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.

This list contains the guides that I could find with modest searching and that I thought offered actual insight.  If there are any DS class guides that you know of that you think I wrongly missed, please link them in a comment below.

[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.

General Tips

Deterrence causes attacks on the hunter than can miss to miss.  It basically adds a 100% chance for melee and ranged attacks to miss and for spells to be deflected (but not reflected unless you have the SV talent).  This is simple in principle but sometimes weird in practice.  Deterrence seemingly offers immunity toward whatever Blizzard wants, including AoE attacks like Valiona’s breath, Elementium Blast and Hour of Twilight.

Deterrence disables all weapon-based abilities.  This means no shots, no stings, no Raptor Strikes, no Wing Clips. As such, you will still typically only want to use Deterrence for its mitigation in those situations where the damage reduction is more important than DPS.  If you plan to combine the damage reduction of a glyphed Raptor Strike with that of the new Deterrence, you will of course want to Raptor Strike first.

Deterring some source of damage is not an excuse to twiddle your thumbs. Abilities that do not require functioning weapons still work under Deterrence. Here is a list of things that work under Deterrence that I am stealing from another one of my posts:

• aspect switching
• bandages
• Disengage
• Feign Death
• Flare
• Healthstones
• Hunter’s Mark
• Kill Command
• Lightwell activations
• Master’s Call
• Mend Pet
• moving
• Readiness
• Rez Pet
• Scare Beast
• Trap Launcher
• traps

You do not even have to stop DPS when Deterrence is up.  You can cast Kill Command and launch traps.  You can also refresh your Hunter’s Mark, potentially saving yourself a global down the road if you are BM or SV.

Only keep Deterrence up for as long as it it useful.  You want start it right before it is required and cancel it early if its job is done.  For that, I recommend the following macro:

/stopcasting
/cancelaura Deterrence
/cast Deterrence

With this macro, the first hit starts the aura and the second hit cancels it.  The /stopcasting line is there so that being in the middle of a cast does not stop you from using Deterrence when you need to.

If you are prone to spamming the Deterrence key when you need it, you may wish to use this macro instead so that you cannot cancel Deterrence without holding a modifier key:

/stopcasting
/cancelaura [mod] Deterrence
/cast Deterrence

The new damage-taken reduction buff to Deterrence will cause it to work like Barkskin, Divine Protection, Shield Wall (etc.), so when the raid calls for players to use such abilities they are calling you to use Deterrence.  The key difference, though, is that Deterrence causes the hunter to stop most dps and so that should be kept in mind and weighed against the benefits of the damage reduction.

Fight-Specific Tips

Morchok

The primary use for the new Deterrence here would be for reducing damage taken from Stomps or crystal explosions (more important on Heroic mode).  If, for some reason, you end up having to take one of the double shares on a Stomp, use both Deterrence and a glyphed Raptor Strike (obviously RSing first).

Zon’ozz

The new Deterrence buff will help for surviving a ball bounce, be it when the ball has gotten too big, when you have to bounce it back by yourself or when you are low on health from just receiving a dot dispel.

On Heroic Mode you may wish to save Deterrence for black phases, particularly the phase transition.

Yor’sahj

Your dps is generally more important than damage reduction on Yor’sahj so I don’t see real regular opportunities for use here, excluding perhaps eating some red damage on Heroic mode.

Hagara

I see a few potential uses for the new Deterrence here:

• the lightning phase when you’re not dpsing anyway
• right before you are frozen in an Ice Tomb (so as to reduce the damage you take inside a tomb)
• for eating an Ice Lance (you might save it for when you’re eating a lance and you think Shattered Ice is about to occur)

Ultraxion

Deterrence of course works to negate Hour of Twilight.  The fight in general is a dps race, though, so using it to reduce the aoe damage does not strike me as a worthwhile tradeoff.

Warmaster

We finally have something to use for the Twilight Onslaughts.  If your raid has set up an Onslaught on which players use personal cooldowns, that would be the one to save Deterrence for.

Deterrence should also be of use in phase two for those occasions when you screw up and are stuck in the middle of Shockwave.

Spine

Deterrence can help with the damage coming from exploding Bloods.  It will not break your grip while standing in a socket, so you can also use it to mitigate some damage taken during a barrel roll.

Madness

Deterrence immunity works for Elementium Blasts and the new damage reduction should help with Shatters.

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.

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The trinket’s on-use cooldown of 2,290 agility for 15 seconds every 1.5 minutes makes it remarkably useful this tier.

• Zon’ozz: The cd lines up very well with black phases where the boss takes extra damage.
• Yor’sahj: The cd is nice for adds and, being pure agility, works well for both the faceless packs and the Mana Voids.
• Hagara: The cooldown matches up perfectly with Hagara’s phases, allowing you to use it every time she enters her increased-damage-taken stuns at the end of a lightning or frost phase.
• Spine: The trinket is simply great for tendons.
• Madness: The trinket is good here again for when you need added burst, be it on bolts or Blistering Tentacles.

These fight-specific uses—and the advantage of being able to stack the trinket with other cooldowns—make the Kiroptic Sigil better than a spreadsheet might suggest.  However, the very idiosyncracies that make the sigil useful also make it hard to compare to other trinkets.  At the very least I would say that you want this trinket for progression on Spine because having the burst for the tendons is a great asset to have (particularly for SV).

Sharing the Story

The Raid Finder creates the possibility of narrative closure for players who would not have it otherwise.  Most players never saw Illidan in BC and downing Arthas in WotLK was also beyond the ability of a great many players.  The Raid Finder prevents this sort of outcome for Cataclysm.  Now any player who can run a few five mans will also be able to kill Deathwing and see the end of the story for themselves.  This narrative closure is a nice boon to the playerbase, but it also has consequences.

One consequence, in my opinion, is that it undermines the story.  This expansion cast Deathwing as a global evil that had the power to turn Azeroth into a barren, desiccated monument to insanity and death.  His strength was built up to be beyond the scope of mortals; if he can nearly murder Alexstrasza and put whole zones to flame in mere seconds, what hope should we have?  But then we learn that a bunch of random, poorly-organized strangers can zerg him and his most powerful minions in part of an evening.  These heroes do not overcome great odds or make great sacrifices.  No, the Raid Finder offers up Deathwing on a platter, leaving a hollow victory and a whimper of a conclusion.  I realize that the Raid Finder has to make bosses into pushovers for it to work, but it nevertheless has a consequence of making victory over Deathwing feel like no more of an achievement than completing a five-player dungeon.  Relative to other victories in raids, the RF makes the story end for me with the same feeling that I got when beating a game with a cheat code as a kid or skipping to ahead to the last chapter in the book.  Part of the power of a good conclusion comes from the journey of getting to it, and if the journey is cheapened, so is the conclusion.

Another consequence is that with the Raid Finder, the story of Cataclysm was over with for a great many players within the first eight days of the 4.3 patch.  There is nothing new to see or do until the next expansion, only repetition.  A problem that was once only held by high-end raiders is now held by a much, much larger group of players: how to stay motivated to play when you know you have seen everything there is to see.  This poses an interesting question for an MMO.  Is it better to have some content that is somewhat gated for the majority in order to preserve a sense of having more to do, or it is better to leave all content within reach to offer a sense of completion and closure?

5×5

The design decisions of the Raid Finder appear to say that Blizzard wants it to be the dungeon finder on a larger scale.  Many of the things that can be said of random dungeons can also be said of the Raid Finder:

• It is convenient.  You can access it from anywhere, at any time, by yourself or with friends.
• It is rewarding.  You can obtain high-ilvl gear and respectable chunks of Valor for very small amounts of effort and time.
• It is effectively anonymous.  Players grouped together by the Raid Finder have likely never seen each other before nor will they likely ever see each other again.
• It is non-building.  Each run is a singular occurrence in which associations between players are only temporary.

This leaves the Raid Finder open to both the praises and criticisms of the Random Dungeon Finder.

With this table I do not mean to claim that the Raid Finder is, on balance, neutral.  In the larger scheme of things it is likely an asset to the game.  The table is also not supposed to be a summary of all praises and criticisms of the Raid Finder, merely those that carry over from the Random Dungeon Finder.

What the table does suggest, though, is that Blizzard is content to advance the changes that the Random Dungeon Finder began.  The decline of server communities, the concentration on loot, and the lack of player accountability are small enough costs in Blizzard’s eyes that they felt that the dungeon finder model should be extended to raiding.  And, in their own interests, they are right to do so.  Opening raiding to a larger share of players entices new players to join and brings back old players.  But it does also change the game dramatically under the feet of existing players.  It alters the way the game is played, how gear and achievements are earned, how content is cleared.  It is a tough road the Blizzard has to walk down, constantly improving the game and reducing barriers to entry while at the same time trying to not alienate existing players.

Maleable Content

The Raid Finder is another step down the road toward leaving the difficulty of a given piece of content at the discretion of the player.  In older approaches to MMOs, the game world was fixed in difficulty and players would find the right place for themselves by choosing among locales rather than options in the user interface.  This left players in a position where the content they approached depended greatly upon their skill and time because those two dimensions of play served as barriers to entry for dungeons and raiding.

Today, things are a bit different.  WoW has added hard modes to dungeons and raids; it has also moved away from the environmentally-integrated hard modes of Ulduar toward difficulty settings that players can choose in the user interface while being nowhere near the instance.  The Raid Finder takes this element of choice a step further, adding a level of difficulty that is categorically easier than normal modes.  Now the PVE content that players approach is not dictated by skill and time so much as basic interest: “do I want to run a heroic or kill Deathwing to cap Valor this week?”

This leaves players in a position where the content does much less to challenge us to improve.  Victory can be had with little effort or great effort depending upon the player’s inclination.  Why climb the mountain when you can just ride the gondola to the top and get the same view?  Seeing a tier’s raid content is no longer earned or rewarded based on skill and dedication; rather, it is treated as an entitlement that everyone has a right to regardless of skill and dedication.  For good or ill, this is a rather remarkable change to the endgame.

