Achievements?

I was browsing my recent achievements on my iPhone Wow app. (More on that app later.) I was a little surprised that it didn't show my achievements from Friday. I checked wowarmory.com, from whom the app gets its data, and it didn't have them either.

wowarmory.com lists Call of the Crusade and More Dots! from my Thursday runs. It shows nothing from Friday. We were doing some wacky/dumb achievements Friday. The kind of things you might not want to do again: Rubble and Roll, and Nine Lives. We also had a couple reasonable ones: FL w/two towers, and the Assembly of Iron to get a Archivum Data Disc. We also got a bunch of other achievements that I already had.

So where'd the achievements go?

Photo Trivia: Do You See Anything Wrong?

(Yes, other than my information overload interface.)

Hunter Pet Tanking Gear

First, let me warn you: Hunter pet-tanking gear selection is probably more complex than gear selection for a normal tank. Be ready. Be analytical. Get your brain around all the factors. Second let me say that you probably will not want to tank anything important until 3.2 comes out with it's many changes. Now that that is out of the way let's get into the details.

Objective 1: Your gear needs to be fully hit-capped. This is not negotiable. Your pet needs 100% hit. A tank that misses is going to cause problems. Hit is carried directly down from a hunter's hit to the pet's hit. This includes Careful Aim bonuses, which will be carried down. But more importantly, if your pet is fully hit-capped, they will also be Expertise and Spell-Hit capped. So, no bad parries or pet spell specials flubbing. And if you don't typically melee a boss from the front, let's just say you don't want a boss to get a parry on you. These changes will only apply in patch 3.2 and later.

Objective 2: Your gear should have 328 Resilience. [You only need 132 Resilience in 3.3 now!] You don't need more than that. This applies to tanking level 83 sub-bosses and bosses. If your pet is properly talented and you are properly talented, then with 328 Resilience your pet will be un-critable. Again, this only kicks in when patch 3.2 lands.

Objective 3: Equip two pieces of Tier-7.5 gear for the +5% pet damage. This is desirable if possible. I did it with spare pieces and stacked stamina in them. Tier-7.0 is okay too. If you can't do it, or would interfere with your main dps set, skip it. Just realize that your pet tank will have a tough time keeping on top of the threat list. Pets are a tough sell in my mind as a MT. Their taunt doesn't work on some bosses. I can make a convincing argument for them as OTs. Not getting the +5% bonus will leave dps sitting on their hands instead of pewpewing what you're tanking.

Objective 4: Get to about 25% crit. You need to keep your pet rolling in focus and keep your talents cascading over each other. Crit is the path. This is most critical for solo and five man content. Ten man and twenty-five man content will provide you with more buffs. For those larger raids you may cut a little of this and focus on Objective 5.

Objective 5: Stack Stamina. Really. The pet needs all the pass-through stamina it can get. Even with Great Stamina, Blood of the Rhino, Wild Hunt, and Endurance Training, it wont feel like enough. What saves pets are the ability to shrug off 75% of AoE damage and their incredible bonuses to incoming heals. They still need to be able to survive normal damage while healers are ... indisposed. And if you're stunned or silenced, chances are about 100% that you can't make your pet do it's emergency tank buttons. All that said, please notice that this is Objective 5. It is not objective 1. You need mitigation and focus and everything in Objectives 1 through 4. Don't make your pet the dumb Feral tank that has 50k health but avoids no damage and drains the healers mana like a whirlpool.

Objective 6: Stack raw Attack Power if/when you've met Objective 4. Otherwise, throw in the Agility. Pets get 22.0% of your Attack Power. Make it count.

Gear is a never-ending voyage. I love it. Gearing for pet-tanking is a whole another world. I hope this helps if you take the plunge.

EDITED TO ADD: If you found this useful, try reading Example Beastmaster Hunter Pet Tanking Gear for Patch 3.2 andPet Tanking Talent Choices.

