The Great Hunter Debate

Once again the hunter community finds itself embroiled in a heated debate, and it should come as no surprise that at the center of this controversy is WHU blogger, Scattered Shots columnist, and Hunting Party Podcast host, Frostheim.

You see he is organizing a sequel to the great Level 1 Dwarven Hunter Raid - the Level 10 Dwarven Hunter Raid, scheduled for Friday, April 9, 2010.

Level ten allows hunters to do two things. First is the ability to tame pets, and second, we get our first talent point. And herein lies the controversy. You see one of the rules for the level 10 raid is that you can’t go to eleven. Ten is the max. Thus the debate is where should hunters spend their one and only talent point?

Let's take a look at the talents available to us at level ten.

1. Improved Aspect of the Hawk - 10% to increase our haste by 3%.
2. Endurance Training - Increases pet's health by 2% and hunter's by 1%.
3. Improved Concussive Shot - Increases the duration of the daze effect by 1 sec.
4. Focused Aim - Increases our chance to hit by 1%.
5. Lethal Shots - Increases our critical strike chance by 1%.
6. Improved Tracking - Increases our damage by 1%.
7. Hawk Eye - Increases our range by 2 yards.
8. Savage Strikes - Increases the critical strike chance of Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite and Counter Attack by 10%.

Keeping in mind that the group will be killing something that is a much higher level than 10, and we'll need the best dps we can get, we can probably eliminate Endurance Training, Improved Concussive Shot, Hawk Eye, and Savage Strikes as contenders. They just aren't going to do much for our dps.

That leaves Improved Aspect of the Hawk, Focused Aim, Lethal Shots and Improved Tracking as options. So how do we decide which one? Well luckily we have this handy, dandy spreadsheet that can help guide us.

Now a few important things about the spreadsheet. It's designed for level 80's and not level 10 characters. So any information we get from the spreadsheet is speculative at best.

I chose a dwarf with no professions. Since the low level ranged weapons were not available I decided to shoot for the moon and equipped Fal'inrush, Defender of Quel'thalas (heroic of course) and epic ammo. I left all of the buffs and debuffs alone and chose a wolf for a pet (no talent points of course). I left the other settings alone and then began selecting talents. Here are my results.

As you can see Focused Aim provided the biggest dps increase at +7.09 and would appear to be the clear winner. Even if the spreadsheet could be optimized for level 10 characters I don't believe the results would be all that different.

I'm opting for, and recommending, the 0/1/0 build, and putting all of my eggs in the Focused Aim basket.

It makes sense too. I don't know what level mob the raid will be fighting, but reducing any chance to miss seems like a smart move. So what do you think? Is Focused Aim the way to go for your one and only talent point?

Good Hunting Level 10 Raiding!

Swimming in the Deep End

Let me begin by saying I'm not trying to be mean spirited here. I understand that not everyone min/maxes, not everyone plans their gear, reads forums, blogs, etc., and that not everyone is willing to make changes to gear, talents, and gems every time they upgrade a piece of gear. I get that.

Here's the thing though, I want to gem for Armor Pen, and I want to go with four pieces of T10. Unfortunately, despite the fact that all I need from ICC (25) are a ring, tier tokens, and stuff from the Lich King himself, making the move to Armor Pen is still a dps loss (at the very least it's not enough of a gain to warrant the trade offs).

Still though going Marks and gemming ArP is the hip trend and all the "cool" kids are doing it. It's swimming in the deep end of the pool. Every time I see a hunter in full T10 (even if it's all item level 251) and gemming ArP, I wonder if I'm doing the right thing by waiting.

Let's take a look at one such hunter who has taken that very plunge and is swimming with all the big kids while I wade in the shallow end.

Let's start with the gear. All of the gems are +20 ArP except for the meta, Nightmare Tear, and one Deadly Ametrine (+10 agi / +10 crit). Everything is properly enchanted except for the legs which appear to be missing an enchant (not recommended). Also the neck piece is from heroic TotC (10) and not regular TotC (10).

Okay now lets take a look at the spreadsheet dps for Marksman.

Well the first thing that stands out is that this hunter way below the hit cap. I tend to over emphasize the hit cap. I'm more comfortable being nine points over the cap than I am one point under it. Let's review his talents.

This is a reasonable spec, however given the lack of hit I'm going to adjust it and put some points into Focused Aim. Here is my revised spec.

So what I did was,

1. Put three points in Focused Aim.
2. Removed a point from True Shot Aura.
3. Removed a point from Hunter's Mark.
4. Removed 2 points from Improved Steady Shot.

