So I was browsing MMO-Champion and stumbled upon this blue post:

The only specs we really failed on in LK raiding were Frost mage, Subtlety rogue, BM hunter and Arms warrior.

…and I thought, “BM hunter? Really?”

I mean, I know tons of people see it that way, but I don’t.

Here is a handy list of stuff I raided as a Beast Master hunter:

• Naxx
• Obsidian Sanctum
• Obsidian Sanctum hard modes back when they were still semi-hard
• Eye of Eternity
• Ulduar up through about half of Yogg
• Various Ulduar hard modes (back when they were still hard)
• VoA
• Onyxia
• ToC
• Various ToC hard modes
• ICC, the two times I went in there before I quit raiding

I dunno Blizz, I appreciate the concern, really, but I don’t feel like you failed me. I mean, maybe you did for that dark period between 3.0.8 and when you started giving us consolation buffs (although that didn’t stop me from raiding as Beast Master), but now that we’ve reached the end of WotLK, the spreadsheet has proven that a geared BM hunter does just as much DPS as a geared Survival hunter.  Tons of raiding hunters still play Survival, don’t they? Even though Marks has shown to outstrip it?

See, ultimately what bothered me the most about “spec issues” this entire expansion wasn’t the game mechanics so much as it was a good portion of the playerbase. If you had a problem with raiding BM hunters during the Ulduar era or even during the ToC era, then fine– my guild and I operated differently, but I can see where you were coming from.

But then ICC showed up, BM got more buffs, BM became essentially equal in DPS to SV, and yet blogs/forums were still only posting strats for MM and SV while ignoring BM, and various people in game were still picking on BM while gladly accepting SV raiders.

Yeah. I’m not seeing any logic here. (Please let me know if you see it, so I can correct it and put my foot in my mouth.)

Anyways, enough about that. I don’t raid anymore, and I don’t really seriously play my hunters anymore, so ultimately this doesn’t affect me, other than finally allowing me to get something off of my chest that has been bothering me the last few months. I guess I just wanted to say that I just found it odd that Ghostcrawler lumped BM hunters in with, say, sub rogues and frost mages, who, from what I understand, have it FAR worse off than we do. So yeah, don’t worry about it too much, Blizz. All’s good in hunterland. Go work on our frosty and stealthy friends.

Well, that’s all for now on one of my rare excursions into WoWblog-land recently. I have to admit, blogging here feels kind of odd lately. It truly does feel like what Aspect of the Hare used to be left back in February when I went on hiatus, and I don’t think it’s coming back, even if I do keep blogging here. Not to say that’s a bad thing. I just want to overhaul the blog and shift the focus a bit. I think more story posts are in order. You know, like “Once upon a time, there was this PuG…”

*grin*

Veeeeerrrry slowly.

Ahem. Sorry. That wasn’t the point of the post. >.> Although it is quite true.

Any-whotsit, I get a frequent amount of e-mail or comments asking about how one should go about leveling a hunter, and with my latest TreePost I’m also getting some questions on how one levels a Tree. So I figured I’d give it a quick rundown!

Hunter:
Hunter is something I’ve leveled a bajillion times by now and I can toss up a leveling talent spec in my sleep. It typically goes something like this: dump 5 points in Lethal Shots (because I’m a Crit Monster), and then head down a “modified” version of “Beast Master Raid”. By modified, I mean 5/5 Endurance Training (instead of 5/5 Improved Aspect of the Hawk), and 3/3 Thick Hide. I used to also do 2/2 Spirit Bond but at this point I think Animal Handler is the stronger talent, even when leveling, and with Endurance Training and Thick Hide, most things would be hard-pressed to kill your pet anyway, especially if you choose to go all out and nab a Glyph of Mending.

My current casual hunter project is a level 55 hunter named Althalor; here is his talent spec thus far. (Gosh it’s nostalgic to see 41 points in Beast Mastery.)

Now remember, you really can’t go too wrong with a leveling spec. It’s not like Elitist Jerks is sitting around theorycrafting the most efficient ways to kill ten kobolds. Although that would amuse me.

