Been Awhile Internet

The Weekly Raid

So, it's been awhile since I sat down to write one of these things. The past couple weeks  have been loaded with several things for me. Call of Duty was released, Diablo is somewhat interesting again, and that raiding thing. Let's talk about that raiding thing. We have put in a few extra days the past two weeks to try to catch up as we lost nearly an entire week due to the hurricane smashing the faces of a few of our raiders. All in all it's been good though, getting a Spiritbinder Heroic kill as well as finally pushing through 25m Heart of Fear made the past two weeks extremely good for us. We plan on pushing onto the third raid instance with an extra night tonight, and hopefully clean that place up, as it doesn't seem it's too difficult on the normal mode. 

So the topic I really sat down to hammer down today was self preparation and how this really ties into your raid progression. It seems this past week on our first normal Heart of Fear clear we ran into a ton of issues with people showing up to raid extremely unprepared. By unprepared, I mean they showed up to a progression raid with absolutely no knowledge of the encounters ahead, the mechanics that these fights bring and how they could contribute to the raid team. When trying to be the best guild you can absolutely be these small attentions to detail can really make a difference if everybody in the raid has just done research on how their class can approach a fight. Small details such as knowing you can BoP a person before entering Dissonance Fields, can save your raid a headache. Knowing how to interrupt on a fight such as Amber Shaper can, and will, save your raid a wipe or two that definitely did not need to happen. When you show up completely blind to fights you are causing your raid to spend time on something that really did not need to happen. An issue where you mess up a mechanic will happen, everybody is human. Admit you made a mistake, wipe the fight and pull again. I'm as bad as anyone at trying to figure out ways to solve an issue the raid continues to have. At the end of the day, know your job, what you need to do, and leave everyone else's job up to them. With good leadership the people who constantly mess up with slowly be fed to the sharks and you're raid will grow stronger. Play your class to the best you can do it, and know how to deal with mechanics. Most guilds will take a strong mechanical player with slightly less damage, than a more weak mechanical player with higher damage.

-Divine <LA> Stormrage

The Hurricane Woes

Lock and Load

Our raid group, like plenty of others had to lose a lot of raid time due to the hurricane. What a bad week for this to happen as well. New raid released and we were hoping to get in a start issuing out some tier. We ended up splitting into a couple of 10m's to at least get the chance to see some of the new content. Here's my synapses of the first 3 fights. 

Vizier is an interesting fight that really isn't that interesting. Dodge some rings, stack in some bubbles, break some mind controls, repeat and the boss falls over. It's a pretty decent fight for us and with use of  some single target nuking the fight was a quick kill. Blade Lord has some interesting mechanics that are very predictable with use of DBM timers and good raid positioning, this fight again was a relatively quick kill.

Now to speak on Garalon. The enrage on this boss was moved back the Wednesday after the raid was released because it was simply too tight for a normal raid encounter. To speak on hunters on this fight I'll keep it short. Get ready to be sat if something isn't changed. Cleave classes like rogues, warriors, fire mages, and multi dotting classes will be doing 2-3x the amount of damage we can do. We aren't fit for this type of fight, and I really don't see there being anything we can do about it. I'm almost positive I will play my shaman for this encounter, as hunters just can't push out the required damage.

Sorry for the short blog this week, been a crazy crazy week. Also, my Sony Vegas is having some weird issues when I updated it, and I can't open the program. So no new videos for a little bit.

Divinespeed - <LA> Stormrage (US)

Lock and Load - Heroic Feng the Accursed

Lock and Load

Hello hunters!

Feng the Accursed No More! 2/16 Heroic

What an awesome fight! I really enjoyed the slight change from the normal difficulty that this fight was. The only new mechanic added into the heroic version of the fight is a new phase, which has you kill some adds. Although the new phase is fairly simple mechanic wise, the increased damage output from the boss, and raid damage output needed makes this fight a sure test for every part of your raid group! Here is how I went about with the fight!

