1 night left.

1 single night left.

That’s the timelimit I have to get Glory of the raider and a 310% mount. I’ve been going at him for 4 hours every single night this week. We’re doing the speed kill version of it, and we’re really pushing it. We’ve had both a 2% and a 3% wipe. Both would have been kills if the tank hadn’t died at 15%.

I’m pushing my dps to the limit. 4.4K dps with BM spec on the 2% wipe. Not too shabby.

Tonight’s the night we’re gonna make it happen. I sure am glad I don’t live in the US where the patch is being applied as we speak.

This is also the reason why I’ve been a bit inactive with posting more Naxx tanking strats. Plus I have a guildie visiting over the easter, and he’ll probably stay until next weekend.

I’ve updated the Tanking Naxx articles with pictures as promised. Feedback and suggestions is as always appreciated.

I’m going to publish a few articles about tactics when tanking with a hunter in Naxx. I’m starting off with the spider wing, as I find that to be the easiest wing to tank as a hunter, in theory. The first boss out is Anub’Rekhan. Feel free to come with feed back, good or bad. And if you’ve used any of my strategies, or modified it to get a kill, please do brag about it! =)

If you have a tanking article, or simply basic pointers, for a fight I have yet to cover, feel free to send it to me at spam(at)nightcrew.se. An example, hint hint, would be Durante writing about how he did the incredibly feat of tanking Sapphiron. I’d even dare say, it was quite the opposite of being vacuous.

I’m currently going over the design on this blog. Don’t be alarmed. There’s nothing wrong with your browser, probably. Unless you’re using  Internet Explorer, of course.

Eresin put this little tag on my forehead, and I will need the help of ihlos to get it off me. I would have loved to tag Zwicky as well, but I don’t think he’s got a blog.
But before ihlos takes over, I guess I’ll have to explain my name. As some of you know, my real name is Nordh. I changed it when I was 18-19 years old in respect to my dead grandfather, and because it simply sounds so much better than my old name. So I guess that explains the first part of Nordhbane. In fact, it explains pretty much all of my characters first part of their names, except for my lvl 72 hunter “Nordh” that doesn’t have any second part. =P

In my arsenal I only have 1 character that doesn’t have Nordh in it, and it’s a shammy called Nhaia. Me and my girlfriend has 3 accounts between us, and we invited a friend to start to play wow again, so we were playing 4 shammies (multiboxing). Nhaia (N as in Nordh), Chaia (C as in Celara, my GFs characters name), Jhaia (J as in our friend Johan) and Mhaia (M as in my two first pets that I’m still using from time to time, Maya and MayaII (original, huh?)).

But back to my main hunter, Nordhbane. When I had the game in my hands I decided that I would play a hunter, because of the pets. But I sat for probably half an hour on the character screen just looking at that dwarf and thinking… Nordh, I want Nordh in my name. I think it has a nice mythological aspect to it. And what’s better is that dwarves in Azeroth are resistant to the cold. I wanted something that my character could have been nicknamed by his peers. In the end I decided that Nordhbane would fit the purpose perfectly. He is the bane of the northern landscapes. He’s a survivor of the cold.

Now I guess it’s become a more realistic name. WoW with all it’s addictions, Nordhbane is just exactly that, the bane of me.
Some other character names of mine are:

• Nordhaim, hunter (I like this because it can be pronounced like Nord-haim and yet Nordh-aim would fit a hunter)
• Nordhemon, warlock (A play with letters)
• Nordhblast, mage (I’m not a big fan of this name as it’s my AoE frost grinding bot, or will become if I ever get it to 80. Blast and frost spec doesn’t go too well together)
• Nordhshine, priest (A play on words with the phenomena Aurora Borealis, while also a priest is something that would shine light upon people)

So I guess that’s how imaginative I am when it comes to character naming.

Is it just me, or has the set bonuses just gotten worse and worse over the different tiers? At least if we’re looking at it from a BM perspective.

