After weeks of working on Kalimdor I finally found a questline of 2 quests I had previously missed in northern Barrens. And seeing that I had 698/700 when I found them I was really happy. I only had a few hard AQ questline and raid quests left when I found it. Thank God for wowhead and the ability to show questgivers for any certain zone.

Currently working on Sarth3D 10 man. Having a break now. Going decently. Some tries we’ve had enough dps for first drake, but others we’re just barely too late for whelps. Well, time to clear trash again, wish me luck.

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.

One of the hunters I have the utmost respect for is Durante and his gorilla Bubbles.  He’s an avid hunter tank just like me, and I believe this article shows how talented he is. He’s managed the incredible feat to tank Sapphiron on heroic. A feat I, myself, failed at on normal a few months back.

Here’s a video of the fight:

Glyph of Mend Pet has been added - Increases the healing done by your Mend Pet ability by 40%.

Now that’s a nice glyph for us tanking hunters! =)

I’ve been thinking of trying to tank Sartharion for quite some time. And one of the best equalizers that a hunter has is that the flame breath from Sartharion is his strongest attack, and the one that will most likely kill the tank when doing Sarth3D.  This will not be a problem for a pet though since they recieve 75% less damage from AoE.

Ihlos, on BigRedRhino, came up with a food for thought. Does Great Resistance stack or is it multiplied with Avoidance? Note that Great Resistance also gets buffed to 5/10/15 in 3.1.

Potentially we’re looking at a Fire Breath that only does 10% damage, without using a lifesaver rotation from the healers. But then again, which I think is most likely the correct scenario, I believe it’s multiplied. But that will still mean that the breath only does 21.25% of its damage. Constantly.

If anyone is good at testing stuff, feel free to give a report on how Great Resistance and Avoidance stacks.

The only thing IÂ’m really worried about is flamewalls and how to move. In the movie where the warlock pet is tanking Sarth3D(10) he is EXTREMELY lucky with the firewalls. They come from the same direction every single time once you can actually see how heÂ’s handling it. The frapser didnÂ’t really keep it in focus in the beginning, which was the only time it would have had to be moved.

My idea on how to deal with them is to put the pet in one safe zone and me in another. When the walls are coming I have to be really focused, if the pet is in harm IÂ’m gonna be using EotB, and if IÂ’m in harms way IÂ’ll just run myself.

The biggest problem with using EotB is that I will have no control over if IÂ’m standing in a void zone, making that tactic potentially deadly.

IÂ’ve also been thinking about what will happen if you tank Sarth from the lava. The walls donÂ’t go all the way to the mountains, so I would potentially be safe from them if IÂ’m standing far back in the lava. The damage from the lava shouldnÂ’t be that high, and thus easily outhealable.

If you know of any tactic that would potentially be better, I’m all ears.

If you haven’t heard about it already, I suggest you go check out the new site, WOW Headlines. It automagically gathers new blog posts from “registered” blogs and puts them into categories based on classes. Great work by Nance, the person behind Alterac Volley.

I’ll be gone for a week now. See you all when I get back, unless I break my spine or something in the slopes. I’m going to be filming a bit with a new SportsCam.

I’m not an extreme skier/snowboarder, like in the video posted here. It’s more for relaxing downhill videos to use in the TV-channel (Swedish) I’m working for.