Bear tanking fun

Well, not the druid kind. ;)

I hopped over to Eastern Plaguelands and got myself a cute lil' black bear, and went over to Hellfire Ramparts to see how he'd fare.

I went into Ramps on Heroic at first, and got to the first boss with a bit of difficulty. It may be that the bear was only level 75 still, and that the mobs hit pretty hard, but I couldn't down the boss at all. I did get his adds down, but poor Kyou couldn't take the boss's hits. So I went out and set it on Normal.

I know, I know, on Normal they're pretty much 20 levels lower than me. And clearing them was really easy. I even pulled the first boss with two or three add packs. But Thunderstomp plus Swipe made for great AoE damage and I didn't even need to Volley.


Got through the rest of the instance pretty quickly, the room just after the corridor was especially fun when I pulled all of them. ^^ I guess if you ever need BC enchanting mats* this would be a great way to get it. (do I smell a market for Mongoose?)


After that I headed over to Utgarde Keep to test him out against level 70 normal dungeon mobs. I had tried to solo a bit of this dungeon before (during the Valentine's event, I got bored of waiting for the boy to show up so I started clearing a bit with my gorilla) and it was a bit difficult. I don't know if it's just me now, or the new changes, but I cleared the first few mobs a lot easier than I did the first time I tried.

Ran into some problems at the forge, but after that it was smooth sailing. But the first boss... well I don't conceivably see how you can solo him. I did find a way to bug out the adds he summons though, so that could come in handy. But because you're only in there with you and your pet, you will inevitably get Ice Blocked. You can command your pet to attack the ice, but all the while the boss will be hitting on it with no heals. When 3.1 comes out I might go back in there with a level 80 pet and try again though.

And again, it's a great way to farm for enchanting mats*. I probably got lucky that time, had three greens drop and one blue. Heh!

Oh, and I found someone who got the new 81 spell power to staff done. Looks pretty cool!

I also noticed they added some changes to the UI. (well, honestly I'm not sure if they're new, as I hardly play with the default UI) As you can see in the screenshots, elite mobs' nameplates have the gold dragon border on their level. Also, there are two sounds that play which indicate you have 90% of the tank's threat, and another which indicates that you have pulled aggro. Pretty handy! Gotta commend Blizz on this sort of thing.

*Speaking as an enchanter, of course!

Rockin' the PTR

Gonna test this out tomorrow with a croc or a bear, maybe try soloing some dungeons.

Woot, standing animation for hippogryphs! Now to hope they have a new walking/running animation as well, because otherwise they'd just be flapping on the ground like chickens.

I checked out the Argent Tournament areas, it all seems horribly complicated and buggy right now. But the mounted combat system looks very promising! I must say, your character with a jousting spear/lance looks really awesome.

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?

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.