RL update and to hit

Okay, so RL stuff....

I am scheduled for surgery next week. I will be spending several days in the hospital, and so there will not be any blog posts for a bit. I have one in the pipe, and I will try to get another done (about children's week pets or my second week in Naxx, or something else).

Now, back to Wow.
Part of the fun/evil of gearing up is dealing with stats. Your primary as a hunter is to hit. Unless you are at hit cap, there is no sense worrying about any other stat. After all, to hit controls whether you miss bosses or hit them, and if you're missing, all the attack power and agility in the world will not save your dps.

Now, Naxx was ridiculously good to me last week. Insanely good. I got... a bow, 3 pieces of tier 8 (shoulders, head, and pants) a shiny necklace, a rogue dagger (we didn't have any rogues or other hunters), and a quest item. Now, if you check my current armory, I don't have my shiny head and shoulders equipped. Why?

To hit. My shoulders and head piece contribute around 80 points to my to hit. As much damage as those shiny tier pieces would do, and as much as I want to replace my green helmet, I can't do it.

So, what can I do? Well, there is a nice to hit trinket from Heroic Nexus (Sphere of Red Dragon's Blood) and there are enchants. There are also a pair of shiny rings that hopefully your neighborhood jewelcrafter will be willing to make...
The Ring of Northern Tears
The Ring of Scarlet Shadows. There's also some rep gear options (I'm using the walrus people polearm) but I kinda stink at remembering to do dailies.

Now, the first ring has some spellpower on it, but it also has a socket and crit. Plus they're both crafted, the mats aren't that bad, and it's something you can very easily do as a new 80. Plus, rings are easy to switch in and out. Pick up a shiny piece of awesome that drops your to hit below cap? Switch in one of these two rings (and resocket gems if needed) and you should be good to go. Added bonus, the mats aren't that bad. On my bank toon I had 160g, and I still have about 80 after getting the mats.

Oh, and hit cap with 3/3 in Focused aim is 163.90, and for no points in Focused Aim it's 262.24. Your pet gets your to hit rounded down. My numbers come from Less QQ, more Pew-pew
Personally, I took the points in Focused Aim so I didn't have to try to get to 263. 164 is much easier to reach, but I have no idea how much dps I may have sacrificed by those 3 talent points, nor do I care. I want my dps to be good, but as long as I am good enough that I don't hurt the raid, I'm happy. After all, for me it is just a game. A fun, engrossing, and wildly entertaining game, yes, but there is a limit to how much stress I am willing to deal with for a game. Atm, if I get over 2k dps I will be insanely happy.

Noblegarden

I dislike this holiday. Mostly because I hate being in direct competition with other players for limited resources. This would be why I do the cooking quests as early in the morning as I can. And with this holiday, the eggs will always be camped. Grr. Azure Watch did seem to be the best place to go, and the back of the town from the forge to the tent is a nice path with lots of eggs, some that are easy to miss if you don't know the spawn points.

But, that said, it's an easy title to get (took me 4 hours) and is one that even the lowbies can achieve (if they don't mind dying in Un'Goro). I like being the Noble, and I would probably like this holiday more if it didn't seem to bring out the worst in people. I saw people do some jerky stuff today (like someone who already had the title trying to steal my spot while I was in it), and I saw some awesome stuff (ty to the nice orc warrior who went afk in Dal in an obvious space and to the undead warlock who waited for my cooldown to end so I could get the bunny ears achievement).

MM in raids without replenishment, tips and tricks

If you're like me, you spend most of your time without replenishment. Whether it's soloing quests for cash (and pet leveling), running 5 mans, or raiding, mana management as MM is a challenge. Especially when your tanks are go go go and the healers lose mana slower than you.
So, in my quest to improve dps this week, I discovered a few things and figured I'd share with you.

1. Viper Sting. Remember that one, the one that drains mana and only seems to get used in pvp (unless you're me and didn't even remember you had it till you were reminded)? Well, guess what, it works just as well on bosses with mana and if you keep it rolling on a boss, you will not run oom. Me, I switch between viper and serpent (serpent, chimera, viper, rest of shot rotation, serpent as chimera's about to come off cooldown, chimera, viper....) It means I don't lose the nice chunk of damage chimera+serpent gives me.

2. If you are not actively shooting something, you should be in aspect of the viper unless your mana pool is full. This includes the running around bits of a fight.

3. Rapid recuperation. It's not quite as nice as it used to be (grumble, Blizzard fixed bug, grumble) but it's still nice. In any boss fight, wait a bit till you hit Rapid Fire (I wait till I'm at about 70% mana). Enjoy. Then hit Readiness and repeat. If the fight is going quickly, wait till kill shot is available. Then you get two kill shots and two rapid fires. Nifty.

4. Aspect of the viper. Eventually you're going to have to. First, always always always switch to hawk/dragonhawk to sting and to use Chimera. You don't want to gimp your number 1 damaging shot. Second, you can either just steady shot your heart out or keep to your rotation. It'll depend on the fight, but you want to keep shooting. Autoshot alone's going to take quite a while to refill your pool.

