On Spiders, pet special ability issues and macros

It's exciting times to be playing a hunter there's no doubt about that. As I alluded to a in a recent post I've been running around training some new pets. My choices are a combination of research, analysis and 'zomg cute factor' just so you know *grin*.

I've got Snaggle as my Ferocity pet so I wanted to try out a Cunning and a Tenacity pet. After some reading at the most brilliant pet resource of all Petopia I opted to train a spider as my Cunning pet. My reason was because spiders have the special ability Web and I could foresee this being very useful in PVP against melee classes.

I decided to train one of the spiders that lurk in Terrokar forest since a) the location was convenient and b) I like the skin. After putting the lurve onto my spider and feeding him some Clefthoof Ribs to make him happy I specced him out and played around a bit with killing other spiders to get comfortable with using him. I found myself to be pleased.

Next I hopped over to Ironforge to pick up some glyphs from the Auction House and realised that a couple of fellow guildies were duelling out the front, a warrior and a rogue. Eager to try out spideys Web ability I joined them. I duelled the warrior first and won and then fought him again and lost. Mr Rogue had been observing and was very interested in seeing Web in action so then we duelled. I lost the first one and won the second. Now Mr Rogue is one of the top PVPers in our guild, very skilled so the fact that I managed to beat him was awesome! He however was not very pleased with spidey at all! I was not very pleased to discover the rogue ability Dismantle. We experimented a bit and discovered that when under the effects of The Beast Within it's still possible to be affected by Dismantle. Not happy. Still all in all I was feeling the joy of having a new tool in my PVP arsenal and in honour of the discombobulation Mr Rogue was experiencing trying to find a counter for Web I adopted his name suggestion for spider: Smithers. Hehe.

The main thing though of course is working out how to manually trigger Web. In a PVP situation against more than one player it's going to be pretty useless if the ability is on autocast and spidey uses it on a ranged caster while a warrior is all up in my grill. During these initial duels I had an autocast macro set up to toggle the ability:

/petautocasttoggle Web

But this didn't give me the fine control I was looking for. Someone suggested I modify a warlock pet macro for my own use and this is what I ended up doing. The bonus being that I can use one macro to trigger a special ability for each pet depending which one I'm currently using thus:

/cast [pet:spider] web; [pet:cat] rabid; [pet:bear] swipe

I haven't decided whether it's worth having the cat and bear abilities on manual cast yet. I can see a future where I get yelled at for having Swipe on autocast for bear in a crowd control situation. Rabid I will probably end up working into a macro associated to a shot rotation. Anyway the macro works and that's good. Well it kind of works. I've been grinding elementals up in Nagrand for pet levelling purposes (as well as hopefully some profit) and using the time to experiment with 'on demand' casting of Web. I soon discovered that I would frequently get a 'ability not ready' error when trying to cast it. Huh?

I'm no guru as I've often stated before so it was time to search the interwebs to see what more intelligent people than me are saying. What was puzzling me is that Web is a no cost instant cast so it's not like I needed to make sure Smithers has enough focus before I try and cast it. What then is causing the issue? To Elitist Jerks! I waded through the massively long Hunter WoTLK thread and on page 185 came across this comment:

Hey guys, I've noticed with my crab that while claw is on autocast, it triggers the 1.5s GCD and thus it makes it very hard for me to using pin or roar of sacrifice.

I have noticed however that intervene doesn't have this problem since the pet can intervene while in the GCD of a claw. However, I wish blizzard would do the same with pin and roar of sacrifice as these are all on demand skills.

The way it is currently, I have to turn off claw, cast pin, then turn claw back on. Even though I have a macro to do this, it requires 2 button presses and is kinda inconvenient.

Does anyone have any opinions on this? =P

I know that blizzard removed focus costs from almost all the pet special abilities since people were complaining that due to the focus dump skill, no pet could ever have the energy to perform their special abilities without the hunter first disabling the auto cast. However with the special attacks on the GCD, it is still pretty annoying =P.

What do you guys think?

