February 5, 2010
Hi guys, you may remember that I had an idea for an addon that would help us hunters figure out what DPS we’re leaving on the table and improve our game. Well, luckily, one awesome reader stepped forward to code this. Pherra has already written the first version of the addon! It’s still in pre-pre-alpha, but we’re getting there :)
The goal here is to have an addon that will silently collect information about the currently unquantifiable “hunter skill level”, and help you improve. You will be able to look at your performance after your fight (or night) and see where you lost some DPS, as well as how you’re progressing. We might consider eventually having it tell you “oops, you shouldn’t have done that” during a fight, but not by default. The default will be a quiet addon with a small footprint that will tell you (and only you) how to become a better hunter.
Here’s the list of features we want so far. We will set the addon up so that it only tracks what you do on boss fights.
- Count the number of global cooldowns not used while in a boss fight
- Ignore cooldowns not used when stunned, when you’re not targeting something attackable, when you’re out of range, and when you’re delaying explosive shots because of a lock and load
- Track auto-shots that didn’t go off
- If you are moving when the swing timer is done, you miss a shot
- If your add dies while you’re volleying, you won’t start auto-shooting until you target a new add
- Track ticks of explosive shot clipped by other explosive shots
- Track the number of times you cast a steady shot when a better shot is available
- Also maybe check other shot priorities
- Track whether you’re using serpent sting appropriately
- As marks, you should be re-applying your sting whenever your current +% damage and crit are higher than the one that’s “saved” on the boss’s sting
- As survival, you should try to keep a high uptime, but never reapply a sting unless it has expired
- No hunter should sting a target that only lives for a few seconds
- Track your viper management
- If you go into aspect of the viper, never run OOM, and finish the fight without ever having gone below the point where you would have run out of mana without the viper, you wasted DPS
- If you run OOM, you wasted DPS because some of your shots that are off cooldown will be unusable.
The reason I’m posting this is that I realized that the sum of the knowledge among the people who read this blog is far greater than my own. If you folks see something that could be made better, have ideas for features, or some other inspiration, let us know in the comments!
Posted in Hunter, World of Warcraft, addons | Tagged addon, Hunter, skill | 39 Comments »
February 4, 2010
Edit: Upon further research, I think I might have jumped the shark gun. Evidently, the only way to hit the platform with a frag bomb is if you aim for it. Unless you hit it by accident while you’re hitting adds. I’m going to leave this post here as a testament to my tendency to leap without looking, but if Ensidia was indeed aiming these bombs at the platforms, they deserve the punishment they’ve received.
Edit edit: evidently, I also like to use idioms I’ve only heard once and assume I know what they mean before looking them up. Big thanks to Eidotrope for making me less lazy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Offtopic, World of Warcraft | Tagged ban, blizzard, Ensidia, exploit, lack of testing, lich king, shark jumping is the new olympic sport | 41 Comments »
February 3, 2010
Alpacaa produced quite possibly one of the best Louis Armstrong / Yogg Saron mashups I have ever heard. Well, one of the only ones, but it’s still one of the funniest boss kill videos I’ve watched.
He wrote the lyrics and sang this himself (video embedded after the break). For more Alpacaa boss videos, check out his youtube channel.
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Posted in Offtopic, Spotlight, World of Warcraft | Tagged boss kill, louis armstrong, mashup, video, yogg saron, youtube | 3 Comments »
February 2, 2010
Thanks to the excellent hosts of Raid Warning for inviting me to participate on their hunter round table! My segment was debating a variety of things with the illustrious Brigwyn, and there are other segments with:
The direct download is here, the iTunes link is here, and you can play it embedded in your browser on that first link.
Posted in Hunter, Offtopic, World of Warcraft | Tagged Hunter, raid warning, round table | 5 Comments »
February 1, 2010
As a hunter you may be called on to tank one of the ICC blood princes, Keleseth. While there are a number of approaches to tanking him for different classes, this post will describe how a hunter can do it and do it well.
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Posted in Beast Mastery, Hunter, Survival, World of Warcraft | Tagged blood prince council, hunter tanking, ICC, Keleseth, raiding, Taldaram, tanking, Valanar | 21 Comments »
January 28, 2010
Not very well, at any rate, and not in Warcraft’s LUA language. That said, I have an idea for an addon. I’m sure someone out there either can do this, or has done it already.
It’s an addon that tells you how many preventable losses of DPS you had during a fight. Picture failbot for hunters. If you miss an autoshot because you’re moving, that gets added to the tally. If you run more than 5 feet when disengage is off cooldown, that gets added too. If you fire an arcane shot as SV or fire a steady shot when chimera shot is available, that’s added.
These could be summed up and graphed over time to get an idea of how your skill is progressing. Knowing how many seconds of auto-shot delay you had from one week to another can help you get better. An addon like this could also be a convenient answer for people asking “how can I suck more than that guy who has less gear than me?”
Here’s the thing: this is the kind of data we don’t necessarily want broadcasted or shared- the last thing we need is a server where pugs broadcast the output into /1 of the instance (like I’ve seen people do with failbot! Augh!).
Luckily, much of the information needed to determine when a hunter failure has occurred is client side, and isn’t readily parsable live from the combat log. For example, cooldown info is not visible from other peoples’ clients.
If anyone is interested in writing this, knows of something like it already, or has any suggestions or refinements (maybe the shot rotation thing is not possible or a bad idea?), please leave me a comment here or contact me.
ps. I’d pay extra if detecting a new druid character creation was added to the list.
Posted in Hunter, World of Warcraft | Tagged addon, dps, hunter fails, idea, preventable dps loss, raiding | 31 Comments »
January 26, 2010
This site normally covers stuff that happens after you hit 80, but reading Pikestaff’s post, practical advice for brand new hunters, I remembered how much the game has changed for me since I hit 80. Pike, you are tempting me to reroll and drink enough scotch that I’d get to relearn all those lessons :P
Those were good days, they were.
Posted in Hunter, Spotlight, World of Warcraft | Tagged aspect of the hare, new hunters, pikestaff | 1 Comment »
January 26, 2010
I’ve seen this a fair bit lately: hunters with double (and even triple!) the hit rating needed to never miss a raid boss. How did they get there? What can you do to avoid getting there, and how can they get out? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Hunter, World of Warcraft | Tagged gear, hit, hit cap, hit rating, ICC, melee weapons, pve, trinkets | 18 Comments »
January 25, 2010
Hi folks, just a quick note this morning: the Hunting Party Podcast now has its own site! Check out http://www.huntingpartypodcast.com/. For now, it’s only bare bones site that you can use to listen to old episodes, and yes, we’re aware that you can do that on our sites already. This will, however, be the place that we host our embedded ustream player when we start doing live shows.
Posted in Offtopic, World of Warcraft | Tagged Hunting Party Podcast, new site, podcast | 3 Comments »
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