We toyed briefly with an account at uploadingit.com, who advertises 100GB per day of transfer (probably enough most days), and to their credit, they even privately offered us an increase for the days we publish the show so long as our average stayed under 100GB. Unfortunately, they’ve been fraught with downtime lately, and as we were uploading the show to them, they went down. Right after I posted that the Kruf episode (116) was working again.

We considered cloud storage from a few different vendors (Amazon, and the likes) but with our monthly 1.5TB of FTP traffic, it’d have been way too expensive. We also considered Libsyn and Podbean and other types of unlimited bandwidth podcasting hosts, however they charge by the amount of shows you have available at one time, and we wanted to keep the whole show downloadable. Also, their pricing structure seems to reflect that they do most of the legwork involved in setting up a new podcast, but we don’t need any of that. We only needed someone to serve our files.

Anyways, I remembered that the space upgrade at wordpress.com was in fact considerably cheaper than a lot of the other hosting options out there, and while they had had flakey downtime and latency issues two years ago when we used them, I’d heard good things about them since. Long story short, we’re going to be using the wordpress.com hosting service from now on. If you ever have issues playing the podcast, please get in touch with Euri by email.

[edit 2: the file is rehosted- thanks for your patience.]

[edit 3: The new host broke. Rehosted again, sorry for the flaky availability of this file.]

This episode, we talk to Kruf, from Dream Paragon. If you speak Finnish, by the way, they’re recruiting.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. 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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Frostheim reports live from the event where his Ghostcrawler tracker was in full working order. Frostheim tells us what GC had to say on a number of topics such as PvP, dual-wielding, GC’s favorite hunter podcast, and the possibility of a certain female dwarf getting and in-game item in patch 4.3.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

In addition to being a rogue, he’s Frost’s former raid leader. We talk a little bit about Frost’s raiding days, and AFKRogue also gives us some insight on how to kill Rogues in PvP (not that we didn’t know how to do that already).

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Also, as a bonus this one time only, since none of us could excuse ourselves to do dishes or have real lives, we ran an epic post show where we kept answering listener questions until they were done. This took hours, and was recorded. Unfortunately, it’s too long, too unstructured, and a little too profane for iTunes, so we will release that as a separate download.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Firstly, load your character up in wowreforge.com by selecting your realm and typing in your character name. Now you will see all your gear and the reforges you’ve already done to it. If you want, you’re able to change enchants and gems manually (like when you have a 10 agility socket bonus that comes from a blue socket that can be activated with a 20 hit/20agi gem).

Now under all the gear, you have a dropdown called “cap 1″, preset to hit at least 961 (8%) for non-Draenei hunters, and 841 for Draenei. If you believe in haste plateaus, you would want to add a second cap, set to keep haste above 1235 (plus the average time you lose to latency on instants, assuming you queue up all your casted shots).

The next step is key: the default stat weights they put in for hunters seem fine, but to really control what the optimizer does, you want to set the weight for crit and haste to something like you get from femaledwarf, and then set the weight for mastery to be a little lower. If you do this, when you click on the “optimize” button, it will reforge all your mastery into crit, hit. por haste, avoiding sending you below 8% hit.

If you want to see whether these changes represent a paper doll increase to dps, femaledwarf.com supports importing a standardized reforge “recipe” that looks something like this:


Head : MasteryRating -> HitRating
Neck : MasteryRating -> CritRating
Shoulders : HasteRating -> CritRating
Chest : MasteryRating -> CritRating
Waist : MasteryRating -> CritRating
Legs : HasteRating -> HitRating
Feet : MasteryRating -> HitRating
Wrists : MasteryRating -> HitRating
Hands : HasteRating -> HitRating
Ring1 : MasteryRating -> CritRating
Trinket1 : HitRating -> CritRating
Back : CritRating -> HasteRating
WeaponMainHand : HasteRating -> HitRating

This is, conveniently, the format that wowreforge.com uses when you click the “summary” button at the bottom left of the page. Want to go a step farther? It’s also the format that the addon Reforgerade uses as input when you want to mass reforge without doing it manually piece by piece. When the addon is installed, type /rfa with the reforger interface open, and paste the recipe from wowreforge.com or femaledwarf.com into it.