Spec: Beast Mastery

Talents: 3/3/2/2/1/1

Glyphs: Marked for Death, Animal Bond, Deterrence

With the correct strategy, for almost the entirety of this fight you will be stacked in a tight group on the boss, for all 4 phases other than the first (Staff) phase. For a majority of this fight it is a matter of maximizing your DPS in every way possible, making sure that you hitting your Bestial Wrath off CD at good times to maximize damage. Improvements on this fight will always come week to week, as it's pretty patchwork and gear will shine. Also, be conservative with your 2nd stampede, you will only get 2, so find  a time where your trinkets are lining up, hit stampede and your 2nd potion. Try not to do this just before the last phase transition  and the boss will be moving, and you may lose some pet up time. Be sure to take advantage of deterrence with a /cancelaura deterrence macro to help maximize moving. Having your warlock cookies keybound, although a relatively common thing, is EXTREMELY important in this fight, as there are some points where you may take a relatively large amount of damage, without warning. Be sure you don't clip your Murder of Crows. During shield phase, you can handle this many different ways. You will definitely have a BW available during one if you want to pop it to spam AoE adds with half cost Multi-Shots. I chose to use my BW's on the boss to help push the phases quicker, but this is up to you. Most guilds are having a DK grasp the adds into a tight group. I recommend using a binding shot as soon as the adds spawn on the raid, when the DK grips the adds they will immediately be stunned for 5 seconds. If you have a 2nd hunter in the group, have him put a binding shot on the back side of the adds, so ass soon as they move to the shield they are stunned for 5 seconds again. This gives your raid a full 10 seconds to just destroy the grouped up adds, and everyone will love you. Be sure during epicenter's you don't lose your SS dot, if you are inside the null barrier, you can still attack like normal, the increased miss chance is taken away with the barrier, but I could see where it can fall during a BW.

World of Logs; No logs this week as they got deleted! :(

Some changes you may or may not make.

If your raid group is struggling with the adds, survival is extremely close to BM on this fight, and will give you much more benefit on the shield phase of the fight. Also, lynx rush is a more forgiving talent to take than aMoC, which is more involved during readiness. Lynx rush will also give you some additional add damage if you chose to us it there.

Over all the fight was a ton of fun and I am extremely happy with how tuned it was!

Divinespeed - <LA> (Stormrage US)

laguild.enjin.com

Lock and Load, New Guild, New Opportunities

Lock and Load

Hello hunters!

It's been a few weeks since I've done one of these bloggy type things! A lot has happened over the past few weeks, which has led me to not blogging about my raid weeks here during the beginning of the expansion! So I am going to sum up my first 3 weeks of raiding in just a few sentences. 

New Faces, New Chances

Although I greatly enjoyed my time in Peachy Keen, the guild decided to head another direction with their hunter core and my trial was declined. I have absolutely no hard feelings for the decisions they made, and I wish them the best of luck. I already had an offer on the table from a guild that is really getting into the swing of heroic progression and looking to make a name for itself in the upcoming raid tiers. I am now raiding with <LA> of Stormrage (US Alliance). Although going Alliance was the toughest choice of this move, I feel like the officer core over here is really looking to push progression, make changes to push progression further, and overall have a fun raid environment that is going to continue to push progression.

Raids!

So, now the reason people actually would click on this blog, raiding! So, Mogu'shan Vaults was released a few weeks back, as a trial with PK, I didn't get as much time in the raid as I would like (which is why there have been no blogs). So we are going to consider this past week of raiding my first week of raiding. The fights are unique, very unique and it is so entirely refreshing to see fights that really have no relation to fights from the past. I think Spirit Kings is my favorite fight, a lot of interesting mechanics, and very well tuned. Elegon of course has it's challenges, but with DMF trinkets the fight took a sever decrease in difficulty from the first week.

State of the Hunter

I feel like Hunters are in an ok spot right now, we are lower than we'd absolutely like to be, but we aren't terrible to bring to a raid. We bring some interesting utility on multiple fights, and our DPS isn't the complete worse thing out there. Although we are definitely a lot more weak than we were during DS. I'm overall happy with the changes to Hunters this expansion, and I think it will only get better as we continue to gear and further perfect gear/reforging etc.

<LA> 1/6 Heroic

My first time killing Stoneguard comes in the heroic version! Generally I'd like to really touch on the specific changes I made while adjusting from the normal to heroic mechanics, but it's not something I can do in this situation. I will cover what I did for this fight, and some of the changes I believe I need to make to improve my performance. 

