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.

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.

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.

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 buttons available (so far) are:

• Assist, passive, and defensive: just like a normal pet, it will attack targets based on your target or who is damaging you, depending on which is selected
• Move to, follow, and stay: you can control where the temporary pet goes, but it moves there according to pet movement logic. If you tell it to move somewhere too far, the effect will be cancelled as soon as the pet moves outside the initial range of the tame beast ability.
• Claw and Bite: the only feral forms you can tame are bear and cat, so I guess smack is left out. It uses the focus bar of the druid, so make sure to dump as much focus as you can before the spell ends.

There are obviously more questions than answers right now: I know that pets don’t have talents any more, but copied pets kept their old abilities. What will druids get? Maybe scaled down versions of the actual abilities from their form? Frenzied regeneration would be a nice one to see. I wish I had a beta invite to test it myself, but I am sure Darkbrew will be testing this all day :P

It appears that right now, we can’t tame summoned creatures like ghost wolves, other hunters’ pets, or the beasts summoned with Call Beast (the level 75 talent). We can use our new pet abilities (like Lynx Rush) with the new pet, but if the tame duration ends before the ability does, it finishes early.

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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.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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.

The short of it is that I am taking an indefinite break from blogging.  I wish you all the best in game and in life.

The game will be moving toward a simpler approach to player auras.  They will be fewer in number (only eight buffs and six debuffs).  Instead of specific specs providing specific buffs, buffs will more often follow a Blessing/Shout model where a player of a particular class can provide only one of several different buffs at a time.  Some classes may retain spec or role-specific buffs when their specs are very distinct, as with druids or warriors.

• Spell resistance is going away entirely.  That means no Aspect of the Wild (in its current form as a resist buff at least), no more gemming spell penetration for PVP, no more stacking resists for extreme soloing.
• Hit is being shifted around a bit.  To not have a miss roll on a boss we’ll need 7.5% hit.
• The big news, though, is this: “Ranged attacks will be able to be dodged.  Hunters will benefit from expertise and will have it on their gear, which will also allow hunters and Enhancement shaman to share gear more easily.”  To strike a boss from behind without ever being dodged, we’ll need 7.5% Expertise to avoid dodges in addition to the 7.5% hit needed to not miss it.   This suggests a couple things:
  • The post is vague on whether shots will be able to be parried or blocked.  Hunters may, like melee currently, have an interest in being behind the boss because an additional 7.5% expertise could be needed to not be parried while in front of the boss (and 7.5% yet more to not be blocked (?)).  This would really suck given our wider turning radius. However, it seems more likely that shots will just not be on the parry and block tables.
  • Gone will be the days of weird class disparities resulting from differing needs for spell pen, expertise, hit and so on.  Since (1) spell hit is going away and (2) hit and expertise are being equalized to require the same amount of rating for a 1% gain, this means that a caster needing 15% hit (which they will for bosses) will be roughly the same in itemization costs as a hunter or melee needing 7.5% hit plus 7.5% expertise.
• “All spells and abilities will crit for double damage, baseline.”  Hopefully this will put an end to the weirdness of having some hunter abilities follow a 1.5x crit modifier and others follow a 2x modifier.
• PVP gear will be a lower item level than same-tier PVE gear in MoP.  Combine this with the other rather massive shifts in PVP stats (which you should just read the blog post to get a handle on) and we will likely see a rather abrupt end to the strategic use of PVP gear in PVE and vice versa.

[Edit: Cleared up some of the wording about parry.]

The mistake I made this time, though, was that I only macro’d the pet ability to Cobra Shot, and so my pet did not have its debuff up during the first several seconds of the fight when I’m not firing Cobra Shot.  So, I would recommend macro’ing your pet’s debuff to a shot or shots you fire at the start of and throughout the fight.

I wanted to be careful about having my pet continue to behave normally in other fights (since I’m too lazy to switch macros between fights), so I used a macro line like this so that the pet stays on his assigned target and doesn’t fail to cast his debuff:

/cast [@pettarget] Dragon's Breath

If you are interested in looking up a pet’s debuff uptime on a target, you can check this under the pet’s details page on World of Logs and clicking the “Buffs cast” tab.  You can then check the pound sign next to the debuff’s name to graph the uptime and see when during the fight (if ever) the debuff was not present on the target.

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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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Multiple hunters attacking the same target should now see the proper benefit from Noxious Stings.