I decided to be a little selfish here so I based this on our 25-man raid comp and the fact that we have three MM hunters, two of whom have TSA (I don't want him eating into my dps by too much :P ). Let's add the leg enchant and crunch the numbers again.

Just to recap, we adjusted the talents to get more hit and added a leg enchant and voila! At this point all of the gems are still ArP. Let's see what happens when we change to agility gems.

Okay, +50 isn't a lot, but it's not zero either, and keep in mind that this hunter isn't a one-trick pony and sometimes runs as Survival (I know this because he logged out as Survival). Okay, let's see how this all impacts his Survival spec.

Here are the spreadsheet number for his current setup.

This is based on the following spec.

Again, this is a reasonable spec, but remember with the MM spec and zero points in Focused Aim he was 106 points below the hit cap. Here there is one point in Focused Aim, but that's still too low. I'm going to revise the spec as follows.

I chose to remove two points in Hunting Party and dump them into Focused Aim. Remember that gear and talents need to accommodate two specs, not one. Now that the spec is revised, I'll stick the enchants on the legs and crunch the numbers again.

Alright, that's a good start, but since this is Survival and those Armor Pen. gems don't do a whole lot of good, let's see what happens when I add some agility gems. Again, since this has to work with the MM spec I'm going to gem the same for both.

So by gemming for agility, enchanting all of the gear, and reaching the hit cap, the MM dps went up by 342.23 and SV dps went up by 382.15. Now most of the MM increase came from reaching the hit cap and adjusting talents. The ArP gems really weren't the killer here. I could get into a discussion about the merits T9/T10, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

Armor Pen can be very powerful, but it's not something you should just rush into. You need to evaluate if the timing is right based on your gear. When folks say you need a passive ArP number of 700, or once you can reach 900 ArP with gems you can switch, those are not hard and fast rules. They're merely thresholds where it might be a dps increase for you.

You also have to balance ArP with all of the stats. Hit rating should never be ignored. You also need to understand that Armor Pen. is a real commitment, and that you're locking yourself into a spec and play style. It just doesn't work for SV.

Swimming in the deep end of the pool is great, but if you're not a good swimmer you might find yourself drowning in your decisions. Armor Pen can be tricky, but luckily there are some great tools out there to help you out.

Good Hunting!

Hit, ArP, Square Peg Meets Round Hole

We're working towards an Armor Pen. build. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer. When we get new gear we usually have a couple of options, we can put it in the bank and wait until we have all the supporting pieces (where's the fun in that?), or we can equip them and try to make them work with our current setup.

Last night we were fortunate to get both Distant Land and the Nerub'ar Stalker's Cord. They are replacing Quel'delar, Ferocity of the Scorned and Linked Scourge Vertebrae respectively.

The staff has no hit and no ArP. Quel'delar has no hit but does have +91 ArP. The belt we're replacing has no ArP, but does have +40 hit. Our new belt has no hit but does have +63 ArP. Great googly moogly!

The net affect of equipping these items is a loss of +28 ArP and a loss of +40 hit. The lovely female dwarf told us that despite these losses, she really liked our staff ;) (She dug the belt too).

At this point we're not gemming for ArP, so reaching the ArP cap isn't a priority. We always want to be hit capped though. With the old items we were five points above the cap and that's with three points in Focused Aim, and +32 hit from enchants.

As much as we love our space goat allies, we really don't feel like following them around ICC all night for their hit buff. That leaves gems as our next option. Now as long as we see our dps going up, gemming for hit is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. When we get the rest of our gear and decide to gem ArP, then gemming for hit won't be a good option. This is mainly because there are no ArP enchants, so gems and gear remain our best sources for that stat.

Eventually we'll dig ourselves out this mess, but until we get our four pieces of 264 T10 we may be forced to use more hit gems, or just bank items until we have our set. Salvation will come in the form of our T10 gloves. So if you'll excuse us, we need to go have a chat with Toravon the Ice Watcher.

P.S. - When we started our gear planning we were curious to see if there were any items with both hit and ArP.  Here's a link to what we found on wowhead.com.

http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=minle=245;si=1;ub=3;cr=114:119;crs=1:1;crv=0:0;gb=1

We found this list to be pretty underwhelming, and none of the items were things that we'd want for our pseudo "BiS" set. Oh and before you ask, we're not including ICC heroic items in any of our plans until we've actually killed the Lich King.