I dislike this change personally because content has always been a huge motivator for me.  Wanting to fight the Lich King or Sinestra or Yogg’saron left me excited about progression.  Getting to the next boss was always fun because it was both new and challenging.  The Raid Finder removes this motivation for those players who use it because progression encounters have always already been seen.  Even normal mode progression is only repetition these days.  In this respect, the Raid Finder feels like a massive spoiler to conventional raiding that Blizzard is bribing us to use.

What I find particularly odd is that even the heroic version of the Dragon Soul offers no extra content compared to the Raid Finder.  There is no Sinestra or added Rag stage.  Rather, it is, in terms of content, the same raid in all three difficulty levels.  Skill and dedication earn you nothing in the way of content, making the Dragon Soul something of a renunciation of the model of raiding that Blizzard held for a very long time.  If this holds in Mists of Pandaria then we can expect normal and hard mode raiding to turn into activities solely for those who want the added challenge.  The difficulty that was once an intrinsic part of raiding is now merely a handicap that you choose to put on yourself.  The Hunting Party Podcast commented that perhaps this is a good thing; now we may be more likely to only see players who like adversity applying to raiding guilds.  At the same time, for raiders who enjoyed how raids used to combine content progression with a good challenge, the game has become a bit paler.

Let’s start with the new hunter-specific notes:

• Aspect of the Hawk now grants roughly 35% more attack power.
• Deterrence now also reduces damage taken by 30% while active.
• Black Arrow now ticks every 2 seconds for 20 seconds, as opposed to every 3 seconds for 15 seconds.  The total damage dealt by the ability is unchanged.

The AotH buff suggests that Blizzard believes that hunters are a bit below where they should be; however, the buff seems to preserve Blizzard’s intention that AotH be a set value rather than a percentage that adjusts with gear.  The Deterrence change is pretty nice for both PVE and PVP and will be great for for things like the burst AoE on Blackhorn and not dying as easily to dots while Deterrence is up.  A Black Arrow buff was announced earlier, but the form it has taken is particularly nice since it increases both the frequency and the duration of the dot.  This does not increase the damage of the dot itself, but it does greatly increase BA’s chance of proc’ing Lock and Load.

femaledwarf.com already reflects the 4.3.2 changes.  Zeherah makes the assumption, I think rightly, that the AotH buff will be applied to the baseline ability rather than on top of the IAtoH bonuses.  This results in a 700ap gain.  The AotH and BA changes together amounted to a 2k dps boost for me at Femaledwarf.  The BA change is responsible for most of it, suggesting that SV’s in-practice lead over the other specs will only increase.

• Vengeance is no longer triggered by receiving damage from other players.

Wow, yes.  This is a welcome nerf that will return tank specs to being just tank specs inPVP rather than juggernauts that both deal as much damage as dps and have insane survivability.

• Fireball damage has been reduced by roughly 6%.
• Pyroblast damage has been reduced by roughly 6%.

We all saw that coming.

• Players can no longer win multiple copies of the same item on a single Raid Finder boss kill. For example, a player who chooses Need on two set piece tokens or two weapons and wins the first, will not be eligible for the second on that particular boss.

Another welcome and needed change to the Raid Finder’s loot system.

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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.

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Grand Vizier Ertan is the first boss in the Vortex Pinnacle, is one of the bosses that drops A Treatise on Strategy on Heroic mode (it has dropped for me off him), and is definitely soloable by hunters.  The drop rate for the Treatise is apparently low, so don’t expect a guaranteed drop.  A whole run should take about six minutes, though, so a daily run will not consume much of your time.  As an added bonus, you get 70 Justice Points (77 with the guild perk) since you are killing Ertan on Heroic difficulty.

Preparation

• Talents: I went with an MM PVP build because that’s what I had on hand.  A raiding MM build should also suffice, but if you want to increase your odds of survival, make a custom MM build that takes both Hunter vs. Wild and Spirit Bond.  A possible alternative to an MM build is a BM+Spirt Beast approach, but I have not tried this myself.  In general, though, you want a build with self-healing, and that means MM or BM.
• Glyphs:  I glyphed Chimera Shot to increase the frequency of the heals.  I also used the Glyph of Mending to boost pet heals and Raptor Strike for the damage reduction.  If your DPS is high enough that you steal agro from your pet more than every 30 seconds, you may also wish to glyph Misdirection.
• Pet: For a blend of dps and suvivability, I recommend a cat with a custom build similar to this.  Ertan performs only nature spells (no melee attacks) and so you do not need a tenacity pet’s armor, dodge or crit immunity bonuses.  The only real advantage that a tenacity pet would have for this fight is the 40% bonus healing from Blood of the Rhino, but the damage is not so intense that you need it.
• Consumables: You take a fair amount of damage this fight, so I recommend consumables that boost your nature resistance and stamina.  I went with agi food, drum kings and a Prismatic Elixir.  You also want bandages.

The Run

1. Make sure to set the dungeon difficulty to Heroic before zoning in.  You can do this by right clicking on your character’s unit frame and changing the “Dungeon Difficulty” there.
2. When you zone in, dismiss your pet, hit Cheetah, Camouflage, and then run past all the trash on the way to Ertan (example).  If you take the inside of the spiral ramp and don’t stop, you should be able to make it all the way to Ertan in one Camouflage.  This is the primary reason why the run takes under six minutes for us.
3. At Ertan, use your consumables and activate Aspect of the Wild.  Its resist bonus is great for this fight, particularly for your pet since pets double dip on the resist bonus.
4. Have your pet run in first and then stand (1) on the opposite side of the boss from your pet and (2) as close as you can to the boss without min-ranging on him.  This is so that the Lurking Tempests that spawn stay collapsed because no matter where they are, they will see that they are within something’s field of vision (either yours or your pet’s).  If you do not keep the Tempests collapsed like this, they will pop up and start zapping you until you are dead.  One reason to stay as close as you can to the boss is so that the Tempests on the far side of the boss from you are within your `vision range’ for lack of a better term.  If you stay too far back they will pop up even if they are physically in front of you.
5. Do not use Intervene.  I know it sounds great, but it will cause your pet to change positions and ruin the 360° of coverage on Lurking Tempests that you need to not get zapped.  You take less damage by not using Intervene.
6. Use Mend Pet regularly and be ready to use Cower if necessary.
7. When the cyclones collapse, try to dance between them so that you do not get slowed.  However, do not move so much that you cause Lurkers to pop up.
8. Expect to take a bit of damage during the collapses.  Deterrence does work on the lightning that shoots at you.  With Readiness, you should be able to Deterrence at least three collapse phases.  It can also help to time your Readiness so that you can fire two Chimera Shots in a row.
9. It is easy to step in slightly, Raptor Strike, and then step out slightly during the collapse phases.  The glyph makes for a nice way to reduce incoming damage when you don’t have Deterrence.
10. Make sure to dodge between the cyclones again when the collapse phase ends.
11. Bandage as necessary after the collapse phases.  Try to use a bandage right after a Chimera Shot so that you do not delay any Chimera Shots.  CSs plus bandages should be enough healing to keep you alive.

That’s it.  The fight should take about four and a half minutes, varying with your dps of course.

Lock and Load not being caused by Arcane Shot is an intentional change. As many players have pointed out, there is just no need for it any longer.

We also intend to make sure Black Arrow is used over Explosive Trap, probably by buffing Black Arrow slightly.

We are looking a lot at hunter DPS right now. We think it is in a good place when compared to other ranged DPS specs (in equivalent gear), but falls short when compared to ranged DPS with Dragonwrath. The guilds currently posting heroic combat logs have a lot of Dragonwraths, and unfortunately, hunters are the only ranged DPS who don’t have access to a legendary weapon. When more hunters have Deathwing weapons, their DPS will go up compared to the Dragonwrath users who won’t be upgrading their weapons, and we’ll see what hunter performance looks like.

It’s likely that future legendaries won’t be usable by so many classes and specs. For the present situation, one option is to just buff hunters to make up for their inability to have legendary weapons, but when you look at DPS casters who have no legendary, it’s a tough option to take. We’re not sure yet of the future of the attack power buff in Mists of Pandaria, but in the short term we want to make sure that there are some situations where melee can do really high DPS rather than routinely coming in below ranged DPS (which is how we felt about the last two raid tiers).

If we buff hunters, it will more likely be through other avenues.

So, the takeaways are these:

• Blizzard is monitoring the state of hunter DPS “a lot” but big changes are unlikely.  They are aware of the DPS disparity of hunters with other ranged, but view it as a problem with their design of the legendary staff rather than a problem they need to fix with hunters.
• A buff to Black Arrow to put it ahead of Explosive Trap is likely.
• Adding hunters into the melee AP buff is unlikely.

Also, Kaivax confirmed that Vial of Shadows only using melee AP is indeed a bug.  Zeherah found that this bug caused her dps to decrease (with her gear) by 363, so if Blizzard fixes the trinket it should make for a decent gain for the hunters who have it.

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.

DPS Bot’s rolling two-week sampling window has exited the period of post-patch volatility for Ultraxion, and so it now seems reasonable to take a look at how the different DPS specs are stacking up on the normal modes for this boss.  Why Ultraxion?  He is the closest thing to a monotonous, egalitarian tank and spank that we have this tier.  Why only normal mode?  The data still looks a bit too messy on the heroic side of things.

Specifically, this post will look at the rolling median DPS measures of the top 100 parses on normal modes of Ultraxion for the two weeks preceding Dec. 26.  I am using median DPS because it is not as easily influenced by the magnitude of extreme outliers as averages are.  I have selected the top 100 parses, as opposed to all parses, because what I am concerned with here is class potential (found in the top parses) rather than where the average player stands.  I am using a sample period of two weeks because it is the largest sample that DPS Bot allows and gives the best chance for good parses to filter into underrepresented specs like BM.

