Tuesday 17 November 2009

Fully 10 man geared


What Val's been up to.....

Well it's been some time since my last post and in that time, I've managed to get myself fully T9 10 man geared. Nothing I need from any 10 man raids now, the only upgrades I can get are from VoA25, ToC25 and ToC10 Heroic (not even going to mention 25 heroic, lol). Not bad going!



I've dabbled in a bit more Arena too, played some more 2v2 with a Holy Priest and some random 3v3 games with different people but the 1400 barrier is being a pain to get past. I'm going to hopefully get a Holy Paladin, unholy DK and BM Hunter (yes, I'm going to respecced BM for PvP!) to try a "beast cleave" team. The combo got a bit nerfed but if it's still strong, it might just work out!

I've also broken the 40th Mysterious Egg barrier without getting a Green Proto-Drake. WHEN WILL IT DROP???

Ok, now all that text is out of the way, lets get some more screenies in!

Oldbeard

Sadly my friend Wideeye/Oldbeard has stopped playing WoW again due to life balance issues...well, thats what I thought until I saw what really happened...HE TURNED INTO AN NPC!


PvP tip 1: How to win Wintergrap

If all the Alliance grouped up from the west it's insta-win! Below is sadly a rare sight on Chromaggus EU.


Free PvP Tip 2: How to win WSG

If in doubt, hide the flag!

Super-size your Freezing trap

Surfing USA Howling Fjord


Trial of the Hunters

In one of the guild ToC10 attempts we took 3 Hunters!! Can you believe it. Oh and yes, one of those pets is a bear (not mine!).


Cataclysm

Wow, massive changes in the new expansion pack for us hunters...NO. MORE. MANA. We're going to be like a whole new class! Should be fun. New races will be available too for hunters, I might even consider changing my race from Night Elf to Worgen!

One of the new races did jump the gun though....


Congrats Elendria!

The Loremaster achievement requires a lot of dedication to get, there's no quick way around completing it so GZ to Elendria!


Getting to know Asaron

Asaron, a Guild Tank of AMOV holds two things very close to his heart. His love of fishing and his love of Gnomes. If you're ever looking for him, check any nearby water sources or high concentration of Gnomes, "Cuddlyhoney" in particular.


Getting to know Sunier

In his own words:



New Personal VoA10 Koralon DPS Record

Topped my highest DPS on this boss and I've got 2 new items of gear since :D



VIDEO TIME!!

Trial of the Crusader: 25 Man

I was lucky enough to get into a ToC25 man PuG and get all the way up to Anub'Arak (which is where most ToC25 pugs fail in my experience) and not only that, I got 2 items! Sweet:
Windrunner's Tunic of Triumph
(ok, I did buy the trophy from someone for 800g to get that last one)

Not only that, I recorded the Beasts of Northrend fight. It's best to watch the below using the HQ button and don't worry, there's no boring commentary by me or any techno music!






No Ground in AV?

This weird bug happened to me in AV, the ground went see-through!



Turtle Power!

I was fishing for some mats for a fish feast when this mount dropped! I have no luck with mount drops usually (I think I'm about week 40+ waiting for that Green Proto Drake). I highly recommend using the mount wearing nothing but a chefs hat.



See you in the Icecrown citadel!

Sunday 30 August 2009

WoW, A new post!!!


Yes, you're not mistaken, I am actually updating my blog!

First of all, some news headlines:
(click on picture to enlarge)

"Everybody Loves Valilor" 2v2 Arena team go on a 10 match hot streak


A new optional Hard-Mode only boss has been added to Naxxramas


Valilor hits Lv450 at fishing


Equipment Manager has been released


Dave, Valilor's first ever pet is abandoned to make way for a PvP Crab :(


Valilor gets his...err....Red Proto Drake?


Kologarn attempts to stop AMOV's progress through Ulduar


Valilor earns the Crusader Title!


AMOV Maintain their "king of the rollers" title




Valilor gets a new personal record DPS on the mob before Emalon in VoA10


Valilor's Argent Tournament Squire starts to freak people out


Patchwerk is all out of play



Some pretty big headlines there I'm sure you'll agree!