Three Enchants to Consider

Today I wanted to cover three enchants that you may want to consider as part of your raiding set.  These are Cat's Swiftness, Tuskarr's Vitality and the Biznicks 247x128 Accurascope.

The first two come at the expense of some DPS enchants, and the last one is so old school it may be hard to get, but they're all worth a look.

Speed Kills

Ever since we interviewed Munken from Ensidia on the Hunting Party Podcast, I've been running with Tuskarr's Vitality on my boots. Ensidia requires all of their raiders to have some type of speed boost whether it comes from talents, gems or enchants.

The concept here is simple.  Almost all raid encounters require you to move around, and the faster you can get from point A to point B, the more time you'll spend doing DPS.

Cat's Swiftness - +6 agility and minor speed increase (8%).

• Large Prismatic Shard x8
• Primal Air x8

This is a Burning Crusade enchant.  The advantage it has over Tuskarr's is the small dps gained from the +6 agility.  That and it's name just make it more Huntery anyway.

I haven't checked the AH to see what it's going for, but the mats shouldn't be that difficult to acquire.  There recipe comes in two versions, a BoE Outland drop and a BoP drop from Kael'thas Sunstrider in Magister's Terrace.  As time goes by this one may be harder to find.

Tuskarr's Vitality - +15 Stamina and minor speed increase (8%).

• Infinite Dust x10
• Greater Cosmic Essence x2
• Dream Shard x2

This is the WotLK version of the speed enchant.  Scrolls, mats, and enchanters who can make this should be readily available.  If you're looking for a speed enchant this should be easy to get.

Old School Challenge

Biznicks 247x128 Accurascope - +30 hit rating (almost 1%)

• Lava Core x2
• Essence of Earth x2
• Delicate Arcanite Converter x4
  
  • Arcanite Bar x5
  • Ironweb Spider Silk x4
• Dark Iron Bar x6
• Thorium Tube
  
  • Thorium Bar x6

If you really like to min/max and want a challenge you can try scrounging one of these up.  Depending on your gear and how you're doing on hit this scope could allow you to replace an item such as the Icecrown Ramparts Bracers with say Scourge Hunter's Vambraces (thanks to Rilgon for this tip).

My advice is check the AH first to see if there's a scope for sale.  Then check to see what mats are available to buy.  I was able to get the Lava Cores, Arcanite Bars, Essence of Earth, and Thorium Tube for around 100g.

The Dark Iron Bars can only be made in Blackrock Depths and there's a bit of an attunement required in order to smelt the ore.

The tough part is going to be finding someone who can make it.  The schematic is a drop from Molten Core, so there may not be too many Engineers around who are able to craft one.  If you're an Engineer you could try and farm the schematic, but that could take a while.

Good Hunting!

The Hunting Party Podcast, Episode 15

This week, the show is a round table with Frostheim, Euripides and discussing the finer points of hit rating and cooldown timing, while I try to get in a last minute raid before vacation. I finish up just in time to help answer some reader email.

Apparently there was a bet as to whether or not I was successful in downing Anub in TotC (25).  At least one of them wasn't familiar with the the Darkbrew effect.

[audio http://www.badiator.com/huntingpartypodcast/huntingparty_015.mp3]

As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

I Mourn for Shadowmourne

MMO-Champion data mined information about Shadomourne the new legendary axe dropping from ICC.  I play a dwarf hunter and am perfectly capable of wielding an axe.  Apparently Blizzard is well aware of this and has restricted the classes that can use this to Warrior, Paladin and Death Knight.

Now since this is the PTR I'm sure it's just an oversight and we can expect to see Hunter added to that list.  If not I may have to get in touch with Mr. T and see how good his WoW hacking skills really are.

As a jewelcrafter I'd be perfectly happy loading the three gem slots with Delicate Dragon's Eye for 102 agility.  And my pet could use the strength, right?  C'mon Blizz!

The Hunting Party Podcast, Episode 9

This week, Euripides and I are pleased to have Frostheim, from Warcraft Hunters Union on the show! We talk about all the new PTR news that came out recently, and talk to Frost about many things, including his penchant for soloing the unsoloable!

[audio http://outdps.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/huntingparty_009.mp3]

As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to outdps@gmail.com or thebrewhall@gmail.com, and mention “podcast” in the subject.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

The Hunting Party Podcast, Episode 7

This week on The Hunting Party Podcast, we had the great pleasure of interviewing Munken, hunter extraordinaire from Ensidia! For those of you who may not know, Ensidia is a premier sponsored guild (formerly known as SK-Gaming) who has many world firsts under their belt.