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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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A few points of clarification:

• Valor conversions do not go past your weekly CP cap, meaning that even if you have 7,800 Valor stored up, you may have to wait a few weeks before getting the weapon since you can only convert so much per week.
• Weapon racials are activated by the base weapon, not the weapon’s appearance via transmogrification.  This means that you can’t transmogrify a gun into a bow as a troll and expect your racial to work.
• I suppose there’s a another kind of hunter who this news is relevant for, the transmog nut.  The bow in particular looks pretty good.

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 table below titled “All Parses” presents information drawn from all parses over the last two weeks at raidbots.  The information is presented by raid type and contains the following variables:

• SS: This is a spec’s spec score.  It represents the spec’s median dps divided by the top spec’s median dps.  It thereby represents how close to the best spec a spec is.
• FS: This is a spec’s Frostheim score, a name I’m giving the score since Frostheim is the one who promoted its use.  It is like spec score except that instead of the top spec, it is a spec’s median dps as a percentage of the median spec’s median dps.  Basically, it measures how far above or below the middle a spec is.
• Sample: This is how many parses that raidbots has received for the spec over the last two weeks.  Please take note of how small the sample sizes are for some specs and adjust your reliance on the data accordingly.

This “All Parses” table represents the median hunter by raid and spec.  In other words, it represents the middle-most raiding hunter, which is by nature not the best raiding hunter in terms of DPS.  What it shows is that for the middle-most raiding hunter, SV is ascendant in more than one way.  First, the buffs to SV have sent it over median spec to be within striking distance of the top spec.  The buffs have also prompted a sweeping realignment; we hunters are switching over to SV en masse.  SV is simple to play, is not hobbled in some of the ways that MM and BM are, and does very high dps.  This popular switch over to SV often leaves BM and MM below raidbot’s threshold for statistical reliability in terms of representation.  This is one of the main reasons that I’m reporting on figures related to median dps here: MM and BM simply don’t make the cut for percentile calculations.

The “All Parses” table also shows BM doing rather well, often sitting right on top of the median spec.  MM, however, appears to be in a state of relative decline, falling below both SV and BM and only hitting the 75% on SS scores on hard modes.

SV does, of coure, makes the cut for 90th percentile calculations and some of these numbers are represented in the table below.

This table represents the 90th percentile along the distribution of SV parses from Ultraxion by raid type.  It uses parses from Ultraxion under the assumption that this fight is the best way to judge raw DPS(e) numbers owing to it being a simple tank and spank fight with no DPS modifiers.  The table thereby represents high-performing SV hunters and suggests that what holds true for the median hunter also holds true for the high-performing hunter: SV is doing very well these days.

The new level 90 talents are:

• Glaive Toss: You hurl two glaives in front of you 30 yards, dealing 1,X damage to all enemies and reducing their movement speed by 50%. The Glaives will return back to you, also dealing damage and snaring targets they hit. If Glaive Toss hits at least 2 enemies in both directions, the cooldown is reset.
• Powershot: You wind up a powerful shot, dealing 1,X damage to all targets in front of you within 20 yards (width). The damage done is increased on targets further away:
  • 15-30 yards: Double damage, Stunned 1 sec.
  • 30-50 yards: Tripple damage, Stunned 2 sec.
• Binding Shot: You fire a magical projectile, tethering the enemy and any other enemies within 10 yards to the landing arrow. Increases all damage they recieve from you by 15%. If they move 15 yards from the arrow they are stunned for 10 sec (5 sec PvP). (30 yd range, Costs 20 focus, Instant)

You may also note several changes in our class abilities:

• Percent weapon damage as a component of shots is being reduced in magnitude across the board.  Blizzard will be increasing the damage on/from weapons to compensate for this.  The goal (explained here) is to reduce the power of weapon-damage-based abilities at low levels.
• Disengage is learned at level 14.
• Black Arrow reads “Fires a Black Arrow at the target, dealing 1,051% Weapon damage as Shadow damage to the enemy target.  In addition, Black Arrow deals 4,204 damage over 20 seconds to the target and any other enemy within the path of the Black Arrow when fired. ”  Black Arrow still triggers Lock and Load via T.N.T. and will cost 40 Focus.
• Trueshot Aura will return to buffing AP by 10% across the board.  This change will assumedly also affect similar buffs.
• Camouflage will be able to be cast in combat, but if it is cast in combat its duration will be reduced from one minute to six seconds.
• Lock and Load will make only one Explosive Shot free that triggers no cooldown rather than the current two.  However, the free shot will deal double damage.