Not too long ago, there was a little exploit which Blizzard have since plugged which allowed hunters to tame a Worgen (You can see why now after the Cataclysm announcement). Laneelalt got in there just in time though! Shame they have all been turned into wolves now.



Thankfully I'm not wearing it anymore but for a couple of weeks I had to put up with this terrible looking helm...what were they thinking designing this?



I spotted the uber-rare Ashes of Al'ar flying mount from the Tempest Keep in Dalaran the other day, check the video a bit further down. Man I want one of these!



Not only that but I've also been seeing Skoll, the new rare exotic spirit beast around Dalaran. Shame it's exotic and not just a rare looking wolf...



I also managed to solo the boss in the oculus....ok, maybe I didn't but I quite like this picture...



As you probably know, I'm an Officer in "Aggro My Own Vegetable" guild on Chromaggus, so I thought I'd do a nice "meet the team" feature and here is part 1:



Movie Clips

Here's a clip of the Al'ar mount in action



In memory of Michael Jackson, I give you the forward moonwalk!



Sometimes I get terrible lag spikes, which usually ends up with WoW DCing me or the connection just never coming back...here's what it looks like for those of you who don't get it!



I was going through some old video's I had, they aren't great but I found 2 old ones of me ganking and boy do I look different now! Check out the 2 vid's below and then compare it to the 3rd....Since Wrath I look a lot more bad a$$!
(Yes getting through doorways with my old shoulders was a problem)





Friday 17 July 2009

Random bits of news

I've got some bigger posts planned (I just need to find some time to post them) but here's the latest Valilor news:


  • AMOV have downed both Hodir and Freya - getting close to a full clear! (Wiping on Mimiron at the moment).
  • Patch 3.2 in the background downloader - coming in 2 weeks maybe?
  • New Chest Heirloom available which add's another +10% XP to the shoulder bonus in patch 3.2. You need the crusader title to get it though, which means being both a champion of the argent tournament and exalted with all the "Starter" factions (For Alliance: Darnassus, Stormwind, Ironforge, Gnomeregon Exiles and the Exodar).
  • It looks like MM hunters CAN get on par with the other pure DPS classes if you have enough Armour Penetration + Armour Penetration trinket but more on this later!
  • For all you iPhone users out there, there is an official WoW Armoury app available for free and it's seriously good! Check the video of it below (note how it doesn't work for Horde! Mwa ha ha!



That's all folks!

Wednesday 1 July 2009

Patch 3.2 PTR - 1st July 2009

Well it's been a while since my last blog - mainly down to going to Glastonbury festival so here's an update.

Patch 3.2 is up on the PTR and it has some interesting changes for hunters. As it could all change before going live, the below is just speculation at the moment.

3.2 Changes effecting MM Hunters & My thoughts
(Source: WoW Insider)

Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage-over-time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. The other effects of resilience (reducing critical chance, critical damage and mana drain effects) have not changed.

NERF. My concern here is that this will prolong the lengths of the arena matches, playing into the hands of the "infinite resource" melee teams, who are already top at the moment. Blizzard just "fixed" MM Mana problems but it is still a concern in PvE...longer matches will make OOM moments almost unavoidable while the melee teams can just keep coming. Ghostcrawler is aware of this and I wouldn't be surprised if something changes before it hits live.

All pets now receive 40% of their master's resilience and 100% of their master's spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums.

BUFF. Basically our pets will now have more survivability in PvP, assuming you have resilience. This is a big boost to BM hunters as we all know that killing their pet first is usually the best option (If you didn't know that, don't tell anyone I told you!)

Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target's maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

NERF. Here is my big concern in 3.2. Blizzard have buffed MP5 and nerfed replenishment. MM Hunters only just got our mana "fixed" and now it looks like it's going to get nerfed again - we don't spec MP5 and the 20% nerf to replenishment is going to hurt us. Seems a little harsh as the change appears to be mainly aimed at Holy Paladins to get them to pick up MP5.

Silence, Strangulate, Silencing Shot, and Arcane Torrent: These abilities will also apply a 3-second interrupt effect against non-player controlled targets, making them more versatile against creatures immune to silencing effects.

BUFF. Silencing shot is now also an interrupt. I thought it already was? Either way, no harm.

Aspect of the Cheetah: Can now be learned at level 16.