Before we get into the numbers, there are some general disclaimers that I should go through.  For each hunter spec to have an equal shot at a good parse, we would want players to be randomly selected into them so that, overall, each spec would have roughly the same proportions of talented players and theorycrafting interest.  But that is not the way the game works.  MM has been the favored hunter spec of the expansion and BM has struggled to both keep up and shed its Wrath-era reputation of non-viability.  We see this disparity in player preference reflected in the simple number of samples brought in by DPS Bot.  Over the last two weeks for normal 25-man raids, World of Logs held 93,987 usable parses for MM, 67,169 for SV and only 12,387 for BM.  With that kind of representation the odds are simply against BM when it comes to getting an equal share at theorycrafting attention, let alone an equal shot of nabbing the best hunters.  Only sub rogues and frost mages saw less representation.

There is also skewing relating to in-game advantages.  Both casters and rogues have powerful legendaries (or pre-legendaries) these days, and the top parses are likely to be filled with players using them.  What this means is that comparisons of hunters with rogues and casters are not equalized in terms of gear.

We also cannot be confident that some other selection effects are not going on.  Not all raids upload to World of Logs, and we cannot be certain that it is mere randomness that separates those who do and those who do not.  There is also selection internal to WoL and DPS Bot.  How effectively are erroneous parses being removed?  Does DPS Bot still cut off the top 5% of parses to avoid extreme outliers?

Despite having these and other potential concerns, I think we should still press ahead and look at the data.  No data is perfect and most of the time the concern is how best to accommodate the imperfections rather than correct them.  In the task at hand, the best we can do I think is allow that the data is not ideal and keep its biases in mind as we analyze it.

The Data

In the following tables, “Median DPS” is a spec’s median DPS in the top 100 samples on Ultraxion taken from the two weeks preceding Dec. 26.  Rank is where this median DPS is positioned among the 22 different DPS specs.

MSS is the the spec’s spec score based on median dps; that is, it is its median DPS as a percentage of the highest spec’s median DPS on Ultraxion.  Unless a spec is the top spec it will not score 100% on this measure.  Spec score is a way of measuring a spec against the top DPS (as we tend to do ourselves in game).

FS is the spec’s `Frostheim score.’  It is the spec’s median DPS as a percentage of the median spec’s median DPS.  Put another way, FS is how close a spec is to the middle of the pack.  Percentages over 100 represent how far above the middle the spec is.  Percentages below 100 represent how close a spec gets to (but still falls short of) the middle.  The Frostheim score (as I’m calling it) is a way of measuring how divergent a spec is from where we might assume developers might want all specs to be.

I see value in both the MSS and FS measures.  One mirrors what players think in the game, that is, they (and their raid leaders) look to how far away from the top they are.  The other reflects what we can assume to be a developer goal, that of identifying how divergent from the norm a spec is.  Neither score is a be-all and end-all measure and neither should be viewed exclusively.  However, they each do a reasonable job reflecting a ratio that players have reason to find meaningful.

Ultraxion N25

This table is ordered by the current implicit ranking of specs in player preference: MM first, followed by SV and BM.  As we can see, the table upends this presumption a bit, at least for this difficulty level.  SV pulls ahead of MM slightly!  This lead appears in the heroic parses as well.  Whether it will hold up in the coming weeks, well, only time will tell.

Unfortunately, the overall rankings are not that promising for hunters.  We do not reach higher than 81% of the top spec’s DPS and that does not bode well for how hunters will look to raid leaders who compare everyone to the top of the meters when considering how to fill raid slots.  However, we should keep in mind that not many specs are looking particularly good on Ultraxion spec scores these days because the top spec is something of an outlier.  Fire mages are out above the pack, so to speak, with an FS value of 119% (which is high, higher than BM is low) and the next highest spec only getting a 94% spec score on normal 25man.  If we decide that fire mages are too much of an outlier and have the spec score refer to the next highest spec instead, hunter spec MSS values look a bit nicer: 86% for MM, 88% for SV, and 77% for BM.  Most specs are above 90% on the adjusted measure.

FS measures suggest that hunters are not stragglers so much merely below average.  MM and SV hunters are close to the middle of the pack.  BM looks a bit worse than MM or SV on both the MSS and FS measures, but we should remember the reasons mentioned above as to why BM might be lagging.  BM might have more potential to it than is suggested by the data here.

Ultraxion N10

This table reflecting Ultraxion 10man is a bit more promising than the 25man table, showing one spec (SV) making it into the top half of DPS specs.  BM also looks better here, nabbing a FS value of 90%.  However, the hunter specs are in general not standing out for their DPS.  Note that here again Fire mages are ahead of the pack and, in adjusted MSS values, MM would be 85%, SV would be 91%, and BM would be 82%.  Even 90, 82 and 85 percent, though, do not look good when most specs are at 90% or higher.

These tables are a bit disconcerting overall, especially considering how little raid utility and survivability we bring to The Dragon Soul.  There are few mechanics (none for bosses that I can think of) that cause a raid to distinctly benefit from having a hunter, and there are some (such as on the Spine) where the raid actually hurts for having a hunter.  Hunters in general tend to take more damage than all other dps specs this tier owing to our lack of survivability options (we don’t get to Raptor Strike much and Deterrence does not work on many sources of damage).  This leaves me thinking that hunters are not looking particularly attractive these days, not when another ranged DPS of equal skill could do more damage, live longer and potentially offer more raid utility.  Of course, this is all speaking in terms of averages.  Player competence trumps these sorts of odds, and so it it behooves us to have more skill and know our jobs better than other ranged DPS so that we earn a spot despite whatever slight numerical disadvantages we might be operating under.

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The change that Blizzard made to Disengage in 4.3 is subtle but powerful.  To explain what happened, and what all the complaining on the various forums is about, we have to first talk about how Disengage works.

Disengage is effectively a self-induced knockback.  The game treats it as a very large jump, and you can make that jump off a cliff, over a shark, or into a wall.  I use the word “jump” intentionally because, in terms of effects on the hunter, the game reads a Disengage and a jump in similar ways.  The game reads the Disengaging hunter as being at the point that she Disengaged from until she lands.  This means that effects that occur at that origination point can continue to affect the hunter despite the hunter being airborne and on the way to somewhere else.  These effects include melee abilities, as I discuss in examples below.

The fresh complaints over Disengage relate to how CCs affect hunters while they are in the air.  Some hunters complain that CCs are affecting them midflight, but this as a general principle this is not new.  We have no immunities granted by Disengage and the knockback provides little protection from other movement-affecting effects like CCs and even other knockbacks.  However, with 4.3, Disengage is getting overwritten in new ways and by new effects (at least to my knowledge).

While I was running arenas with a friend the other night, I disengaged off some stairs to get away from a warrior.  The warrior cast Intimidating Shout as I was in the air.  It affected me, owing to how the game reads my location mid-Disengage.  Instead of being feared when I eventually landed, or just dropping out of the air like a stone, I actually reversed course and flew back to the stairs that I had Disengaged from.  It was like getting Death Gripped.  There was no full or even partial Disengage; instead, I was feared, my Disengage was on cooldown, and I was back in melee range of the warrior as if I had never moved.

In a different situation in a battleground, I was coincidentally again disengaging away from a warrior.  He landed a Hamstring (a snare) on me while I was in the air and several yards out of melee range.  This time, I did not get Death Gripped.  Rather, I simply dropped like a stone midflight like this.  There were about five debuffs on me at the time since I was defending a node alone, and so I can only say that Hamstring is my best guess from my glance at my debuffs as to what stopped my Disengage.

Posters in a thread over at the official forums suggest that my anecdotes reflect the way that things are working with Disengage these days.  Different CCs affect us differently: roots, snares and stuns appear to cause a hunter to simply drop mid-Disengage.  But other CCs cause us to get Death Gripped back to the launch point.  I can vouch for fears doing this, and forum posters suggest that disorients do this too.  I would speculate that this has to do with the ways in which CCs now overwrite Disengages.  Since fears and disorients cause a character to need to actually move differently rather than simply canceling an existing form of movement, they could be Death Gripping hunters (in effect) rather than simply dropping them.  Of course, I’m no programmer, so that is only a guess on my part.

Why this change with 4.3?  It allegedly relates to a fix that Blizzard made to help warrior charges.  For years and years, players were able to avoid warrior charges owing to the way that the game treats jumps (as described above).  If a warrior charged a player while he or she was in the air, the warrior would charge to the location that the player jumped from rather than to where the player was or where the player landed.  This was, understandably, a problem for warriors.  Blizzard apparently did  something to fix warrior charges in 4.3 that allows the warrior to path correctly to a target that moved during the charge.  This somehow changed the way that jumps were treated by incoming effects and, allegedly, also affected Disengages.

Regardless of cause, though, the effects are clear: our Disengage now gets canceled if not reverted by CCs midflight.  Snares, roots and stuns now drop us.  Fears and disorients Death Grip us rather than dropping us.  It is a shift for the worse across the board.

It is hard to argue that Blizzard should simply reverse the patch change because, after all, charge jumping was a bug that warriors had been dealing with for a very long time.  However, it would be nice if their gains did not have to come at a cost to hunters.  Disengage being read as a jump seems like an awkward design decision that leaves developers in a position where unintended consequences are bound to result from changes to either jumps or Disengages.

Cooldowns

I have written about our defensive cooldowns recently and so will simply direct you to that post.  However, one ability that I did not mention there is Spirit Mend.  If you play BM and have the option of running a spirit beast, make sure to get good use out of Spirit Mend.

Talents

Spirit Bond for BM – This is a talent all BM raiders should take.  It is an excellent if boring buff that increases in value the more heals you take in a fight.  This makes it great for a fight like Ultraxion where you take a lot of consistent damage (and you magnify the already-magnified heals with SB).  Spirit Bond does little to help us survive a huge spike of damage; rather, it helps get us back to a safe level of health after the damage has been done.  Spirit Bond also does not help us look better in parses: it increases our heals taken and does nothing to reduce our damage taken.

Hunter vs. Wild for SV – More stamina may seem like it has no value, but, well, it does.  It allows you to take more damage before you die and survive larger single hits of damage, performing the same service that damage-reduction abilities perform.  Its value can also be viewed in terms of time: with more stamina, you take longer to die, allowing (1) a greater chance for a healer to hit you with direct and AoE heals before you run out of hit points and (2) more tics of heal-over-time abilities to affect you before you die.  A difference with damage reduction is that having more stamina does not save healer mana. Despite this drawback, Hunter vs. Wild still makes for an excellent use of SV’s two discretionary talents if the hunter does not need Entrapment or a reduced-CD Disengage.