Munken is often the camera man for their excellent publicized videos. Anyone who wants to use the same UI that he does can look at it here.

This show, while normally G rated, contains a little colorful vocabulary on the part of our guest.

[audio http://outdps.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/huntingparty_007.mp3]



As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to outdps@gmail.com or thebrewhall@gmail.com, and mention “podcast” in the subject.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

It's a Start

• Hunters might be able to choose the talent tree of their pet to let them pick the pet that looks best to them...
  

One of the big gripes I have with the current pet system is that it locks pets into very specific rolls with very specific abilities.  As a result certain pets are coming out ahead and falling into a "best in slot" category.  For instance, almost every raiding hunter is running with a wolf.

If Blizzard wants hunters to be able to choose pets based on what the individual hunter thinks looks best, then they also need to allow the hunter to train specific abilities, such as Furious Howl, to the pet.

Being able to turn a turtle into a ferocity pet is nice, but unless you can train the turtle in Furious Howl, the wolf will still remain the top choice.

In patch 3.1 Blizzard removed Thunderstomp from gorillas and added it to the Tenacity talent tree allowing hunters to train any tenacity pet with that ability.  I loved that change as did most hunters.

A lot of us joked about how is it possible for a worm to Thunderstomp?  Yes the idea is silly and so is the idea of a crab learning Furious Howl, but you know what, it works.  I think we all have to recognize that this is a game, and certain elements have to be treated or accepted as such in order to provide a greater functionality to the players.

After all, we are hunters, the great beast masters.  We can train our pets to do anything.  Yes we're just that good.

Now it's off to see if I can train one of my cats to use the coffee maker.

I Thougt it was an Upgrade?

Today's post comes from the Makeover department of Brew Hall HQ.

The other day I earned enough badges to buy my Conqueror's Scourgestalker Headpiece. Gratz to me! It's replacing my Hyaline Helm of the Sniper. Now the T8 helm is superior to the Hyaline Helm in almost every regard, however, it has one important stat the T8 doesn't, and that's +30 Hit rating.

Looking at my current gear, and talents, if I want to use this helm I'll need to do some major re-working of gems, enchants, etc. This is both time consuming and expensive. Not to mention that there may other upgrades in my future that will force me to go through all of this again.

So what to do? The first thing is to go to femaldwarf.com and run the numbers. What I want to know is if I were equip the T8 helmet right now, is it an upgrade? Much to my surprise the answer was yes, but not by much. Also, I have one point in Focused Aim that I'd really like to dump (if you listened to Episode 1 of The Hunting Party you'd know that it's a little broken again). If I equip the helm and respec, it's not an upgrade.

Now I could keep going down this track and rearrange gems and enchants and sure I could make this work and come out ahead. But the thing to keep in mind is, your next upgrade may not be too far around the corner. In my case it was just a matter of earning enough badges to get Leggings of the Tireless Sentry, which in this day an age does not take very long.

So for me the best option was to put the helm in the bank for a couple of days until I could purchase those pants and then I could go through the process of re-gemming, re-enchanting, and re-spec'ing.

So the moral of the story for today boys and girls is that an upgrade is not always an upgrade. You can't just compare the new item against the item it's replacing. You need to look at it in the context of all your gear and talents and make decisions accordingly. Luckily for us hunters we have tools like the DPS Analyzer and DPS Spreadsheet.

Well time for me to get that makeover. 

 Good Hunting!

It's a 3.2 World and We're Living in It

My baby hunter recently ding'd 77 so it's now time for me start thinking about life at level 80. When Darkbrew hit 80 it was the start of a long journey running heroics and working on Northrend reputations.

Having leveled a hunter to 80 once you would think this might be a rinse and repeat, but patch 3.2 changes everything.









Level 80 Day One

One of the first things I'm going to do is head over to the Argent Tournament and start running Trial of the Champion normal mode. I'm surprised they didn't just have us equip our lances and drop a pinata down from the ceiling for us to whack.

In normal mode there are four nice pieces of gear that drop, and there's no lockout for normal which means you can run this over and over again until you get everything you need.

• Scale Boots of the Outlander
• Banner of Victory
• Belt of Merciless Cruelty
• Wristguards of Ceaseless Regret

I will also start running this in heroic mode. Heroic drops ilevel 219 gear which is equivalent to Ulduar (10). In fact I think there might be an upgrade or two for Darkbrew in here (sad I know). There are six pieces of hunter gear in heroic. Remember that heroic does a have a lockout so you can only do this once a day.