MEH. Good for leveling but not important to end-game.

Deterrence: This ability now allows the hunter to parry spells and attacks from behind as well as in front. Now has a new visual spell effect.

BUFF. While many people hated it before, I use it all the time in Arena - it's very handy, especially against Bladestorms. Having it work from behind will allow us to run away instead of back peddling, which is a great boost. It also helped those who are a bit laggy and don't get their positioning right.

The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.
Traps now have separate 30-second cooldown categories: Fire (Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Black Arrow), Frost (Freezing Trap, Frost Trap) and Nature (Snake Trap). A hunter can have one trap of each category placed at one time.


BUFF. ZOMG how many traps?.....Wait a minute, lets think about this.

PvE - MEH. mainly aimed at SV. As MM we don't really use traps much for DPS (running around dropping them is too much of a DPS drop) and the only time we use it is for kiting, which none of the changes will help us. SV can drop a frost down (mainly for adds) and also use black arrow getting more Lock and Loads possibly (has a new Internal CD now though) which if it does will be a DPS boost.

PvP - POSSIBLE BUFF. This is where the changes are being aimed at. In Arena we all know hunters kite with frost trap. The change above allows us to also drop 2 more traps which will increase our damage on the targets - which isn't bad. The only downside of this is that our traps are quite mana expensive, which isn't great in the new "longer battle" scenario and also it takes 1 GCD to drop a trap - 4.5 seconds in total!

I'm not too excited about this change really, Blizzard said they want to make our traps a little more intimidating - using immolation & snake trap in addition to frost may not be worth the mana/GDC expenditure, I'm not sure. I guess playing it will test this out. IMO if they wanted to buff traps, they could start by fixing them, for example the "arm time" of our traps (let them work instantly) and also don't let people immune to our traps completely destroy them - let them at least fire but leave the immune person alone. Standing around for 30 secs with no frost traps isn't fun!

Here are some ideas of how we could make our traps more effective in PvP:

Separation of frost from freezing trap, so we can kite and use a freezing trap/freeing arrow at the same time.
Snake Trap/Immolation Trap - reduce movement
Remove them from the GCD
Reduce their cost
Make Freezing Arrow an actual freezing arrow (maybe as a MM/BM CC Talent - not for Wyvern Stinging SV hunters)
Create a resource draining trap - Mana/Rage/Energy - etc.
Bear Trap!

That's just some not-thought through ideas off the top of my head...

I also hold the right to change my mind on this change once I get to test it out! :p

Talent: Beast Mastery
Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds.


MEH. No MM should have this talent so Meh. Nice boost for BM though, they're in need of some PvE boosts!

Talent: Survival Entrapment: This talent no longer works with Immolation Trap or Explosive Trap.

Lock and Load: Now has a 22-second cooldown. The Lock and Load effect cannot be obtained on targets immune to snare effects when Frost Trap is used.

MEH. While I talent Entrapment in my MM PvP spec, I never used any trap other than frost or freezing trap so entrapment from immolation/explosive never happened - I won't notice this change. If people start getting snared from explosive traps AND frost traps, it could get a bit OP (it is only 2 seconds)?

MEH. LnL now has a 22 sec CD - I also have this talented in my PvP spec (Used with Arcane Shot) but as the trap CD is 30 secs it doesn't make much difference (28 seconds with 4 set bonus). This is mainly aimed at SV hunters getting procs from Black Arrow and Frost Traps.

Pets
Roar of Sacrifice: Redesigned. This ability can now be used on any friendly target to make that target immune to critical strikes, but the Hunter pet takes 20% of all damage taken by that friendly target. Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.


SLIGHT BUFF? An interesting one. At the moment it reduces damage taken by us and passes it onto the pet. This change allows us to use it on others but only works against crits as opposed to total damage. The change to work on crits is to obviously stop hunters using it in PvE on the tanks. Until I know how how much damage you save from crits vs straight damage reduction I won't know if it's any better but being able to use it on a team mate is obviously better.

OVERALL

For MM, it looks like a PvE nerf because of mana regen (when we didn't need a nerf, if anything we needed a slight buff imo) and in PvP we have some buffs (also needed) - mainly through deterrence and pet survivability. It's only on the PTR so it could all change...

