Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Shadow Labs, hunter power, and loot (phat)

After finishing Sethekk Halls and getting my Shadow Labs key, it seemed like the logical next thing to do, so as soon as someone asked in Guild about an SL run, I was the first to volunteer my services.

We ended up with a very odd party indeed. Two Hunters (the other was a Marksman with a wolf casting that Ferocious Howl move), two Shadow Priests, one of whom donned healing gear and played the healbot, and a pugged Warrior later replaced by a Druid after my esteemed Priest colleague sent him running home with insults. I thought he did pretty well and the problem was more one of the absurd amount of aggro a Shadow priest can generate, but apparently he thought differently.

Obviously rather short on crowd control, I feel we did very well - no trash pulls (not even Blackheart the Inciter's 6-pulls) managed to wipe us, and we chain-trapped and mind controlled like pros.

We had a total of four wipes, one on each of the bosses while we worked out our strategy - the first boss's fear move really really sucks, Blackheart's group mind-control-slash-aggro-wipe is nothing short of a sickening pain in the ass, and Grandmaster blueberry summoner is just a joke if you set your hunters on killing all the voidwalkers on the kiting path. Our wipe on Murmur was bad luck (we tried to 4-man it while the shadow priest was afk), the healer became the bomb and couldn't get LOS on the tank quickly enough after getting back.

Oh, and uh...

Friday, June 8, 2007

Survivalism


If there's one thing I do more than anything else in WoW, it's experiment. I have spent so much money on respecs over my 70 levels it's just insane - I was at the 50 gold respec cap when I was in my early 60s, and I was level 45 when TBC came out.

Similarly, I have an alt for nearly every class - but that's another story.

Today I'm going to expound on my current Hunter spec, 0/15/46 (here - pay no mind to the fact that the descriptions are wrong, it's correct in essence).

No, it isn't the highest DPS spec. I'm quite convinced that Beastmastery has that position duly covered - and I tried that spec, right from the pages of BRK, but it wasn't for me. This spec gives me something the others didn't: control.

Freezing Trap is quite possibly the best form of crowd control there is, when used properly; it's not limited to types, like Polymorph, Sap, or Seduction, and is one of the only ways to CC typeless mobs, at the cost of being real tricky to use and not being spammable - two points in Trap Mastery is non-negotiable. The points spent in Clever Traps and Resourcefulness help reinforce this role - I can chain-trap anything given no warning at all, since my traps are cooled down two seconds before they end.

The rest of the points that could've gone into Mortal Shots have gone into Expose Weakness - after some questing and enchanting I have just about 600 agility, which means I've passed the threshold required to beat out the maximum rank of Trueshot Aura. I figure for the +30% critical strike damage bonus I've lost, I'll eventually allow an entire raid of physical damage dealers to do extra DPS for as long as I can keep critting - and with lethal shots, killer instinct, master tactician, and naturally high crit from agi, that's a very long time. In addition, my crits are less likely to pull the mob off my pet - and gimped ranged critical strike damage is a lot better than hunter melee damage if you can't get to range.

Unlike many other Survival Hunters, I also elected to keep Wyvern Sting. It could use some adjustment, it's true, but I've found uses for it. I want to say that you can use Scorpid Sting to overwrite the effect, thus cancelling the DoT and allowing you to use it with Freezing Trap... but I'm not certain, so I'll speculate for now and test it later on. EDIT: Turns out you can indeed use Scorpid Sting to overwrite Wyvern Sting, but it works a bit oddly. It's important to know that Wyvern Sting is applied twice; once when you cast the spell (the sleep effect) and after the target wakes up, it applies the Wyvern Sting (DoT portion) to itself, overwriting any existing stings. What you have to do is wake the target up and THEN apply your Scorpid Sting. It is possible to trap a mob while it is still asleep and keep it trapped with the proper order and timing of stings.

What you need to do is this: First, sleep a mob with Wyvern Sting. Lay a trap under it - after the ice appears, you need to apply two stings in rapid order. I recommend Serpent Sting rank 1 to start due to its low mana cost. This will wake the target up and apply the DoT portion of the Wyvern Sting effect. You now need to cast Scorpid Sting, and it has to hit the target before the first tick of damage, and then you have to disable Auto-Shot or you'll break your own ice and defeat the purpose of the exercise. I recommend a /stopcasting macro for this.

Obviously it is a better option to do all this from long range and have it run into the trap sitting at your feet - you'll have much more time to hit it with Scorpid Sting, for one - but this was just a theoretical exercise. /EDIT

Another talent I chose to invest points in is the much-maligned Improved Feign Death. This goes along with my whole theme of control, allowing me to drop hate more reliably, which is one of a Hunter's primary functions: threat management. If I die because FD was resisted, my party loses my chain-trapping skills, my Expose Weakness, and my pet, Resarto.

