Posts with tag 4.0.1-hunter

Every Monday and Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Each week, Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Now that we've covered our basic 4.0.1 talent builds and rotations as well as glyphs and gems, it's time to take a step away from the raids and into our heroic 5-mans. Among the swarm of emails I've been getting have been a lot of reminders that raiders are, in fact, a minority. Our heroic-running brethren are experiencing the same radical changes, but these changes affect them in very different ways.

Even the hardcore raiders out there are probably spending more time in heroics than they do with their mothers (and really, is it so hard to pick up the phone once in a while?), with the sudden need to level a dozen new pets. Heroics make for fast and painless pet leveling -- you can usually get your pet up to 80 in just two to three heroics, depending on which ones you get.

It's like when Mania (of Petopia) said on the Hunting Party Podcast, "I think the sexiest female model in the Horde is the male blood elf" -- so wrong, and yet so true. So join me after the cut for a rundown on maximizing your heroic DPS in a crazy, post-patch 4.0.1 world.

Every Monday and Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Each week Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

On Thursday, we discussed hunter talents and rotations for 4.0.1, and today we're going to get into gems and glyphs, as well as talking a bit about stat weights. But before we get into all that, a word of caution about rotations.

Many hunters have been playing around with rotations focusing on Arcane Shot only and ignoring the signature shot for the spec. I have to recommend against this. It is certainly much easier, and for some specs (like BM) may actually be a bit more DPS, but it is a bad habit to get into! Expect to see a slight boost to the damage of all hunter signature shots in the very near future that makes these shots clearly worthwhile. It is well worth your while to learn the correct rotation now rather than spending your time developing lazy habits. Be a hunter, not an elf.

With that out of the way, join me after the cut for more info on how to customize your hunter to optimize raid performance in the brief window before Cataclysm hits.