Femaledwarf.com also has a handy link to open wowreforge.com with the stat weights calculated pre-populated for you. Bear in mind that these values are only accurate for the reforging profile you have on now- change some points around, and the values could change drastically.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

I’m going to continue to not shave, though.

Anyways, enough off-topic personal stuff- I should make the podcast this weekend, but there may be some… unavoidable background noise ;)

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

I had developed a particular set of habits based on the old system of targeting.

• Every time we had stopped pulling, I would target myself, and if any mobs were in range, face away from them. The only time I pulled, it wasn’t an “accident”. Also, completely unrelated pro tip: if the hunter misdirected to the rogue, it’s never an accident.
• When my AOE target died, I’d hit multishot to select a new target. It had the same function as tab targeting, and this feature saw a lot of use in heroics.

As Frost pointed out in his WHU post, you can macro “/startattack” before anything you want and it will tab-target for you, just like it used to. Instead of aimed shot, however, I’d probably use multi-shot.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

The 359 PvP weapon is purchasable for 3400 Conquest points, and is probably a significant upgrade over any blue, and possibly even over the new ZA 353 PvE weapons. As always, femaledwarf.com should be used to ensure that this is the case.

The next step of PvP weapon is the 372 Vicious Gladiator, and this is more DPS than anything in the game short of a heroic raiding weapon. It’s not the easiest weapon to obtain, though, since you need to have a 2200 rating in 3v3 or 5v5. 2v2 doesn’t count because Blizzard doesn’t balance around duels or 2v2, instead focusing on groups of 3 or 5.

If you want to get this weapon, you’re going to need to do more than get your feet wet in PvP. You’re going to have to win a lot of arena, and that involves a somewhat different skill set than raiding. It takes a different UI, more macros, better knowledge of other classes, and better communication tools. I’m not by any means a gladiator, but I’ve recently made the leap into arena, so I will talk a little bit today about what that took.

A better UI

First off, you need to set yourself up for success. You should never click anything that’s likely to get used in an arena match, so keybind everything. A good bar mod is a good first start: I use bartender because it allows me to create invisible bars with abilities keybound. On the topic of keybinding, it’s never ever a good idea to key-turn or back-peddle. Most people use the “wasd” keys for movement, so bind A and D to strafing, and unbind Q and E. Those spots are too valuable to be wasted on key-turning. Also, unbind S and forget that your character has the ability to crawl backwards while being chewed on by a feral druid. I’ve bound it to disengage, and I’ll tell you what- there’s nothing like accidentally disengaging to your death for the first time in years to remind you how much you have to learn about PvP!

Next, you need an addon to calculate CC diminishing returns, cooldown use, and trinket use. Gladius is your first stop. Out of the box, it will allow you to see all that info, and it’s very customizable. Next, you want an addon that will show you the buffs you can purge with Tranquilizing shot. I use Dispelborder, but apparently X-Perl has an equivalent feature built in. Don’t rely too much on this information, though- you want to save your focus for times when it’ll do the most good.

Lastly, you need to have a set of “idiot lights” (to steal one of Frostheim’s expressions) set up with Power Auras or TellMeWhen. You want to have no chance of forgetting that your rapid fire, readiness, scatter trap, or silence are off cooldown. I also have auras for disengage and deterrence, as well as some procs. Basically anything that will cause you to change your next decision can be set up in an aura so you don’t have to search your buff bar or action bar.

These are simply the basics of a good PvP UI, and to be honest, I know I’m missing a lot of functionality that I’d need to get to the next level. I’ve elected to make this list out of the really obviously good addons. If you have feedback, comment and I’ll do a proper UI/addon post at some point in the future.