• Druids’ Symbiosis ability will cause the druid to gain Feign Death and the hunter to gain Dash (explained here).
• It looks like Warlocks are getting something very similar to Stampede which, arguably, reduces the likelihood that hunters will get Stampede.

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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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It is hard to put faith in a result, no matter how precise or appealing, if we have no idea how a person arrived at it.  We want theorycrafters to describe their methods so that we can have some confidence that their results are reasonably-obtained rather than the product of chance or mistake.  Real-world scientists have the same expectation in their fields and, quite understandably, have put a lot of time into articulating what things make a result trustworthy.  They use the following terms:

Valid

This is a rather expansive concept for a five-letter word.  Broadly speaking, the concern of validity deals with how well a test has been constructed.  It can be broken down into internal validity, which regards whether the proposed cause is really leading to the proposed effect, and external validity, which regards whether or not the test is representative of the phenomenon in question.  There are also the ideas of construct validity and content validity, which relate to whether the test is measuring what the tester thinks it is measuring.

What the concern of validity sums to, then, is the desire to have a test be in all ways a good and reasonable test of the phenomenon in question.  If a test fails on just one dimension of validity it can ruin the whole thing.  For example, even if you otherwise perform the absolute best target dummy testing possible but fail on construct validity by comparing a Careful Aim build with a non-CA build, the whole thing may have to be thrown out.  (Careful Aim is problematic for most testing on target dummies because, owing to the dummies always being over 90% health, it skews results in favor of the CA build.)

Because validity is such a huge concern, good theorycrafting should include a long enough description of the methods and math used such that the reader is assured that test is appropriate and properly executed.  This can require a long description for some tests, but these days we have some significant shortcuts at our disposal.  For example, linking to a femaledwarf profile can remove the need for a lot of the descriptions of settings.  Bloggers and forum regulars also have the advantage that they can link to previous posts explaining their methods if they are repeating an old test for a new tier.

Reliable

We want a result to persist through repeated testing.  Put another way, we want a result to be generally true rather than only true of one run of the test where some fluke or trick of RNG made an outlier result.  This is why good theorycrafting often involves many iterations on a simulator (such as with SimulationCraft) or extended periods of time on a target dummy; the goal is to get any spikes or troughs in results to average out over lengthy testing.  Thirty seconds on a target dummy is no way to test something considering how much your results may vary away from the “true” average due to crits and procs.

Replicable

This is the idea that another tester should be able to reproduce your results.  Replicating an experiment allows scientists confidence that a result was not the product of a particular tester’s idiosyncracies and is instead valid in a general sense.  Replication recently allowed scientists to confirm that neutrinos can travel faster than light, but a lack of replicability was also the downfall of a famous result in the search for cold fusion.

Replication additionally allows for conversation and advancement within a scientific or theorycrafting community.  A test being replicable allows testers to repeat and build off each other’s work, achieving better results than a single person working alone would be able to attain.

Together, these virtues of good testing combine toward this conclusion: good theorycrafting involves explaining your work well enough that other people can have faith in it as being generally true of the phenomenon in question and can replicate the test if they want to.

Unfortunately, thorough explanations of methods and math are not as common as we might like in the WoW community.  It takes time to write them out, it makes for a potentially boring  TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) wall of text in a post, it detracts from the flow of a post, and it opens up the tester to scrutiny that he or she might not want to be under.  Frostheim is a prominent example of someone who does not overtly show his work.  I suspect, given his audience of hunters who probably just want quick answers, that he does not want to bog down his guides and posts with long explanations of methods.  It also certainly saves him significant amounts of time, given the number of guides he maintains.  But it also deprives the hunter community of some confidence in his results; we have to take him on faith rather than being able to affirm that his methods are sound.  It also precludes the community-improving dialogues that might result from explicit methods and the exposure that many hunters might want for starting their own theorycrafting.  A partial solution to the inelegance of explanations of metods and math, at least for bloggers, is the use of appendixes.  Testing explanations could be added on to the end of a post to offer the details to the curious but would not get in the way of the main post’s message.

