Posts with tag wow-hunters

Scattered Shots: Marksman 102: the armor pen years

by Brian Wood Mar 15th 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

There's a lot of things that separate hunters from the plate classes, and it's not just that we attack from a safe distance. Spreadsheet models also suggest that we hunters are smarter, more charismatic, and across the board we are an uncommonly good-looking lot.

Of course there's also the difference of the armor itself. Fortunately we have the opportunity to completely strip all of that armor away with the gear that's currently available in the endgame. With the right gear choices and the right gems hunters can reach the ArP hard cap, and with comes some truly impressive DPS -- in fact the very best DPS available to the hunter class.

However, going for ArP at the wrong time can easily lead to a DPS loss. Last week we discussed the standard agility MM build and today after the cut we're going to delve into the mysterious world of the ArP MM build, including when to switch specs, when to change your rotation, and when to start gemming ArP.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Marksman 101

by Brian Wood Mar 11th 2010 at 1:00PM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

Marksman was the original hunter raiding spec back in vanilla. After falling out of the top spot in BC and early Wrath, MM is back with a vengeance. MM is topping meters, punting gnomes, and kicking so much ass MM hunters have to use addons to take names of all the ass they can't get to just now, but will get around to kicking at their convenience.

The MM spec comes with the most versatile toolbox, the most controllable DPS cooldowns, two optimal raid specs, and the strongest AOE of the hunter specs. However, MM is also one of the trickiest hunter specs, relying more than other specs on proper use of cooldowns and good movement management.

Join me after the cut as we go through the nuts and bolts of the MM hunter spec and how you too can learn to punt gnomes and top meters.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunter stat caps: hit, crit, haste, and armor penetration

by Brian Wood Mar 8th 2010 at 1:00PM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

I don't know whether it's from charity or curiosity, but I often spend time talking with the sad and dispossessed members of WoW, which is to say, other classes. In one conversation I thought we had found a common ground: the trials and troubles of choosing gear. Any kinship I may have felt, however, shattered when they started complaining about having five (or only four) different stats to compare.

Yeah, a whole five different stats on gear that matter to you? Cry me a river.

Hunters have a lot of stats to juggle -- more than most classes. On any given piece of gear our DPS could be affected by attack power, agility, intellect, hit rating, haste rating, armor penetration rating, crit rating, ranged weapon DPS, and even stamina. Not only does each stat affect our DPS differently, but many of our stats have some kind of cap after which they become much less useful -- or no longer useful at all.

Today we're going to head back to hunter school and take a look at the hunter stats that have caps: hit rating, crit rating, haste rating and armor penetration rating. We'll look at the hard caps and soft caps and how these stats change as our gear improves.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunter set bonuses

by Brian Wood Mar 4th 2010 at 6:00PM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

For me, responding to my email is kind of like working out. As long as I do it every day, it's not so bad. It's just habit. But skip a few days and it starts to pile up and gets easier and easier to put it off. And of course the longer I put it off the worse it gets, until going through it all can seem like an insurmountable task.

I've been slacking off lately and letting the email pile up. The one interesting benefit of this, however, is that it makes it a lot easier to see patterns in the questions. A huge percentage of the emails I've been getting lately are about the hunter set bonuses. Should we go for the 4-piece tier 10? Only go for two pieces and get better itemized pieces for the rest of the slots? Keep the 2-piece tier 9?

So today we're going to run down the advantages of the tier 9 and tier 10 hunter set bonuses for each of the three hunter specs, and suggest which way you should gear your hunter.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Cataclysm: Stat and system changes for hunters

by Brian Wood Mar 1st 2010 at 7:30PM

Blizzard has given us a bit more information about Cataclysm stats and exactly how they'll be changing. Reading between the lines it seems clear that the intent of the announcement was to keep the hunter community well-informed, and they then went ahead and tossed in some info about other classes while they were at it. But I think it's pretty clear they were talking to us.

Here's the relevant scoop for hunters:

Stamina: We'll have a lot more -- much closer to the plate amount. This will be true across the board for non-plate classes.
Intellect: We won't get it on gear anymore. Since, you know, we won't be using mana.
Attack Power: No longer on gear for "most items." AP will still be a part of the game, and we'll probably still have talents like Trueshot Aura that boost our AP, it's just not a number that we'll be seeing on our gear. Existing gear will have its AP converted into agility and stamina.
Resilience: This stat will finally become a pure PvP stat and will only work against players, and won't reduce crit chance.
Armor: The difference in armor between mail and plate will be smaller.
Gem Color: It's not certain, but hit rating gems are probably going to become blue gems, implying that hit/agility will be purple.
Haste: Will let us recover focus faster.
Mastery: We didn't get a whole lot of new information on this new stat, other than "...will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique."
Agility: Will likely now give us 2 attack power and probably a slightly lower crit chance boost than it does now.
Armor Penetration: Going away entirely from gear. It'll still be in the game as talents, but not a stat that we have to pay attention to for our gear lists. Anything that currently has ArP on it will have that ArP converted into haste and crit. Keep in mind that haste is probably going to be more appealing to us when this change happens too.