Beast Mastery is obviously not your only option here. Tawyn leveled to 58ish as Marksmanship. Leveling Survival seems to be super in vogue now from inspecting the lowbies I see running around; I worry about potential pet-threat issues once you get Explosive, but hey, it’d make a great challenge I’m sure!

“I’m a level one hunter and have no idea where to start! Help me Pikey-wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” is another similar question/plea I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot. My answer here would be to direct you to my 12-part “So You Want to Play a Hunter” series, which will walk you step by step through playing a hunter from levels 1 – 70.

Caveats About Said Guide: This was written pre-WotLK, so a.) it only takes you up to 70, and b.) Some of the stuff regarding things like Auto/Steady shot weaving, certain levels at which you learn things, and a few abilities are not present or are significantly different. Still, most of the lowbie stuff is relatively accurate, and it’s the best I can offer until someone ties me to my desk and kicks me into rewriting the thing for WotLK.

—

Resto Druid:
Most people will tell you to either level Feral and tote around a healing set for instances, or level Balance. Pike will tell you that there is nothing that will teach you to heal the way leveling full blown Resto and living in LFG and healing instances will. This is why if I plan on being a healer at end game, I level as a healer. The experience is invaluable.

Anyways.

I do make a few tweaks here, although it depends rather on your style of how-you-will-(slowly)-kill-things-between-healing-dungeons.

If your style is to nuke things to death as a mini-moonkin, then you may want to stick to your standard resto spec, albeit maybe getting your Balance points out of the way first, or tweaking Balance a bit so you have the shortened cast time on Wrath/Starfire. Completely acceptable.

If you tend to do as I do and play as a RestoKitty, I’ll fill out 5/5 Naturalist and sometimes Furor as well. Neither of these talents are ones you will have at as a level 80 tree, however, they make leveling go considerably smoother. Some RestoKitties have even gone one or two tiers into Feral as well, though I’ve yet to try this myself.

As a RestoKitty, it may be to your benefit to keep some of the Rogue-ish gear you will no doubt acquire in your questing and travels and toss it on when you have to do a quest. When you combine that with a RestoKitty-ish spec, your solo’ing and questing– while it won’t be blazing fast– also won’t be as gimpy as people tend to assume it is, at least in my experience.

A word of warning, however: RestoKitty does become more difficult to pull off as you get higher in levels, so it may be worth your while to switch to the spellcasting method of solo’ing once you hit 60 or 70, or look into dual-specs.

Other options: RestoKin/Dreamstate typically involves going deep enough into Balance for Moonkin Form and then dumping the rest of your talent points into Restoration; something akin to this. This makes you a versatile, Red Mage-styled, jack of all trades who can heal pretty dang well and still kill things relatively quickly. I couldn’t do this myself, partially because I’m too in love with Tree Form and partially because I’m also in love with Wild Growth, however, I’ve heard that it’s very effective and might be something you want to look into.

RestoFeral is considerably rarer, and from what I can tell involves things like Nurturing Instinct and going about half deep in each tree. The lack of overlap between gear and talents would, I think, make this more unwieldy than RestoKin, but some people have done it, and it might be worth a shot if you really like RestoKitty.

Hokays! I hope that helped a bit and/or was able to clear some things up. Lemme know if I made some dire mistake (like saying Naxx boots dropped from Karazhan, not like I’ve uh, ever done that before of course >_>;;), in the meantime, I’m off to go read more Jules Verne <3

So I’ve done a bunch of heroics so far today. One of them was Heroic Violet Hold, which I’ve done a lot and frequently use as a sort of DPS test strip.

Ya know what I was getting when everything (Bestial Wrath, Call of the Wild, etc.) was popped, and with otherwise no outside buffs? 3800 dps. Ya know what I normally get on ten-man Patchwerk when fully raid-buffed? 3800 dps. All and all I was consistently seeing between a 400 and 500 dps increase simply from the buffs to Animal Handler and Wild Hunt. (I don’t think the new Catlike Reflexes will be worth dropping points from other things to put points into… but I’ll probably test it and/or spreadsheet it at some point.)