Tier 8:

• 2 pieces: Increases the damage done by your Serpent Sting by 10%.
• 4 pieces: Your Steady Shot has a chance to grant you 600 attack power for 15 sec.

10% extra serpent sting damage. Without speccing for it, you’ll have about 450 damage every 3 seconds. In other words 150 DPS. So this set bonus only gives 15 DPS bonus. With a dps of around 4K, 15 DPS is… 0,75% DPS increase. And that’s with a 100% SS uptime. To get maximum use of this, you’ll have to spec into improved stings.

4 set bonus can be rather good, depending on proc rate and up time. My guess is that it will give around 150-175 AP at average. 45s hidden cooldown with a decent proc rate. I have above 4K AP unbuffed and above 5K in raids, so this would boost my AP with a few %. DPS can’t be calced from AP alone, but if you increase your AP with 1%, you will not increase your DPS with that much. So in the end, this will not boost your DPS by much at all.

Let’s compare this to recent sets.

Tier 7:

• 2 pieces: Your pet deals an additional 5% damage.
• 4 pieces: Your ranged attack speed is increased by 20% while Aspect of the Viper is active.

My pet does about 35% of my damage in a Naxx run (based on the latest WWS). Including pet unfriendly bosses such as Thaddius and the spore guy. That means I get a flat out 1.75% dps increase from this bonus. Not too shabby compared to T8.

The second bonus is hard to calculate in DPS, but it pretty much sucks. You’re already haste capped if you’re using this bonus so the only benefit is for your auto shots regenerating your mana faster. But in theory, since AotV is based on your attack speed, this would actually decrease the mana generated for each shot. I’m not sure if it’s based on attack speed before haste is applied, or not. I sure hope it’s before.

Tier 6:

• 2 pieces: Increases the mana you gain from your Aspect of the Viper by 25%.
• 4 pieces: Increases the damage dealt by your Steady Shot ability by 10%.

As can easily be seen, the 2 set bonus is way better than the T7 4 set bonus. 25% more mana flat out, including the passive generation, versus 20% extra haste that only affects the mana gained from auto shot. I know which one I’d take.

Now, let’s compare the 4 set bonus with T8’s 2 set bonus. 10% increase from steady shot, or 10% increase from serpent sting. Even with the Steady Shot nerf, it is clear that a shot that I average at 1730 on a Naxx run would increase my dps more than serpent sting. Let’s say I shoot 1 steady shot every 3 seconds. Shouldn’t be too way off considering a rotation with multishots and arcane shots in the mix. With Steady Shot I would have 173 extra damage every 3 seconds. With Serpent Sting I would have 45 extra damage every 3 seconds. And you can never get more damage per second with serpent sting by using it more. Steady shot however can be used up to twice every 3 seconds if you choose to spam only steadies.

Also note that Steady Shot at the time was about 30-40% of your total dps as BM, meaning a 3-4% dps increase.

Tier 5:

• 2 pieces: Causes your pet to be healed for 15% of the damage you deal.
• 4 pieces: Your Steady Shot ability has 5% increased critical strike chance.

The 2 set bonus can’t be translated into dps, but it is the single best bonus ever in a hunter set IMO. Not only do I still use it for soloing and tanking, but when the set was first gotten, there were a lot of pet unfriendly fights where your pet wouldn’t survive too well without the help of this bonus, and thus your DPS was saved.

The 4 set bonus is rather decent. It’s hard to calc the exact dps this would give you, but it helped more than just 5% of the Steady Shot dps (it would actually be more like 6.5% since most hunters specced into 30% extra crit damage), it also gave your Kill Command higher uptime and more pet focus. Counting only steady shots (30-40% of the hunters dps at that time) it would mean a 1.95-2,60% dps increase.

Tier 4:

• 2 pieces: Reduces the chance your Feign Death ability will be resisted by 5%.
• 4 pieces: Reduces the mana cost of your Multi-Shot ability by 10%.

