Posts with tag Survival

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we continue our discussion of ways to avoid dying horribly. This week's tip: Roll a death knight.

Yes, the sad reality of being a mage is the ever-present threat of a swift and ignominious demise. We're like every character in The Walking Dead: We could go at any time, and our only consolation is that God willing, we'll be able to blow up a few zombies on our way out.

Last week, we discussed a few methods for surviving to pew pew another day, namely aggro drop and damage mitigation. This week, we turn our attention to two other lifesaving techniques: movement and crowd control. Just remember as we go forward that every time a mage survives a fight, an angel punches a warlock in the face. Have I used that joke before? I may have. Doesn't make it any less true. Angels hate warlocks. So does Jesus. And me. And, I pray, all of you.

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim.

Last week, we covered what the new PvE rotation is looking like for MM hunters in Cataclysm, and today we're going to move along to the SV PvE rotation. Currently in Wrath, the MM rotation is more fixed and requires some careful forethought and planning. In Cataclysm, it is more so. In Wrath, the SV rotation is more reactionary, and in Cataclysm, it is that and more so.

Despite the frantic gyrations from being focus-starved to actually having too much focus, the SV rotation is probably the least-changed hunter spec rotation in Cataclysm. We use Cobra Shot instead of Steady Shot, we don't have to worry about reapplying Serpent Sting and instead we get to actually use Arcane Shot from time to time. Join me after the cut and we'll take a look.

Recently, Blizzard has been supplying us with a lot of information for their plans in Cataclysm. So far we've learned about changes to the stat systems, as well as talent trees. Everything announced so far will be incredibly far reaching, and affect many aspects of the game, including some that have been hanging around since vanilla.

In an effort to keep our loyal readers informed, WoW.com has been doing its best to cover every inch of blue text we find. It came to our attention that we had overlooked one important change when we discussed the effects of stat and system changes in Cataclysm the other week. So, without further ado, this morning I will be explaining how the ability Basic Campfire is affected by the upcoming expansion.

Welcome to Scattered Shots. I am Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from The Hunting Lodge and you're not. Today we are reviewing what pets you should consider for raiding and how to spec out your pet for the best possible DPS. So join me will you? As we explore what it takes to make a raiding pet.

This past week has been an interesting one for Hunters and their pets. If you were like me, finding out that Hunters could tame Garwal's Worgen form, reminded you of why being a Hunter is truly awesome. Of course it would last and Zyrhym showed up and had to burst our bubble by delivering the bad news that Blizzard was removing them from the game. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

What was nice about this glitch was the passionate responses seen on the Official Forums and Hunter community at large. It really highlighted how much we Hunters love our pets. Many of us see them more as companions than just some other weapon in our Hunter bag of tricks.

One way Blizzard has helped foster this idea is by letting us have three different categories (Ferocity, Tenacity, and Cunning) and literally hundreds of different pets to go out and tame. But to me the best part is being able to not only tame my pet of choice, but having the ability to train him. Doing this makes Hunters and their pets a combination as epic as Nutella and Pancakes.

When you set out to tame your pet, make sure and match your need with the correct category. For pure DPS you have Ferocity. Need a tanking or good solo pet? Get a Tenacity one. And if you are in a PvP situation and want to make sure someone has your back no matter what? You could try a Cunning pet. With dual specs and Call Stabled Pet you can now match up your spec with the right pet and further enhance your status as the Supreme Hunter! Let's take a moment and talk about Ferocity Pets and raiding specs, alright?

Welcome to Scattered Shots. I am Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from The Hunting Lodge and I'll be your tour guide each Thursday as we explore what makes our Hunters tick and how we can make them better.

I've read comments here, over on the Official Forums, and other Hunter blogs and forums saying how Blizzard is forcing Hunters to spec either as Survival or Marksmanship. I always find this a hard argument to support, especially since it is Blizzard that has continued to give us three different talent trees that we can spec into. But as always, there seems to be a preferred talent spec.

To me the blame isn't Blizzard but us Hunters always looking to squeeze out every ounce of DPS out of our class and remain on top of the damage meters. (Go ahead let the flames begin, but hopefully you'll give me a chance here.) We go out of our way looking, experimenting, and testing different build combinations to find the one magic build that gives us top DPS. Once we have found that, we tend to forget that we really can play all three builds. No, they all won't perform the same. And if you are in a progressive, hardcore, min/max raiding guild, well then stick with the spec-du-jour. But if you are like the majority of the players out there, you probably want to play something that better fits your play style. Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it has to fit just right.