BTW. I love looking at other hunter's raid screenshots. I was just screwing around in Thursday's Ulduar run and took the above picture. I mentioned it to the officers (two being two of our tanks), but not the rest of the raid. A pally healer was confused by the big red turtle with a big red shield over it. Flash had about 35k health raid buffed. He kicked it up a few notches with Last Stand. And yes, I followed my above Objectives in order. I'm sure I could have gotten him a bit more higher in the health department. The wow's from officers were when he was still around 35k health.

Giant's Bane

Thanks to Kologarn for dropping our third Giant's Bane. And many thanks to our Elvish Huntress for passing it to me. I do suspect she'd rather have the cat lady's equipment. Whereas, my Dwarven arse prefers something with a kick. Our guild now has 3 hunters geared with good ranged weapons. So we're 3/4 in my guild quest.

Also, my previous gun is now mounted and trigger locked in my vault's gun rack.

Ways to Drop Hit

So Tuesday, our guild got together for a 25man. It had been a long while. We had taken Kologarn down around two months ago in 25man, but then we had a couple people abandon the guild and a few others summer-afk. And Kologarn had been a six or seven wipe event.

Well this time, we came in and got FL with one tower up. It took three tries as we had some new people and people just weren't used to the extra damage he does in the first hardmode. Then we went and one-shotted XT-002, Razor, Ignus, and Kologarn. It wasn't completely surprising. Most all of us have done these things in 10mans. But it was nice to actually see it happen.

So, I'm over the hit rating by 78 points thanks to Twisted Visage. The thing is a monster. All my other stats went up. A lot. +hit is pretty typical of the Ulduar upgrades. So I need to smartly trade some. I have a crazy amount of gear to choose from. However, I'm lacking in the ring area. I'm also not so amazing in the trinket area. I have a bunch of the Wintergrasp trinkets. I may actually try them out. The problem is that my big +95 hit trinket is the Pyrite Infuser, which has a wonderful proc. Checking Shandra's spreadsheet (previously known as Cheeky's Spreadsheet) I see I'm really really lacking good rings and trinkets:



I've long sought out the Furies trinket. I've never won the drop. That would be an ideal replacement and would be all money -- bumping down my +hit. Sadly, I never got the other two Naxx-25 drops either. There is always a HUGE amount of competition rings and trinkets that are good for hunters. It's no wonder with so many classes needing the same things. I could QQ more here but I don't think planning to get an Ulduar ring or trinket upgrade is likely. So that's not a way out of my mess.

My current ranged weapon has +24 hit rating. When I put the spreadsheet into not caring about hit I get the following:



Now as far as upgrades go the real meat is in the top 5. This is because only the iLevel 226 ranged weapons and above got adjusted to help hunter dps scale better with better gear. However, I do happen to have the Naxx-10 gun. It doesn't have any +hit and is only slightly inferior in raw dps. So with the stat balancing it comes out 20.75 dps more. And it sheds me of 24 embarrassing +hit.

So that leaves me 54 hit rating over the cap. Well it turns out that I have options in the belt area. While under the hit cap my Torn Web Wrap was a touch superior to the Ulduar-10 drop, the Belt of the Blood Pit. The former has 29 +hit and the latter has none. Not as nice as the leather-working Belt of Dragons of course, but I already have it and the mats are a bit beyond our guild right now.

So that gets me down to 25 over the hit cap. /sigh. I'm still looking at needing a ring upgrade or a trinket upgrade. If I get a ring upgrade I can trade in some more +hit. If I get a trinket upgrade I can trade in my pyrite infuser. Unfortunately I just spent over 1,000 gold on enchanting the Twisted Visage, so just going out and buying greatness isn't in the cards. And honestly looking at the other trinkets I either use in PvP (disks and titan rune) or farming (oracles), they don't really seem to pan out. Although, the titan run could be useful to break out of PvE fears and stuns.

Gear Sets

I'm a gear hound. I have all sorts of situational gear sets. I've always been like this. I used to use ItemRack. Now it's Outfitter.