You'll also notice the presence of Entrapment, which I really like - Freezing Trap junior. More time spent in your Frost Trap means less time beating on you, or your squishies, not to mention that's it's an incredibly annoying thing to run through in PvP - and the lack of +parry and +health talents. These I sort of regret, but I spend comparatively little time getting whupped on, and if I am Deterrence is there to save the day. I do have all 3 points in Surefooted; the last time I PvP'd the only class that really gave me a run for my money was Warrior - that Intercept + Hamstring combo is highly unpleasant.

My Marksmanship talents are fairly standard. More crit for more Expose Weakness procs, Improved Hunter's Mark to - again - someday make a raid full of melee do more damage, Go for the Throat for Gore spam, and Rapid Killing for the Rapid Fire cooldown reduction. And Aimed Shot to... uh... make me feel manly. I mean, for Misdirection! Yeah, Misdirection.

Finally, Readiness. It's obviously a very powerful ability, but has more to do with what ability you're clearing the cooldown of than it does with any intrinsic power. The two most obvious cooldowns you would want to clear right the hell now are Traps and of course Feign Death -- both most often immediately after a resist. The need for the first can be negated with careful pull planning, and using it for the second is arguably selfish, as the only purpose is to save your own life. Interestingly, this is why people hate Hunters so much - they can f*%k up really, really badly and kill the entire group, or even the entire raid, and come out of the thing without even a tiny scratch.

But there are a million other things you can do with it. Two Concussive shots in a row, load on extra damage with two Multi-shots and two Arcane shots in the space of a few seconds, or - this is my favorite - tank a whole swarm of anything that deals melee damage for 20 seconds straight with a pair of Deterrences. It's really nice to see an enormous red cloud of 'Dodge' and 'Parry' (whoosh! clang! whoosh whoosh clang!) while your health bar takes nary a dip.

Ever see Hunter AOE? Explosive trap, wait for cooldown, pull a swarm of monsters. As soon as the first trap goes off, lay a second, Readiness, lay a third, and then Mend Pet and Feign Death and allow your pet to take all the damage.

Well, enjoy my novel, and my misguided opinions about what makes Hunters yummy.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Sethekk Halls.... and a confession

So I did my first PUG as a Survival hunter today - in fact only the third PUG I've ever been in, the first two being Hellfire Ramparts and Blackrock Depths. In fact... only the third instance I've ever run, ever. Gasp and alas! I am a newb! For shaaaaaame!

Despite all that, I did pretty damn well.

This being my first visit to Sethekk Halls, of course fate would designate me the group leader. We did pretty much all right - our first wipe was on an accidental link, and we didn't wipe at all after that until the 5-mob pull before Talon King Ikiss. That one got us. Sapped one, trapped one, shackled the undead, and tried to kill the last while the shadow priest volunteered to MC one of the others. Well horror of horrors, both the freezing trap and the mind control broke early, and it was just chaos - our second wipe. We managed to down one of the mobs before we bit it, so the resulting 4-pull was just a piece of cake.

Then things got really hard.

Talon King Ikiss is a bitch. Not his Arcane Explosion - that's pretty easy to dodge, unless *cough* some hunter hides behind the wrong pillar, gets blinked to, and the rest of the group can't catch up with the Warrior to heal him. Ahem.

That was only one of our many wipes - the Arcane Explosion was no problem, but that Arcane Volley is just a filthy, filthy move. It ignores LoS, and does 1800 or so damage. I managed to survive this by bandaging while hiding from the Explosion, in the end, but that damage stacks up really fast. Most of the time, the shadow priest died first, and without his Vampiric Embrace healing, the Volley damage just overwhelmed us. It didn't help that at this point I also managed to alt-tab myself out of the game....

I came in second place (after the Rogue) on the damage meters for the entire run, trapped on most of the pulls, and chain trapped on several of them - even managed to trap the Sapped mob with Readiness once or twice, which is a really great skill. I'm still not sure whether it's better than Scatter Shot, but... I'll give it a few more instance runs before I decide.

I did a pretty good job, I think - I never once broke crowd control, I managed to direct the vast majority of our pulls to a successful conclusion (order of kills and such), but by virtue of having the little crown icon (and that everyone else was kinda... grumpy by the end) I couldn't help but feel responsible for our numerous wipes. I also completely forgot about Misdirection. One of our problems was that the tank couldn't get quite enough threat, and I could have solved his problem rather nicely, if I hadn't been so concerned about what I was doing wrong in this instance.

Ah well, I can only get better. My pet served as a handy supplement to my DPS and as a pretty decent off-tank once or twice -- too bad he didn't get any action at all on Ikiss. I just couldn't keep him up against the arcane volleys, and the priests had their hands full keeping the tank alive, so he stayed in pet limbo and Expose Weakness took the spotlight.

And I got my Terokk's Quill and my Shadow Labyrinth key! One good spear down, one great one to go.