Thursday 6 September 2012

Hunter And The Hunted


Perhaps this post should be called Hunter and the Huntard. I have played my Hunter  almost from the beginning of my time in WoW. Warriors and melee classes are not my forte, so when I found the hunter class, it was 2nd character ever rolled, and I hit the jackpot. I chose Beast Mastery at level 10 because this seemed like the logical step for a hunter to work closely with his pet. I trundled along for months slowly leveling until I discovered a Blog which blew me away. Big Red Kitty had just started blogging and I was in from the beginning, he was a handsome Dwarf, with a pet cat, which liked to turn red as often as possible. BRK was very funny and talked sense when it came to the hunter skills and had a very easy writing style. It was like looking into a mirror (without the easy writing style, sense of humour  and interesting content), and seeing myself in BRK's adventures. From that day forward I was a diehard BM Hunter and have only briefly ventured into the realms of Marksman during some of BM's darker days.

I was pottering the other day and got a shout in guildchat to come along and kick Deathwing's bottom in normal. I was offered a slot on either my hunter or shaman. After a 2 second delay I logged out and strapped on my Hunter gear and polished my bow. Now there was one slight problem with all this, I had not actually logged onto Bob since patch 5.0.4 dropped, but I had gone through the options on my other hunter. I quickly made the Talent choices, changed the major Glyphs and got ready for action.

"Bob, can you logon to Mumble please?", Oh bugger, I had just installed Windows 8. Installed mumble in a few seconds. "Sorry guys, I am on Mumble but I have no sound". "LOL, Ok Bob, stand there and kill things". To this end I stood there and killed things moved when needed, killed the adds and in general played with my new toys. There was 3 major issues that night.

  1. Bobcat, my faithful companion did not like changing platforms, and sometimes just sat next to me looking cute.
  2. I never actually saw the effect of either Lynx Rush or Dire Beast
  3. My DPS sucked, sitting between the Tanks. (The shame of it)
Now 1. could have just been a bugfest, these things happen, 2. I have time to play with these functions whilst leveling and 3. its my first time out and I can refine me options later.

So now is my time to review the options. The first mistake I made was that in a rush to help out the Guild, I forgot that I need Expertise, and my only saving grace was being a short, fat hairy dwarf for 1% of my requirement. I have remedied the situation, and will not get caught short again, so I ventured of to Elitist Jerks to investigate if anything else was amiss in my methodology.

I got to Cooldowns and stared at Ancient Hysteria / Bloodlust. Now I have been asked about this before but have never seen it in my spellbook, and this is the reason:

Ancient Hysteria / Bloodlust / Heroism / Time Warp.

As BM hunters we can provide this otherwise external haste buff by bringing a Core Hound. Ancient Hysteria (or one of the other names) buffs the haste of the entire party or raid by 30% for 40 seconds. Under AH maintain your regular priority, as above under RF.


Oh bugger, no wonder I could never find it. It is a pet buff that come with the Core Hound. Time to tame a Core Hound and put into my stable of 5 for that 1% time there is no Shaman or Mage in the party. D'oh.


1 comment:

  1. BRK was my first hunter blog I ran across too. Loved it.

    Don't fret to much, many hunters were caught off guard with the expertise thing and as far as fluffy goes, madness is bugged like crazy.

    A huge tip for BM.

    Macro dire beast into arcane shot and cobra shot.

    If you spam them when it is time to cast them it will assure you always cast DB within seconds of it being available giving you one less thing to worry about.

    I went for beast in UBRS for my core hound. There is one in azermist island that is white that is kind of cool too. With no talent specs any more beast is not really required. He rocked before because he came with 1 extra talent point. Yeap, he had 1 more talent point than all other pets in the game.

    LR is not a bad ability, but on a fight like that you might never notice it. Go get a mob in the world that will not die fast and attack with it. It is awesome on a single target to watch your pet jump all over the place. Humorous if you ask me.

    Glad to see you are having fun with it. Hunters rock, even if we are not the DPS monsters we usually are any more come mists.

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