PTR Code 8962!

A glorious thing has happened. The PTR (Public Test Realm) got the same codebase as the WoTLK Beta is using, so... There'll be no Northrend coverage or fussing over the new ShadowKnight...er...Death Knight class (sorry), but I should be able to make a very good start at explaining to people what Addons are not only essential, but actually work before the PTR code goes to the live servers and everyone has to learn how to play all over again*. The talent changes are just about that serious. Buffs no longer work anything like they used to, and nearly every class has one or more to bring to a raid now. I promise you will like them. Since these things are new, and "not quite balanced yet", you will especially like the fact that if you are a fairly alert and meticulous person, you will find ways to wreak absolutely ludicrous amounts of havok upon your enemies until things settle down a bit.

So far, the obvious winners (aside from Inscription) have been that the graphics engine has been rejiggered so that it does much more accurate handling of shadows and lighting, which has resulted in a very notable visual improvement in just about every zone. Hunters no longer have to worry so much about running out of mana because of a major change to Aspect of the Viper. Steady Shot has been "unlinked" from Auto Shot, meaning we no longer have to worry about crafting a custom shot rotation macro (those of you who weren't using one still fail, epicly if you thought you didn't need one). ...and for beastmaster-specialized (or "specced") Hunters like myself, we get Exotic Pets which for most people at the moment seems to mean Kurken, the Snowy Giant Two-Headed Dog. Since I have cojones the size of coconuts, I got a "real" core hound. Kurken fans, my pokemon can beat your pokemon. Count on it.

REMINDER: Brewfest begins this weekend.

* - If you're used to having addons around, the time right after game patches have traditionally been when many or all of one's important addons no longer work properly, leaving players feeling like they're playing with a few fingers missing. Players who don't use a lot of addons tend to not understand this strange sensation, which is why I'm explaining it.

Hunter Basics

Meh. I'll probably come back and cover this topic in detail at a later date, but watching a lot of the player base, I can see there's a few "clues" that are just not getting out there to the Hunters at the rate they should.

First and foremost: Agility is your new god. Worship a the temple of Agility and you basically can't go wrong. Intelligence is your second-best friend, because it means more shooting before the midnight chimes and you turn into an auto-shot monkey. Intelligence should never take precedent over Agility in your gear.

Spirit: Forget Spirit. There's almost exactly zero gear that will give you enough Spirit to make up for what you'd lose in Agility by wearing it. The Blizz devs gave us Spirit of the Viper to make up for the fact that any +Intelligence gear we might obtain will be nearly useless because of the lack of Spirit. Viper between fights (and maybe during some of the longer ones if you can stand the drop in DPS) and Aspect of the Hawk during.

After 40 you wear mail, and only mail: Take a pass on leather unless you're completely deisperate and are wearing something you got 10-15 levels ago. At 70 if you're wearing leather (that isn't a purple) go to the Auction House and search for "Netherstorm" and possibly "Bandit" as well. Netherstorm of the Bandit is green, but it'll be very hard to beat it for some of your item pieces. One useful side effect of that is if you're still wearing a few of those for awhile at 70, your repair bills will be dirt cheap. The belt in particular will be hard to replace so keep an eye out for one on your way up.

If you're a dwarf, buy a gun. Don't waste the racial bonus. (I know this is odd coming from a dwarf using a crossbow, but darn it good guns are really hard to get ahold of at 70.)

Prowl: Unless you do a lot of PvP, Prowl is nearly useless on a cat at 70. Be ready to respec the pet if you get to 70 and realize you've taught him (or he came with) Prowl. The damage bonus for the first hit out of stealth is going to amount to one-half of nothing in the long run, and Hunters are about sustained DPS. Leave the "burst" DPS to the mages (and warlocks riding the short bus).

Melee: Again, unless you're doing a lot of PvP, melee is almost useless for you. If you're close enough to the mob to hit it with your fist, you're doing something very wrong. If you find a pair of pom-poms to wave around that give you more agility than your shiny daggers or fist weapons, wear them and leave the +agility daggers to the rogues. Let them laugh. You have Flare.

Misdirection macro: If you hit 70 and don't have one, make one and have it ready to kick off. There will not be time to click on Misdirect, and then click on the tank, and then click on the mob again, and then start shooting. When the healer gets aggro from what you're shooting at, spank that macro and start mashing buttons so that it goes back to the tank instead of killing the person who would otherwise be keeping you alive. If the healer dies before you do and you haven't popped Misdirect, you have failed.

Fishing: Fishing is not as horrible as you might think. Sure, it's boring to level, but there's no easier source of +Agility buff food. You will also likely wind up with a decent supply of +healing fish, which is good for currying favor with the healer in your group (and will also help to keep you alive).

Food: If you're not eating +agility or +hit food for raids/dungeons, you might as well be going in without shoes or gloves on. Fish, Warp Stalkers and Talbuk are deee-licious.

Ammunition: Buy the biggest darn ammunition bag you can get your hands on. Any decent leatherworker will be happy to craft you a quiver big enough to sleep in if you bring them 100 light feathers (the other materials are always available in the Auction House). Pay attention to your faction standings, and the moment you can start buying specialty ammo, stop buying the white stuff. Halaa (in Nagrand) is good for buying ammo after you get to Outlands, even without having worked on a faction. Every time you login, before you do anything, top off that ammo bag. Running out of ammo == failure, and the super-big quiver/pouch will hold enough ammunition to get you through a full run of Karazahn with some left over. If you're stuck for a bigger ammo sack (and/or until you get some faction-requirement ammunition), make friends with an Engineer because they can craft ammo crates that can each hold five stacks of "at least it's better than vendor-bought" ammunition. Remember, you'll burn through it fast enough so it's not like carrying four crates in your pockets is going to keep you from picking up vendor trash.

