Lethal Shots

Wrath is less than two weeks away. Everyone is doing a mad scramble trying to get things done before they start the level grind again. People are trying to build up gold reserves, finish quest lines, finish rep grinds, and all sorts of other stuff. But I’m not here to talk about everyone. I’m here to talk about Hunters.

As a Hunter, there is one thing that should be at the top of your pre-Wrath to-do list. Pets. You get to have five of them now, and with the changes introduced in 3.0.2, your old pet may not get the job done anymore. Now is the time to get out there and try out the new pet classes and abilities. See which ones work the best with your spec and play style, or at the very least which one you think looks the best.

Now that you’ve tried them out you need to pick two. One for solo work and the other for group play. Your solo pet should be a Tenacity pet. Sure you can solo grind with the others, but a Tenacity will make things much easier as you level. Your group pet will be for DPS. Either a Ferocity or Cunning pet will work for this.

Here are some of my suggestions for pets:

• Tanking & Solo – Just about any Tenacity pet will work for this job.
  • Gorilla – You can not go wrong with this choice. Having your own mini AoE tank is just plain awesome.
  • Worm- Think gorilla, but instead of a mini Paladin, you get a mini Warrior.
  • Bear – Solid old school choice.
  • Boar – Another old school favorite.
• Group & DPS – Ferocity pets are the obvious choice here, though some Cunning pets offer interesting possibilities.
  • Wasp – The armor reduction they give is nice for boosting everyone’s damage in a heavy physical DPS group.
  • Core Hound – Cool looking, and great against casters.
  • Devilsaur – Raptor on steroids. Bigger is better.
  • Chimera – Beautiful pets with decent DPS.
  • Cat – Also an old school favorite.
  • Wolf – And yet another old school favorite.

*Note that some of these are exotic pets and require the 51-point talent in the Beast Master tree. Also, I don’t want you to think that these are the only pets you should look at. There are many more pet families to choose from, these just happen to be my favorite.

Ok, now that you have chosen your two pets, it is time to level them. That means you need to break down and grind those guys up to 70. You don’t want to head into Nothrend with a level 65 pet now do you? Of course not, you’d get laughed right out of there.

I chose a Gorilla for my tanking pet and a Wasp for my DPS pet. The ape hit 70 yesterday while grinding at a Necropolis spawn, and the insect should hit 70 during my next kara run. So how about you? What pets did you choose?

At least that what it has felt like over the weekend. With the coming of zombies to Azeroth, I have been, quite literally, avoiding all major major cities and population centers like the plague.

Now I know some people thoroughly enjoyed the event, some choosing to wreak havoc as a zombie, others choosing to combat the zombie invasion. I myself had no interest in it at all. Sure, I let myself get turned into a zombie once, but the novelty of it soon wore off and I went back to more productive adventures.

The one thing I couldn’t avoid was having PvP play forced upon me, especially in traditional safe havens. Personally, that annoyed the crap out of me. I play on a PvE realm for a reason.

The largest downside of the plague was the griefing. High level players camping lower level zones such as Elwynn Forest, constantly killing any low level player moving through. It was ridiculous.

Blizzard, if by some weird alignment of the cosmos you read my little corner of the Internet, please never do an event like this again.

I noticed something Wednesday night when I went to Kara. Almost all my macros were borked. Now I don’t use a whole lot of macros. Pre-patch, I used a macro for my shot rotation, Misdirection, and pull with Distracting Shot. Well, with Autoshot unlinked my old shot rotation went out the window and I have gone back to manually weaving shots, but I still needed the others. I also needed a macro to switch between AotH and AotV.

First, my pull shot. My old macro looked something like this:

/cast Distracting Shot
/stopcasting

The idea is I fire Distracting Shot, then stop firing so as not to break my trap. Now don’t ask me why, but this stopped working. Here is what I came up with to keep the same functionality:

/cast Distracting Shot
/cleartarget

My Misdirection macro actually didn’t break. When pressed, it first tries to cast MD on my target. If unable to, it then tries to cast it on my focus. As a last resort it cast MD on my pet. Here is the code:

#showtooltip Misdirection
/cast [help][target=focus,help][target=pet,exists,nodead] Misdirection

With the changes to AotV, I needed an efficient way to switch between it and AotH. What this macro does when pressed is cast AotH, unless it is already active. If so, it cast AotV. Essentially, it switches between the two with just one button press.

/cast Aspect of the Hawk
/cast Aspect of the Viper

If you have any other macros that you find extremely useful, just leave it in the comments.

Tanking is honestly something I never thought I would be doing. But then came the patch, and pet talent trees with it. As a I read about the changes to pets, ideas started to form in my head. I thought back to all the time I spent looking for a tank just to do a few simple group quests or quick jumps into instances. I looked at tenacity pets and saw potential. Now that the patch has hit, that potential has been realized. A properly specced Hunter combined with a properly specced pet becomes a viable tank.

When a Hunter chooses to act in this role, he makes a few sacrifices. He goes from being providing pure DPS to being more of a hybrid class, similar to a Druid. Think of a Feral Druid specced for DPS. He provides DPS and can also tank and heal when needed. While he may not be the best at each role, he can still perform well in all of them.

A tanking Hunter is the same way, save for one difference: he can do all three at the Same Time. Yes, you heard me right. All three roles at once. But the drawback being he will not be the best at any one. True tanks will still be better. Pure DPS will still top him on the meters. Real healers will still out heal him. But that’s ok. A tanking Hunter is filling a role. He wants to provide a viable tank for small group work, or maybe even an off-tank for raiding.

Personally, I have tanked a couple of lower level Outland instances, a few group quests, and the Headless Horseman several times. As long as the healer knows to pay close attention to my pet, it works great. I look forward to coaxing my guild into letting me tank progressively harder fights until I find the limit of Hunter tanking.

Leave me a comment detailing any experiences you have had with pet tanking and how you fell about it.

When 3.o.2 went live, my UI went dead, which made it a great time to delete everything and start fresh. With over 100 addons installed, I had several redundant ones and even more that I didn’t need, which is the price for constantly trying new addons and never cleaning anything out.

I started off by backing up my Interface and WTF folders, and then deleting them. A quick start of WoW recreates these folders in their default state so that I could start putting new addons in them. And here is what I came up with:

New UI in 3.0.2

Here is the addons I am using currently:

• CooldownTimers3 – Nice addon that shows cooldowns in a decreasing bar format.
• Dominos – Replaces the default action bars.
• Elkano’s BuffBars – Replacement for the default buff frame.
• Fotress and Various Plugins- LibDataBroker viewer. First time to try this and I prefer it over Fubar or Titan.
• Kharthus’s Hunter Timers – Provides timers for various Hunter abilities.
• Minimap Button Frame – Removes most buttons from around your minimap and place them in a hidable frame.
• Omen Threat Meter – My threat meter of choice.
• Prat – Allows greater customization of the chat frame.
• Recount – In game damage meter mod.
• Squeenix – Simple minimap mod.
• X-Perl UnitFrames – Replacement for the default unit frames.

Other addons that are not visible:

• Atlas – Provides in-game dungeon maps.
• Auctioneer – Invaluable tool for Auction House pricing.
• Gatherer – Keeps track of type and location of all nodes and chests you gather.
• RatingBuster – Provides stat breakdown based on class in the item tooltip.
• TBag – My inventory addon of choice.
• WIM – Creates a instant messenger type window whenever you receive or send a whisper, keeping each conversation in its own window.

In the past I have also used Lightheaded, TomTom, Questhelper, and Cartographer. when I first tried them after the patch they did not work, and I haven’t taken the time to test them again.