Spec: Survival

Talents: 3/1/2/3/3/1

Glyphs: Marked for Death, Animal Bond, Deterrence

The absolute toughest part of this fight in my opinion is being able to manage your focus, while being 110% raid aware. Focus control is something I have always struggled with on a fight where I need to be constantly moving, and switching targets. I chose thrill of the hunt so I would almost always have an instant cast when needing to move out of a trap, pool, or move to/from someone for chains. Also, you will always have 2 targets available to do damage on. This makes this fight not as good for hunters in my opinion, as 2 target damage is definitely one of our weak spots. The most important part of this aspect, and another reason TotH is a good talent choice is you can always have SS ticking on two targets at once. I believe I used a few too many multi-shots this week, as 2 target MS's are fairly week compared to a single arcane shot. I think I will try fervor this week, as it will keep me honest with MS, and give me extra focus for instants on the move. Hunters and Deathknights provide the absolute most utility in breaking cobalt traps while outside of petrification. With the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera talent you have a 1 min deterrence CD, with readiness you can break multiple in a short period of time, if your readiness happens to reset your deterrence. Another thing that can help with this fight if traps are over running your raid constantly. Have a resto druid symbiosis you, they will gain deterrence and you will gain dash, a short sprint that is absolutely amazing for running tiles.

Hope I helped you out with some tips for Heroic Stoneguard! On to Feng next week, and I will be back next week with an update! 

Divinespeed - <LA> (Stormrage US)

laguild.enjin.com

Lock and Load Week 2

Lock and Load Week 2

Wow, this raid week was full of enjoyment for me! So quick recap of my preparation for this raid week. I race changed to Orc! Something I knew would be coming for a few awhile now, but had just never made the change. I also switched bows over to the Heroic Crossbow, vs the normal Deathwing bow. If you havn't done this yet, what are you waiting for?! With ranged weapons getting the huge buff that they got, the crossbow is now FAR superior to the normal DW bow. I'd almost make the argument it's better than the H:DW bow, but probably not. Over 400 crit is so fucking sexy compared to the normal DW bow. Last change I made this week was going from Vial of Shadows -> Cataclysmic Gladiator's Insignia of Conquest.

Oh, the Dee Pee Ess

Nobody ran consistent logs this week as we were subbing people in and out constantly throughout the raid night to get everybody a chance to do some raiding. So I guess you can take everything with a grain of salt. But wow, I was so impressed with my DPS on nearly every single fight. Minus Hagara and Zon'ozz my DPS was up over 2k on the fights I played the same spec both weeks. I think the bow has the most to do with this change, but the trinket and race definitely help. No bow from DW again, so officially, I wont get a raid week with full BiS :(. Time to prepare for MoP!

The Pandas are Coming the Pandas are Coming!!

With less than 2 weeks till release it's really time to start hammering down your leveling strategies and exactly how you plan on grinding that rep and professions come the first week. There is a lot to tackle here, so I will start with leveling.

I'm praying they keep cross realm zones away from Pandaria for a few weeks at least, or else dungeon leveling will be the way to go. I plan on holding a few dailies to give me some base experience to start out with. I also plan on hitting dungeons right at release time to grind level 86 as fast as possible and get into the 2nd zone quickly. This will put some separation between myself and the crowd. I'm not going for realm first, but am looking to level rather quickly. This is to optimize my time in getting gear and being ready to go 6/6 Normal that following tuesday.

Professions will be my task along the way. Engineering isn't something I have a ton of control over leveling as it requires mats from mining most likely, and will probably be a huge gold sink for me. That being said, enchanting and fishing are both something I can definitely slowly begin to level as I progress in my leveling. Remember with professions, you don't have to be max level to get the raiding benefits from them, so don't go sinking a ton of gold into something you wont use to make gold.

Gearing will be the final task for myself. Getting everything ready before hand is pretty strong. Knowing which bosses, in which instances drop your pre raid BiS blues, is VERY VERY VERY VERY important. Know which dungeons you need to spend more time in because you have more possible loot, which dungeons you have less loot in. GRIND GRIND GRIND GRIND GRIND GRIND!!! 

I'm very excited for this upcoming expansion as it will be my first time leveling the week of the expansion, and it's something I'm looking forward to experiencing. 

Divine - Peachy Keen (Stormreaver US)

@CoryTill

PeachyKeenGuild.com

Lock and Load 1.5

Lock and Load Week 1.5

Every week I plan on writing a brief blog to explain what I've done since previous to help improve my prior weeks results. This comes with saying, I browse forums every week and check for small hints in that way, but I will lay out what I plan to personally test in this weeks raid, as well as touch on a subject or two I feel needs addressing.