Join me after the cut as we contemplate what some of these changes may mean for us hunters.

Filed under: Hunter, Cataclysm

Scattered Shots: Dreaming of awesome ammo

by Brian Wood Feb 25th 2010 at 1:00PM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

Currently hunter ammo is nothing more than an extension of our ranged weapon DPS. Perhaps our Stakethrower does 222.7 DPS in raw damage. Well, our Shatter Rounds just boost that by 91.5 DPS. So it's as if our gun was actually doing 314.2 DPS. It's certainly easy to understand, but it's just so... boring. Really, they could just boost the DPS of our ranged weapons and it'd be the same thing.

But ever since Blizzard first told us they'd be removing consumable ammo we hunters have been dreaming of how awesome our ammo could be. It might burst into flame on impact, or cut through armor, or heal us, or heck, for all we know it would serve as a mount so we could fire gnomish rogues into the face of bosses!

Join me after the cut for a discussion of the state of hunter ammo, and some speculation on just how awesome it could become.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunter trinkets

by Brian Wood Feb 22nd 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

Trinkets fill a very special slot in our gear selection. Rather than just a collection of stats, trinkets are the one gear slot we can pretty much count on doing something special, be it crazy procs or on-use abilities. Of course because they aren't just piles of stats, trying to compare one trinket to another can sometimes be difficult. Worse yet, they are some of the most difficult slots to fill, and we don't want to waste our time (or DKP) with a subpar trinket.

In the past we've looked at the ICC hunter loot, and more ICC hunter loot. Today we're going to look beyond just ICC and examine all of the top hunter trinket choices, from Greatness to Deathbringer's WIll. Furthermore, I'm going to go out on a limb and rank all the trinkets from best to worst for each hunter spec. So join me after the cut to see if that limb can hold up against some solid dwarven weight.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunting the Crimson Halls

by Brian Wood Feb 18th 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

The Crimson Halls of Icecrown Citadel contains the kind of horrors that the Plagueworks could only hint at. The Crimson Halls is where all the emo vampire RPing blood elves went to die... and then came back!

True story, and a complete tangent: a friend of mine, in her 30s, mother of two, recently admitted to me that her shameful, guilty pleasure is reading the Twilight books (which, I gather, are like Anne Rice 90210 for teenagers). She says the books are awful and everything you'd fear, but she can't stop reading them. Then she saw a Twilight movie was horrified to see -- to really see with her own eyes -- that these hunky guys of literary lust were like 17 years old. Sure, they were in the books too, but apparently when reading she had unconsciously changed them to a more age-appropriate hunky mental image and suddenly felt very creepy seeing these kids on the screen. It's one vast landscape of pain, being old.

Join me after the cut as we veer back on topic and take a look at the hunter tips and tricks for the Crimson Halls, from Blood Princes to Blood Queens, including how we can take a break from kiting and become tanks!

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Extreme soloing

by Brian Wood Feb 15th 2010 at 3:00PM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

We hunters are basically an entire party unto ourselves. Our pet is the tank, we're the DPS, and we can split the healing duties between hunter and pet. By focusing on the right talents and gear and glyphs, hunters and pets can be a formidable soloing team, taking on content that was never meant to be done alone. We can solo our way from Molten Core straight through to even Lich King 5-mans.

Soloing content meant for groups or raids comes from the same impulse behind climbing a mountain: we do it because it's there. We do it for the challenge, the excitement, for the glory for the hunter class. And if that isn't enough for you, there's also the allure of legendary items like Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, or rare mount drops like the Swift Zulian Tiger, Midnight, and the Swift White Hawkstrider.

Join me after the cut as we take a look at exactly how you can topple Molen Core to Violet Hold on your own, how you can heal your pet for thousands of heals per second, and become the envy of your guild mates. There's nothing quite as satisfying as polishing off Ragnaros and hearing your friends bemoan how horribly broken you are.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Can Beast Mastery raid?

by Brian Wood Feb 11th 2010 at 11:00AM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

Beast Mastery is the beloved hunter spec with the strongest and most protective of followers. While a BM hunter was a rare thing to find back in vanilla, BM saw a terrific boost throughout Burning Crusade and the beginning of Wrath of the Lich King. For years BM enjoyed the incredibly rare status of being an excellent spec -- if not the best spec -- for soloing, leveling, pvp, and raiding.