Macros

Your raiding macros will not be enough. To properly PvP, you need to be able to do things to people you’re not selecting. Focus, mouseover, and team macros are all important. I’m going to assume you already know how to create a macro for an ability, but depending on your preferred setup, you’ll want to incorporate the “[@focus]” and “[@mouseover]” commands. Here, for example, is a macro that will silencing shot your mouseover:

#showtooltip Silencing Shot
/stopcasting
/cast [@mouseover]Silencing Shot

The “/stopcasting” is to allow you to silence even if you’re casting something like a steady shot. You will want to have mouseover or focus macros for all your CC, including silencing shot and scatter shot.
Focus macros mean you’ll have to change your focus every time you change your CC target, but it makes it easier to land your abilities. Ever tried mouseover silencing a shammie healer sitting in the middle of his totems with an opposing hunter standing next to him to eat your traps? Yeah, focus is a good thing.

The other thing you absolutely need macros for is using your survival cooldowns. Detterence and disengage don’t absolutely need macros (although there are some people who swear by using a wing clip macro on their disengage), but roar of sacrifice, intervene, and master’s call all do. You’ll want to be able to use any of these abilities on a team-mate when it’s called for. I’ve cheated and created 3 keybinds, each pointing to a macro that uses a different name (like [@Euripides], or [@MyWarriorFriend]) for master’s call. I’m sure there’s a more elegant solution, but that’s what I’ve gotten used to and it works as long as you remember to keep the macros up to date!

Class Knowledge

This is the one I have the most trouble with. I’ve PvPed a lot, I land most of my scatter traps, I put out a lot of pressure, and I know how to use my cooldowns, yet still, I’m probably not going to get much higher than 2200 this season, and that’s only when I’m playing with other really good people. The reason for this is that all the really excellent PvPers know every other spec and class in the game as well as they do their own, and I’m not there yet.

One of the problems is that people play class/specs differently in high end arena than you see in casual PvP (duels and BGs), so it’s hard to learn from casual PvP. Being able to build a good UI that tells you when certain key abilities are being used will really help, but you need to know what abilities to have your UI watch for. Also, the truly skilled PvPers can tell by the spell effects what’s happening, instead of relying on a UI to sort the useful information out.

The only way to develop this skill is to get a lot of experience. Play a lot of games, and try to arrange to play with people who are better than you. Your learning speed will go up drastically when you play with (and against) people who are better than you. Also, read up on each spec that you can on the arenajunkies class forums, ideally retaining as much information as you can about the specs you see the most. Talking to people who play these specs well will also help. Lastly, focus particularly on the specs of the people you play with. Knowing what your team can do is easy, because while you’ll see any number of random combinations of specs coming out of the opposing sewer pipe, you’ll always have the same people on your side.

Communication tools

Vent is for raiding or BGs, not arena. Arena requires a communications tool that doesn’t need a push-to-talk setup, and while vent can be configured for this, it still sounds awkward, clunky, and annoyingly loud sometimes. For this reason, almost every single serious PvPer uses Skype. If you don’t have it, get it. A lot of people use their real names on it, but I’ve elected to use my character name. Also, every time I add someone, I rename them in my contacts list to whatever their in-game name is, so I don’t get mixed up.

Obviously, there are many ways to communicate verbally while in arena, but since all the good PvPers already use Skype, it’s not worth the argument.

When you’re in a game, you should use your voice to communicate things like when you trinket, when you deterrence, and when you’re going to CC or have been CCed. Also communicate things like rapid fire or your agility trinket, as it’s a lot better to use that stuff when your other damage partner is free to use theirs too, or at least free to attack.

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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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

We’ll be better off without him, folks. We’ll just get someone else to come on and chain heroics and yell while we podcast.

ps. I want my friendship bracelet back. And for the love of all that is holy, please wash all the wrist hair dandruff off before you mail it back.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

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. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

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.

This episode is sponsored by:

http://audiblepodcast.com/hpp

and http://www.typefrag.com. Use the code “OUTDPS” for tracking when ordering Typefrag and a 25% discount off your first month.