavon we lost our MT and a bunch of healers the first time. (Almost got him anyway.) The second time I DC'd. Definitely not one of my finer performances. I guess I can blame latency being 2-3x what I normally play with. Loatheb I only got to 4k. I've come close to cracking 5k before. My crit rate was about where it should have been on that fight so I didn't under-dip on spores. I should point out for anyone that hasn't done Loatheb before, that dps should group up in 5packs under a spore and get the buff from its explosion. Based on crit rate, I see our other hunter didn't know that. I'll have to let them know.

I suppose this is also as fine a time as any to talk about shot rotation to help any hunters that are looking for a boost. This may be moot when 3.0.8 comes out, since Steady Shot is getting nerf'd on its AP coefficient -- but that patch is taking a long time.

Steady-shot (SS) is our meat-and-potatoes shot. For a vegetable side, you'll apply a serpent sting (SrS). You apply the sting because you've taken a glyph of improved steady shot which bumps your SS damage up 10% when you have a sting applied. You probably also have a glyphed serpent sting that increases its dot by 3 seconds. Hunter glyphs FTW.

BM hunters should just wail away with SS, mixed in with some SrS refreshes. Toss in Arcane Shot or stutter-stepped Multishot while moving.

MM hunters like that as well, but they'll also Chimera Shot (CS). Aimed shot will be more common too.

SV hunters also do the SS, but generally they'll trap-dance to proc their Lock and Load, such that they can get their free Lock and Load Explosive (ES) dot-shots off (spaced out of course).

So is there a decent macro for the base SS? Yes, there is. There are many like this, but I haven't found any exactly like it. Basically, it makes sure you're auto shotting, and allows you to spam-press for steady shot. If Kill Shot is up and the mob health makes it possible, then it'll do that instead. If Kill Command is available, it'll do that as well. It also gets rid of many of the failure sounds such as "I can't do that yet!" and red error messages.

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

You'll fire your SrS, ES, CS, arcane, and aimed all some other way. But SS is meat-n-potatoes. You could throw Kill Shot and Kill Command in other loaded shot macros. I do. But SS should be the most pressed button so this is where it needs to be.