Aha! So it seems that pet special abilities are using the 1.5 second Global Cool Down. That's not very cool since even with the changes to Autoshoot you're generally spending a lot of time managing the GCD to keep up a steady rotation working in your shots as you need them. Initially I tried inserting /stopcasting in front of my macro but this didn't yeild consistent results. Further research revealed that pet special abilities share the GCD with Bite. So I turned off Bite and ran around killing Basilisks. Result - Web cast everytime I wanted it to. I removed the /stopcasting command from the macro and experimented with firing the macro mid cast of steady shot and no problem. This would seem to indicate that the special ability is tied only to Bite and not the GCD for hunter abilities. No idea if this is actually true though.

Conclusion: At this time the only way to manually cast a pet special ability on demand is to have Bite turned off. Whether this is at the detriment of your DPS is not a question I have the theorycraft skills to answer, but for me, in a PVP situation the ability to control when I cast Web is more important to me than the damage from Bite.

Of course now I need to work out whether I should manually cast Wolverine Bite or just leave it on autocast. Questions, questions, questions! Like I said, these are exciting times! I'm sure I'll have more to report once Smithers is level 70 and I've mixed it up in a BG.

What has your experience been? Got any wisdom to share?

Tales from the battleground

I may never pug a battleground again. Ok I'm lying, I know I am, because I'll want to PVP and no one else will be up for it and I'll keep hoping for one of those stellar moments where the stars align and a pug group forms with no AFKers or idiots but rather with people who know how to play and want to win. Yeah, I'm an idealist I guess.

I do have some positive stories to tell from the warzone of the battlegrounds though, there is hope.

Last Friday night I was part of a group that just roflstomped all over Warsong Gulch (ok so it was a premade of guildies plus some friends, I promise I have a couple of good pug stories too though).

We won 7 games in a row, mostly in around 8 minutes each. After the 7th game we just couldn't seem to get the queue to pop no matter what how long we waited. Horde of the Cyclone battlegroup I apologise to you. Actually no I don't! HAH! And jimihendrix hunter with the /rofl emote? You picked the wrong hunter. There's nothing like having everyone on voice chat to help organise a little personal extra pwnage.

We had so much fun as a premade we went back and did it all again on Sunday. Good times. Although it sadly got a little boring after a while.

How about a tale or two of triumph in the face of adversity? After a really disappointing 'losing attitude' pug WSG the next one I joined I immediately asked if there were players present who wanted to win. I got a couple of affirmative responses and then a pally piped up: "What are your instructions then oh fearless leader?" (or something along those lines). 'Well crap' I thought, 'You've put your big huntardy foot in it now Jez, better talk fast or forever accept the label of scrub'. So I did: "The main plan is communicate, call all incs and exits, guard your carrier, set picks, control mid, get our flag back. Mostly just communicate." I wasn't very hopeful but zomg people DID communicate and would you belive it - we won! That was a very satisfying feeling.

Then there was that Eye of the Storm incident. Emelin and I were grouped up to PVP together so barely a premade but when thanking someone for a buff I realised that I was Battle Leader. Eeep. Um. Ok, might as well say.. something.. no one else is. So I gave some basic instruction: Grab DR and MT everyone else rush FR. And people actually followed my lead and we captured 3 nodes! I did my 'call incs early' thing and spent most of the battle guarding a node and calling out instructions re where to defend and where to attack. As a hunter I generally end up guarding nodes in battlegrounds like Arathi and EoS so if I've got the eyeline I tend to do a lot of communicating about enemy movements anyway. Well and tell people to fight on nodes not roads. But yeah we won that EoS too!

I don't really like being in the 'leadership spotlight' so to speak in WoW. I prefer the role of support. But it just goes to show that being the one to stand up and give some direction and encourage communication can actually make a difference. I don't think we won those battlegrounds because of me, but I do think that by communicating early a desire to win and offering a strategy it maybe boosted all the other jaded people like me sick of losing attitude pugs into bringing their game faces and doing their best to win instead of just expecting to lose and not bothering to try that hard. A positive winning attitude really does help. Who knew.

Pet, growl & PVP

So I've had this question rattling around in my brain lately: should I turn off Growl on my kitty in PVP? I'm reasoning yes since Growl uses 15 focus which could be more usefully allocated to Claw and therefore have been running BGs and Arenas with it turned off. The only time I am using Growl is when soloing. I thought I would do a little research to find out if I'm not being a complete noobtard and actually found something intelligent on the official Blizz forums (I know, I know, crazy right). A poster in the thread in question also provides a handy tip which I had never thought of:

Growl works against other pets in PVP.