So let's look at the different Talent Trees, discuss a bit about what makes each one tick. Then look at the currently recommended builds and shot rotations for each spec.

The Hunter's Mark examined what's going on behind the Hunter talent Lock and Load a little while ago, and last week Atkallen did a follow up post getting down into the nitty gritty of the numbers a little further. Essentially, he charges that you're looking at an LnL proc for about 2-4% uptime during a four hour raid -- that is, for about 4% of the time, you've got Lock and Load giving you free Explosive Shots with no cooldown and no mana cost. And as he says, that's the "applied" time -- since LnL disappears as you use it, odds are that the real time you have it available will be much less.

He also tracks that time from 3.1 to 3.1.2, and says he's found data that confirms his previous theory: that it was more than the tooltip that needed changing during the last patch. Before the patch, he was looking at 11% uptime during three Ulduar fights, and after the patch, that's dropped down to 6%. Blizzard said they were only changing the tooltip, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Finally, he stands by a notion that a lot of our commenters debated last time: that LnL is proccing more after 3.1, even though the mechanics claim that it shouldn't be. I haven't had a lot of personal playtime with it post-patch, but there are two different conclusions to take away here. First: LnL, in conjunction with Black Arrow and Resourcefulness, is a definite force for DPS in the Survival spec no matter how often it's proccing. And second: there still may be something else going on here behind the scenes -- the removal of the cooldown is almost definitely a factor, and Blizzard may be playing around with the RNG more than they're letting on.

The Hunter's Mark's Atkallen takes a good look at one of my new favorite Hunter abilities: Lock and Load. I'm pretty late to the party on this one (BigRedKitty showed us all how awesome it was a while back), but ever since I went dual spec and started raiding Survivalist, most of my time is just spent waiting for a Lock and Load proc. And oh boy, when it hits twice in a row and I can throw off Explosive Shots for free on just a global cooldown, look out.

But Atkallen's post suggests something a little sneakier about the buff, which procs off of any trap snares or damage, or, more commonly, off of Black Arrow, another Survivalist talent. It used to proc off of Serpent Sting, from 3 to 10 percent of the time according to how many points you put into the talent, and when it was changed to the current form and lowered to 2, 4, and 6 percent, most Hunters worried that they wouldn't see it pop up as much. But here's the thing, and I can attest: it still shows up all the time.

We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

There's a good selection of places for you to visit today for more interesting articles. Show me a Mookin raiding in Ensidia who's haste capped on himself and on his priest alt that is doing better than a survival hunter in Ulduar and not Naxxramas, please.

• Fel Fire thinks the problem with Ulduar is Naxxramas.
• Troll Huntress over at WoW Ladies has a nice Patch 3.1 Survival Hunter Raiding Primer.
• Kree take a good and intelligent look at how to be like an Ensidia player.
• BobTurkey continues to take a great look at Priest Haste Rating.
• Teeth and Claws has some good loot information for Druids in patch 3.1.
• Gray Matter talks about the Moonkin Haste Cap.

The developers are continuing their hotfix spree, this time targeting Replenishment in the arena. While in an arena, any class that procs Replenishment will only proc it for themselves. It does not apply to the entire party while in an arena. This is something that a lot of people have expected would happen eventually, and it's good to see that they didn't wait for another major content patch for something like this. It had to be done, so they did it. I'd love to see that trend continue.

The arena community has been asking for this for awhile, and if you want to know their reasoning, Serennia discussed it just the other day. I strongly suggest giving it a read. Replenishment is a game changer in the arena, and in a format with teams so small, you can't really expect every team to find a Replenishment to slot like you can in 10 and 25 man raids. Replenishment essentially being a requirement in the 3v3 format would be a disaster, and it's been made pretty clear that teams with a Replenishment have a severe advantage over those that don't.

A post-Patch 3.1 world seems to be one where broken things get fixed quickly, rather than just sit there broken for months until the next content patch. As long as that holds up for more than these few weeks immediately after the patch, I'm a fan of it.

Not to be outdone by TalentChic, the folks at 3D Armory also sent us their lists of what the most popular builds are in the game after patch 3.1, and since everybody seems to be build-hungry lately (and why not -- we each get two!), here they all are.

