Dear BM brethren

Rejoice and be glad.

Well... Soon. (tm)

Tanking gear to-do list

My druid hit level 80 tonight!

I wasn't really sure at first what I'd want to do the endgame with on her, but I've finally decided that I'll make her a bear. I tanked, healed and dps'd quite a few instances while levelling, and of all of them, tanking was the most fun role. I'm already used to dpsing on Toshi, so I didn't warm up to boomkin very well. It is, however, a very fun spec for levelling and I must give it credit for that at least.

Reading the tanking gear post on Big Bear Butt, I've come up with a small to-do list to build Tora's tank set. Mostly for my own reference. :D

chest - Exotic Leather Tunic (UP quest), Crystal Infused Tunic (H Nexus)
feet - Slag Footguards (H HoL), Gorloc Muddy Footwraps (H Gun'drak)
legs - Gored Hide Legguards (H Gun'drak), Chain Gang Legguards
hands - Bile Cured Gloves (CoT Strat), Handwraps of Preserved History (CoT quest)
head - Shroud of Darkness (H VH)
neck - Amulet of Wills (HoS)
shoulder - Spaulders of the Careless Thief (H Nexus), Trollwoven (LW)
weapon - Enraged Feral Staff (H UK), Staff of Trickery (H VH)
belt - Sharp Barbed Leather Belt (H UK)
bracer - Bindings of the Tunneler (H UK)
back - Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions (rep)
trinket - Offering of Sacrifice (H Gun'drak), Essence of Gossamer (H AN)
rings - Keystone Great-Ring (H DTK), Band of Frosted Thorns (H Nexus), Ring of Earthen Might (JC), Iceforged Battle Ring (Storm Peaks quest chain)

Looks like we'll be running mostly heroic Gun'drak and Utgarde Keep for a while! Also not forgetting that Gal'darah drops a nice melee dps ring as well.

I'll probably try to gear up my resto set along the way as well, because I like healing almost as much as tanking. (this is why I rolled a druid!) But I did it through all of Outland, and halfway through Northrend, so I'm a little sick of it. Tanking is really what's getting my druid going at the moment.

You know BM is dead when...

BRK makes a post about Survival dps.

I will be away celebrating Lunar Festival IRL, but hopefully I'll still have time to think up some posts. :)

World PVP rant

It's that time of year again... where Alliance are forced to run into Horde controlled areas to complete achievements.

Toshi was camped by a mage and a druid trying to get into Orgrimmar to do the Honor Your Elders stuff. So I logged out and hopped on Tora.

The first mob I try to kill she was ganked by a 80 rogue in Naxx gear.

WHY CAN'T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!

Now excuse me while I go watch some Death Note.

A/N: Yeah yeah, pvp happened, etc. We get it. It wasn't really my decision to roll on a pvp server. *grumble*

The demise of raiding BM

As mentioned in my previous post, I respecced BM before tonight's raid to see how Spirit Beast dps would hold up.

And as you can see from the title, it's pretty abysmal.

The nerf to pet damage has really hurt the tree's raiding potential. I'm not sure it was really called for. Blizz should probably have chosen to either nerf Steady Shot (and in turn affect all three trees) or just decrease pet damage.

Compared to Survival, I was doing a good 300-400 less dps as BM with Loque. 2.3k dps on a target dummy is all well and good, but if you can't put out better in a raid situation, with all the mages, warlocks and shadow priests doing upwards of 3k, you can kiss your raid spot goodbye.

I'm not really sure if I should say anything else. I'm just really disappointed that I had to hearth out and respec before Sapphiron because I wasn't performing as well as I usually do.

Tora's Epic Flight Form Fund took a hit because of the double respecs in a day, but I guess I don't mind. I'm the class leader after all, I have to see what works best...

Sadly, tonight was probably the last time I take Loque out of the stables for a long time. At least, until we get dual specs.

Goodbye Bestial Wrath, though I can't really say I'll miss you.

Post-nerf thoughts

So, Blizzard decided to nicely spring the patch upon us (I didn't see it coming... did you?). Wintergrasp and Northrend bugs ahoy! And is it just me, but am I seeing more loading screens lately? Namely, loading screens within Naxx? Crazy.

Anyway, so I raided as Surv again tonight. No changes in spec at all. I must say I miss the AoE component of the new Explosive Shot. And the nerf to Volley really hurt my trash dps, but I suppose it was needed.