You can manually trigger Growl to force another pet to attack yours. Then you can send the pet to attack another enemy player. That will drag the enemy pet away from you until the enemy hunter or warlock tells it to attack you again.

It can save you from a lot of damage if the enemy hunter/warlock isn't paying attention.

I've been meaning to set up a growl macro for, well, ages and here is an excellent incentive to do so, not disregarding squishie saving requirements in PVE. So, what should the macro look like? Time for more research! The macro I like the look of best is one in the comments of a BRK post which looks like this:

/petautocastoff [nomodifier] Growl
/petautocaston [modifier:Shift] Growl

Time to set one up methinks.

Maybe also time to set up a macro to turn on Aspect of the Monkey and cast Wingclip for those unfortunately unavoidable melee moments too.

Anyone able to recommend any good PVP specific macros?

What's your favourite class to kill in PVP?

Inspired by a recent post from Euripedes at CriticalQQ and some idle chatter in the BA chatroom I bring you this important question.

Thinking about it I have a hard time choosing a particular class that I like to kill the most. I pretty much enjoy squishing anyone on the opposing team but if forced to give particulars I would say:

Rogues!
After many many many occasions of being ganked by rogues there is something really satisfying about escaping their stun and unleashing a little DPS hell on them.

Paladins
*Aimed shot* heal through that bizatch! Paladins are fun because they are so full of plate so it takes a while to wear them down. Oooh how bought a serve of viper sting with that? Admittedly I do better against pallys when they are occupied with healing their team mates.

Warlocks
Say hello to my 'IWinLOL' button. Gotta take these guys down fast and hope they aren't specced affliction and so can't load up a bunch of instant dots with the result that your victory dance over their corpse is cut short by your own death.

Warriors
Damn warriors and their damn charge and their damn mortal strike. Combinations of frost traps, concuss, intimidation and a lot of pewpew and kiting can take these guys out with some effort. I think I have more fun cycloning them on Seph though.

Hunters
There is a definite thrill in going up against your own class and seeing who comes out best. I am always amused by hunters that neglect to feign death to dislodge the pet gnawing on their kneecaps, or of course throwing down a freezing trap to take the pet out of action.

There are also situational kills that I particularly enjoy that don't relate to a specific class, such as for example, killing the flag carrier in Warsong Gulch and returning the flag, that's a good buzz. Or killing someone trying to cap a node in Arathi Basin or a tower in Alterac Valley. Hmmm my good time kills definitely seem to be defense related.

And oh oh oh!!!! In a big time first for Jezrael I actually successfully capped the flag in WSG the other day. That was super thrilling - particularly because I generally play defense in PVP and in WSG in particular am usually all about controlling mid and/or chasing the FC down and retrieving the flag. On this particular occasion I'd just finished a flag retrieval all the way to the horde flag room and unfortunately the horde flag also got returned around the same time. There were no horde in the room when the flag spawned so I figured 'carpe diem' and grabbed the flag. Heading down tunnel and hoping boots were up I encountered a couple of alliance players (a shaman and druid if I recall correctly) who helped me escort the flag back to our base. By then our flag had been picked up again so I headed to the roof. It was a funny feeling laying traps and flares to protect myself. There were a couple of horde in the flag room itself but when our flag was returned and the call went out to cap I was able to jump down almost right on top of the flag and Wooohooo! Definitely a game highlight for me :)

So spill the beans, who do you enjoy killing the most?

PVP as a feral druid, stop laughing!

It took me some time to work out how to pvp on Jezrael, what abilities to bring into play, how to perform a role appropriate to the abilities of the hunter class. I'm pretty confident when I pvp now on my huntress although I'm by no means uber. With Sephiroh I'm experiencing that learning curve once again. A combination of sucktastic gear (for pvp anyway) and uncertainty about what I can best bring to the fray leaves me feeling pretty much next to useless a lot of the time.

After some fairly intensive bouts in various BGs I'm starting to get it together though and tonight I was able to pick up my first piece of PVP gear: the Merciless Gladiator's Kodohide Legguards.