Eeeeeeee I can’t wait to see what I’d get on ol’ Patchy now O_O

In other news, have you ever seen your pet crit for well over 1000? Multiple times in a row? You’re about to.

It feels so good to be a Beast Master again and not feel like I’m dragging everyone down. No more having to spec Marksman– as much as I did enjoy it, it wasn’t the same– in the name of the raid. We’re Big, We’re Red, We’re Back.

*happy Pike*

Of course, the big question is whether we still lag behind the other two specs in a raid situation. My initial inkling is that we do, however, I don’t think we will as substantially as before. It all remains to be seen, though. I was invited to a guild 25man Ulduar on Friday, but I work that night, so I’ll be unable to go test. All’s well, though, I’m probably way undergeared anyway… best get my feet wet in a ten-man first. *nod*

Preemptive Edit: Because I have a feeling people are going to ask, here’s my spec.

Marksmanship Week wraps up with a VoA10 yesterday where I did a pretty dang good job– I was in the lead on Recount by a large margin on both Archavon and Emalon, and some of my long-time friends who were in the group commented on my sudden noticeably big jump in DPS. Yes, where Survival failed to bring the increased numbers, Marksmanship delivered– a lot.

And so we reach the end of this great Spec Experiment. Things I’ve learned?

- Marksmanship is definitely replacing Survival as my dual spec. I don’t need to be the raid group’s emergency replenishment bot when I don’t have a raid group anymore. >.>

- I was using my wolf this whole time as part of my experiment to really try to min/max this as much as possible, but I miss my raptor so much that I will probably go back to using him full time. Furious Howl has a cooldown, but Raptor cuteness is forever <3

- I was sort of expecting to spec back to BM and suddenly flail around feeling like I had nothing to do and everything was "easy" after playing specs with a lot more buttons to push. But in all honesty, the reverse was true. For me, Beast Master feels very difficult to play well, and I think a lot of it has to do with perception. With Marksmanship, topping the DPS chart feels smooth and near-effortless, whereas with Beast Master, it feels like I'm prancing on a rather precarious position and one misstep will cost me. So I really really have to try to coax what I can out of it, merely to reach the lower level of what I got as MM. The result is that, oddly enough, BM has suddenly become sort of a more stressful spec to play o.O It’s kind of weird and I’m not sure what that will mean for me in terms of playstyle. Though lemme tell ya, I can’t wait until BM gets this supposed buff that we’re supposed to get… and hopefully still will… /crosses fingers

(Note: I don’t mean to offend anybody here; I know the idea of “which spec is the most challenging to play” seems to be a really touchy subject, with most everybody clamoring to claim theirs as the most difficult to play. I think first of all a.) it’s subjective, and b.) I haven’t found a single hunter spec thus far to be boring to play– awkward, yes, *glances at Survival* but certainly not boring– and to me, that’s what counts. They are all challenging in their own way. /nods)

In the end though, I don’t really aim for giant DPS numbers so much as I aim to be competitive; so long as I am somewhere in the top 3 or 5 (depending on whether it’s 10man or 25man) then I am content. This experiment has been an awesome and eye-opening experience to me, but I’m glad now I’ll be able to close Recount for a while and not worry about it.

/leans back and streeeeeeeeeeetches

• Extremely variable DPS. Anywhere from “Gosh, this I do this on the training dummies as Beast Master” to “HOLY MOTHER OF MEDIVH I ALMOST BROKE 5K”, all in the same raid.
• Very possible to beat better-geared Survival hunters at the DPS race.  Cause I did it today in VoA25.
• Is overall giving me slightly better numbers than Survival did. I don’t know why. I still don’t know what I did wrong when I was SV. o.O
• Is fun.  Mwahaha.  Billions of cooldowns, plus toys like Rapid Fire + Readiness, and did I mention I hate re-applying Serpent Sting?  I hate it.  I dunno why.  If you are a Marksman you don’t have to.   Ever.  It’s bliss. Oh and I can strafe around again and I don’t have to worry about standing still anymore! /glee

