Got your Rhok on?

If you're one of those fairly new hunters that has no idea why I named this blog "Hunters Rhok", please do yourself a favour and check out an article on WoW.com written by Brian Wood (a.k.a. Frostheim of the Warcraft Hunters Union blog): Rhok out with your Lok out.

Why do the quest? Because it's fun. Because it's more legendary than our legendary. Because only REAL hunters have Rhok.

And because hunters don't just rock, we Rhok!

Hunter Login Screen Changed

If you play a hunter at all, I'm sure you would have noticed this change from the patch if nothing else: we now display our ranged instead of melee weapons!



I wish the change had been documented somewhere, because the only screenshot I can find of my login screen prior to the patch is this one:



...which I took to show off my T5 shoulders more than anything else.

Oh well, it's a nice change - it makes sense that hunters should display our ranged weapons and not our "stat-sticks". Now, if only our bows showed on our backs while walking around...

Hunter Pet Haiku Winner!

Mania over at Mania's Arcania (and caretaker of the much loved sites Petopia and Warcraft Mounts) recently held a Hunter Pet Haiku contest where randomly drawn winners would win a month of WoW game time.

Well.... I won! /cheer

It's a good thing it wasn't based on how good my entry was, because there are some great ones (which you can now vote on in the Petopia forums to win a "most popular" prize)... but here's my winning piece:

Loyal black panther
Sacrificed so I may live
I will avenge you!

You can judge for yourself whether it's good or not... I'm happy my faithful Shadow gets the recognition he deserves after having to sit in the stables while Fury the wolf gets all the raiding fun, although I suppose he *is* immortalized in my Hunters Rhok banner! :)

Patch 3.3.3 Bug Fixes

Patch 3.3.3 is being rolled out as I type (*insert obligatory grumble about Maintenance starting at peak Oceanic play time here*) and there are a couple of notes for hunters that I wanted to point out (read: /boo at).


Apart from the changes to Ferocious Inspiration and Heart of the Phoenix (both of which are welcome), there are 2 "bug fixes" affecting me that I wasn't too ecstatic about:

• Rapid Fire: Now triggers the global cooldown correctly
• Lock and Load: Fixed a bug where Lock and Load always proc'd 100% of the time from the first tick of Explosive Trap and never from additional ticks. It should now be 6% as advertised

Why does Rapid Fire need to have its own GCD? It's not a direct damage ability per se (if you don't do anything after it, you won't get any benefit from it). On-use trinkets aren't on the GCD and do the same thing, so why pick this out?

The Lock and Load bug was a rather more obvious bug I expected to be fixed... but I'll miss it on fights like Onyxia. Pretty harmless bug if you ask me - it's not like people drop Explosive Traps left and right to try and get a proc out of them (if you were that desperate, you could always drop a Frost or Freezing) - but I guess Blizzard didn't think so.


On another note: Hooray for getting rid of battleground tokens! Trying to get Warsong Gulch tokens as Bloodlust Alliance is worse than camping for a spirit beast...



*Edit: Apparently the Rapid Fire note was to *fix* Rapid Fire not being able to be used on a GCD, not to give it a GCD. Much better :)

In case you were wondering

Yes, you can bandage Dreamwalker... and there's *just* enough spare time in between getting the initial 4 mobs down and waiting for the first add to come out to do it. My 6k "heal" helped! /cheer

(She gets the usual bandage debuff, sadly... 7 DPS/tanks bandaging a dragon at the same time would have been hilarious)

I Hate Pink

...Luckily, this particular shirt is actually covered by my armour/tabard:

...so it can stay. It *is* a rather unique shirt, after all... you get a "Best in Show" buff while wearing it.

Also, I only had the rather boring-looking Fine Cloth Shirt previously; if I ever get around to checking out which crafted shirt looks best I'll chuck this in the bank.

Oh, and I got a new melee weapon too. Pretty good 25man ICC PuG for me this week, although still no bow....