But wait, you're thinking, you're feral aren't you? Yes, yes I am and I'm going to confess that I don't respec for bgs and hope and pray that Megan doesn't appear and smite me for bad form.
/cower

What I have discovered so far is that feral and BGs are not a grand love affair - unless of course tanking Drek or Galv in AV is on the cards. Therefore whilst in PVE land I'm having good times tanking or off tanking around the place I am getting my healy kicks in BGs. After playing a hunter for so long I get a kick out of buffing everyone as well as keeping people alive. Even though I'm feral I'm also in possession of a pretty decent healy set and am sitting at just under 14k healing with around 10k mana. I guess that's one good side of druids being such a gear dependent class - I can be feral and still push out some decent heals. The most annoying thing currently is that I'm just too squishy in mostly PVE gear - but that will change as I get more honour and thus more gear. Naturally the first thing I grabbed was my trinket with the 2min cd.

I've found different BGs require different behaviours but consistent to all of them is me running around healing people, entangling warriors and rogues and throwing cyclones on casters and especially healers. One thing that I'm needing to finesse is making sure I don't throw a cyclone on a player who is actually just about to get smacked down and instead making sure I am taking care of the ones who aren't receiving any special *love* from my colleagues.

I've found WSG to be the hardest BG for me by far to date. I'm not confident (or geared) enough to run the flag and am finding it challenging to work out what I'm most useful doing.

Some of my favourite moments in BGs on Seph so far:

In AV jumping from healer to tanky gear and tanking Drek, love that flexibility. Also healing a rogue consistently as we pushed the RH and having him be very grateful and trading me a stack of mage food as thanks.

In WSG, keeping the flag carrier alive so that we could cap and on the other hand being a sneaky kitty and keeping a horde FC pounced and maimed long enough for back up to arrive. Lucky it arrived quickly cos stun locking ain't a kitty ability.

In AB: sneaky node capping and also keeping the melee alive defending nodes.

All said and done in BGs the flexibity of the druid class really gets to shine. As I get better gear and am harder to kill I look forward to being more and more useful. Maybe I'll even give arena a shot. Maybe.

A few of my favourite things

Some of you were possibly tortured with The Sound of Music as children and may remember the tune for this little ditty


Serpent on rogues and viper on healers,
throwing a flare on those sneaky flag stealers.
Kiting those warriors and keeping up stings,
these are a few of my favourite things.

Snake laden traps and daze-dealing shots,
firing an Aimed to decrease all of those hots.
Keeping ahead of those Mortal Strike swings,
these are a few of my favourite things

Angry red Sooty all up in your grill,
fear doesn't work, so swallow that pill.
Fail to escape as my DPS sings,
These are a few of my favourite things

When the death coils, when the stun locks,
when I'm failing to kill.
I simply remember my favourite things,
and then I still feel the thrill

Fighting on nodes, defending those towers,
trapping and flaring for what seems like hours.
Thanking the pally for buffing with kings,
these are a few of my favourite things

Cookies from locks and tables from mages,
saving a healer from a warrior who rages.
Tracking the flag thief and using map pings,
these are a few of my favourite things

Destroying your totems and gimping your damage,
Sooty and I are on a battleground rampage.
Enjoying the rush that a critical shot brings,
these are a few of my favourite things

When the death coils, when the stun locks,
when I'm failing to kill.
I simply remember my favourite things,
and then I still feel the thrill

Why Warsong Gulch is the Shiznit for hunters

Before I wax lyrical about WSG and why it roxxors for hunters I first want to get all excited about my newest piece of PVP gear: the Gladiator's Chain Helm. I finally amassed enough honour this Tuesday just gone and decided to take the plunge for the helm since it gave me the opportunity to add itemisation with the 2 gem slots and purchase a glyph rather than needing to gather mats for either an enchant or leg armour. I decided to go for the Enigmatic Skyfire Diamond for the meta slot mainly because out of all the hunter suitable meta gems I had the right 'other gem' requirements in my current PVP gear set up and a Shifting Nightseye for the red slot since it has stamina plus agility. I also shimmied on over to the friendly Cenarion Expedition quartermaster in Zangamarsh to pick up a Glyph of Ferocity to slap on my new shiny. So all in all I'm very happy and my resilience is now 113 which although not at all good is definitely a step in the right direction.