Depending on how long you have been reading this blog and/or how attentive you’ve been, you may already know by now that Tawyn leveled Marksman until level, oh, 58 or so. Granted, I did it because I had no idea what talent points were and everybody told me “Go Marksman, go Marksman”, so I did. Pretty sure I had points in Improved Concussive Shot and everything. Anyways, I enjoyed it and I was used to it and I sort of always had a soft spot for it, and I imagine it’s partly because of that, that making the switch to Marksman isn’t nearly as hard as making the switch to Survival was. It feels rather natural and full-circle, in a way.

Honestly I have a confession to make; I have long wished for a viable Marks/Beast Master hybrid build. It just seems like the pinnacle of hunter-ness to me; taking a bunch of talents that augment both the hunter and pet equally. The idea of something like this really excited me back in WotLK Beta but I saw it tested a few times and it never lived up to a “pure” spec. And so, I don’t know if I will ever get my wish, so I am destined to bounce around between BM and MM, it seems.

In other news, I’m trying to decide which of mine/my friends’ “Alt Guilds” to stick my main in while I wait around for a new “Real Guild”. I’m torn between < The Ice Stone Has Melted > and < Slack Jawed Daffodils >, though the former has the larger vote on Twitter at the moment. Hrmmm.

I am now officially specced 7/57/7. All I’ve really had time to do so far is some dailies and a little bit of time on the training dummies to de-rustify my rotation.

Things I have noticed so far:

1.) The Marksman rotation feels like you are pressing more buttons despite the fact that in theory, Survival is the one pressing the most buttons. Probably because the Survival buttons tend to be on longer cooldowns.

2.) Questing is hilarious; my pet is better at holding aggro as an MM pet than an SV pet for some reason I can’t ascertain (or maybe it’s just my mind…), a Chimera + Aimed will kill almost all mobs (sometimes I don’t have time to even use Aimed), and Rapid Recuperation is like a dip into AotV without having to use AotV. I’ve had less downtime doing dailies as MM than as any other spec thus far. (Interestingly, Beast Master is the spec where kill-em-all quests take the longest amount of time to do– I’m not killing things nearly as fast and thus I am in Viper much more often.)

I’m actually sort of worried about this week not being a good week for this test; I work evenings Wednesday through Saturday this week which means I have… uh, just tonight and tomorrow to try to get into all the raids I want to test. And tonight is limited because there are already a few I am locked out of. >.> We’ll see how things go.

So that’s basically about, oh, 50-100 DPS more than I do as BM on 10man Patchwerk. I probably should’ve just snapshotted the Current Fight (I think it was on Overall) but hey, it was a nice number. And much more than I’ve normally been doing as Survival so far this week. (Even if the whole Twilight Torment thing from my pet kinda skewed the numbers. I had decent numbers on the other fights too, so it’s justified. /cough)

Mostly I’m surprised because I don’t feel like I changed my playstyle at all. I did wind up sucking it up and installing Quartz this morning, but I don’t think it had much of an effect, since overall my latency is pretty low and my FPS is pretty high. Very helpful for my moonkin, though. >.> 1900 DPS at level 75? Yes please. Aaaanyways, perhaps I just got the right mix of buffs, finally.

I feel like I am finally starting to get into the Survival groove. Maybe. At least, this was the first time I saw a bunch of mobs and thought “Oh! I should use Frost Trap for Lock and Load!” only to find out it was on cooldown because of Black Arrow. I’ll uh… remember next time. >.>

…Frost Trap is the one, right? <.<

So I am both pleased and somewhat befuddled to report that any Beast Master worth their salt could destroy me in DPS right now. Seriously, today, spec’d cookie-cutter Survival and using a cookie-cutter wolf, in both a 10man and a 25man VoA… I wound up a good 300-400 DPS short of what I’d do as Beast Master.