• Chestguard of the Ravenous Fiend
• Gloves of the Dark Exile
• Ancient Pendant of Arathor
• True-aim Long Rifle
• Pauldrons of Concealed Loathing
• Marrowstrike

In addition to Trial of the Champion I'll also run some other heroics for gear and badges. Utgarde Keep is still good for the Plunderer's Helmet and Drake Mounted Crossbow (you can't expect the True-aim Long Rifle to drop right away).

Nexus is also another good one for the Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood. There are other three other items that drop in here too, not to mention it's a 5-badge run.

Now that people are starting to out gear the earlier raid content I'll probably try and find an Obsidian Sanctum (25) run. The Hyaline Helm of the Sniper and Fury of the Five Flights (lol, good luck getting that one) are nice drops.

Now if you're flush with gold you can hit the Auction House and pick-up some very nice items. Some of these won't come cheap, and you'll find it's a mix of entry level to "best in slot".

Legs

• Giantmaim Leggings
• Darkcore Leggings

Back

• Ice Striker's Cloak
• Shawl of the Shattered Giant

Ranged

• Nesingwary 4000

Rings

• Titanium Impact Band
• Band of the Kirin Tor
• Inscribed Band of the Kirin Tor
• Etched Band of the Kirin Tor
• Signet of Edward the Odd

Neck

• Titanium Impact Choker
• Nymph Heart Charm

Wrist

• Armguards of the Tower Archer
• Slime Stream Bands
• Bracers of the Smothering Inferno

Waist

• Torn Web Wrapping
• Belt of the Dragons

Trinket

• Darkmoon Card: Greatness

Before you start spending all that gold keep in mind that you'll be earning conquest badges and there's a lot of nice gear that you'll be able to get quite easily. For example, The Broach of the Wailing Night only costs 19 badges.

Then and Now

So how does hitting level 80 today compare to hitting level 80 back in December? It's quite nice actually. I went ahead and plugged some information into Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer (you can here an interview with her here) and compared Ranchero (pre-raid) with Darkbrew (pre-raid and current). Here are the bottom line dps results.

As you can see gearing up just from Trial of the Champion and a few affordable AH pieces puts you ahead of where you could have been before 3.2.

For details on how I spec'd and geared each one you can click on the links below. Darkbrew pre-raid matches the gear I had when I first stepped into Naxxramas. Darkbrew current is my current gear, and Ranchero is geared in items that I thought I could reasonably get in a short amount of time.

• Ranchero Pre-raid
• Darkbrew Pre-raid
• Darkbrew Current

It's a 3.2 world and we're living in it!

These Go To Eleven

Marty DiBergi: "Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?"

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] "These go to eleven."



So with patch 3.2 right around the corner I thought I'd write a little bit about the changes coming to tier gear. Patch 3.2 is introducing three flavors of tier gear this time around, Tier 9, Tier 9.5, and what I refer to as Tier 9.these go to eleven.

So who exactly are these for? Tier 9 (Conquest) is geared towards non-raiders and 10-man normal raiders. You'll be able to buy the whole set with emblems of triumph which will drop from the heroic daily and the Trial of the Crusader raid instance.

Tier 9.5 (Triumph) is aimed at 25-man normal raiders (it's possible that 10-man heroic raiders might be able to get these as well, but that is just speculation at this point). Tier 9.5 will be purchasable with Emblems of Triumph as well as an item called Trophy of the Crusade.

Tier 9.these go to eleven is aimed at 25-man heroic raiders. These can be purchased with Tier tokens. Unlike Tie 7 and Tier 8 the tokens that drop are not item specific so you can purchase your pieces in any order. The class groupings for tokens remains.

The Hunter set is the Windrunner set. Although each set has different stats, all three have the same set bonus, and can be mixed and matched. The set bonuses are,

• 2-piece - The damage done by your serpent sting ability can now be critical strikes.
• 4-piece - Each time you hit with a ranged attack, you have a chance to grant your pet 600 attack power for 15 sec.

Basically patch 3.2 is allowing everyone the opportunity to get geared up to a Ulduar 25-man level without having to raid 25-man Ulduar. Raiders will always have a leg up on everyone else, but the gap won't be nearly as severe. There are plenty of debates out there as to whether this is good or not. I personally like the changes and I've already got my eye on The Diplomat which drops from Trial of the Crusader 10-man normal mode.

Get ready to dump that Tier 8!