Ok, so this set doesn’t really follow the trend. It pretty much sucked.
Pre-TBC sets are a bit hard to do compares with, at least for me. It’s a bit time limited, and I really wasn’t much of a number cruncher then to understand how good this and that AP was for that time. But some set bonuses that stand out for me personally is things like:

• Tier 3, 6 pieces: Your ranged critical hits cause an Adrenaline Rush, granting you 50 mana.

50 mana, every time you crit. Scale that up comparing mana values then to now and you would never go OOM. Even if you don’t scale it up you’d still get a lot. I have about 40% crit and  I’m using AP enchants and gems instead of Agi.

• Tier 2, 5 pieces: Increases your pet’s stamina by 40 and all spell resistances by 60.

Even with todays standard, that’s quite a nice bonus. Pets now have at least 4 times as much stamina, so if we scale it up with that, we’d have a set bonus that would increase your pets stamina with 160, plus pet talent bonuses.

• Tier 1, 3 pieces: Increases the range of your Mend Pet spell by 50% and the effect by 10%. Also reduces the cost by 30%.

Any tanking hunter would love to have this today. I remember how I tried to get 5 pieces of dragonstalker so I could combine it with 3 pieces of giantstalker for maximum pet effectiveness.

Conclusion:

Set bonuses are getting worse and worse for hunters. Not only do they give less dps, but they are becoming more boring as well. I’m really not looking forward to upgrading my T7.5 to 8.5. I will probably keep at least 2 pieces for the sake of my pet. But it all comes down to stats I guess. Bonuses are just that, bonuses. It’s just sad that they’ve gotten so bad. I guess Blizzard thinks handling hunter sets is quite a froword task.

Inspired by Eresin, I figured that posting my /Played time might be a good way to introduce myself.

/played

I’m not, what you would say, a noob at playing my hunter. In fact, I have 2 more hunters at lvl 70, one on another server where I played horde for a while, and another on my current server. Different class and severly undergeared. Nordhbane however is my main, and have always been my main right from the first time I started WoW up.

I do suck at arenas, but I randomly play it with a hunter friend of mine just for fun. But at least I do ok in BGs and World PvP. Or did pre-WotLK. I haven’t bothered playing much at lvl 80.

I have “always” been BM, apart from 2 raids as Surv in SWP (strongly disliked it) and 1 week as MM (hated it) in vanilla trying to do the hunter demon quest. I had a bad few weeks of lag at the time, so I couldn’t kite the winterspring boss, so I gave it up.

I never understood all the drama queens about BM sucking in raids in vanilla just because they couldn’t keep their pets alive… There wasn’t a fight up to AQ40 that I didn’t manage to make my pet survive, including Vael in BWL, even though that required a group set up with an AoE healing priest.

Even before TBC I fell in love with doing things the unnatural way. For example, tanking Azuregos. In TBC I made a lot of hunter-only runs to The Shadow Labs for example. I tried to push the envelope as much as possible. I was even allowed tanking one of the adds in the Magtheridon encounter.

When the new pet talents were introduced I was really thrilled. When most hunters saw the new ferocity abilities, I was looking at the tenacity pets. I became an avid reader of Big Red Rhino. It was finally time to bring out the big guns. I leveled in WotLK as a tank, and tanked every single dungeon on my way to 80. Besides tanking a few heroics, I’ve also tanked raid encounters in both 10 and 25 man version of Naxxramas since.

I also love soloing things, be it Onyxia, AQ25 or lvl 70 instances. I’m always ready for the next challenge.

At the moment I am BM dps spec, waiting for the dual spec system to arrive. My guild decided the fun was over and I followed their decision even though I got questions from the healers the very next raid asking where the gorilla was and telling me to bring it back.

I think that pretty well explains what kind of hunter I am. And as Ihlos would say: Let the hunt begin!