Lock and Load procced a lot more than usual tonight, to my delight, so that's probably the extra 3% talking. Woot. But overall boss dps and damage seems to have remained the same. I noticed our locks are really catching up now. There were a few fights where they actually outdps'ed me (gasp!) but I was kind of expecting a bit of a slide down the meters, really.

Overall though, I came in the top 5 dps on bosses tonight, so that's pretty satisfying.

Oh, I forgot to post about this last week - I got Envoy of Mortality in our KT kill last week! Unfortunately I didn't quite get to test it out before patch hit... sigh. But it's still pretty awesome. And Mammoth Cutters are much cheaper to make too!

I might respec BM for tomorrow - Spider Wing, Sapph and KT. It'll be hell for Sapph, ugh. BRK's got some interesting numbers on the Spirit Beast and I'm really tempted.

Plus, it's been quite a while since I could do ZG for the raptor, since I've been lazy to respec. XD WTB dual specs please!

Surprise! Patch 3.0.8

Thank you, Vader.

Full report coming.

Sapphire Hive Queen and PTR update

It seems those who were able to tame the Sapphire Hive Queen before this patch comes out will be able to keep it. There's a slight bug with the stables though, and you won't be able to view her in the stables window.

The proc chance of Lock and Load has also been increased in the latest version of the PTR from maxed 7% to 10% from Serpent Sting. It's not as much as I hoped for... but it's better than nothing I suppose. I don't see it proc much more often than before, so I really don't see much difference. :\

Maybe the RNG gods aren't with me today. And I still think they should increase it to at least 50% and have some sort of visible way to track the cooldown. (Perhaps a debuff, like how Heart of the Phoenix places a debuff on you once you use it...)

On the topic of the PTR... gonna have a slight rant about huntards again. There was this guy in Trade complaining about how Explosive Shot sucked. I so happened to run into him at the training dummies, and of course inspected him... My god, he was rocking with the Armor Plated Combat Shotgun, Vereesa's Chain Belt with a 24 Stam gem, and a really, REALLY bad Surv spec. It had points in Deflection and Counterattack instead of Survivalist and Hunter vs. Wild, and no points into Hunting Party.

I kinda cracked, /facepalm'd, and went off at him saying not to complain about his dps because he had a bad spec and bad gear. So what does he do? He ran off, and copied my spec. Argh. God I hate it when people do that. When are people going to learn that spec =/= skill?

Art - The Survival Hunter

Whoo! *wipes brow* Finally a nice, decent pic of Toshi and his main pet, Hige. You've no idea how much time I spent agonizing over those shoulders. *cry*

And while I did draw Tmiel with his Slayer of the Lifeless, believe me I did try and draw Toshi with Arrowsong, but damn... the details are too much for my poor brain to handle. Maybe some other time... T_T

Also avaliable with no background.

How to: Thaddius (heroic) video

We finally downed Thaddius on 25-man tonight, along with Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad.

Sadly, no Envoy of Mortality for me yet. :( Also lost a roll on Drape of the Deadly Foe, le sigh.

Anyways, the video shows how I do things as Surv... because yeah, I stayed Surv for 25s this week, hehe. I wanted to see how it'd hold up against BM/Readiness, and surprisingly, it's pretty good. Notice the trap dancing on the adds. It would have been impossible to trap dance safely with the charges though, so the only time I can proc LnL from traps is to drop a trap when running from negative to positive side.

Thoughts about Hunter changes in 3.0.8

I was bored this afternoon, so I thought I'd copy myself to the PTR and give it a whirl, maybe look at how much of a dps reduction I can expect after the next patch goes live.

(Note - Toshimitsu was flagged for a namechange, so for all intents and purposes in this post, Toraneko = Toshi)

Since I was pretty much free to do anything there (multiple respecs kgo), I tried out all three specs to see how the dps difference between them would be. And to my surprise, Survival is currently coming in with top dps.


Surv was the first spec I tried, and it was simply the same spec I'm playing with on live at the moment. The recount above is myself self buffed, no raid consumables. I did another pass a little later on with consumables (agi and int pots, and agi food) and surprisingly the difference in dps was negligible, only about 50-80dps difference from burst.

Suffice to say, the new cooldown on Lock and Load will be annoying to work with. For one, it completely eliminates the rotation of trap dancing, because if you are specced into Resourcefulness, you will be either waiting 14 seconds to get a L&L proc, or wasting 8 seconds waiting for the LnL cooldown to go off.