Chimera Shot for MM – CS is a nice self-heal, but it is not primarily a self-heal nor is it a very big one.  This means that often what little healing we would get from CS goes into overhealing because we time its use by its cooldown, not our health pool.  The CS heal’s value increases the more consistently we sit below full health.

Of these talents, both Hunter vs. Wild and Spirit Bond are accessible by all three hunter specs.  This means that all hunters can take them, but they will come at a cost to DPS when they are offspec talents (for example, it costs an MM hunter DPS talents to take Spirit Bond).  Ordinarily, hunters do not take them as offspec talents, but they are something to consider if you are (1) at liberty to respec between fights and (2) can afford the dps loss and would meaningfully benefit from the survivability gains.

Other

Knowledge, Raid Awareness and Positioning – These virtues are of great importance for all raiders, but they are of extra importance to hunters since we tend take more damage than other classes when we do get hit.  The more we can do to not stand in fire, to not get cleaved, to stay in range of heals, to stack appropriately and so on, the better we will look at the end of the night.  Also, simply being aware of those rare instances when our defensive cooldowns will help is very important.

Lightwell – Lightwells are great.  Use them.  Use them a lot.  They require no casting, no global, just a mouseover and a click.  If you raid with a Holy Priest on a regular basis, I recommend setting up an addon to track the hot from the Lightwell (called Lightwell Renew) so that you do not clip it or wait too long between uses.  Incidentally, it does help to have keybinds for your rotation so that even if you otherwise click most of the time you can still maintain your rotation while your mouse is heading to and from the Lightwell.

Healthstones – Try to use a Healthstone when you will take the full heal from it.  However, do not be so stingy with it that you never end up using it.  Also, do not be afraid to ask for a healthstone before a pull; it’s the warlock’s job to provide these stones, just like its our job to, um . . . do other stuff.  Yeah.  Other stuff.

Helpful Ground Effects – Try to familiarize yourself with what the different helpful ground effects look like (Efflorescence, Healing Rain, Holy Word: Sanctuary, Power Word: Barrier, Socialist Totem) so that you can know which graphics you should try to stand in when possible.

Bandages – If all else fails, bandages do work and are worth having around.

In the final tally, hunters are far from helpless when it comes to taking damage. In addition to our decent mobility for avoiding damage (and moving into helpful ground effects), we also have some means for surviving damage.  However, the fact remains that hunters simply do not look good in parses these days.  What few damage-reduction abilities we do have come at a cost to DPS on the exceedingly rare occasions when they are useful.  If you compare this with the hybrid DPS specs who deal as much or more dps than we do–like shadow priests, boomkin, ret paladins and so forth–that also have many options for damage reduction and self-healing, well, we just do not come out looking good. Frankly, our lack of suvivability options in the face of raid damage needs to be balanced by either above-average DPS or extra raid utility in other areas, and these days we do not seem to be able to offer either of those things.  If I were a raid leader, I am not sure what incentive I would have to bring a hunter into the Dragon Soul other than things unrelated to class like player competence and reliability.

For field testing, I chose npcs in the Vortex Pinnacle that stand absolutely still regardless of agro: Howling Gales and Grand Vizier Ertan.  I was able to obtain RiF procs on both, but the procs were so infrequent in an Arcane Shot rotation that I do not conclude that the change to RiF is a substantial boost to DPS on stationary targets.  On Ertan, for example, I only achieved one proc over the course of the fight.  The lack of an internal cooldown allows for the potential of getting five back-to-back procs in a row (which I have seen happen), but the chances for this appear to be miniscule overall.

Note that the MfD applications from an AS rotation will not have any chance of a proc if Hunter’s Mark is up on the target.  Also note that targets that move increase RiF’s value, making it a somewhat interesting choice for working on some of the DS bosses, such as the Spine of Deathwing where the targets move a lot.

Why should SV hunters care about Explosive Traps?  Well, as Frostheim describes, Explosive trap is a good way to proc Lock and Load, but it is not a simple choice to use it.  It is better than Black Arrow on single targets if you can simply drop it at your feet and have it take effect.  If the time it takes you to launch it is around 1.5 seconds, it should be about equal to Black Arrow.  If it takes you longer, it just gets worse and worse.  On multiple targets it is generally always preferable to Black Arrow.

Regardless of when you use Explosive Trap, on those times that you do use it you want to get it in place as quickly as possible.  Toward this end, the first thing you want is a good macro.  I prefer a /castsequence macro because it has given me the fewest problems with fake globals and misplaced traps.  If you prefer an alternative macro, I encourage you to suggest it in a comment below.

/castsequence reset=14 Trap Launcher, Explosive Trap

The reset condition exists just to make sure that you do not lay a trap at your feet unintentionally after activating but not using the Trap Launcher.  For that reason, you do not want the reset time to be too long.  You also do not want it to be too short, either, because if the macro resets before you have hit it a second time, you are stuck with with the predicament of trying to activate Trap Launcher while it is already active (which the game no longer allows).

The second thing you want for quick and effective launches is a keybind for your macro.  This is true even if you prefer to use a mouse for the rest of your abilities.  Usually you can queue up a rotation just fine with a mouse, but abilities with targeting reticles (like launched traps) are an exception.  This is because by only using a mouse you are adding your cursor’s travel time from your action bar to the trap’s intended landing point onto every single trap you launch.  That time adds up, and if Zeherah’s estimation on Femaledwarf is any gauge, repeated delays of mere seconds can cost thousands of dps over the course of a fight.

With a keybind you can position your mouse at the same time that a keystroke activates the macro, allowing you to fire off the trap as soon as the reticle appears and increasing your dps.  I think similar recommendations can be made for binding other abilities that benefit from the player being able to perform two actions simultaneously, such as with off-global abilities like Silencing Shot and with abilities that improve with the use of mouse turns such as Disengage.  It is physically impossible for clicking to perform as well with these sorts of abilities since clicking only allows for sequential rather than simultaneous actions.

A third thing you want to keep in mind is that the trap launcher does not trigger the global, and you can get it ready before Explosive Trap and Black Arrow come off cooldown.  By getting the Trap Launcher ready ahead of time, or at least during the global before you use the trap cooldown, you save a bit of delay.

Morchok

• You can stand behind and between pairs of rock pillars to continue dps when avoiding Black Blood of the Earth.
• If you are on Crystal duty, try to cast your Steadies or Cobras in Fox as the shard gets low so that the knockback from the crystal exploding does not cancel your cast.
• Preliminary views of the logs suggest that Stomp is only split between players, and so Snake Traps are apparently not helpful for eating damage shares.

Zon’ozz

• Hunter pets do not appear to bounce the ball.
• Save DPS cooldowns for the black phases.
• If you know you are about to be dispelled, try to (1) cast your Steadies and Cobras in Fox and (2) be closer than max range to the boss so that your dps does not get interrupted by the knockback.  Do not creep closer to the boss if it screws up your raid’s game of ping-pong though.
• Heroic Mode: Deterrence allegedly works for avoiding the opening burst damage of Black Phases.
• Heroic Mode: Use glyphed Raptor Strikes

Yor’sahj

• Add kills do appear to trigger Rapid Killing.
• Make good use of Disengage to move around during the fight.  Aspect of the Fox is great for moving with an ooze as it travels toward the boss.
• It is possible to get very close to the boss for red oozes.  If you find yourself taking too much damage, start using glyphed Raptor Strikes.
• You can Multishot at the boss and hit the black ooze adds if both you and the adds are positioned properly.  This can help in avoiding minimum range issues with the adds.

Hagara

• Aspect of the Pack can help during normal mode and LFR Ice phases if your raid is good about not taking damage.
• Disengage is a great tool in case you get behind in the Ice Phase.
• Aspect of the Wild can help during the Lightning phases, particularly if there is no shaman present.  Pets double dip on AotW resists, so it can be a way to keep your pet healthy if nothing else.
• Reposition yourself to help other DPSers free you if you see that you are about to be entombed.
• Hagara takes more damage immediately after a Ice or Lightning phase so, if convenient, try to use dps cooldowns then.
• Heroic Mode: Use Master’s Call to not be slowed by frost patches during the Ice Phase.  Note that you can also cast it on other players who may need the help.

Ultraxion

• On the drake trash before Ultraxion, note that both Distracting Shot and Silencing Shot work to bring the drakes down.  A hunter can snag all the drakes himself or herself.
• Try to safely delay using Heroic Will as much as possible so as to preserve as much uptime on the boss as you can.
• You do not need your WASD keys at all this fight so even if you are a clicker you can easily afford to bind Heroic Will for more precision and being able to finish off a shot closer to when you need to hit HW.
• You can activate Heroic Will via a macro with this command: /click ExtraActionButton1
• Deterrence can eat Hour of Twilight if necessary and can be used on every third Hour cast.

Warmaster Blackhorn

Resources

• Rinku’s hunter tips for T13 normal modes
• WoW Hunter’s Hall boss guides and links
• Arktem’s hunter commentary on heroic DS

Changelog

• 11/19: Added wasp tip to Warmaster.
• 12/30: Added Raptor Strike tip to Madness.
• 1/20: Added Raptor Strike tip to Madness.

RiF should work properly now with Marked for Death, and the Bombardment change has been reverted and is staying away.  I will test the changes if I get a chance later today.  Find the hotfix notes here and below.

Classes

• Hunter
  • Kill Command should now always consume the Resistance is Futile! buff, regardless of whether the target has Hunter’s Mark or not.
  • Reverted a bug fix that caused Bombardment to be consumed by the next Multi-Shot. Fixing this bug proved to be a significant dps loss, so Bombardment once again lasts for its full 6 second duration regardless of the number of Multi-Shot casts. The tooltip will be updated in a future patch to reflect that this change is intended.

