In case you didn’t catch this at the source, I’ll be writing an auction house column at wow.com. I’m nothing if not tenacious :P
This won’t reduce the amount I write about hunters on outdps.com, so don’t worry!
Excellent Explosive Shot Write-up!
February 9, 2010Sorry for the lack of original content- nursing a sick baby. Pro-tip: don’t have kids if you’re squeamish. Blech.
Garwulf from the Huntsmans Lodge has written up a very good guide about explosive shot for SV hunters. It answers a lot of questions new hunters have, and even has some gems of wisdom for the more experienced of us!
Crowdsourcing Smart!
February 5, 2010Hi 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!
Ensidia Banned?!
February 4, 2010Edit: 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.
Who Said Hunters Can’t Sing?
February 3, 2010Alpacaa 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.
Hunter Round Table at Raid Warning!
February 2, 2010Thanks 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:
- Daewin, also of the Hunting Lodge Podcast
- The Wych, of Bind on Equip
- Nassira, of Diaries of a Marksman Hunter
- Hypknotoad, of The Addicted Podcast
The direct download is here, the iTunes link is here, and you can play it embedded in your browser on that first link.
Tanking Keleseth
February 1, 2010As 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.
Preventable DPS Loss Addon? I Can’t Code!
January 28, 2010Not 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.
The Hunting Party Podcast, Episode 20!
January 27, 2010In this episode, Darkbrew and Frostheim talk about the dev chat on twitter, about Frost’s new gig at wow.com, 2t9 versus 4t10, as well as a wealth of subjects raised in listener emails.
As I mentioned earlier, we have a new site! www.huntingpartypodcast.com, for all you hunting party podcast needs. Our live shows will be hosted there when we start them!
As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. Frost, in particular, watches them for mentions of the words “uncommonly” and “good looking”, and performs Fourier analysis on the frequency. Keep him busy, we’re safer that way.
If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.
Just Starting Out?
January 26, 2010This 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.
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