Next we have the Marks tree. I haven't been MM in over 3 months, so I might have been a bit rusty with the rotations. It seems to be holding mid ground in terms of dps on the PTR, which you will understand once I show you the BM charts. Overall though, the Marks spec is still probably very solid and has nothing unexpected. Aside from the change of mana to Arcane Shot of course, which is nice for this spec.

And here are the charts for BM. Hold on to your seats people...


That's right, BM is currently a whopping 200dps below Marks, even with a Cat. It seems the Cat is still by far the best pet, though the Devilsaur is coming in close. One way or another, I'd say you can take either one and put out the same numbers.

The numbers I got with the Spirit Beast however, were a bit disappointing. It was below both Cat and Devilsaur dps by about 50. It seems the Spirit Beast will simply remain a trophy, and nothing more.

Now, these numbers are not set in stone - I might be doing something wrong, I may be biased towards Surv at the moment, or maybe there's something up with the PTR. However, all accounts I've read are pointing towards Survival doing the most damage on the test realms.

All in all, I'm not sure how to react. I'm honestly not too fussed with the Steady Shot nerf, but this sudden upheaval in the hierarchy of the specs has me reeling a little bit.

Art - Protect The Ones You Love (complete)

It's been a bit of a slow WoW day for me, so I had the opportunity to finish colouring this piece up tonight. It took a bit longer than I anticipated (mostly due to my being a bit rusty at openCanvas) but the results were better than I initially expected. ^^

Funny how I finish a piece of art that features my bf's character rather than mine first... Hunter armor is such a pain to draw. *tears out hair*

As with the previous piece, this is also available in a widescreen wallpaper.

Art - Protect The Ones You Love (WIP)

I recently drew a really imba picture of the boy's Warrior, so I thought I'd scan it and colour it. The colouring bit is coming along slowly, but I liked the original ink so much that I made it all pretty and such.

Also avaliable in a widescreen wallpaper!

More experimenting with Surv

As mentioned in a previous post, I thought I'd save 10mans for Survival testing. Well, tonight was the guild's weekly 10man Naxx, and I thought I'd try out a different spec from last week.

This week, I put in that one point in Go for the Throat (which in my haste last week I forgot to do) which was suggested on the EJ Surv hunter thread.

Instead of putting full points into Sniper Training and 1 in Imp. Feign Death, I decided to go Trap Mastery and Resourcefulness this time. Because this was a clean run of Naxx (as opposed to just two bosses like last week), I had more opportunities to use Explosive Shot's AoE capability.

My main rotation on trash would be to wait for tank to pick up and establish aggro, run in and drop an Explosive Trap, wait for Lock and Load to proc, use up L&L's charges, and then Volley until Explosive Shot is off cooldown.

Usually, after proccing L&L, you can just sit back and literally listen to the fireworks. It's like music.

What surprised me though, is that I topped dps for most bosses. (Of course discounting the fact that we'd taken a few undergeared people in to get some loots for them...) There were a few fights were our Fury TG Warrior out dpsed me, but that was by a rather small margin and so I don't really mind.

Since there is no WWS report tonight, I can't really tell how well Replenishment went for the raid.

See that Explosive Shot three in a row crit? Oh yeah baby...

I told myself I wouldn't...

...but I got myself a wasp anyway. I thought, why not? Since this particular one is going to be untameable in the next patch.

Thoughts on Survival

Against my better judgement, I respecced Survival for our guild's 10man Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad kills tonight. One of the new healers who'd just dinged - a CoH priest - was complaining of going oom halfway through the fight because we didn't have a Replenishment class. So I decided to take a dive into the deep end and throw dps out the window while I did so.

So I dragged my ass down to IF, respecced, and banged on the Heroic Training Dummy for a while, figuring out a good rotation. Right after that, I got asked on a heroic Halls of Lightning run, where I was mildly surprised by the dps output it was doing, especially on boss fights. (Hello, 10k Kill Shot crit!) Funny story... we actually killed Loken 5 minutes before the instance reset and I didn't manage to loot my badges, Stone Keeper's Shards or the quest item... boo!

Anyway, I rock up to Sapph, and we down him on the first try. I'd read some surv hunter reports that they'd run up to the boss and drop an Explosive Trap on their heads to proc Lock and Load. While it's not one of the most dignified things to be seen doing, especially on Sapph, it does result in a chain of Explosive Shots, and hey, more crits mean more uptime on Replenishment, right? Absolutely!