So on to what I intend to be the meat of this post. One night this week just gone we were supposed to run Kara, having recently started up an Aussie week night run now that we have enough Aussies in the guild. Unfortunately we didn't have enough people to do the run so we did a quick 'attunement' run of SV, Arc and BM to key up an alt of one of the guildies and then set up a premade to run the PVP daily Warsong Gulch.

Now I confess I used to hate, loathe and outright detest WSG as a battleground. This was before I understood the strategy and how to use my class to good effect though. Now my opinion is thoroughly changed, in fact I believe that WSG is a BG which really allows the hunter class to shine.

Game objective
Capture the flag - a battlefield objective known well by anyone who has played multi-player FPS type games. One side tries to capture the flag of the opposing side and return it to their base whilst making sure that the other side doesn't capture their flag and do same. You can only capture the opposing teams flag if your flag is at it's base. A simple enough premise yes but not always simple to execute. Hunters with our particular skills are able to add a lot of value with this kind of game objective.

Tracking

Using track humans and track beasts it's possible to provide important information about the opposite factions movements. It's important to continually monitor the movements of the opposite team. See a druid heading tunnel toward the flag room? Throw up beast tracking and watch to see which exit route they take to get across the mid. The earlier you can announce to your team which way they are trying to go the better your chances of taking them down and recapturing the flag. I should note here that with patch 2.4 allowing anyone to track the flag carrier after 45 seconds(I think and unless anything changes which is wont to happen when a patch is still on the PTRs) this will make hunter tracking abilities not quite as critical. Still useful though - 45 seconds until you can track is still a long time in a BG.

Trapping
Trapping is great in any battleground and WSG is no exception. Guarding your flag carrier? Head up to the roof and drop freezing traps and flares at the only entrance to the roof. Know which way the opposing teams flag carrier is heading? Drop a freezing trap to slow them down long enough for the defense team to arrive and start taking them down. Inthe mid embroiled in defense? Use freezing or snake traps to assist the other classes in controlling and containing the attack. Which brings me to an important point which applies to all PVP situations.

Contain and control
Every class has skills and abilities which are used to control the action and a hunter is no exception. Whether on offense or defense (and a hunter can do both very successfully) the aim is to control and contain the encounter. From my perspective this means keeping your opponents in one place long enough to take them down. Especially the flag carrier.

I personally tend to prefer playing defense in WSG so here's an example of what I see as a good use of hunter abilities. That druid heading tunnel to grab our flag that I mentioned above? Ok, he's (or she's, but I'm gonna stick with he) exited via our GY and is heading down the that side of the mid avoiding all the shenanigans going on in the centre. Since I spotted him going in I've got track beasts up because I know he'll be in travel form when trying to return to his base. I see him going GY announce it in vent/bg chat and race over having mounted up as soon as I saw him head up the tunnel. No point chasing him into our flag room since he will be more vulnerable in mid and the defense team will be able to get there quicker. So I get in range and dismounting on the run immediately send in Sooty with Intimidation to stun and slow him. I then follow up with Concussive shot to slow him further. With Sooty nibbling at his kneecaps he's forced to shift to caster form and self-heal which slows him down further. I'll get in front and drop a freezing trap and if I get within melee range while doing this I'll wingclip him too. Everything I'm doing is designed to slow him down so that the defense team can arrive and start making druid chop-suey. That said, this also means there is time for the opposing team to send in support. Ok that's fine, keeping up as many slowing effects as possible on the flag carrier I'll also be looking to a) take out any healer support he may have and b) provide support to the defense team - like a rogue beating on the frost mage or our healer and etc. This is where I'll go TBW since now there is danger of CC from the opposing team and start using abilities like viper sting to mana drain healers and casters and multi-shot to cause as much damage as possible. RAWR.

See the other important thing in any battleground apart from controlling the action is supporting your team. So often in BGs I will see this 'everyone for themselves' mentality. Doesn't work, sorry. You heal me I can do more damage and exert more control. I support you as a healer when getting attacked and you'll stay alive longer to provide heals. When everyone plays for themselves it becomes incredibly easy for the other side to pick you off and then you can never gain momentum as a group because you are in a constant round of rez, run back to action by yourself, die again, rinse and repeat. I see this particular mistake made frequently in the other 'node controlling objective' BGs.