Strategy: To put it bluntly, Hunters are the lightning strategist class, almost as much as Wizards were in the old Dungeons & Dragons game. You may not immediately see the utility in the "blue swooshie" ability, but have it ready to smack--it can and will save your bacon by making the mob go bother someone else (sometimes you pet, usually the tank). Same thing goes for Misdirection... That's another way we get to dictate who the mob is attacking. Flare is continually usable with any spec at all, and really hampers rogues. (NO stealth bonus for you mister!) The pet ability "Intimidation" is a stun, which is the effective equivalent of "Full Stop" and again, super-awesome for Saving the Healer. Unless you've got a short-bus riding, keyboard-turning tank on your hands, that delay will usually buy enough time for the tank to get aggro back. As an added bonus, that "blue swooshie" ability you've been ignoring all time time really screws with the heads of the other guys in PvP because suddenly they're targeting your pet who may or may not be in front of them and it will take them precious moments to realize it and go back to smacking you in the face. Frankly, I think it's more useful than FD for PvP.

The Pet Dies First: I know some of you are very partial to your pets, but let's not quibble. You can res him, he can't res you. If you're clearly in a "we're all going to die" setting, have that pet buy you a little time, Feign Death (because it doesn't work so well when you're getting beaten silly) and just lay there. When the dust settles, res the pet and stuff him full of sausages and all will be forgiven.

Third Sunder Rule: In raids, watch those little debuff icons on the target. After the third Sunder, you can generally start blasting away. Sending the pet in before that happens (particularly if you just cast Mend Pet) means a surprise critical hit or three can get you squished.

ClassTimers and why you need them

It sometimes startles me to find new players who are still using the bare Blizzard UI. While this sort of purism is admirable, it's also somewhat harmful to their play style. Far be it from me to insist that anyone should play a video game a certain specific way or claim that they're doing it wrong, but I will definitely assert that by not using some of these add-ons, they're simply making the game more difficult than it really needs to be. In some aspects, the difference between using add-ons and not using add-ons is much like the difference between calculating sales tax with pad and paper and simply using a pocket calculator (or decent cash register). Sure, you can do without, but you've got better things to do with your time--like looting monsters and buying stuff.

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Okay, so I'm going to start relatively simply with the ClassTimer add-on.

What ClassTimer does is relatively simple and straightforward. It provides very visible, and very obvious countdown timer bars for the various spells and effects your character uses. Having little buff icons near your portrait--even with time values under them--is mainly just useful in only the coarsest of ways. Looking at a bunch of them at once, you're more likely to think "Yep, I've got a lot of buffs on" than to notice anything out of the ordinary, like one that's gone missing. Put these babies somewhere in the lower right quadrant of your screen (I suggest top center of that quadrant) and you'll be able to tell with the briefest of glances which of your timers are about to run out, and in what order.

To be more specific about it, this add-on means a greatly reduced chance of you saying things like:

"Oh c**p I didn't notice the Soulstone had expired."

If you are playing a class with abilities that trigger randomly to let you perform extra actions for a certain period of seconds (like say, Mongoose Bite, or Shadow Trance) ClassTimer can even show you a cooldown for those so you know in a very deep and meaningful way just how long you have left to take advantage of them.

Basically, unless you're planning on just hanging around IronForge and talking in /2 all day, you want this addon.

As with all add-ons worth using, the size, fill, color, font, and location of the bars is completely customizable. Note, although many spells are already configured in ClassTimer, a few spells (like Demon Armor) aren't in it's list of things to watch for by default. In the configuration dialogs you can easily add new things for it to pay attention to by simply typing the name of the ability in the little input box.

For you PvPers, it appears that this will even show cooldowns some of your enemies abilities, so you see just how long before you can smack that cockroach..er..paladin in the face when his bubble runs out.

Although ClassTimer is obtainable through the WoW Ace Updater application, I'll simply suggest that unless you're into installing complex add-on management applications that you simply download the zip file of the latest Subversion build from this browsable directory as ClassTimer.zip.

Once it's installed, depending on what other things you have installed, you may wind up with a FuBar button, or a minimap button. If you don't, simply type /classtimer in your chat window and it will bring up the configuration dialog.

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I'll get back to Quartz in a bit, after I've had time to polish the instructional screenshots somewhat.

Initial Post

Ho there. You've reached the blog of Me. I run a toon named Eshk on the Skywall server who is a level 70 Hunter (not hun-tard). No, I don't care for PvP, and it's doubtful I'm going to bother explaining why. What I'm going to do between here and December is hope (and maybe some prayer) I'll get into the Wrath of the Lich King Beta so that the bug hunting can begin anew, and teach you people how to play.

Yes, I'm aware that Big Red Kitty has this pretty sewn up, but think of this as the place you go if what he says is still over your head. We're going to get specific yes we will, and we're going to even be deliberately pedantic at times. Occasionally, we might just be grape-flavored simply because it amuses us.

Sometimes (because we're dodging incipient altaholism) we'll maybe even discuss some rudiments of warlockery.

Rather often, we're going to be jibbering about add-ons for the Warcraft client which should be considered essential to gathering huge quantities of WIN. In fact, we're going to mention one right now. Quartz.

In the meantime...

Nothing to see here (yet). Move along.