It looks like bans of up to eight days are being handed out to guilds who exploited the LFR loot system.  This apparently includes Paragon, Method and Ensidia, but not Vodka, Blood Legion or Premonition.  I wonder what longer-term effect this will have on the hardmode progression that starts this week.  Will we see one of these ban-free US guilds get the first kill on heroic Deathwing? I also have to wonder how much Blood Legion’s chances will improve from their having 15 caster legendaries.

Hunter forums have lit up with complaints of annoying bugs with Feign Death, Deterrence and Disengage.  These are just reports and are not accompanied by evidence, but they are worth keeping an eye on as possible bugs.  I can speak with more confidence in saying that the 4.3 changes to Bombardment and Resistance is Futile do not work.

Zeherah has added modeling options over at femaledwarf for 4.3.  You can tell FD to use Explosive Trap rather than Black Arrow and, also importantly, you can adjust how long it takes you to fire off the trap.  These options should let SV hunters fiddle around with how well they can expect trap-launching Explosive Traps to work for them.  You can also adjust FD’s tolerance for using AS as a Focus dump.

World of Logs appears to be handling logs and rankings better now, and there is now also some data that is making its way from WoL over to DPS Bot.  However, the rankings at WoL and the averages over at DPS Bot are based on so few parses at this point that I really would not put any weight on them.  I ranked on Hagara 10N last night largely because fewer than 200 MM hunter logs had been incorporated at that point.  If I remember right, a hunter at rank #156 did 3k dps(e).  I also would not trust a lot of the WoL rankings for another reason: they presently include a lot of obviously bad logs.

Season 11 starts today.  Also, the next wing of the LFR opens, including Ultraxion through Deathwing.

Class Notes

The new hunter-specific notes can be found here and are highlighted in red among the older class notes below:

• Monstrous Bite now reduces the target’s healing received by 25%, up from 10%.
• Talent Specializations
  • Beast Mastery
    • Animal Handler now increases Attack Power by 30%, up from 25%.
    • Widow Venom now reduces the target’s healing received by 25%, up from 10%.
    • Burrow Attack now does approximately 20% more damage, and has an increased area of effect.
    • Froststorm Breath now does approximately 20% more damage, and has an increased area of effect.
  • Marksmanship
    • Bombardment now only affects the next Multi-shot cast. [Does not appear to be in effect.]
    • Resistance is Futile! is now activated by targets affected by Marked for Death. [Appears to be broken.]
  • Survival
    • Explosive Shot damage has been increased by 15%.
• Bug Fixes
  • Point of No Escape no longer affects melee abilities.
  • The casting bar for Tame Beast should now always indicate the correct cast duration at high values of haste.

The largest change (at least in appearance) in the hunter-specific notes is to Bombardment. Instead of affecting all Multi-shots cast within five seconds, it only affects the next Multi-shot.  The weird thing is, though, that I am not seeing the change in effect.  To all appearances the Bombardment buff is currently functioning the same as it did before 4.3.  In search of evidence that I was not crazy, I came across posters over at EJ and the official forums saying the same thing.

Edit 12/3/11: The Resistance is Futile change appears to be broken.  When it procs from Marked for Death it does not return the Focus or consume the buff.  It does still work off of Hunter’s Mark, though.  I am frankly confused at these patch changes.  They are very clearly not working but they implemented them anyway.

Bug Fixes

The bigger news, though, is this: “pet bars will no longer sometimes disappear when zoning.”  Casual testing via zoning into an instance while on flying mount suggests that the bug is indeed gone.  Fantastic.  Also: “pets should now more reliably keep up with mounted players.”

Blizzard says of macros that “using #showtooltip in a macro should now cause the action bar icon to become highlight [sic] at the appropriate times.”  This means that you can have Aimed Shot in a macro, and it will still highlight when Master Marksman triggers.  Likewise for Explosive Shot and Arcane Shot with Lock and Load, Focus Fire at full Frenzy stacks and so on.

PVP

In PVP news, random BGs that result in ties now award Honor equal to that earned in a loss to both sides.  Conquest Points earned in this pre-season week will stick around when the next season starts.

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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.

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General Guides:

• MMO-Champion: strategies, embedded video guides and loot lists
• LearntoRaid: high quality video guides
• Icy Veins: detailed text-based guides

Hunter-Specific Guides:

• Rinku of Paragon’s guide to 4.3 normal modes

Rinku’s guide is full of nice tips for cooldown usage, pet targeting, surviving damage, positioning and more.  The biggest surprise to me was that Deterrence will work on Hour of Twilight on Ultraxion.

In general, keep in mind that this is Blizzard’s rough draft of the new system and that more changes are sure to come between now and the next expansion.  You can find Bashiok’s comments on the very rough state of the talent calculator 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.

edit: The post now includes updates resulting from conversations held in the comment section.

The baseline SV shot priority is and will be the same as it has been this whole expansion.  You want to use Explosive Shot and Black Arrow on cooldown, keep Serpent Sting up on the target with Cobra Shot, and dump any extra Focus during free globals using Arcane Shot.

There are a few differences from patch 4.0 that returning hunters may wish to note:

• Black Arrow does enough damage that it is the Lock and Load proc source of choice for single targets.  Zeherah notes, though, that changes to the internal cooldown of Lock and Load on the PTR may make Explosive Trap again a reasonable if not preferred way to proc Lock and Load.
• The Glyph of Arcane Shot is better than the Glyph of Serpent Sting even without the new two piece tier bonus.  The other two glyphs of choice are still Kill Shot and Explosive Shot.  Keep in mind that on AoE fights or in fights where AoE damage is simply more important than single target damage that you may wish to glyph into SrS rather than AS (thanks Zeherah!).
• A OwN/SE build is now the way to go, meaning that SV no longer takes Careful Aim (and hasn’t since the CA nerf).  This in turn means that the SV rotation no longer varies with the CA phase, making things even simpler than before.
• The proper Lock and Load sequence no longer interposes a shot between the first two Explosive Shots.

This last point merits some elaboration.  Hunters over at Elitist Jerks have come across a new LnL sequence that squeezes the Explosive Shots in a LnL closer together without clipping (and that’s a good thing).  Clipping results from an Explosive Shot following too quickly on the tail of a preceding Explosive Shot, overwriting or “clipping” the last tic of that ES.  This causes you to get eight Explosive Shot tics from a LnL sequence rather than nine.

An easy way to avoid clipping would be to just fire Cobra Shots between all ESs during LnL.  The thing is, though, that we want to cram as many Explosive Shots into a fight duration as possible, and that means getting Explosive Shots in our LnL sequences as close together as we can without clipping.  I tested the new method from EJ a bit myself and think that it offers a nice way of tightening things up.  Under most conditions you can simply go through your LnL sequence as before except excluding the shot that was previously interwoven between the first two ESs in the sequence.

Unfortunately, “most conditions” are not “all conditions.”  There are some situations (as commenters below point out) where having no delay between the first and second ESs results in clipping.  One such situation is when you are moving toward the target.  This causes the ESs to arrive too close together and clip.  Because of this it helps to make sure that you are not firing the second ES in a LnL sequence before there is one second left on the first ES.  Zeherah cautiously recommends using an addon to watch fractional seconds.  I personally recommend NeedtoKnow for this but other addons may work too.  Regardless, to be on the safe side, I recommend putting a slight delay (but, again, not a shot) between the first two ESs in a Lock and Load sequence.  This delay should be very small, substantially shorter than a global, and I recommend testing it out yourself on training dummies to get a feel for what works for you.

If you have 66 Focus (including regen) and do not need to save for BA, you want a LnL to go like this:

ES > slight delay > ES > AS > ES

If you cannot pay for an AS plus an ES or need to save up for BA, you want a LnL to go like this:

ES > slight delay > ES > CoS > ES

Some contend that you need an additional delay beyond an AS between the second and third ESs, but I can’t substantiate this with my own testing.

Aspect of the Wild

I hate to say it, but, yes, this ability sometimes has its uses.  I use it for soloing Vortex Pinnacle but it also has its uses in situations where your raid is about to take a spike of nature damage but you have no shammy, such as might easily happen on 10man Nef.

Cower

Cower does occasionally come in handy for our pets.  I use it on Firelands trash and while extreme soloing.  On bosses it is usually only helpful when the pet is somewhere it is not supposed to be, such as under a lava wave in The Obsidian Sanctum

Deterrence

Deterrence increases the miss and deflection chances of incoming attacks by 100%.  This means that Deterrence will turn away Bloodthirst, Arcane Shot and Wrath but it will not prevent damage that has no `miss table,’ like magma damage.  The spells and abilities that are affected are not always clear.  For example, Deterrence works on orbs on Majordomo but not on shards on Baleroc.

Disengage

Disengage is great for getting out of dangerous situations.  There are a few things worth noting about the ability when it comes to damage, though.  The first is that the game reads Disengage like a jump, and so if you use it to `jump’ out of fire, the game reads you as still being in the fire until you land.  This means that you continue to take fire damage during your flight time even though your character is visibly out of the fire.  If a simple sidestep gets you out of the fire faster, it is preferable to Disengage.

The other thing to note about damage and Disengage is that the ability can be used to reduce fall damage.  Disengage causes the game to calculate fall damage taken from the point that Disengage was used, regardless of how far the hunter has already fallen.  You could fall from miles in the air and take no damage if you Disengage close to the ground (providing that you manage to shoot a bird or something on the way down so that you are in combat at the right time).

Feign Death

Feign Death cancels many casts in addition to dropping agro, making it great for avoiding damage.  Unfortunately, feigns in raids often result in burden-shifting, where some add or mechanic’s attention may get put onto another player instead disappearing upon the feign.  In these situations it is often better to not feign if it means potentially keeping the attacks or mechanics off of a healer.