So I finally did it, that long paused thing I've been meaning to do for a few weeks. Became a big, nasty, hairy (although he has less hair) and smelly Orc. After doing some theorycrafting talk with Zedextenr, (Exodus - Cho'gall) and after he blew up some charts in an LFR with me, that I would need to make this race change to be able to compete with the top tier of hunter talent in the US. We also talked about CD's which I discussed in my previous blog, and I'm starting to think, assuming lust isn't on pull, that all CD's being throw at 0:00 in a fight is the best, followed by a readiness at :06. I think this for a few reasons. All your CD's will alight better later in the fight, Eng Tinker and Blood Fury to be exact. Instead of waiting 15-25 seconds to later in the fight, you only have them down for ~6 seconds. A lot more needs to be tested with this, but it's looking more and more convincing as I do more testing. The next bit of knowledge I threw on him was this PvP trinket that seems to be 2nd BiS over Heroic Vial of Shadows at this point.

This is what I would like to touch on this week. In my opinion, a PvP trinket having this much throughput for PvE just seems completely and totally broken. Do I mind having to go grind a few arenas to get the conquest to buy this trinket the first couple of weeks of MoP? Not at all. But the fact that this trinket may be best in slot through heroic content disturbs me a bit. PvE needs to remain PvE and PvP needs to remain PvP. Unfortunately, I'm not sure exactly what Blizzard plans to do with these trinkets, but the 55 sec ICD just makes it unbelievably good. A PvE trinket with this similar style of proc usually has a 90-105 sec ICD. These trinkets also give MORE proced/on use agility than the PvE counter parts. A simple solution to this would have these trinkets no longer proc agi/str/int but proc straight PvP Power. I really hope something is done with these. 

Questions for Tuesday 9/11/12

Was my money worth the race change? Can't go back now 

Will be noting the readiness usage on every fight, and how the results turn back!

How good is this PvP Trinket? Another Variable in this weeks twist. 

If everything above is a DPS increase as I suspect all will be, I should have much better results this week! Pray for my bow! (Hey I'd like to have at least 1 lockout with it!)

GLHF in your raid this week!!

Divine (Peachy Keen - Stormreaver US)

@CoryTill

PeachyKeenGuild.com

Thoughts on New Hunter Talents

I wasn't going to blog today, but there has been a big stir around the hunter community with all these tests of the new abilities floating around. A blog was posted over at The Grumpy Elf today highlighting these tests and laying a lot of numbers on the ground. The blog was an interesting read, and I would recommend you take a look at it before continuing with my thoughts on it.

So here it is, we were given about 4 new abilities at any given time, depending on the talents you take, and how you approach using them. The blog breaks it down that these new talents give you about 10% of your total DPS in a given encounter. I can't argue the numbers as I haven't done the testing for myself, but I can definitely see where these numbers come into play. All of our 'new' talents are fairly unattractive, and don't provide us with any new utility we didn't have before. We were basically given all of our original spells and shots, with the addition of 2 new dots, 3 new instant damaging spells, and 2 casted/channeled abilities. When you break down the shots in this manner they become less 'gross' in my opinion.

2 New Dots: Dire Beast and Murder of Crows, both spells that don't add much damage, and have CD's that must be managed throughout the fight. These are no different than dots a warlock, spriest, or Fire Mage must manage throughout their rotation.

What makes these dots so bad for a hunter as compared to these other classes? Focus. It's a pretty simple mechanic that really judges how we play the class. Even with DB costing no focus at all, it's on the GCD and every GCD has to be judged as a hunter. The hunter class is like no other, if anything it's more similar to a a melee class than any other. When a mage misjudges a GCD, they can make up for it immediately with their next. If a hunter misjudges his/her focus KC/Exp/Chim are off CD and we can't cast it, further hurting our DPS output.

My response to this blog is this. Hunters play very uniquely, and each person plays their hunter uniquely. Maybe you are having trouble with all the new things, maybe it does hinder your dps in some way. Yes, you can take actions out of rotation to simplify it, and maybe you can produce on the same level as others who are having trouble. To the casual hunter, I'd say, you don't care about your numbers anyways, click the new spells all you want, how you want, and when you want. To the hunter dedicating time to get better at the class, start small, maybe use one of these macros where you bind Dire Beast in with Arcane Shot till you get use to when the spell is coming of CD and you can push into using a separate bind for it. Use the new abilities off CD, don't worry about lining them up to execute the 100% best strategy. Just use them, as often as you can. Play your hunter, as often as you can. Don't worry about your dps, paint your picture, get use to the feel of the new spells, then worry about lining them to maximize the numbers.

-Divine (Peachy Keen - US Stormreaver)
@CoryTill
PeachyKeenGuild.com