In advocating for transparency in theorycrafting I am not trying to lecture from on high.  I am not a perfect theorycrafter by any means, and I make mistakes with a depressing regularity.  Indeed, all theorycrafters make mistakes.  That is why theorycrafters explaining themselves with an eye to validity, reliability and replicability is so important.  We are all human and prone to error, and it is only through an enterprise of transparency and communal scrutiny that we will achieve the best results.

Edit: Post updated to include Frenzy builds.  Thanks to Harvoc for the suggestion.

Because (1) Sic ‘Em! is a discretionary talent for SV and (2) Sic ‘Em! interacts in an interesting way with the pet talent Wild Hunt, we need to look at player talents in conjunction with pet talents to determine the best SV talent distribution.  Throughout the post below I will be using this femaledwarf profile, which largely uses the default settings for SV except that Arcane Shot is disabled during CA phases and shot interleaving is sometimes enabled for the 3/2/0 builds.  The gear level is around 395, includes 4p-t13, and generally follows a Crit>Haste>Mastery priority.  The relative benefits of Haste and Mastery for SV are on my to-do list to investigate, and preliminary investigations suggest slight gains for me were I to prefer Mastery in reforging.  It is also worth keeping in mind that the levels of both crit and Arcane Shot usage obtainable with raid gear may result in different findings than those obtainable with just dungeon gear; they both result in more Sic ‘Em! procs and increase the value of having two rather than one point in Wild Hunt.  If you are still in dungeon gear, you may find that having only one point in Wild Hunt is best.

The table below looks at the various combinations of SV’s discretionary player talents of One With Nature (OWN), Sic ‘Em! (SE), Frenzy, Bestial Discipline and Careful Aim (CA) with distributions of ferocity pet talents, Shark Attack (SA) and Wild Hunt (WH).  The column and row-spanning cells in italics indicate how to read the talent distributions in bold.  For example, 3/0/2 means three talents in OWN, none in SE and two in CA.  I also look at Frenzy builds (as per Harvoc’s suggestion in the comments below), which take three points in Frenzy in the BM tree but take no points in Efficiency in the MM tree.

This table shows that it really does matter how we distribute our pet talents, and that we really should not talk about player talents without at least mentioning pet talents.  The top two builds are the Sic ‘Em! and Frenzy builds with 2 and 1 points in Wild Hunt, respectively.  Before we make a final conclusion, though, let’s also look at cunning pets.

The table below reflects distributions of the discretionary player talents with a Cunning pet.  Since there is only one Cunning build for PVE, we only have six cells of results.

The DPS from the top 3/2/0 builds very slightly edges out the Frenzy builds on average across pets.  My final recommendation, then, is for raiding hunters to take a 3/2/0 + 2/2 WH build.

It is worth noting that both the 3/2/0 and Frenzy builds assume high Hawk and pet uptime.  The key difference amounts to the Efficiency talent.  By not taking it, Frenzy builds increase the typical cost of Arcane Shots and Explosive Shots, slightly altering the SV rotation.  I suspect that the only reason that a Frenzy build is this good is the current Focus surplus.  Not taking Efficiency also means that Frenzy builds should avoid interleaving shots into a LnL sequence.

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.

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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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A Treatise on Strategy is probably the hardest to acquire quest item for the new Darkmoon Faire, in part because it only drops from particular heroic dungeon bosses.  According to WoW Insider the treatise sells for 20k or so on those rare occasions when it does show up at an auction house.  This means that players who want gold and players who want achievements both have a reason to want to get their hands on it.  An issue with the current loot system, though, is that anyone in a group can role on the treatise if it happens to drop in a Heroic.  Hunters, fortunately, have the option of soloing for it.

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.

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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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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 crystal 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.
• Heroic Mode: Deterrence’s new 30% damage reduction can help with Stomps and are particularly useful for Stomps below 20%.

Zon’ozz

• Hunter pets do not appear to bounce the ball.
• Deterrence does not prevent ball bounce damage, but the new 30% mitigation buff will reduce it.
• Save DPS cooldowns for the black phases.  The Valor trinket’s cooldown tends to line up well with these 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 so close to the boss that 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.

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 or Lightning phases.
• 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.  The Valor trinket’s cooldown lines up well with these phases.
• 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.
• Some hunters note that pets who apply debuffs do not apply them properly on this fight.  I recommend macroing the ability into a shot.  Repositioning the pet does not appear to help.
• 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.
• 1/20: Added Raptor Strike tip to Madness.
• 2/12: Updated regarding Deterrence changes.
• 2/21: Added more Deterrence and pet tips 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.