The standard build atm for marksmen is 7/57/7. It does not include efficiency because, well, it's not a huge damage talent, is it? But for me, efficiency is a must. I am not a mage, I should not have to sit and drink after every pull. So, I removed go for the throat and improved steady shot, and used those 5 points to max efficiency. And here's the the build and please ignore the glyph of rapid fire. I haven't been able to get my hands on a kill shot glyph.

Soloing old content because it's there

I have dualspeced BM for old dungeon running. I haven't gotten much of a chance to do it (because figuring out end game loot is complicated and um, the loot gods love me this week), but I figured I would share the resources I've found. And if I ever find good video walkthroughs, I'll be sure to let you guys know. There are great wotlk videos over at tank spot, and your group will be impressed if you have some clue as to strategy your first time in.

That's my current BM spec. I mostly just took talents that looked good, so take it with a grain of salt. I'm currently using my trusty warp stalker Boo, because I love him. I'm not glyphed yet, but I know I'll be looking for mend pet, feign death, and mending.

This might be better with this as a tenacity pet spec.

Any tenacity pet will work for easier content. If you want to solo heroic Magister's terrace or Onyxia or AQ 40 you may need to do some careful thinking (and gear selection). A turtle's armor bonus would come in very handy for that, especially if you're needing to do the complicated pet tanking (aka passing off aggro between you and your pet). I have never done complicated pet tanking, but as I understand it, you pull aggro off the pet, use deterance, then misdirect back onto the pet. That's a bit more than I'm willing to handle atm, but it apparently works quite well.

Your gear selection also becomes important. If you know that you're going to be facing a ton of fire damage, fire resist gear. I generally equip my alchemist's stone trinket because of the extra stamina it gives me. And of course, bandages, potions, and buff food are all really useful things to have. I don't hit a dungeon without them, personally.

Probably the best thing you can do is hit wowwiki or wowhead and read up on the dungeon you're planning to go into ahead of time. Make sure you know what types of damage you're likely to run into, and have some vague sense of boss strategy.

Elitist Jerks has a really useful thread on this subject, complete with boss strategies and gear suggestions. Me, I may try to convince the holy priest (and mount and pet collector) that she and I should duo things I haven't seen before. Say the raid with the red tiger and the raptor mounts, for example.

Oh, and while I'm thinking about it....
If you are like me and fail at pet management, grab a wolf. There's some lvl 80s in the Storm Peaks, and furious howl goes off even in passive. So even if your pet is glued to your side, they're still giving you a nice buff. Last night my dps increase from that completely offset the loss of pet damage.

The exciting end-game (or what I've been doing since I hit 80)

I've been running heroics at a mad-cap pace. I hooked up with an AWESOME tank and he's been helping me gear up. In that process I have learned a few things...
1. My reflexes stink.
2. I need to figure out keybindings. Right now I use a combo of clicking and keys and it isn't fast enough. I've already rebound my shots to 1-7 and am working on hitting them. I think I need to reorganize them, though. Sigh.
3. My dps in groups without replenishment is MASSIVE suck. MM is still mana-intensive, even with all the efficiency talents.
4. Focused aim is so worth it. I'm now hitcapped (168 with 3/3 focused aim), and I have no enchants or gems. Once I get enchanted I can replace the green ring with spellpower (and quite a bit of to hit which is why I have it). Yay.
5. I need to read more EJ. Lots more. So far today I've discovered 2 things I need to start doing (using readiness and switching aspects to fire chimera)

And I've also...
soloed Underbog (yay for dualspecs)
soloed Strat (I want the mount)
got a shiny new mount...

and ran into a really annoying bug. I'd like my blessing of wisdom to stay on for more than a minute, please.

DONE!

Now on to the rep grind. And Loremaster. Getting the achievement in each zone before I hit the next (except Grizzly Hills because Escape from Silverbrook is a fail quest for me) was a good way to do it. And a REALLY good moneymaker.

3.1 so far...

Well, it's been a day or so since the servers came up. So far it's a mixed bag.

Instances are really buggy. Really buggy. Like half my guild got stuck in Naxx for several hours buggy.

Fishing is now awesome. The shorter time makes it much more like herbalism. I see a pool, I fish the pool, I move on.

Garetia is now dual-speced. And I am officially bankrupt again. In fact, I didn't have enough to dual spec her until earlier this evening (potion sales + power-questing for the win).

I adore the marksman bug. Can I keep it, Blizz? Please? It completely makes up for practically requiring us to take Efficiency and rapid recuperation. (40% mana loss in one pull + extremely slow mana regen out of combat does not a happy hunter make)

Argent Tournament is good so far. Just one more day till I get enough to go up a rank. I think I'd like it better if I could choose factions from the start though. I don't need any rep with Darn (maxed and have been since 40s).

New fishing dailies seem fun. I like the rewards.

Boo for not being able to learn Call Stabled Pet till 80. So a hunter can dual-spec at 40 and not be able to switch out pets at will. That makes no sense.

Servers are laggy and buggy.

I have a new cat. Pitch from the Basin. He's now my BM dps.

Mounts in water are nice.

The mana regen nerf is PAINFUL at lower levels. I don't think I've ever used the health for mana thing so much. Not your best idea, Blizz, nerfing all mana-using classes. I'm actually afraid to try my pally or priest or druid now. But mostly the pally (who already had mana issues).

Oh, and my warlock hit 25 and Garetia hit 79. Only 1 more level to go!