Glyphed Raptor Strikes

With the glyph, Raptor Strike will apply a five-second buff reducing the hunter’s damage taken by 20%.  Since Raptor Strike has a six-second cooldown, this means that the hunter can have the buff up 83% of the time if it comes down to it.  However, Raptor Strike is a melee ability and costs globals, leading to Raptor Strike’s use being a dps loss.  Using it requires some cost-benefit analysis regarding which is more helpful to the raid: taking less damage or preserving your dps level.  Glyphed Raptor Strikes are most useful on fights like Nefarian where the hunter can dps in melee range and use Raptor Strike before spikes of raid damage.

Intervene

The Intervene ability will cause a tenacity pet to apply a buff to a friendly target that absorbs damage on the target until any of the following conditions are met:

• a direct-damage attack is taken by the target, at which time the Intervene effect ends and the attack is absorbed up to a value equal to 50% of the pet’s health
• the pet absorbs the equivalent of 50% of its health in indirect damage (the absorption could go beyond 50%, but I couldn’t find a good way to test it)
• the buff duration of ten seconds comes to an end

Intervene, then, works sort of like a priest bubble, absorbing a potentially huge amount of damage (85k+ with raid buffs and Last Stand).  This, combined with its very short cooldown of 30 seconds (21 for BM), makes it a good tool for helping a tank take a large blow or helping another player (or yourself) survive burst AoE damage.  Intervene won’t absorb all kinds of damage, though; for example, it won’t absorb fall or drowning damage.  Intervene’s eight to twenty five yard range means that it is not always the best tool for quickly saving ranged (who may be 30+ yards away) or melee (who may be standing on top of the pet).

Note that Intervene’s absorb value is set by the pet’s max health.  This means that Shell Shield, Cower, and the pet being at full health do not matter.  Stam buffs, stam talents and Last Stand, however, do help because they increase the pet’s maximum health.  Last Stand increases the absorb value by ~30% and can be macro’d with Intervene.

Of course, like some of our other abilities, Intervene has a price.  To use it, we have to use a tenacity pet with suboptimal dps talents, and that means a dps loss.  This can make using Intervene on some fights something of a tough call.

Roar of Sacrifice

I mention this ability only to say that it actually is not that helpful in PVE settings.  NPC spells do not crit and tanks who are not idiots do not receive melee crits, making this ability largely a PVP cooldown.

Snake Trap

In those rare situations where you have an attack whose damage needs to be split among a number of targets, activating a snake trap can help because each snake will usually take a share of the damage.  This allegedly works on Majordomo for eating scythes but requires careful timing so that the snakes spawn in time but are still in front of the boss when the scythe hits.

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Emberfrost writes of the Q&A:

The meaningful Hunter questions got ignored again. Why because people would rather play with all their pets, or use snake trap for damage, then ask the important questions like Hunter Pet Bugs, Scaling, 2 failing specs.

Really even when some people asked those questions Blizzard ignored them. Why, why would you ignore the important questions instead answer questions from Weekend Hunters?

And Kaivax responds:

As you know, we are limited by the quantity and quality of the questions we get, and there are only so many answers that we’re willing to provide. We simply don’t want to load the community down with a bunch of “We’re not sure” or “We don’t know yet,” responses. There are more paladins than any other class, so it’s not surprising we got a lot of paladin questions. We talked a lot at Blizzcon about how dramatically warlocks were changing, so we got a lot of warlock questions.

Hunters have a lot of damage coming from high values of static nonscaling Attack Power and high base damage, but severely lack longterm scaling, causing them to fall behind by the end of the expansion despite starting very powerful in the first tier. Especially Survival. Are there any ideas or plans to address overall Hunter scaling?

The developers meant to answer this specific question — they’ve said so — but somehow it slipped through the cracks. The answer is that we have tried for some time to keep physical attacks feeling distinct by designing some to be mostly weapon based, and others as mostly (or entirely) attack power based. This applies to most melee characters, as well as hunters. But we have continually been stymied by scaling issues and player confusion, so our plan in 5.0 is to make nearly all of these attacks scale by both weapon damage and attack power (or ranged attack power) to about the same degree.

Our internal 4.3 testing for hunters shows Marksman, Survival, and Beast Mastery very close. This doesn’t always play out in encounters, because players often develop different strategies when encounters go live (than they did during PTR testing). In 4.2 encounters, the three hunter specs were not as far apart in DPS as many players believe, but because the hunters who would get the most DPS out of any spec tend to play Marksmanship, there is a sampling bias towards Marksmanship. We sometimes see DPS averages drop for spec A when we buff spec B (and don’t touch spec A), simply because many very-talented players migrate towards spec B.

This is some nice insight into Blizzard’s thought processes and plans for hunter scaling.

Next, the SV-related posts.  The first one relates to the claim that the blues made that most SV players don’t know the best way to execute their rotation.

I passed this along to Xelnath, as he’s the one who made the statement you’re referring to. Here’s what he has to say:

I’ll own up to this one. Our players are incredibly creative, dedicated and focused on maximizing their classes’ effectiveness. That said, I’ve seen some incredibly talented Subtlety rogues pull off damage nobody thought was possible. Sometimes the truth is hidden out there – when a majority of players are drawn to the current theorycrafted max-dps spec – there’s fewer eyes to find the tricks to maximize the effectiveness of another spec.

I don’t know how to play your class – you guys are the masters there. Sometimes an “underpowered” spec is actually just underloved.

Thanks for the passionate discussion.

The overall suggestion is that most players are missing something about SV.  I, like others, am perplexed as to what it could be.

There’s also this post that has more to say about Survival:

“So….which is it? We don’t know how to play our specs or we do?”

When looking at the big picture of class design and performance, the answer is kind of both. I think the point is that specs not played nearly as often as others aren’t necessarily underpowered. Our data may show a much smaller percentage of players using certain specs, though a good amount of the people who do use them competitively tend to do very well.

Here’s a follow-up from Celestalon:

Unholy and Survival are definitely underpowered in 4.2, and are getting buffed to compensate in 4.3. However, the point that Xelnath was trying to make, I think, is that they’re not as far behind as people think they are. With just a couple minor buffs, these specs are able to be competitive, in at least some encounters. Subtlety is a good example of this already: Subtlety is a very difficult rotation to play, and suffers quite a lot of drawbacks. But in some encounters, those drawbacks can be mitigated, such that it becomes the optimal spec. For example, the top Subtlety rogues are beating the top Combat and Assassination rogues on Baleroc, since that fight plays to Subtlety’s strengths. Will Subtlety win on every fight? No, probably not. But they’re not nearly as far behind as most players think, and sometimes can even be better. We’re hoping the changes to Survival and Unholy (and Destruction, and Beast Mastery) in 4.3 will help push those specs into a similar situation. We really hope people give these specs a chance.

So, according to Blizzard, SV is both better than we think it is and deserving of a substantial buff for 4.3.  In other words, it is behind, but not by as much as we think because, apparently, we’re missing something.  What that missing thing is, well, they don’t say.

Overall, though, the answers provide some new information, mainly about 5.0, and so are quite welcome.

In 4.3 hunters will:

• be able to expect greater parity in dps between the specs.
• still have snake traps that do enough damage to break traps and scatters but not enough to be meaningful (because Blizzard apparently likes it that way).

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You can find the patch notes here.

Currency Conversions

Valor Points are being converted to Justice Points with the patch transition. Converted VP that would take the player past the 4k JP cap are simply lost (at least that’s the way it worked on the PTR).

It is not the same situation for the Conquest to Honor Point conversion, though. Currently on the PTR players can exceed the 4k cap with the conversion. Players assumedly are not allowed to gain Honor again until they reduce their total to an amount below 4k.   I have no idea how far past 4K the converted Conquest Points are able to take a player.

These conversions mean that if a person is really desperate to hang onto their Valor as JP past the 4k JP cap, they can convert it to Conquest Points now (at a 1 to 1 conversion), let it become Honor with the patch, and then trade the Honor into JP at the 1.5 to 1 conversion ratio (providing they’ve already spent some JP so that the conversion works).  This is a steep loss, but holding onto 2/3 of your points past the cap is better than none.

Also keep in mind the weird thing that Blizzard did with Honor gear at the last patch transition.  In the first week after the patch’s release they made the previous season’s ivl 365 Conquest gear purchasable with Honor.  Then in the next week they released a new set of Honor gear at item level 371, making the ilvl 365 gear obsolete (so to speak) after just one week.  So, just in case they do this again, you might consider waiting a week after the patch before spending your Honor.

Buffs

Both SV and BM are getting buffs.  Expect both to get a substantial bump.  It was about +1,300 dps for SV and +1,400 dps for BM on the PTR for me according to femaledwarf.  The buffs do not allow them to surpass MM, but they bring them much closer.   Also note that worms and chimeras are getting buffs and this should provide an additional increase to BM’s AoE dps.

Widow Venom is getting a buff (from 10% to 25%) but it will still suck relatively speaking because, unlike other healing debuffs, it actually costs us Focus and a global rather than being built into our rotation.  Devilsaur’s healing debuff is getting the same boost.

Shannox

• Glyphed Raptor Strikes, Disengage and Deterrence help if you get Rage from Rageface.  Of course, they don’t help if you’ve got Facerage.
• Ril comments that snares work on Riplimb when he’s bringing his spear back.  This is certainly true on Heroic; there he gains something called Dogged Devotion upon turning to the spear and that makes him open to 50% snares but also returns him to snare immunity progressively.  So, in other words, land that snare right away.
• Heroic Mode: If you’re on Rageface duty you’ll want an instant that hits very hard in one single tic to break Facerage, and that makes Chimera Shot pretty ideal (ES, AS and KC are decidedly not ideal) (Jrbsheppo comments that AiS procs also work but I personally don’t like them as much as CS).  Once you break Facerage, the dog will target you so try to kite him over Crystal Traps and call for the raid to move away so there is time for his stacks to reset.  Using Feign Death while his Rage is on you will cause him to retarget, so only use it if you’re confident he is not going to be able to easily get on somebody else and refresh his stacks.  You do have a chance to get Faceraged yourself, so have a backup breaker worked out and on the ball.