Tuesday 16 June 2009

Quick Update



I got the Envoy of Mortality from a Naxx 25 Pug! 2 Hunters on KT but luckily the other one had Siren's Cry from Ulduar 25 so left it to me. Exciting end to the encounter too, KT was almost dead when the tank died, so PN (mage) kited him, ice blocked which bought me enough time to Pew Pew (s)Kill Shot! It was like Die Hard or something but, you know, more undead (I guess you could argue Bruce willis is getting closer to KT in every film).


VALERIYA HAS THE GREEN PROTO-DRAKE!! Heloko and I are up to week 12 now waiting for it to hatch from the mysterious egg when Valeriya strolls up and gets it on her second week. Women!



MISSING: HARDMODE. No, not a hard mode in Ulduar but our Our guild's Top DPS(tm) - he has disappeared! Has anyone seen this Destruction Warlock? Rumour has it, Caparzo made good of his word and punched him in the face! Lol

AMOV have also just got further into Ulduar...update to come! :D

Tuesday 2 June 2009

Patch 3.1.3 2nd June 2009

In patch 3.1.3

More good Hunter news!

  • Hunter's Mark: The ranged attack power bonus from this ability has been increased from 300 to 500.
  • Master Marksman: This talent now also decreases the cost of Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot by 5/10/15/20/25%.

The hunters mark is getting buffed so we'll now have an additional 200 AP on boss fights (marknig trash doesn't happen too often). This is pretty good news and even better for BM hunters as they will benefit from this more (They need some more loving). Probably not enough for them to catch MM/SV up though.

For all MM hunters, you will already have talented 5/5 into Master Marksman so our aimed and chimera shots will have their mana reduced by 25%! This is great news for encounters where we go OOM (Probably every boss fight in 10 man) so will be a direct improvement to our DPS. In 25 man where mana isn't such an issue it won't really benefit the hunters too much.

It's a good buff for us 10-man raiders and it shows Blizzard haven't forgotten about us when they buffed only 25-man ranged weapons! (Speaking of which, I've defeated KT in Naxx25 each of the last two weeks and still don't have the Envoy of Mortality, one time it dropped and I came 2nd in the rolls and the second time it didn't drop and I was the only hunter :( )

From a PvP perspective the mana saving will help as we will be firing both aimed and chimera as soon as they cooldown so, our mana at least, will last a little longer.

So 2 patches and 2 hunter buffs. Why you ask? Well I think it might have something to do with this: http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/classrank/dps/7/0/3/310 If you take an average of all the scores across all the Ulduar bosses we're about mid table - behind a few hybrid DPSers. For shame! (We should be up with the Rogues/Locks/Mages - the Pure DPSers)

Saturday 23 May 2009

AMOV Special: Ulduar 10 Part 1 - The Siege of Ulduar



After finally downing Malygos, AMOV are now working their way through Ulduar. Like Naxxramas, Ulduar is a big raid, containing 14 bosses and on their first visit to Ulduar, AMOV tackled the first section: The Siege of Ulduar, which includes the first 4 bosses.

AMOV Raiders:

Tanks

Caparzo - Prot Warrior
Deekay - Unholy DK

Healers

Heloko - Holy Paladin
Chisuka - Disc Priest
Valeriya /Tessera - Resto Druid/Holy Priest

DPS

Valilor - MM Hunter
Succi - Feral Druid
Jammiedodger - Combat Rogue
Rosencrantz - Fire/Frost Mage
Nvision/Valeriya - Ret Paladin/Balance Druid

The Flame Leviathan

Overview

The Flame Leviathan boss is the first boss in Ulduar which must be defeated to progress further. It's a vehicle based encounter and if you've come here after Malygos, you'll probably be thinking "FFS, not another vehicle boss fight" but unlike Malygos - this one is fun!

There's 3 vehicles to pick from; A Siege Engine, Demolisher and Chopper. In a 10 man raid, you will be picking up 2 siege engines, 2 demolishers and 2 choppers, with the first 2 siege engines/demolishers taking a driver and passenger and the chopper with just a driver.

Before you get to the boss, there's loads of adds & towers to kill but it's not too difficult if you stay as a group. Your vehicles scale to the iLevel of your gear (Download the add-on rating buster) so the better geared raiders should be driving.