So there you go, my opinion of why WSG is a great BG for hunters as a pretty new PVPer. I'd be interested to know, did I miss some other useful abilities or do you think this kind of approach is totally wrong? What are your experiences in WSG or any BG? Play a different class? Tell me how you deal with hunters so I know to try and avoid/control it hehe ;)

Arena awesomeness

Thanks to Kotaro's blog Lone Bowslinger *waves* I've found the site that I was looking for but didn't know existed. SK Gaming has a wealth of information on the top arena teams - the specs, the class composition and etc. I'll be spending a bit of time over there doing some research that's for sure and it's definitely getting added to my resources sidebar!

Speaking of arenas - one of my team has started using a mod called Control Arena which from what I know so far sounds awesome. I'm going to be trying out this mod asap and will report back on how I find it.

While the title to this post is 'Arena Awesomeness" I cannot with any honesty state that this is applicable to any of the teams I am currently in >.>

I am currently a member of the following teams:

2v2 BBQ Drop Bears
3v3 Drunken Beachcombers
5v5 Drunken Aussies

Anyone notice a theme or two there? ;)

Across all teams the ratings hover in the 1450 - 1590 range. Not disgusting but not really any good either. Then again quite of few of the team are still building up our PVP gear and not speccing for PVP specifically so I'm not feeling too badly about it.

I'll post some more soon on how we are going specifically.

BG QQ

Yah it's about time I let loose with the rant in this here blog non? And I can tell you that I'm quite the feisty huntard when I get my rant on.

(Emelin is nodding fervently in the background)

The thing in WoW that makes me rantier than just about anything even crap instances PUGs?

Battlegrounds.

Seems like the Wowosphere (see that? I just made that up whoo!) is awash with postings about AB weekend or arenas or PVP in general recently. Or maybe it's that whole being more attuned thing I wrote about before.

So anyway back in December Megan over at Out of Mana wrote a post on Accountability in BG and I was thinking about that this weekend as I spent some time in AB. Now Megan is a way more of an uber PVPer than me that's for sure. I would qualify as one of the people who make a BG 9vs10 in her view with my lousy resilience and HP. That said though I have my own particular annoyances in BGs without factoring in HP and resilience.

I'm obviously talking about PUG BGs of course.

I get really annoyed when what I assume are testosterone fueled 15 year old boys (my apologies if you happen to be a 15 year old boy reading this for the blatant generalisation) who spend 5 mins in the BG before getting all pissy and yelling (ie all caps) in BG chat about how alliance are such losers and WTF nubs and so on. News flash! This doesn't help!

I am formulating a theory that Alliance are so used to sucking/having morons in the BG with them that often when they enter a BG it is with this defeatist attitude already in play. No point saying anything, no point trying to get some teamwork going because it always falls apart.

I have a case study (hahaha I sound like I'm at work...) to illustrate this, but with a positive outcome. I was running a WSG recently. At first things weren't going so great. We capped once but then seemed to be stuck in a stand off with the Horde. It started getting a bit angsty in bg chat but then, miracle of miracles, people started communicating. Providing info about where the Ally flag was or which way our flag bearer would be coming. All of sudden things started to come together and we capped again. It was a long battle but eventually we capped again. And why did we win - because people started talking and working together. It was really quite a beautiful thing to see unfold. It was like there was this change in attitude that you could literally feel... this sense of 'we can win'.

I've been in BGs before where everyone did their jobs and it was smooth and beautiful and we won and there was no really talking required. This could also be because we lucked out with crappy Horde opponents.

But this one WSG will always be memorable because it was a long hard fight where we succeeded by working as a team.

Another part of my theory is that no one wants to stand up and take the lead. You might have seen it in instances where no one really wants to mark. I think it's much worse in BGs. I mean there you are with a group of strangers and you don't really want to push yourself forward in case everyone tells you to stfu scrub. Well at least that's been how I've felt in the past. Now that I'm getting a bit more experienced with the BGs I'll speak up a little more. I'm leery of herding cats though. I'll make a comment like say 'I'm going LM' when AB starts and hope that someone follows me.

In fact last night was one of those poetry in motion BGs where everything seems to hang together because people know what to do. I capped the LM and stood there guarding it. I'm so hot keyying flare and /cast frost trap because that's all I did for a good while. Well I did mix it up with a couple of snake traps. Anyway, this rogue tries to gank me as I stand on the flag (fight on the flag always fight on the flag) and a) I spot him because of my flare and b) he gets ice-trapped giving me time to get to range, smack my LOL-I-WIN button, and start firing. Then I notice something.... I'm bubbled. WTF?? Rogue dead I look around and hiding up in the lumber mill bit is a priest.

