Slight Misdirection

Gotta catch em all

2009-01-16T10:59:00.000-08:00

Blizzard must have discovered some way in which to commune with the future. Perhaps in some guarded room with retina scanners for door locks deep below the blizzard facility. I only say this because they continue to evolve new ways in which to reconstitute my addiction.

In Vanilla wow it was the AQ gates. In burning crusade it was the new talents and arenas. Now in wrath, they have unleashed the greatest weapon man has ever known: achievements. They have turned my OCD and need for perfection against me in a brilliant ploy that ensures that I will play for years to come.

Personally, I love the achievement system. I think it is a bottled form of goodness. While I realize that blizzard did not invent the concepts of achievements, they do what they always do: they looked at what works in the current market and made it better. I think the incentive for rewards is what makes it so addictive, a cool mount or a new title. I want the fishing coin so bad that I am going to pick up fishing and level it once I hit 80.

I was out with my shaman friend last night, finishing up our remaining quests in Howling Fijord. I pull up my achievement screen and notice that I am only about 25 quests away from completing I've Toured the Fjord. But I had run out of quests in my quest log, and didn't know where else to look. Rather than simply move on to Dragonblight (in which I knew an abundance of quests awaited me) I slowed my leveling pace to search out and hunt down those last remaining 25 quests. Oh and I got them. Boy, did I get them. Well played blizzard, well played.

Just as Important.

2009-01-15T09:58:00.000-08:00

Probably my favorite thing about this game is instancing. Running a 5 man, or 10 man in particular. While I have a certain place in my heart for the 25 mans, I enjoy the atmosphere and experience of the 10 man raids more than I can ever enjoy a 25 man. Having played almost exclusivly a healer for the last 3 years (the last 2 spent being a holy priest) had caused me to develop what I consider to be a "10 commandments for DPS" so to speak.

You'll of course note, these are not the 10 that you learned in Sunday School. They are however, no less important.

1. Understand your role. One of the great things about this game is that every class plays completely differently. A rogue and hunter (while both DPS classes) bring completely different things to the group. Know what your spec is, and what the best way to DPS according to that spec is. (I.e. if you are an affliction warlock, use those DOTs!)

2. Learn to 'Presbutan.' You will hear me say this a lot. Presbutan is french for Press Button. It means learn what a global cooldown is and understand that as a DPS you want to be doing something with every global cooldown. The difference between people that just push the button, and people that Presbutan is a significant jump in dps.

3. Focus Fire. Figure out amongst yourselves who the MA (main assist) is going to be, and then actually do it. If you are hunter in your group, just tell your fellow dps to kill what you markso that everyone jumps on that mob. (Hunters, change your mark before the current mob dies, to speed things up.)

4. Learn the pulls. This goes with the above. Learn the order of the pulls in an instance, which is customarily skipped, which mobs need to die first in a group, which need to be killed last etc. This will make you not only a better instancer, but as a hunter it will make you a better main assist.

5. Protect your healer. Most dps have some form of CC or another. If a mob gets away from the tank and is b-lining for the healer, do something about it. If that means you serve as a temporary off tank, then do it. The healer is the most sacred member of the group, if they die, everyone dies. I always try to keep a trap down at the foot of the healer, so that if something gets away, it gets trapped before he has to even worry about it

6. Aggro. Don't pull it. Grab a meter mod and pay attention to it, dont get button-blind. As a hunter, there is no excuse for pulling aggro ever. Feign death and Misdirection give us so much threat reduction that you should never, ever be close to pulling.

7. Let the tank do his job. Tanks are the natural role of party leader. A tank should be setting the pace of the instance. A good tank does this automatically, a tank that is still learning may struggle in this area. But, at the end of the day, the tank's responsibility is to make sure everything is hitting him and not you, so give them a chance to run the instance the way they are most comfortable doing it. Misdirection is the best friend of an unsure tank.

8. Don't stand in the fire. This is rudimentary Warcraft stuff. "Don't stand in the fire" encounters have been in the game since Molten Core. If you haven't figured it out by now, learn it quick!

9. Be Social. Don't be the grinch. An MMO is a social game, talk to your party. Most healers and tanks develop "partnerships" in which they generally always run instances especially daily heroics, etc with the same people. After awhile they become comfortable with each other's play style and things work much smoother. You want to be in this "regular group" and you never know if the PUG you just joined might turn into that group.

10. Have Fun. This goes without saying obviously. It's a game, have a good time.

Afternoon Anecdotal

2009-01-14T15:05:00.000-08:00

Well, last night I was out in Howling Fijord with my leveling partner and friend's enhancement shaman. Now, understand that my friend and I have leveled our fair share of character's together, each being quite familiar with the other's play style.

Usually, of the two of us it is I that engages in any leveling-related world PvP as I am a huge fan of world PvP and think it is one of the best parts of the game. (Note that I said, world PvP and not ganking/camping, I feel there is a difference.) We happen upon a level 71 human warrior, where my friend (who is throughly enjoying his enhancement shaman) initiates a conversation that goes something like this:

"Hey look, there's a warrior"

"That is in fact a warrior."

"Let's get him"

At which point we attack, only to discover that he has gone AFK. Staying true to our horde roots, we finish the deed, and proceed to continue with whatever quest we were working on. Flash forward, about 30 minutes, and we bump into this warrior again, while doing a quest. Conversation follows,

"Hey look, there's a warrior."

"Isn't that the warrior we killed awhile ago?"

"I think so."

"Let's get him."

So we killed him. No more that 3-4 minutes later, we are greeted by a level 80 Arcane mage, who promptly dismounts from his red dragon, blows all of his cooldowns, and melts our faces into steaming pools of self righteousness. We notice his guild tag is similar to that of our most recent victim, and accept the vengence killing. (Which we felt settled the matter.)

Boy were we wrong. Said mage and warrior camped us for the next hour. We would res and escape to move on to a different quest hub, only to be tracked down 10-15 minutes later to be camped again. Now I am quite sure that the first round of killings more than satisfied whatever life debt we had accrued with above referenced warrior. I was wrong. I was very, very wrong.

Pet Changes Coming

2009-01-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

One of the latest blue posts with regards to pet changes:

Pet mechanics changes is on the list
"Yes, I have tried to post several times that the way pets receive buffs from their masters is inconsistent. We need to take a holistic look at stats, especially those like hit, spell pen and haste. It doesn't make sense, for example, for a pet to receive a percentage of your spell hit. Where are they ever going to get the remainder of their hit from?Many classes have pets now, and those classes have different stats to provide to those pets. While locks and hunters (and DKs to a lesser extent) are the most dependent on having a good system in place, the whole paradigm just needs to be reexamined. It is on the list. "

This is good news. Pet scaling always seems to be a subject that is brought up every time hunter nerf/buff conversations start to come up. With the readjustment of the BM spec, maybe some of that lost damage will come back when the pet scaling system gets put into place.

An Introduction

2009-01-14T09:51:00.000-08:00

A strange thing happened the other day. I was over at BigRedKitty as I usually am, reading up on his latest podcast featuring the SV hunter guru-blogger Lienna.

As I was listening to said podcast, about half way through my sandwich at lunch - it hit me: I spend so much time reading blogs/news posts/content from other people. I should do my fair share and pitch in.

So here we have it. Slight Misdirection. This will track the progress of my Orc Hunter, Exze on the Frostmane server, and of course be full of my own opinions and news about the hunter class in general.

Drop me a line at slightmisdirection@gmail.com