Jewelcrafting - Getting Ready

First things first, I'm back from my second vacation. It was a great trip and if it weren't for the timeshare folks it would've been perfect (that's a story for another day). I discovered something about myself, I may be an idiot, but at least I'm not a fool, but I digress.

A couple of months back I picked up Jewelcrafting so I could cut my own gems and take advantage of the awesome jewelcrafter only gems. I took a quick glance at some of the 3.2 changes on the PTR, and today I want to share some of the Jewelcrafting changes and what they mean for me, and possibly you.

First here are the important changes.

• Epic gems and recipies have been added to the game.
• The stats of the jewelcrafter only gems have been increased. The delicate dragonseye now has +34 agility up from +27.
• The jewelcrafter only gems are no longer prismatic. For example the delicate dragonseye is now a red gem.
• Epic gems can be purchased with Emblems of Heroism.
• Epic gem patterns can be purchased with tokens earned from the daily jewelcrafting quests.
• Epic gem patterns require jewelcrafting 450.

So what does this all mean for me? It means I have work to do.

• I will have to do some re-gemming. I'm currently using the jewelcrafter only gems to satisfy my meta-gem requirement.
• I will probably add a Deadly Ametrine and Shifting Dreadstone to my gear in order to keep my meta gem active.
• I will then upgrade any available sockets to Delicate Cardinal Rubys.
• With my current gear I'll probably gain about 20 more agility, but I'll be sacrificing some socket bonuses.
• I'll need to work on getting my jewelcrafting to 450.
• I'll also want to make sure I do the daily jewelcrafting quest each day so I can buy the patterns I want (I want all of them by the way).
• I'll also be doing more heroics to stock up on Emblems of Heroism so I can purchase some epic gems. Remember that when 3.2 hits we'll be earning Emblems of Conquest, and while they can be converted to Emblems of Heroism, I'll probably want to keep them to get Conquest gear.

When patch 3.2 hits you can bet that a lot of folks will be looking to upgrade their gems. In addition to gemming myself, I'm hoping to cash in on the early demand.

So the bottom line is if you're a jewelcrafter you might want to start collecting badges and earning tokens to get the new patterns and gems when 3.2 goes live.

Gems and Enchants and Why They Matter

Pretty awesome DPS trinket wouldn't you say? So where exactly does it drop? It doesn't. The item is obviously fake, but those stats are very, very real.

What you're looking at are the stats gained from all of the gems and enchants that I have on my gear.

Let's do some math, shall we?

For a hunter Agility translates into attack power point for point. I also have a talent that converts intellect into attack power point for point.

Agility also translates into Crit. Every 83.3 points of agility equals a 1% chance to crit.

Also every 45.91 points of critical strike rating equals a 1% increase to crit.

Those stats on the trinket aggregate and boost my attack power and critical strike chance beyond what you see.

Adding things up my attack power and critical strike chance are increased as follows,

Total Attack Power - 583
Critical Strike - 5% increase.

Not only that but I have talents that increase my agility and attack power further

Lightning Reflexes - This increases my agility by 15%. The more agility I have, the more 15% becomes.

Expose Weakness - This will convert 25% of my agility into attack power. Again, the more agility I have the more 25% becomes.

Because you're gemming and enchanting individual items the numbers may not seem that big, but as you can see they're huge. They can equate to having one or two additional epic items.

Imagine if you had a full raid of 25 people with all their gear gemmed and enchanted. It could mean the difference between wiping or downing a boss (and getting more gear to gem and enchant).

Now if only I could enchant that trinket. ;-)

My Pet Survived!

"Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!"

- Henry Frankenstein

It finally happened. In the same week I managed to keep my pet alive through both 25-man Sartharion and Heigan. I'm sure to most of you out there this is old hat, but for me this was some real progress and cause for celebration.

So for those of you struggling to keep your pets alive during these encounters here's what I did.

For Sartharion it was just a little vigilance on my part. Basically the leading cause of death for pets are the lava waves. What I did this time was successfully pull the pet off the boss right before the waves started to move. This meant my pet wolf, Grolsch, was at my side and out of harms way as the waves passed by. Once things were clear I sent him back into the fray.

Nothing fancy, just couple of quick keybinds to send him in and pull him out.

For Heigan I kept Grolsch by my side the whole time. One of the great things about wolves is that they don't have to be attacking something to use Furious Howl (I'm curious to see how long that stays in the game). For the dance I probably got lucky as I just had him following me as usual, but hey he made it. I'll have another crack at Heigan this weekend so we'll see.

Here are the WWS for both fights. As you can see we were both very much alive.