Awesome!

/cheer

The priest and I kept that node safe for almost the entire BG until the Horde decided to do a bit of a zerg on it (we had them 4 capped by this time) and we both bit the dust. It's just so great when you get a good healer in a BG and even better when they stick with you as you unleash DPS death so

/bow
/thank

I really appreciate it.

Hmm for a post that was supposed to be pretty ranty I seem to have got all positive and affirmative and stuff. Dang.


Credit where credit is due: The awesome artwork in the picture above is via Wyndforge. I'm totally unsure of their rules about using the work since I'm at work and about to run out the door to get home to log in (whee!) so didn't read up. I promise to do so when I get home though!

A Conundrum: PVP or PVE

It was only a few days ago that I posted about my PVP nubness. Since that time I've been reading up on all the PVP goodness I can at informative blogs like Out of Mana and Shifttusk does PVP. What I have learnt is great but also has me facing a conundrum.

Unlike my "icky" offsider Emelin I am not wont to change my spec everytime the wind changes direction. I've got my 41/20/0 BM raiding build going on and I likes it. Trouble is, from all I've read, and based on my experience to date (little that there is) this build is not going to serve me all that well in arenas. Mainly due to the lack of burst damage and control. BM as we all know is a great raiding spec with it's MQoSDPS, but in Arena you don't have time to get that sustained thing going on. Instead you want to be controlling the action as much as possible with abilities like scatter shot and silencing shot. The Beast Within is awesome but it can mean that your opportunity to win is based mainly on that one 18 second burst of 'I win Lawl!" rather than an arsenal of abilities.

So the question confronting me is: should I respec? Do I want to have to respec every week so that I can both PVP AND raid effectively. Truth is, not really. Reason: I am still trying to save up the gold for my epic riding skill. I know that I could dedicate myself to farming the gold up but that introduces the whole fun equation I've mentioned previously. farming != fun in my world.

Sounds like it's time for some decision making eh?

Ah but wait. There is also another issue - my resilience is truly pathetic. Like awesomely so. I just purchased my Gladiator's Chain Spaulders last night. I skipped on the Gladiator's Chain Gauntlets because the next thing I will be able to afford with Arena points will be the S3 Vengeful Gladiator's Chain Gauntlets and I'm going to try and balance S1 honour purchased items with the S3 gear as much as I can based on increasing my resilience as much as possible. My health points are also really low for an arena environment too being just under 8k. There's the gem thing too. Although I'm a JC I don't have any resilience recipes. So I will need to buy the gems or farm Halaa tokens for the Sublime Mystic Dawnstone.There's that spending my epic riding skill savings thing again. I also need to investigate enchants and find out what the best faction shoulder enchant is for my new shoulders.

What this is all adding up to is a lot of effort. Did I mention I'm a lazy lazy hunter? I also still need to get the mats for the Nethercleft Leg Armour for my T4 legs.

Methinks I will first work on getting better PvP gear through honour and then look at changing up my spec to allow me to access the S3 arena gear.

I guess the question I ultimately have to answer is: Am I willing to put in the game play time to allow me to do both PVP and raiding successfully or do I decide to do one well and the other not so well.

Time will tell I guess.

PVP nub + tangents galore.

You know how you'll hear a word somewhere and then suddenly find yourself noticing that word a lot more? Or a song or whatever? Well lately PVP has been that song for me.

I'm no leet PVPer by any stretch of the imagination so let's just get that establishment of credentials (or lack thereof) out of the way up front. I do however really enjoy it. There's nothing that gets my adrenalin going quite as much as testing myself against a human foe.

Raiding, sure I like it a lot. I want the shiny purples yes but it's the team work aspect I enjoy the most.

In fact...
/wailing sirens
WARNING: TANGENT ALERT!!
/end wailing sirens

My intial objections to playing WoW back when I was a pirate-head was that WoW was

1. A level grind
2. Based on gear accquired through level grinding rather than skill per se (yes I was wrong there is a lot of skill but there is still the level thing)

which differed significantly from Pirates where your 'leetness' factor was based purely on your skill at the different puzzles and navigating as opposed to having killed x/y annoying screech making spiders ad nauseum to get to the level cap and the fat lewtz. Remember I hadn't really played at this stage.