Then starting in early Wrath, the BM hunters cowered beneath the shadow of the nerf bat. But even after getting repeatedly beaten like a red-headed gnome, squashed into a wee pet-shaped crater, you still don't have to look far to find a BM hunter defending their viability in raids.

Today we're going to take a hard look at the BM spec. We're going to dismiss the rhetoric of the PUG masses who say "If yer BM yer a noob" and take a look at exactly where BM really is in raid viability. Join me after the cut as we take a look at the numbers and the philosophy behind the BM raider.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Grandpappy Frostheim on death knights

by Brian Wood Feb 8th 2010 at 11:00AM

Scattered Shots is brought to you by Grandpappy Frostheim, who spends his evenings in an Ironforge tavern telling young hunters how much harder things were in his day, when they had to kite mobs up hill, both ways.

All I hear from kids these days is whining about death knights. Whining about how bad they are at tanking in their PUGs or how they can't even do 2k DPS. You hunters these days should be grateful for death knights. You don't know how good you got it, 'cause you have no sense of history!

Let me tell you, back in my day we didn't have death knights. If we saw an undead servant of the Lich King walking around, we shot it on sight. In those days a bullet to the skull was redemption, not the sissy politically correct version you got now. We had redemption piled taller than your head over in the Plaguelands, I can tell you that.

So take a seat, put away your new-fangled dungeon finders and take a break from your crazy barber shop haircuts and let Grandpappy Frostheim tell you how things were back in my day, and why you should be thankful for those death knights.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Skill vs. gear

by Brian Wood Feb 4th 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

The skill vs. gear debate comes up fairly often, whether it's people cursing Gearscore or cursing Recount or cursing their teammates from the Dungeon Finder. And it's not even a debate: across the board everyone agrees that skill is greater than gear. Good DPS comes from skill and that skill far outweighs the impact of gear. Gevlon's guild brought this into the spotlight in October of last year when they did Ulduar in all blues -- including Yogg-Saron.

But here's the thing: every time someone is out-DPSed by the same class the response seems always to be, "Yeah, but he has better gear." I've never seen anyone say, "Yeah, he must be a better player than me." I mean, not once, not ever.

The reason is that in our heart of hearts, we all assume that we're skilled players.

So today we're going to take a look at exactly how much our gear contributes to our DPS, and compare that to raid buffs. We're going to define what we mean by skill, as opposed to mere competence. Join me after the cut for a mix of hard numbers and philosophy and arm yourself for the next skill vs. gear debate that pops up.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Beast Mastery 101

by Brian Wood Feb 1st 2010 at 6:00PM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

When you're looking at stepping into the hunter class for the first time there are three key concepts to keep in mind: guns are finely crafted machines of death while bows are primitive contraptions better suited to butterfly-humpin' hippies; dwarves are solidly-built, better looking, and better able to handle the sweet nectar of life (alcohol) than other races; and finally beast mastery is the ideal entry point into the hunter class.

No spec is as widely useful and easy to learn and master as BM. Today we're going to walk step-by-step through everything you need to know to get started on your BM hunter. Don't worry, they're baby steps. Even the aforementioned butterfly-humpin' night elves will be able to understand.

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunting the Plagueworks in ICC

by Brian Wood Jan 28th 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

It is well known that hideous undead monstrosities concocted by the deranged minions of the Lich King make for excellent target practice. Having rained death throughout the ICC Lower Spire and gathered up all of our rightful hunter loot, our next stop on the way to the Lich King is the Plagueworks. We are given more trash to shower us with Ashen Verdict rep, including the much sought-after Precious's Ribbon (clearly hunter loot) before stepping into the chamber of the grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous undead of yore.

Join me after the cut as we take a look at the hunter tips for defeating the bosses of the Plagueworks. As always, we're going to assume that you're familiar with the boss strategies and will be looking at hunter-specific tips.

Filed under: Hunter, Raiding, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: The misunderstood hunter abilities

by Brian Wood Jan 25th 2010 at 9:00AM

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

We hunters are a misunderstood class in so many ways. Other classes don't understand how our bond with our pets reaches beyond logic and min-maxing. They don't understand that though our class is insanely easy to solo and level with, we are one of the most difficult ranged DPS classes to play well in raids. They don't understand that we're just, well, cooler than them.

But we're not here today to discuss the mental failings of other classes. We are here to discuss some of the hunter abilities most commonly misunderstood by hunters themselves. Sometimes the problem is the convoluted WoW tooltips that seem deliberately designed to confuse readers. Sometimes our abilities have interesting mechanics that aren't reflected in the tooltips at all, and of course sometimes people just plain misread abilities.

Join me after the cut as we take a look at the three abilities most commonly misunderstood by hunters and explain how they really work. Not a week goes by that I don't get at least one email or comment about every one of these abilities.

Filed under: (Hunter) Scattered Shots

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