The boss is fun, everyone engages him and he picks a target at random (either a Siege engine or Demolisher) and he has to be kited around. The demolishers also fire their passenger up and into the boss where they destroy his turrets, making him take more damage for a few seconds and enough time for them to jump off and back onto the vehicle.

Result

After clearing the trash leading up to the boss - and wiping once when a tank decided to clip through the landscape into oblivion (Don't boost over ramps) - we came up to the boss. In went 2 Siege Engines, 1 Demolisher, 2 Choppers...hang on, 1 demolisher? Yeah, we had one locked out! /facepalm. I blame Heloko for this - women drivers eh? ;)

With one vehicle down on our first attempt we ended up wiping. However, as we died, ressed, got repaired and back in - the demolisher that wasn't in the fight then engaged the boss - died and a massive AoE from the boss killed us all again. 2x repairs, nice!

Our third attempt well pretty smoothly, we got past "Human Cannonball" NVision's "Fire me, fire me please" spam and took him down. I won some pretty sweet loot too: The Pyrite Infuser - now I'm hit capped without any +hit gems, enchants or buffs! Sweet.

Not worth linking the WWS for this boss really, it took 5 mins 5 seconds.

Hunters PoV

Nothing special here, we can't get launched due to our close-range deadzone but nothing else to consider really.

Razorscale

Overview

After downing the Flame Leviathan you come to a crossroads, dead ahead is the deconstructor boss and to the right and left are 2 optional bosses, the left being Ignis and the right being Razorscale. Razorscale has no trash to deal with before you engage him so you can go quickly from the Flame Leviathan to Razorscale.

To begin the encounter you have to talk to an NPC standing nearby and then some adds come up from the ground. These get tanked and AoEed down. As this is going on, 2 harpoon guns get repaired by the NPCs (A bit like the ones in Utgarde Pinnacle) and they need to get fired to get Razorscale down. When he comes down everyone turns to nuke him until he goes back up and then return to the adds (The OT keeps the adds while Razorscale gets nuked). Once Razorscale drops to 50% HP he will land for good and it's a tank and spank from there (with the tanks swapping due to a debuff).

Result

After the first boss, NVision had to leave so we got Tessera in and Valeriya went to DPS mode. We did the boss as described above, wiped once and killed it on our second go. It wasn't a very hard fight, everyone just needs to keep out of the fire! For the harpoon firing it makes more sense for a ranged to do it (less distance to travel) or anyone that can clear the gap quickly or maintain DPS with pets/DoT while running towards them. In this run I figured that I was probably best to do this so I volunteered.

In our first attempt the healers were running low on mana, so Rosencrantz kindly switched from Fire to Frost so we could get some replenishment and it paid off! If you look at the stats below, most of the raiders "DPS Time %" increased which goes to show we we a lot more effective in attempt 2! Surprisingly, Rosencrantz DPS hardly dropped at all, only by 5 overall! (That's down to the increased AoE ability of frost according to Rosencrantz)



WWS report here.

Hunters PoV

This is quite a long fight with lots of mobs with no mana bars so mana was a big issue for me. The mobs which come up from the ground need to be killed in order or AoEed down. On our first attempt I went to go for a single target approach and on the second I chose to go AoE and volley them all down. Obviously it was back to Single target on the boss.

In single target, failed attempt 1, I was in aspect of the viper for 17% of the fight, that's a long time and as a 50% damage reduction that means I had to nerf myself for 8.5%! I got 13k mana back from AotV, 5k from Rapid Recuperation (when in Rapid Fire mode) and 2k from Judgement of Wisdom - we had no replenishment!

Attempt 2 I went for a more AoE approach so the mana-expensive volley came out to play. As expected, this meant I was in AotV for longer - 19% of the time, which is 9.5% nerf. This could have been even worse if it wasn't for the increased mana I received from other sources (Rosencrantz switching helped). This time I got 16k from AotV, 7k from Rapid Recuperation, 8k from Judgement of Wisdom, 7k Replenishment, 4k mana pot and 0.4k from hymn of hope. So for me to stay out of AotV here, I would have to find another 16k of mana from somewhere!