So I've played for, well, long enough to have a considered opinion I think, and the point I am laboriously trying to make is that raiding is really ultimately learning a script. Let me expand on that by a comparison to pirates. No wait let me not because that is a post topic all of it's own. Let's just leave it for now at: raid - script and therefore markedly different from PVP.

Which is, no doubt, at the root of the tension in WoW between the PVEers and the PVPers (there was this tension in Pirates too.. but that was more about the carebear factor). I've never thought about it before but maybe I'm a PVP style player at heart who just hasn't realised it yet? (And is pretty damn noobish about PVP lest we forget).

It's amazing what a few well timed comments can do to educate you though. And this is where we heave this massively derailed post back on track.

So PVP yeah. I did a bunch of PVPing in the last month or so before TBC came out, mainly because there was no point running instances/raids for gear that would shortly become redundant. I don't think I was very good at it though. I was pretty huntardy at that time too but more on this another time. At any rate in the last month I have a renewed interest in PVP and also arenas. It seems there has been a massive jump in PVP interest generally in WoW although I'm not really sure why. I can only speak about myself and I think the influx of some new players into the guild who are into PVP has piqued my interest. Also the gear is pretty sweet!! Maybe it's the realisation of raiders that you can get good as, or better gear, via PVP more easily than lots of raiding and DKP and etc. Then there's the whole 'welfare epics' thing which people have even written (hilarious) songs about.

I don't really care if I'm on Welfare. I play to have fun and that includes both PVE and PVP.

So I'm no BRK with a shizload of PVP kills under my belt (well they were pre TBC so do they even count? hehe) but I've got some comments on PVPing as a hunter too. More about play style than gear or talent spec though. I'm still working out the gear/spec thing.

See your shots are completely different in PVP. In a raiding or even general PVE situation as a BM you're probably going to be doing something similiar to a 1:1 shot rotation of auto shot, steady shot throwing in some specials like arcane, multi on cool down and stings when needing to be refreshed, and of course those lovely Kill Commands every time they proc.

In PVP you'll be loving concussive shot, arcane shot, stings (to a lesser extent) and aimed shot. And of course, my favourite - multishot. TBW is your best friend and Intimidation is also really useful for the 3 second stun (thanks for the tip on that one Eszti!). Kill Command is just as wonderful in PVP as it is in PVE too, but if you're using 'the' hunter macro you're going to have to get used to executing the action yourself rather than letting the macro do it for you.

See the way I see it, in PVP the hunterly role is to slow up your target enough that a) they can't run out of range or into your dead zone and b) can't get off a cast (in the case of casters) so that you and your pet can chew them up as rapidly as possible.

I don't have a particular preference for who I fight against in a BG - mostly it's circumstantial anyway.

Kiting ability is definitely a must. It has given me great pleasure to have successfully kited an annoying rogue or warrior while Sooty chews them up. Ditto on jump shots - being able to kite and keep firing off shots is important - concussive shot to slow em then throw in an arcane once you get a bit more range again is nice.

Feign death. I only just learned this myself through a few arena encounters with other hunters - FD is really useful to make whatever is attacking you lose focus. I'm still working on remembering to use this ability in PVP but it is definitely a useful one.

Traps. Really are a hunters best friend. Depending on the situation frost, freezing and snake are all great options. In a BG like WSG I'll use a frost trap for it's slowing purposes whereas in Arenas the freezing trap is great. I always drop a freezing trap as my first move in an arena match. Either it will stop someone attacking me OR it can be used by my squishier team mates to kite someone attacking them into it.

Hot-keys. Reaction time and attention to the action are extremely important in PVP. Clicking is favoured by some but precious seconds are lost while you mouse over to that particular icon. Also clickers generally use the WASD keys or similiar to move and this means not using the camera to the best advantage.

So there's my take on PVP as a hunter thus far.

As far as speccing for PVP - well I know that there are talents more suited to PVP in the various hunter trees but personally I am not taking my PVP seriously enough to respec all the time (unlike some of my fellow guildies!). Maybe that will change, we'll see.

As I learn more through experience and research I'll share here.