…heck, I do more DPS as a Beast Master in 10man Naxx than I did as a Survivalist in 25man VoA today. And I had a kitty druid and a bazillion other yummy things in VoA that I normally don’t have in Naxx.

Before you ask, yes I’ve read the Elitist Jerks threads, yes I’m using a glyph/spec/rotation setup I got from them, and yes, I am being very careful not to overwrite my Explosive Shot DoTs when Lock n’ Load procs.

My only theories are a.) the massive slowdown my computer likes to throw at me in 25mans (though that still doesn’t explain the performance I wasn’t exactly proud of in the 10man today), b.) my AP gems are coming back to haunt me (Edit: Now that I think about it, I think I have mostly +hit gems… so never mind >.>), c.) it takes more than a few days to figure out the nuances of this spec, or d.) I hacked the gibson and bent the rules of the game to my will so BM simply does more DPS when I play it.

*shifty eyes*

I’m glad I’ve set the rule on myself that I must stay my test specs for a full week though, or I woulda given up and respec’d by now. I will figure out these Survivalist Shenanigans if it’s the last thing I do.

In druid news, I healed ZA. Well, part of it. Eagle Boss can go die. x_x

(P.S. Just to clarify, you don’t have to worry about me turning into a superhardcore min/max style hunter. I am going pure cookie-cutter right now merely out of curiosity to see if I can figure out what the hype is about, so to speak. Once my curiosity is sated I can go back to things like, well, using my raptor <3)

So my second day of full Survival was not particularly exciting, although I was pleased to wake up and find all sorts of helpful hints and the like left in comments on my blog (and really has me wanting to make a “What hunter spec are you?” poll, just for curiosity’s sake, since it seems a good deal of you actually are not BM!)

I did enough dailies to learn that my pet can hold aggro just fine if I let him chew on the mob for five seconds or so before I open up. I’m just so used to BM where I can basically start shooting the second I send my pet in. (Now to be fair, I do usually have to be in Aspect of the Beast even as BM or else I’ll pull, but hey.) Once I figured this out, solo’ing became much better than it was yesterday especially because I never dipped below about 80% mana. Ever. My inner mana-starved Beast Master kinda wanted to cry about it, I’ll admit.

I got into a quick Heroic Azjol’Nerub, and then a Heroic Violet Hold later on. I kept Recount open and set to “Show Current Fight” for each. My reaction to the resulting numbers was extremely variable, bouncing anywhere between “Gosh, this isn’t nearly as good as my BM numbers” to “Why am I getting Patchwerk numbers in a five-man?” The vast majority of my reactions were firmly in the middle, though– the “I am doing about the same amount of DPS” camp. All it took, though, was a good solid string of crits to push me back closer to 10man Patchwerk territory.

I have discovered that where Beast Master is all about mobility with things like Kindred Spirits, Survival and Sniper Training lean much more towards stillness. It’s sort of a new style of playing that I’m still trying to get used to. See, I love running around while fighting. It’s especially bad on my druid because all I ever cast are HoTs so I’ll run circles around the boss, jumping frantically up and down and twirling around while I toss Lifeblooms and Wild Growths around. While I’m not quite to that point with my hunter (thanks to the whole you-gotta-stand-still-to-shoot-anyway thing), I still enjoy mobility and I strafe around a lot, so learning to suppress that has been kinda difficult.

The day ended with pounding away on training dummies. Again, the numbers I wound up with were extremely varied. At best, I was getting about 400 DPS more than I do as BM, and at worst, about 100 less. The majority of my experiments placed me about 150ish DPS more than BM with no outside buffs. Honestly I don’t know if that’s good or not; I have no idea how much this Fabled Big Survival DPS Increase is supposed to be. ANYWAYS, as far as I am aware, I am using the correct glyphs, spec, and shot priority– juggling my two DoTs (Black Arrow and Serpent Sting) and then Kill Shot -> Explosive Shot -> Aimed Shot -> Steady Shot, as well as having to shake things up with the occasional Lock & Load procs. The Survival rotation is rather complex, but I’m pretty sure I had it down. It really does feel like a Boomkin on Speed (I am allowed to say this because nobody wants Trees in Violet Hold, they all want Priests for some reason which I’ve yet to ascertain. So I’ve spent a lot of time in the chicken suit lately when I play my druid.)