Nevermind on that BiS Gun

It looks like a bow is going to be BiS in 4.3.  There will still be a gun in the raid, but it will only be item level 397 since it appears to be a trash drop.  That means that dwarves won’t be totally out of luck like usual, but they will still end up wanting to use the higher item level bows and crossbows because the gains in weapon dps will outweigh the dps from the gun racial.   The corollary to all this is that it remains a great expansion to be a troll.   Also, keep in mind that this is just info from the PTR and so it is subject to change.

BM AoE Gets a Buff

The latest patch notes show BM getting buffs to both Chimera and Worm AoE attacks.

Femaledwarf Includes PTR Items

Zeherah has updated Femaledwarf.com to now include many of the hunter items from the PTR.  FD also already includes the Animal Handler and Explosive Shot buffs (just check “Enable Public Test Realm Changes” under Settings to try them out).

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Edit: Just to confirm, Zeherah’s hat of awesomeness is indeed a Valor purchase: 2,200 Valor and ilvl 397.  It is part of Blizzard’s loot system for patch 4.3 that allows you to use Valor to fill all slots but legs and shoulders (apparently) with raid-quality items but does not allow Valor to be used in buying set gear.  For set gear you need tokens from raids.

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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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The winning team was OMG, a PHDK comp of a holy paladin, a marksman hunter, and an unholy death knight.  In the final they went up against Skill Capped, a team of a holy paladin, a frost mage and an affliction warlock.  The matches are fun to watch and pretty tense at times.  You can find the videos here.  You can watch them without a virtual ticket.

New Race

Blizzard will be making Pandaren a playable race for both factions.  Pandaren can be hunters.

New Talent Tree System, Including New Abilities

Blizzard is revamping the talent trees again so that they are more in line with the goal of having talents be meaningful choices with big opportunity costs rather than passive stat buffs.  For the details, check out the blue post here, Frostheim’s post here and Wowhead’s MoP talent calculator here.  The changes are huge so I really would recommend checking out those links.

Goodbye Ranged Slot

The ranged slot is disappearing.  We are not losing our ranged weapons, though; they will instead be our only weapons.  Their stat budgets will be buffed to make up for whatever itemization we lose from no longer carrying stat sticks.

Goodbye Minimum Range

From a blue post: Hunter minimum range (including the dead zone) and melee weapon use will be removed.

Pets Talent Trees Becoming More Flexible

It appears that hunters will be able to choose whether they want their pet to follow a cunning, ferocity or tenacity tree.  In other words, you could have your bear be a ferocity pet or a spirit beast be a tenacity pet.

In this post I will not be going through absolutely every nook and cranny of World of Logs’ display options.  Instead, I will focus on those areas that I think are the most illuminating when it comes to considering a DPSer’s performance.  Throughout this post I’ll be linking to WoL parses from Vodka purely as examples.

Prior Knowledge

Before getting into the data you need to have contextual information.  Basically, you need to know the fights, the strategies, the hunter and who you will be comparing the hunter to in order to be a good judge of the WoL results.  Not knowing the explanations behind the numbers can lead to all sorts of misinterpretations.  At the same time, knowing them well can transform meaningless statistics into powerful tools.

Summaries of Damage Done

Summary stats on damage can offer some useful information.  For example, if a hunter is topping damage done for the night it’s a sign that, if nothing else, they’re putting in some effort.  However, whole-night stats can be misleading due to people sitting, having special jobs, doing loot council instead of trash and other reasons.  As such, when looking at general stats like damage done it is best to first narrow down to single fights.  After clicking on a night of fighting from a guild’s calendar in WoL you can narrow down to a single fight by selecting Full Report > Bosses > Boss Try # (there won’t be a try # if it was a one-shot).  Try picking a fight that you think gives the hunter a fair shake, where they can reasonably be compared to other ranged dps.  Also, please be generous enough to look at several fights or attempts before forming your conclusions about a hunter.

After you get to a specific attempt you can focus in on some summary stats.  Try going to Dashboard > Analyze > Damage Done.   This page holds a wealth of information on damage done on the given attempt.  By checking the box next to the player’s name you can graph their dps, giving you an over-time perspective on their dps.  The table below the graph shows damage done, percentage damage done, DPS(e) (which is damage done divided by fight duration), DPS (which is damage done divided by active time), active time and percentage active.  The bottom of the Active Time column shows the fight duration if you’re curious.  Damage done and DPS(e) are great measures because they show a player’s contribution for the entire fight rather than just how much dps they did when they were actually pressing buttons.

You can refine the Analyze > Damage Done results by using the menu options on the lefthand side of the page.  For example, try selecting Damage Done > by target > source: playername and then hitting go.  This will give you a graph and table breakdown of the named player’s damage by target.  This sort of refinement is great for making sure that the player is spending the right amounts of damage on the right targets (example).  You can also check how the player stacks up against other players doing the same job dpsing a particular kind of add.  For example, on the Beth’tilac encounter you can select Damage Done > by source > target: Cinderweb Spiderling and this will show you what damage was done to Cinderweb Spiderlings, organized by player (example).

Keep in mind that similar results can by had by using the Expression widget, also on the lefthand side of the page.  To look at damage done to Cinderweb Spiderlings, type  targetName = 'Cinderweb Spiderling' into the Expression widget and hit enter (example).  I actually prefer the Expression widget to the menu options because you can use just about any relevant Expression Editor language in the widget.  This allows you to see all sorts of interesting things in table and graph form, such as damage done to shields (think BoT’s council or ToC’s twins) by throwing in absorbed > 0.  For more on Expression Editor language, see the section on the Expression Editor below.

Summaries of Damage Taken

It’s also instructive to look at damage taken because, after all, not standing in fire is a big part of good raiding.  After selecting the desired fight, you can get to a look at damage taken by going to Dashboard > Analyze > Damage Taken.  The default page shows the raw damage each player has taken, their percentage of the raid’s total and their damage taken per second over the course of the fight.

To narrow things down to a specific source, select from the menus on the lefthand side of the page Damage Taken > by target > Source: sourcename (example).  This will give you purchase on, say, which players took damage from a kind of add that they shouldn’t have.  If you mouseover the player’s name in the table it will even give you a breakdown of the types of damage the sourcename did to the player.  Alternatively, you can select Damage Taken > by spell >Target: playername to see which spells did damage to the named player and in what amounts as a general overview (example).

If you want to compare how much damage a particular enemy spell did to different players, I’d recommend just typing spell = "spellname" into the Expression widget while Damage Taken is selected.  This is great for isolating a particular idiot-check spell to see which players are not doing their job and getting out of the way.  The attendant graph helpfully shows if a struggling player took all their damage from the spell in one go (so, a single colossal fail) or if they took it on more than one occasion (repeated fails).

Deaths

WoL has some great ways for looking at deaths.  One is the Deaths overview page found at Dashboard > Deaths overview (example).  This page shows times of death and the three preceding instances of damage taken.  However, this page has its shortcomings because those three hits of damage likely will not explain the death and the events leading up to it.  For that, I recommend checking out the Survivability page instead at Dashboard > Survivability.   This page breaks up players by their first deaths in a fight and shows how long they lasted (by percentage of fight duration).  If you click on that percentage you get a pop-up maleable log of what preceded the death, providing much more detail than the Deaths overview page.  These logs are great for seeing whether someone died from lack of heals, standing in fire, stealing agro or, well, any other reason under the artificial WoW sun.

Expression Editor

The Expression Editor is my favorite part of World of Logs.  It shows raw log data that is refined down to whatever types of log entries you specify with your query language.  This is advantageous because raw log data has timestamps, unlike summary measures like dps.  These timestamps allow the viewer purchase on causality and reaction times.  Needless to say, that kind of leverage is great for evaluating players.  If you’re new to Expression Editor and would like to learn more I heartily recommend checking out the documentation section of the WoL forums for a guide on EE query language.  I’d also recommend checking out my guide to tier 11 queries which, while a bit dated in substance, nevertheless provides good examples of how to use EE grammar and terminology to get the information you want.

How do logs show causality?  We can infer causality from sequences of events shown in the logs.  For example, logs can offer us some perspective on which players, if any, kited Rageface into an Immolation Trap while they were affected by Rage.  For that, we could throw in  (sourcename = "Rageface" and spell = "Rage') or (targetname = "Rageface" and spell = "Immolation Trap").  Similarly, we might be curious if a hunter in question used glyphed Raptor Strikes when afflicted with Rage.  We can access those sequences with targetname = "playername" and spell in ("Rage", "Raptor Strike"). I apologize that the font size of the query language is so small.  I have it in <code> so that you can copy and paste it directly in to the Expression Editor.

What about reaction times?  We might, for example, be concerned with reaction times to Cinderweb Drones on Beth’tilac.  We want to see tanks picking up agro right away and dps not switching at least until the tank has been able to establish agro (if not later, given the kill order).  To check on this in the logs, we can type in (targetname = "Cinderweb Drone") or (sourcename = "Cinderweb Drone").  This will show when the Drone spawned , how quickly the tank acted upon it, and when dps engaged.  Of course, that many entries will bury subsequent drone spawns.  If you want to also see subsequent spawns, consider looking only at tank openers and Drone casts of Boiling Spatter.

Beyond causality and reaction times, the Expression Editor is nice for simply making lists.  For example, you might have the very basic question of who got trapped in Crystal Prisons on Shannox.  For that, just throw in spell = "Crystal Prison Trap Effect" and targettype = 'Player' (example).  You can also get lists of just about anything else you could want.  For example, you can look shots fired to check rotations.  If you are evaluating an SV hunter you might use something like ((fulltype = SPELL_AURA_APPLIED and spell = "Lock and Load") or (type = TYPE_DAMAGE and spell = "Explosive Shot")) and sourcename = "playername" in order to check if the hunter  is clipping their Explosive Shots during Lock and Load.

The Expression Editor is also great for looking at alternative stats.  I have not explored this in tier 12 content, but in tier 11 you could use queries to look at Corruption on Cho’gall (spell = "Corrupted Blood") and Sound on Atramedes (powertype = 10).  These stats are normally only viewable through the extra UI elements that Blizzard shows during the fights.