Warrior: Fury 18/53/0.
Paladin: 0/0/0, which means you need to log in, Paladins! Also 51/5/15 for Holy.
Hunter: 0/0/0 wins here, too, but Survival (6/14/51) comes in next.
Rogue: Combat 15/51/5.
Priest: 14/57/0 for Holy.
Death Knight: 17/0/54 Unholy.
Shaman: Elemental 57/14/0.
Mage: 0/53/18 Fire.
Warlock: 0/41/30 Destruction.
Druid: 14/0/57 Restoration, which surprised me.

Keep in mind that these are from only a small sample of the game, so they're not the most popular specs in the game, just the most popular among those surveyed by the 3D Armory. And unfortunately, unlike TalentChic, it doesn't look like there's any way to see where the points are going, just the distribution of points among the trees (though that reminds us that Blizzard probably has some amazing point-by-point stats on how popular talents are).

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-fifth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

The Hunter is probably the oldest class in World of Warcraft. Before anyone in Azeroth took up an axe or sword, or learned anything of how to cast spells -- even before they learned to write -- they had to hunt for food. If they were like early Earth societies, the people of many nomadic groups would have relied on their hunters to bring in the meat they needed, as well as to protect the community from enemies. Back then, there would have been no such thing as fancy armor or complicated magical weapons. The relationship of a fighter to nature was just as important as the weapons he carried, if not more so.

Modern hunters in World of Warcraft come from the ancient tradition of those who learned to keep themselves and their families alive by living in harmony with nature. They learned the essential mysteries of survival in the wilderness, killing animals with stealth and primitive weapons, trapping them, and eventually turning predators and prey alike into friends and servants.

As time went by, those fighters who took up the path of the druid would learn to become nature itself; shamans would learn to call upon it; warriors and rogues would make battle their art, each in their own way. But hunters remained at that pivotal point between sentient races and the natural world -- they are connected to nature, but not manifestations of it; they work together with nature, but they do not worship it or call upon its spirits; they fight their enemies with the utmost passion, but they do it with the tools that hearken back to the dawn of civilization.

No more quivers, no more pouches, no more bullets to make us slouches. Ok, so I'm terrible at poetry, but you get the picture. This has been on a lot of Hunters' wish lists for a long time, but it's finally here. No more ammo.

Or rather, ammo will be an item more like a relic or a wand that modifies our ranged weapon damage without being consumed. Engineers, that means you better make hay while the sun shines. Soon, we'll be buying our last crate of Mammoth Cutters ever.

This is far from the only changed announced tonight -- or this morning, depending on where you are. Let's look at them all one by one.

Hunters, do you have questions about your class? Well, Ghostcrawler's got some answers. Not all of them, of course, but Big Red Kitty can probably handle the rest. Our favorite crab has been chatting a bit about the Hunter class on the official forums. Let's take a look at what he's been saying.

• As far as DPS numbers, Blizzard balances in terms of absolutes, not relatives. This means Blizzards wants people with X quality gear to be doing Y DPS on fight Z, so things like "I got 5th on the meters" aren't as relevant - they're looking at specifically how much DPS you do. (source for this and the next three points)

• Pets are balanced using "a trade-off between damage and utility." Some pets, like wasps, bring bonuses that your 5- or 10-man groups may be missing, and thus it is justified that they do less DPS. That said, "more parity among pets is something [the devs] want to pursue."

There was a recent flurry of interest surrounding the Replenishment mechanic due to Ghostcrawler's statement that "we assume that you have Replenishment available to your raid." He said that it doesn't mean raids will be undoable without it, but that they're tuned assuming you have it, and if you don't, you'll need to out-gear or out-skill the raid, or else you'll have problems.

In this post, I'd like to look at just how easy it is to get Replenishment in your raid. There are three Replenishment specs: Retribution Paladin, Shadow Priest, and Survival Hunter. As you can see, they're all DPS specs. Historically speaking, these specs were probably selected because they had been viewed as suboptimal for raiding (in the case of Survival and Ret), or because they had been valued for their mana regeneration (in the case of Shadow), although at the moment all three of these specs have competitive DPS and don't really need group utility to prop them up.

Unfortunately, GC never clarified whether he was talking about 10- or 25-person raiding, so I'll examine both. I will make the simplifying assumption that the 30 specs are equally distributed in the raiding population: any given character is 1/30 likely to be of any given spec. Put another way, each spec enjoys a 3.3% share of the character base. I know this is not actually true, but it's a very helpful simplification and I don't think it will distort my numbers too much. Edit: Yes, I'm also assuming every Survival, Shadow, and Retribution raider has the relevant Replenishment talents. I think this is a pretty safe assumption.