Honestly the biggest thing I noticed from my tests was that I can do 180,000 damage before running out of mana as Beast Master, and 260,000 before running out of mana as Survival. Similar DPS, but huge difference in overall net damage done.

Regardless, I am only two days into the Grand Experiment, so we’ll see how things continue to go…

I’m playing a game with myself. It’s called, “Pike is actually going to learn to play the other two hunter specs”.

Yes that’s right. Don’t panic. See, I’m sure we all know by now that I’ve been primarily a Beast Master hunter up until this point. This is so largely for two reasons; firstly, it really is my favorite hunter spec (don’t get me wrong), and secondly, well… this seems to have unofficially become a BM hunter site and I figured you guys would appreciate it. /blush

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the other specs or secretly long to learn to play them well. I mean, seriously, anytime I’ve ever spec’d SV or MM recently has resulted in a DPS loss, which simply isn’t logical and means I am playing them incorrectly. So I figured… now’s as good a time as any to figure them out!

The Rules:
1.) Must play one spec for one week. No temporary respecs or spec-swapping allowed.
2.) With said spec, must do at some dailies, a few heroics, and at least one raid (preferably a Naxx clear, but something like OS or VoA will work if necessary) and report back to the blog.
3.) Must not talk about Fight Club
4.) No matter how much he begs, never, ever feed your pet after midnight.

Okay, so the last two rules are a joke, but ya know.

Anyways, with said rules in place, I swapped over to Survival (figured I’d start with it since it’s my dual spec so I’m already glyphed for it) and headed off to the Argent Tournament.

The first thing I noticed was that I pulled aggro on Chillmaw within about half a second and Feign Death failed to work so I wound up Deterrence tanking him. 1200 dps on that fight. Oh yeah, off to a dandy start. /cough (Oh, and how the two Death Knights in the group failed to grab aggro from me throughout the entire fight… I will never know.)

The second thing I noticed was that when fighting the Scourge mobs for that one “kill 15 Scourge” daily, it was impossible for my pet to hold aggro beyond more than a second.

The third thing I noticed was that Misdirection extended one second of pet aggro to about two seconds of pet aggro.

The fourth thing I noticed was that Growl was off and Cower was on. Derp. Swapped those around.

The fifth thing I noticed was that with Growl safely on, my pet still couldn’t hold aggro more than a second or two without Misdirection.

The sixth thing I noticed was that mana issues while solo’ing were pretty much gone.

The seventh thing I noticed was that my traps were always on cooldown when I wanted to use them (Black Arrow’s fault).

The eighth thing I noticed was that it was near-impossible to do a proper Survival rotation on random level 79 non-elite mobs, because they were all dead after an Explosive and a Steady or two. Eventually I just abandoned using Serpent Sting and Black Arrow entirely because I didn’t need ‘em. And lastly,

The ninth thing I noticed was how empty I felt when I realized that suddenly, I was just another Survival hunter with a wolf in a sea of Survival hunters with wolves. Now you’re probably thinking “Pike, you dork, you were totally a BM hunter with a cat and then a BM hunter with a windserpent in Burning Crusade.” And it’s true… I was. But somehow it feels different now and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I differentiated myself back then by refusing to use the Steady Shot macro so I still felt fundamentally unique. Back then, I got my kicks from out-DPSing macro-using hunters with my manual rotation in the same way that today I get my kicks from out-DPSing cookie-cutter specs. Or, perhaps it’s because I was naive back then and automatically assumed that everyone was having as much fun with Beast Mastery as I was. I dunno exactly, but whatever the reason, being like everyone else bugs me now in a way it didn’t before.

Anyways, I am now bound into using Survival until next Sunday evening, though, so we’ll see how things go. I am actually very excited for this project and looking forward to getting a nice glimpse into other worlds of hunteryness! ^_^