I have on my person at all times gear for; my main DPS set, my experimental DPS set (usually not hit-capped), my PvP set (currently around 800 resilience), my mana restore trinket for farming, my pet tanking set, my pet instance solo tanking set, my tuxedo set (for weddings and other formal events), my party set (dual beer mugs, nice glasses, etc) and my frost resist set. Of course my frost resist set should have a major and minor setting.

That sounds like a lot, right? Well there used to be more overlaps in sets. Now there is less. But back in the lvl 60s and 70s, I had graduated Fire, Nature, and Shadow resist sets (high and medium resist levels). I had a melee set. (Remember hug-the-Annihilators in MC?) I had mana regen sets. I had a set for raid dps. I had a set for normal instances. And then I also had party sets.

Yes, it was insane. But I could range tank stuff that only did Nature damage. Or Fire damage. It was pretty cool. People knew. People rolled their eyes. But it was actually somewhat practical. Thanks to the long-spaced in-combat pulse, I could pull all the aggro I could on the nature-damaging shaman helping High King Maulgar and range tank him. Then when he was dead, I could FD and quickly hit my ItemRack dps set, spring up and dps HKM. Most of the time that would work pretty well.

I could also tank Fire Lords back in the MC days. That was a hoot. I went back to MC early in the lvl 80 phase. I still had my Fire Resist set. I put it on and melee'd Baron Geddon and never left for his pulses. I just resisted everything.

So I tried out my current experimental raid DPS set in Ulduar last night. It was a continuation so we had some harder bosses. My experimental set has two T7.5 and one T8 and one T8.5. It also flips out a chest for a slightly better chest with less hit since the T8 has some hit. So I get the pet bonus and the serpent sting bonus. I get a little less crit. I am around +7.5% hit. I have a fair amount more AP. No, I know I'm not Marksman spec. So I wasn't expecting much from the experiment. I was monitoring it closely with Recount. Here are the results:

Non-experiemental, hit-capped, easy bosses, some movement:



Experimental, slightly less than hit-capped, harder bosses, almost constant movement:


I was not expecting them to be close. I thought the tier-8 would LOSE. Given the movement challenges, and looking at the numbers, the SrS wasn't too bad. I am tempted to see what my numbers would look like as Marksman.

The New DPS Quest

I'm not sure how I'm going to manage it. But my new goal is to get every raiding hunter in my guild one of the new gorgeously powerful weapons. Armory doesn't show it but wowhead has it since the update. These puppies are quite buff now. Kel', Razorscale, Kolo, and Tiger-lady. Compare that to my wimpy Arrowsong.


Until we do some 25man Ulduar (perhaps if it drops 40 degrees outside!) I'll be urging us to try hardmode on the deconstructor for the pictured fine drop.

Phat Hunter Loots Night

The other night, our guild went into the Wintergrasp Vault. I hadn't attempted the new 25man since he came out. When he first came out the adds were very tough to get down in time. Now it appears that it's pretty easy as long as dps pays attention and can target the right minion quickly enough. Outcome: Conqueror's Scourgestalker Handguards for a fellow hunter.

Then we went back into Ulduar. We're in a mini-rebuilding mode for raiding. (For at least three raids, we struggled to put together 25. We're looking pretty good now.) We wiped a bunch but finally came together and downed the lazerpewpew bridge guy, Kologarn. Outcome: Giant's Bane for a fellow hunter.

Side note: Last Thursday we had a pretty nice Ulduar-10 run and one-shotted a whole bunch of bosses. It really is amazing how much easier 10-man is over 25-man. 25man is really cramped and close quarters for a few fights.

So anyway, after Kologarn it was not too late, but a little late to hit our heads on another boss. A bunch of raiders were tired so some people logged and a few of us went in on ten-man mode and downed FL and XT-002. Outcome: Gloves of Taut Grip and Pyrite Infuser for the only hunter in the raid.

Ulduar Triva: Notice anything wrong (2)?