So what does this all mean? Well it means going AoE is more mana expensive but the result was this: Attempt 1 DPS = 2763 Attempt 2 DPS = 3808.

I can also calculate roughly the benefit to me (not to mention every other mana user) of Rosencrantz switching to frost. If I had no replenishment then I would be in AotV more for the extra 7k I got from replenishment. If 16k = 19% uptime, then 23k would be 27% of the time, thats 8% longer. My DPS with the 9.5% nerf was 3808 so without it would be 4208 so the benefit of replenishment is 50% of 8%, so Replenishment reduced Rosencrantz DPS by 5 but increased mine by 168!

Isn't maths fun :p

Ignis the furnace master

Overview

Before engaging Ignis, you have to clear the trash before him, which is the hardest trash we've come across yet and when Blizzard said that you'll probably wipe on the trash in Ulduar they meant it! They come in pairs and need to be tanked seperately and generate lots of things to look out for/avoid - some are probably harder than some of the Naxx bosses! No simple AoE threat/DPS here. Some do have a 0.9% chance of dropping the Golemheart Longbow, which would be a nice upgrade for me! :D (Still no Envoy of Mortality though)

The boss itself is hard but optional. It's quite an interesting fight, the boss needs to be tanked and moved around in a circle so the tank doesn't stand in the hot spots he leaves around. He also summons Iron Constructs which the Off Tank needs to pick up, walk into the "hot spots" (scorched ground) until the turn molten and then walk to the water - at this point they turn brittle (You have +50% crit on them at this point) for a few seconds and must be shattered (Killed by 1 hit if over 5k damage) ideally by a ranged DPS because of the AoE damage. For every Add up the boss gets a buff so taking them down is a priority. If this wasn't hard enough, Ignis also picks one person at random and puts them into his HelokoSlag Bucket, where they take a lot of damage and need to be healed through (can heal themselves in there also).

Here's a useful video from tankspot.com for the 10 man encounter:





Result

Our strategy here was for me to Misdirect the boss onto the MT (Deekay), who was standing near the left pool (as you look at the boss) and from there he would tank the boss right in an anti-clockwise circle avoiding the "hot spots". Everyone else was behind the boss and I was on Shatter duty.

I won't lie, this didn't go well. We wiped 7 times. We had a few different problems, from critical people going into the slag pot and dying, add's getting lose and causing trouble or having too many adds up at once, giving the boss too many buffs. Having a hunter on shatter duty isn't ideal as it pretty much means I have to bank on one of my big hitting shots critting, otherwise I have to wait for the cool down! I was luck this time though, every one did crit (the +50% helped!) but for the one that didn't, I was able to use readiness and fire it again.

Attempt 6 was our best one, we lasted 4 mins 36 before wiping. If you have a look at my stats below, if Chimera shot crits, it's easily over the 5k damage to shatter and arcane/aimed are too...just. Bit risky, I think a class which can do a guaranteed crit/hit over 5k would probably do better but I don't think shattering was our problem.

Hunters PoV

This is a long fight and as a MM hunter, that means mana is going to be an issue if you're on DPS duty. If you're on shatter duty you can all but forget about DPS on this encounter. To ensure that I could shatter a construct as soon as it was ready, I didn't fire any Chimera shots once they started coming as I didn't want to waste the Cooldown. As MM's main offender, not using it means no DPS. I also didn't use Aimed Shot, just in case Chimera didn't crit. Nice loot available from Ignis too! (Relentless Edge, and a possible down-grade: Rifle of the Platinum Guard)


XT-002 Deconstructor


Overview

The final boss of the Siege of Ulduar area and can be accessed even if you're too scared to fight Ignis!

First off, have your sound on in this battle, the deconstructor sounds funny and his/her (not sure which) animations are good too! There are 3 phases to the fight, phase 1 where he/she has their heart in and phase 2 where it's out (I'm not quite sure why you'd rest with your heart out but I suppose I'm not a robot).

In Phase 1 you have to tank the boss facing away from the raid and just DPS away. He will cast 2 debuffs on random players (Searing Light and Gravity Bomb) at which point they must run away from the raid in different directions until the debuff expires, a little like with grobbulus. The boss also does a harsh AoE move which will need a lot of healing to be done.