I even have a WWS report! It's my first time actually seeing one of these things in action, so bear with me if I'm a bit excited. According to WWS, my Replenishment buff caused our healers to gain an average of 14k mana. It's not stellar as far as mana replenishment goes, but I guess it's not bad? Forgive me if I have no clue how this works for healers...

I came 4th on damage, and 6th on dps for that fight. Not too shabby for damage, but a little lackluster for dps... but I was expecting that.

On to Kel'Thuzad. We wiped the first time due to an unlucky number of mana explosions on one of our druid healers, and an unlucky ice block on the add tank right before the adds came up, but we did get him down to 10%.

Anyways, second attempt went better. Here's the report for those interested. On this fight, Replenishment restored about 15k of healers' mana. I also switched aspects 5 times on the fight, something which is also interesting. As with Sapph, I was periodically running up to KT and dropping a trap. It was actually pretty amusing to hear our DK tank - who is formerly a hunter - ask if he should be doing anything, because he thought it was something the boss did.

Came 3rd on damage and 4th on dps, slightly better than Sapphiron. (It's the not having to move out of blizzards... I swear)

I wasn't feeling on top at the end of the raid, but after our resto druid posted the WWS reports and told me that Replenishment was actually helpful to him on those fights, I kinda feel better now. It is nice to actually have some utility other than just bring the huge numbers in, and I think I will be respeccing for guild 10s to Survival from now on. :)

Special thanks to the guild's resident grumpy resto druid for posting that WWS report!

Guide to Aces High! daily

aka Practice for Malygos dragon phase!

How to unlock the daily:

1. Go to Librarian Serrah (33.5 , 34.4) in Coldarra
2. Obtain the quest [Corastrasza]
3. Deliver it to Corastrasza (29.5 , 24.8), she is on top of a platform -you need to fly
4. Get the daily quest [Aces High!] (first time you even get a blue item) and repeat it until you only dream about flying around doing this daily when you sleep!

Basically, you get a red drake with the exact same abilities as the drakes you ride in the Malygos encounter. The basic strategy to completing this daily is to HoT yourself up with Revivify, and then engage a blue drake. (Scalesworn Elite) When your health gets knocked down a bit, target yourself (this is important) and use Life Burst.


Here's some handy macros:
/target Scalesworn Elite
/castsequence reset=target Flame Spike, Flame Spike, Engulf in Flames
For the Malygos fight, just change /target Scalesworn Elite to /target Malygos.

The damage part of this is fairly straightfoward. You can spam that macro to victory (much like a hunter would be used to... but I digress) and just focus on healing yourself periodically.

Although the tooltips for the abilities say that they require combo points, they aren't really "combo points" as such. They're more like stacks of the ability. So 5 stacks of Revivify is the same as 5 combo points on yourself. 5 stacks of Flame Spike is the same as 5 combo points on the target.


The blue drakes also do a burst move called Arcane Surge which you have to shield yourself from. As long as you have one or more stacks of Flame Spike, and 25 energy, you can put up a Flame Shield. I've found that you can actually survive that without putting up the shield (it all came down to me being sloppy, but whatever) just make sure you HoT yourself up after you've taken the spike damage. Typically, it deals about 60-70% of your total health, so watch your drake's health closely.

Before you start, make sure you can see your pet bar. This is no problem if you use WoW's default interface, but if you have Pitbull or any other unitframe mod, make sure to double check. It is especially important that you are able to keep an eye on your energy.

For hunters and warlocks (classes which already have pets), dismiss your pets to prevent any sort of weird bugging which might happen. You may also want to have a separate unitframe mod to display the pet bar, because if you're anything like me, having to change Pitbull around is a pain in the ass. For example, I use Pitbull for my usual frames, and turn on ag unit frames for this daily/raid.

The raid encounter will pretty much be the same, perhaps with the exception that you don't need to watch your health as much, due to the presence of healer assignments. However, since you can heal yourself, it is always a good idea to keep an eye on the health bar anyway.

Another general tip for healers in this raid is to turn on pet frames for this fight. The dragons everyone gets are considered pets and it might be hard to heal the raid without this turned on.

Also, if your target's debuffs/auras are filtered, make sure you turn them off so you can see how many stacks of Flame Spike is on the target as there is no traditional "combo point" display as such. This might be a bit hard to identify in a raid situation, but you can always play guess! Anyway, I think Pitbull often places your debuffs first.

I know it might seem like a pain, but a few goes at this daily and it might actually be fun!

Happy New Year!

Not much tonight, everyone's off getting wasted. Not really my thing, but I'm lazy tonight anyways.