Comparebot

Comparebot is an excellent tool for refining and juxtaposing pieces of information from World of Logs.  It is arguably better than WoL when it comes to comparing players between fights, comparing cooldown usages, comparing . . . well, suffice it to say, Comparebot is pretty good at comparing parses.  It is also quite useful for tallying salient pieces of data, such as how many times a hunter used Rapid Fire, without having to do a lot of digging.  I would discuss Comparebot in greater detail here except that I have already written a whole post on using Comparebot as a hunter.  Incidentally, that post also speaks at length about how to make valid comparisons between players and between parses.

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Effective Space

I remember reading a long time ago that Blizzard originally limited travel (think running on foot, ground mounts, ships, hearthstones on a long cooldown and somewhat slow and sparse flight paths) because they wanted to impress upon players the great scope and richness of the game world.  It was certainly a long sometimes dangerous journey travelling at low levels by foot across the Barrens from Mulgore or the Wetlands from Loch Modan.  It was inconvenient having flight paths only in the corners of zones and having to hoof it to dungeons.  However, this groundedness and pacing struck the point home to the player that they were in a world of Warcraft.  These days, we see fewer reminders of how expansive the world is, and I think the following list points to the reason for that.

• Have Group, Will Travel means that only one player out of 10 or 25 need actually travel to a raid instance.
• Flight paths are today much more numerous, especially compared to early vanilla.
• Graveyards, likewise, are much more numerous and convenient, and corpse runs typically are shortened by a guild perk.
• Epic flying being usable in almost all outdoor zones means (1) that players travel fast just about anywhere outdoors and (2) that players rarely if ever observe let alone interact with the game world on the rare occassions when they do not teleport.
• New players a provided with new constellations of flight paths as they level up, and breadcrumb quests are often accompanied by free flights to new locations.
• Repairs and other services are now much more common in the field (via bots, mounts, companions, extra npcs, etc.) requiring fewer trips to and from cities.
• Quests are now highly compartmentalized even within subregions of zones, requiring little travel from questgiver to objective and back.  This is also now true of dungeons, which typically have all but their breadcrumb quests given inside the instance.
• The effects of quest concentration are compounded by (1) the increase in the number of quest hubs within zones and (2) the advent of quests that update in the field and reduce trips to and from quest givers.
• The random dungeon and BG finders instantly teleport players to dungeons.  A leveling player need not even know of the existence of a particular dungeon before getting placed there.
• Hearthstones are now on a mere 15 minute cooldown with the guild perk.
• Teleportation devices other than hearthstones have been added, such as the Kirin Tor rings, the Baradin’s Wardens tabard and the guild wraps.
• Leveling players now get ground mounts at level 20 and flying mounts at 60 (rather than 40 and 70, respectively).
• Stormwind and Ogrimmar have largely become Wal-marts – you don’t need to travel anywhere else for shopping, training and other needs. This centralization of resources combined with incentives specific to the hub cities leave all other cities in the game as ghost towns.
• Among the incentives to Ogrimmar and Stormwind are portals that allow rapid transit to the major centers of Cataclysm content.

I enjoy a lot of these changes and, individually, they increase convenience and the proportion of the game spent doing more interesting things like nuking bad guys.   But together these changes represent a revolution in the way space is encountered in the game.   They have made distance effectively trivial, especially for endgame players.  What does it matter how far away a daily hub or an instance is if you can teleport there instantly?  What kind of an obstacle is a mountain or a lake if you can just fly over it?  Why should it matter if you don’t know where you are so long as you already have the necessary flight path or quest dot on your map?  Of course, space becoming more inconsequential over time is not necessarily a problem in itself.  It is merely different.  What effects this trivialization of distance has had require further exploration.

A basic result of this transformation of travel is that players are much less likely to observe let alone interact with the game world.  Endgame players are usually either teleporting instantly to a location or flying high above the ground on the way there.  Regardless, they are immune to harm, unhindered by terrain and oblivious to detail en route.  This certainly makes the game more convenient but, to my mind, it also makes it less interesting.  With effortless travel the game world is left with no power over us.  It is unable to challenge, inspire, color or enrich our gaming because we simply don’t encounter it anymore.  The environment our endgame characters inhabit these days is, effectively a city, instances and maybe a daily hub or two.  This is not small in itself, but it is small when compared to the size of the world as a whole, and it is less meaningful absent that larger context.

I think that Blizzard realizes the problems generated by the revolution to travel on some level.  They now insist that players stay on ground mounts in their daily hubs, forcing players to encounter the terrain and actually deal with obstacles, non-quest enemies and lore rather than fly over everything.  They added fishing and cooking dailies to the other capital cities to try and draw more players to those ghost towns.  They half-heartedly required players to visit Cataclysm dungeons once before they could queue for them.  They still require players under level sixty to stay grounded.  Yet, these are exceptions and, aside from barring flying at low levels, fairly trivial exceptions at that.  WoW has taken the plunge on flying mounts and teleports, and the world is effectively smaller for it.

What is additionally problematic about this is that Blizzard has been unable to take these changes and explore them to their fullest.  It has tried and failed to develop enjoyable aerial combat, at least judging by the responses to the OCC and EoE drakes.  Part of the explanation for this is that reworking a ground-based game for aerial combat is difficult.  Part of it is players not adapting well to thinking in three dimensions.  Yet, regardless of cause, it leaves Blizzard in an awkward position of having air travel but being unable to make it interesting much beyond the joy of flight itself.  We are left, then, with a status quo where almost all level 60+ travel is easy and uninteresting unless players go out of their way to make it interesting.  I have to wonder if this partly explains why players so often complain of Cataclysm being bland.  Moving through the world is danger-free and so it feels impotent and unengaging.  We don’t have to put any effort into getting to a place and so being there is nothing special.

Instant Randomness

Instances are themselves something of note in MMOs.  WoW has had them from the start and so we have to look further back to see what kind of impact they have had.  Everquest was WoW’s immediate predecessor and, arguably, much of the style of vanilla WoW was taken from Everquest.  Yet, WoW is an advancement from Everquest in many ways, including and perhaps especially when it comes instances.  Everquest had no instances, at least when WoW first came out, and its dungeons and dragons were generated as part of the game world.  That meant that guilds had to sign up on a server-wide calendar to coordinate who was going to kill a given dragon on its various respawns throughout the month.  It also meant that anyone and everyone could be in a given dungeon together at the same time, all unhappily seeking the same item or spawn.  Instances, it must be said, are a wonderful innovation and remove much of the grief that trolls, selfish jerks and even good guys can inflict.  They also, however, move away from the RPG ethic that what you do in important locations has consequences for the outside world.  Certainly, piking Ony and Mag’s heads, opening the AQ gates and expansion launch events reflect this ethic, but not to the extent having everyone sharing the same space did.

Don’t get me wrong, I never want to go back to the Everquest model, I’m just noting a change that has had an effect on how we relate to the game world.  Instances have removed a lot of competition, a lot of grief and a lot of consequences from MMO gaming.  Instances allow the game world to be societal but largely remove the consequences of being in a society from the act of fighting bad guys.  Indeed, in random groups you will likely never see the people you are with ever again upon completing the dungeon.  Instances thereby create not just environmental compartmentalization but also a consequent social compartmentalization.  Various effects have been ascribed to this social division, including the decline of server communities and the rise of trolling in dungeons since players are effectively anonymous strangers to each other there.  Blizzard now has the dungeon finder place people from the same server together whenever it can to help counter these effects.

WoW, of course, didn’t stop its development of instances with simply introducing them.  Blizzard has subsequently implemented a dungeon finder and attached additional currencies to instances.  These changes have combined for an interesting effect.  The fact that the currencies allow players to purchase gear that is always equal to or better than the gear found in the dungeons combined with the fact that extra amounts of these currencies are provided for completing random dungeons has led to a situation where players actually prefer a condition where they don’t know where they’re going.  Put in a shorter fashion, the incentives of the RDF lead players to often prefer it and the ignorance of destination it requires.  A similar situation exists for the random battleground finder.  To me it strips identity and purpose away from individual dungeons and battlegrounds.  It makes them very generic and signals that lore and locale are of a lower priority than loot.  And, honestly, this is fine for the most part; after all, lore and locale only offer inspiration for so many runs of a place.

These changes to the accessibility and rewards of dungeons have had larger effects.  5-mans have been streamlined and laden with incentives so well that they have come to be considered baseline for leveling and endgame players alike.  Dungeons, essentially, are not special at all.  This means that for all players seeking a step two to endgame pve gameplay there is only raiding.  Raiding now has to serve a truly diverse set of interests ranging from the hardest of the hardcore to the casual players who merely want a next step after heroics.  I believe this is why we see Blizzard constantly experimenting with raid tiers, nerfs and now the new raid finder.  In making dungeons and even heroics utterly mundane it has had to make raiding into something that could take up the slack and cater to a wide variety of players.  I worry that this has spread raiding too thin in its purpose.

Increasingly, raids are adapting to players rather than the other way around.  In Everquest and vanilla, the bosses were unsympathetic monoliths of evil.  They did not care if you could not beat them; they did not care what you knew about them.  Heck, in Everquest there were bosses that were unbeatable by design.  Raids, then, were dangerous, epic places that did not cater to players or get easier over time for the sole purpose of making them beatable by less-adept and/or less-experienced players.  Nowadays, to my mind, raids feel like sellouts.  They used to be more pure and dichotomous.  You either had what it took or you didn’t.  Now raids are continually being parceled out into finer and finer gradations via difficulty levels and progressive nerfing.  This, combined with all of the other advancements in balancing and raid design, is arguably a change for the better.  But it also means that raids are manifestly different places these days.  They’re not just the NFL anymore, they’re also division three college football.  They’re not just double black diamond downhill ski runs, they’re also blue square runs.  They are not categorically elite anymore.  And I wonder what effect this has had.  If they are not categorically prestigous or exceptional, if they are instead mundane and something all sorts of people do, does that leave raiding in general as being less compelling?

Addendum

If you enjoyed these essays then I’d encourage you to check out the recent Know Your Lore series over at WoW Insider related to NPCs and Quests.