Phase 2 the boss rests to get some HP back. In this stage he pops out his/her heart which melee doubles any damage taken to it and also 3 adds start spawning from the corners which either need to be Nuked fast (Boombots), AoE'd down (Thingys) or picked up by the OT (Pummellers). If the scrap bots reach the boss they can heal him so they need to be taken out by the Melee DPS if they get to close.

Results

It was getting late when we arrived at the deconstructor (we were at Ignis for some time!) and one of our healers (Valeriya) had to log out for bed, so not only was it our first time on this boss but we had to 9 man it! (We started our run at 9:06pm and we were at the deconstuctor at 12:01am, having spent about an hour wiping on Ignis). 

Out tactics were fairly straight forward, Caparzo would tank the boss facing away from the raid, Deekay would pick up any adds and Rosencrantz and I would nuke any adds coming which weren't getting picked up by Deekay.

We did get over-run by the adds a few times and it took us a while to get used to the encounter but on our 4th wiped and called it a night and headed off for some much needed rest! The WWS report will only show our wipes but we did come back the next week and defeat him with 10 but more on that next week....

WWS Report

NEXT WEEK IN ULDUAR.....

Will Hardmode, the new top-DPS in AMOV, help us progess?

Who will be the first to hit on Valeriya?

Will Caparzo hit first?

Find out next week on THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF AMOV!


Wednesday 20 May 2009

Patch 3.1.2 20th May 2009

I'm going to start doing some "Marksman Hunter News" posts and where better to start than today, patch day!

In Patch 3.1.2

Not too many changes to the mechanics of how MM Hunters play, we get the equipment manager to let us change quickly between PvE/PvP (or whatever set-up you might have) but 1 area where we are getting a nice buff is with our ranged weapons.

Before we have a look at the buffs, this is the reason why the damage on some of our ranged weapons is increasing (From mmo-champion):

"The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board. 

Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.

We don't think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We'll announce that change when it gets closer. (We have some plans for other classes as well, but we ask that you please keep this thread on the topic of hunters and the ranged weapon changes.)

As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely." (Ghostcrawler, Lead Systems Designer)

So how does this effect us? Well to start with any ranged weapon over iLv226 will have it's DPS improved. Not all our shots will benefit from this but we should see good gains on our auto shot, Steady shots, Aimed Shots and Kills Shots for "free". Not bad at all really.

However, there is a catch. This is only going to benefit 25 man raiders, so for yours truely, I won't be seeing any benefit of these buffs as 10 man raids go up to Ilv 219. There is one exception though and that is to get the Magnetized Projectile Emitter from XT-002 Deconstructor in Ulduar 10 Hard Mode! 

The other option for a 10 man raider to get one of these weapons would be to get in a lucky 25 man Naxx25 PUG and hope you win the Envoy or Mortality from KT or to go the PvP route and pick up a Furious Ranged Weapon! PvP guns aren't ideal for PvE but the massive difference in damage from a Furious Gladiator Ranged Weapon vs. a 10 Man PvE ranged weapon will make it superior even in PvE.

So what does Valilor plan on doing you ask? Well, I'm going to stick with my Final Voyage and hope I can get lucky in a Naxx25 PUG! AMOV are currently working our way through Ulduar so it will probably be a while until we try hard modes but as soon as we can, I'll aim for the Magnetized Projectile Emitter!

Happy Shooting!

Friday 15 May 2009

Champions!

AMOV: CHAMPIONS OF THE FROZEN WASTES!



We did it! For the past month, the guild has had one big, blue thorn in their side in the form of
MALYGOS. We spent 3 evenings (I'll spare you the WWS) wiping countless times on him, 90% of the time in phase 3, even though everyone knew what to do. For us, we appointed 2 people to heal (me and one other), the healers would cast HoTs on themselves and then AoE heal while the DPS would go 1,1,2 etc. Anyway, on our forth visit we we one shotted him to the amazement of most the people there! :D

It was anything but uneventful though, we had the MT dying in an earlier phase (He got combat res) and when we did kill Malygos he had reached his enrage timer - when he fell we all died at the same time, if this was Street Fighter it would say "Double KO" - luckily it's not though. So we killed him but we were all dead...how do we loot? We ran back into the raid and some of us landed on a drake while some of us fell to our deaths again - eventually I got on the drake and was able to get the loot going :)

We didn't stop there though, oh no. We went to Ulduar and defeated the first 2 bosses! The
Flame Leviathan is the first boss in Ulduar and it's a fun vehicle fight - something we really appreciate after hours of Malygos fighting! After that we went to Razorscale and defeated him too and called it a night there....to be continued on Sunday!