Unfinished Business

I got bored doing the daily grind of Random Heroics and Raiding, so I thought I'd finish something that I'd been meaning to do for ages:

I hadn't done it at 70 because there was always a queue for the the Shartuul event and I only ever did the quest sporadically, which meant I never learnt how to kill the bosses.

This time round, it only took me a few tries to get the hang of it - Shartuul went down without me having used any of the "emergency" abilities and my minion was close to full health.

Yeah, there's no Achievement for it, I don't get any epic loot out of it (unless you count the level 70 blue that dropped off his corpse), but I had heaps of fun doing it so that's all that counts! :)

Skilled!

Yeah, I know everyone overgears this dungeon now, but it still isn't easy to PuG. As it was, it took us 3-4hrs (2 wipes on Faction Champs, 1 on Twins) to finish the place - Anub is definitely not a walkover.

In any case, I'm really happy I got this done because now I have access to those elusive and rare PuGs going for the Insanity Achievement, which usually require you to link Skill or Mad Skill to join.

Besides, I had a lot of fun doing it - I didn't even notice it was past 3am when I'd finished!

Tips for PuGging heroic Anub:

• Unless your healers are @#$^ing epic (and haste capped), you will need to run with 2 tanks and 3 healers
• It's easier if your DPS can push Anub into phase 3 with only 1 submerge (and without heroism, which is saved for phase 3), because most people (unlike all good hunters!) can't kite and you only have 6 frost orbs for the entire fight
• Healers should have plenty of spare globals until phase 3 and can help out with DoTs etc.
• Some sort of healing debuff should be kept on Anub in phase 3
• In the submerge phase, use Aspect of the Viper to top your mana off and keep pets on aggressive so they attack bugs with no delay (especially helpful if you're on orb duty, which I was)
• Since I was on orb duty, I went BM so my pet could beat on Anub the whole time... and the controlled burst DPS was useful

Nerfing: When is it too much?

Among today's in-game fixes are:

• In the Lord Marrowgar encounters, the boss will no longer reset threat after a bone storm and will now wait a small amount of time before attacking at the end of a bone storm
  
• In the Deathbringer Saurfang encounters, the boss is now less likely to cast Blood Nova on targets affected by Mark of the Fallen Champion
  
• In the 10- and 25-player heroic Festergut encounters, the malleable goo ability should no longer target pets
  

I'm all for progressive nerfing. It gives the "less-coordinated" guilds a chance to see content without having to bang their heads against a boss for months.

It's also great that it *is* actually "progressive", and not the epic nerf of BC when poor Kael and Vashj found themselves dying a whole lot more after just one fix.

However... are some of these nerfs really necessary?

I'll give you Saurfang - healing through Blood Nova as well as a Mark is challenging - and Festergut - not realizing a goo is headed for a non-player would be a nasty surprise for melee - but Marrowgar? You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone running ICC who hasn't come across a boss that resets threat. Are there really that many groups repeatedly wiping to this boss because of that issue?

Not to mention, the zone-wide buff in ICC is now active, starting at 5% and increasing later. Surely this buff is enough to help languishing guilds through this week?

I hope this isn't the start of a trend where the first wing of ICC will eventually become as laughable as Naxx when we first started; easy bosses are fun for awhile but quickly get boring once the challenge is gone.

Buff you? No, buff ME!

I'd just joined a PuG for LBRS on my mage when the following exchange took place between the priest and shaman:



I don't know what other buffs the priest was expecting, because I had already buffed him with AI and the other group members were a shaman, warrior and DK.... and of course only the tank had Fort and nobody had Spirit.

Seriously, where do these people come from?

I hate it even more when the noob happens to be a hunter (I'd also PuGged BRD where the hunter shot anything within range, used a gorilla with Thunderstomp on autocast and was cockily indifferent to any protest to slow down and let the tank pull... you can imagine how well the usually-neutral mobs in the BRD bar reacted when we got there), so I sympathize with any priests reading this that are /facepalming right now.