We also went on a mini-recruiting mission last week and now we're full! I think the days of having to find randoms to fill in spots in our 10 man raids are finally behind us :D

Hoard-ing the food


I was walking through Dalaran when I saw this shocking display of wasting food! Think of all the starving people! Farming the mats for those is a right pain too....

Lestar-eight-i


Heloko's alt finally reached Level 80, now our main healer has an Arms warrior to play around with too - cool. Leveling to 80 must have taken AGES ;)

Master Fisherman


I finally reached Lv300 in fishing. I haven't been trying to level it up, I've just been trying to get mats for the new Fish Feast I can cook for the guild raids. I find fishing in Wintergrasp for the Glacial Salmon, Sholazar Basin for the Nettlefish and Borean Tundra for the Musselback Sculpin works best and can be done at the same time as the fishing dailies, so it's not too bad I guess. 

A few days ago, Gloam and I went fishing in Wintergrasp while there was a battle on. As usual, lots of people were saying "inv" in the general chat so I invited them to our "fishing raid group" - they didn't stay for long! We also got a Wintergrasp mark when the battle was over just for fishing. Nice. Pacifism FTW!

Arena


Over the past 3 weeks i've been dabbling in a bit of Arena. I've got in 2 arena teams, a 2v2 with Tessera (Holy Priest) and a 5v5 with Tommytank (Prot tank), Heloko (Holy Paladin), Tessera (Holy Priest) and Succi (Feral DPS). Obviously I'm a MM Hunter :) . So far the 2v2 team have played 66, won 27, lost 39 (win 41%) - which isn't great but a lot better than I was expecting! The 5v5 team is doing better with played 40, won 18 lost 22 (win 45%).  

I've not got some arena points and some honour but unlike PvE I have no idea what the "optimal" gear is! How much resilience do I need? I guess I'll start to get the feel of it soon...

Here's the spec I'm currently using but i'm not 100% sure it's best, I'm also considering taking points out of Piercing Shots (as it procs from crits, which are less likely in arena than PvE) and putting them elsewhere. Valilor's MM PvP Spec.

I recorded 2 games which just happen to be victories if anyone wants to see what arena is like from Valilor's perspective (Watch in HQ otherwise it looks pants):






Oh and over the course of the 5v5 teams games, I think we found the best healer in the world!




Argent Tournament


If I had to sum it up in a word it would be GOLD. Once you reach champion of a faction, you can do champion Qs and also Valiant Qs (for another faction), and many of them are the same so by doing 1 Q you're really doing 2 and you can cash them both in for around 30-40 gold. Kaaaaching! I haven't been doing this everyday but every now and then when I fancy a bit more gold I just pop on over ;)

If you read my earlier posts, you'll know that I'm a Champion of Darnassus, well now I'm also one of Ironforge but riding their mount looks silly, it's like Peter Crouch driving an old Mini Cooper!

Bronze Drake


The hunt for a Proto-drake goes on but I managed to win a roll at the end of a Timed Culling of Stratholme and now ride a Bronze Drake! At first I wasn't too excited about winning one but after using it, it's so much better than the standard flying mount i've been using for some time - the "Soar" animation is quality. 

Other bits and bobs...

I was running a Naxx25 PUG with 3 other hunters, all of which were survival. Llevellyn however, wasn't using a wolf like the rest, no, she was using a wasp! It looks pretty cool and we were pretty much tying for top DPS (even though I think I had slightly better gear) so it's good going!




I've had a good spell for gear recently, I got the Pyrite Infuser from Ulduar and the Strong-Handed Ring from Naxx25 which made me finally hit-capped without needing any gems or enchants for +hit! That's one less thing for me to worry about (for now) :)

I'm going to re-organise this blog a little, the "Monday Yolk" update will just be moved to the sidebar and not be a new blog update (unless a proto-drake drops of course!)

And finally....