Struggling with Post 3.1 hunter build.

So Since the patch last week when we got another reset of talent points I haven't even logged in to my hunter. Remember until the great BM nerf of 2008 my main was my hunter. I loved all things huntery, my shaman was just a toy to farm herbs and heal pugs between raids. I have been a BM hunter since I rolled my first hunter. I love the feel of managing my self and my pet. I have a love of my pet. It makes me sad when he dies. But since the nerf, I haven't enjoyed it as much. I used to be in the top 3 DPS of our 25 man raids. Now I sit around 10-12. So tonight will be my first Ulduar raid as a hunter since 3.1 and I need a spec. I played around with a survival build, but it felt wrong, and worse my DPS dropped even further due to my lack of survival skill, I just dont know how to play it. I hear a lot of the BM nerfs have been undone, but we will never be the number one DPS again.

I have looked at a lot of specs but I think I am leaning for the 53/15/3 build that seems popular.

Here is hoping I can pull some DPS tonight.

Skraps

Back to work Tuesday.

So I had my nice little vacation from work for knee surgery last week. Came back to work Tuesday, and did really good avoiding pain meds at work. But last night as I was leaving my desk for the night, I felt something pop in my knee and have been in excruciating pain since. I have an appointment to see the doctor tomorrow, and decided to re-medicate myself. I must say, work on percocet while not unpleasant is something i would not recommend.

Swine FLu...

I had a ham sandwich this weekend...and open mouth kissed a pig. Should I worry about swine flu?

Busy night last night.

So as I work to move my resto shammy alt to my main and retire my hunter. I made my first start to finish run of naxx last night. I didn't realize I had not defeated so many bosses on heroic on my Shaman. The worst part of the night was the complete and total lack of loot. All I got was a pair of boots that were barley an upgrade. I had planned on playing from 7:00 to 9:30. What actually happened was I played from 5:00 until 11:30. Ant with everyone tired, and people dropping off we wipped a number of times on K'T. Not because we couldnt do it, but because we lost our focus. So now I have to hope to get that KT kill Sunday night and somehow get someone to run Loken to complete my champion title.

Look I'm Noble

So the only good thing about knee surgery is that I was off work for NobleGarten. It took all of about 3 hours of farming to gather all the eggs and completing the achievement. I did 90% of the requirements Sunday morning, and finished up by eating all 100 chocolate eggs yesterday morning between WinterGrasp battles and 10 man Mally to try anf get the Champion of the Frozen Wastes title. Just need a KT kill (for some reason I never get the last 1/2 of Naxx on this toon, and never get the first half on my hunter) and one day I will find someone to run Halls of Lightning to kill Loken. Why will no one ever run HoL?

I thought I had THE farming spot for eggs. I started in Brill, the two shelves outside the inn, the two carts, and the bushes to the left of the shelves had about 10 eggs that spawned. It was an excelent spot Sunday morning, but by Monday all those spawns were camped. I want to give a special thanks to FlameShock for providing the spot in FalconWind Square. I was able to get the last 75 eggs I needed there in under 30 minutes.

Anyway that was NobleGarten. Here is to Childrens Week starting Next week! My favorite holiday! Now what pet do I go for? It is so hard to decide. I have Willy, and Peanut. Do I complete the trio or go for the new one in Sholzar?

Skraps
sad day, back at work and no more Percocet, so the knee is hurting pretty good, but hey I can bend it half way now.

How not to heal Heroic Azjol-Nerub

So I get a whisper from a friend, "Can you heal Heroic AN pug? I'm tank" I think sure it will be fun. Group is Prot Pally, Destro Lock, Blood DK and Frostfire Mage.

Well the Mage topped 700dps for the run, fully 1/2 the tank. We will never run with him again.

So the fun part...

We get to Anub'arak, start the event and the mage sits outside the wall. Anub'arak pops up and eate me before I can say hello, I'm down. I didn't pop cause i figured it is a wipe. First phase is over everyone is up but me and Mage thanks to Earth shield, and riptide cooking on the tank and the DK. I figure wtf and pop. The lock drops a soulstone on me, i pop mana tide and I'm at 1/2 mana 30 seconds into the encounter.

Pop a potion, heal like mad cause i'm behind the curve. I'm now OOM. Tank still has 4 charges from ES and a riptide cooking. Adds spawn and eat me again. Turns out this is a good thing cause I poped soulstone resurection and I'm back to 1/2 mana!

Just enough mana left to drop mana spring and another earth shield/ripide and we get the job done.

Not the cleanest kill but rated pretty high on the epic battle scale. Might be the most fun pug I have ever had.

Skraps

No raiding/very little WoW this week.

Had a bit of knee surgery yesterday and the thought of sitting at my desk to play sounds horribly painful. Playing on my Dell Mini9 even worse.

Hope to see you folks soon.

p.s. Thank God for Percocet!

p.s.s. If anybody is reading this can you share a link that shows how to do the nifty wow-head item tooltips when you hover over an item link?

thanks all.

Skraps (john)

My thoughts on 3.1, post weekend edition.

So the one thing I learned is 3.1 did not fix the Tank shortage, although it certainly did something for healing. I was a healer through BC, speced enhancement for leveling from 70-80 which was a lot of fun, but I prefer healing. This weekend I pugged the daily heroics every day. I pugged Sarth and Mally. All as DPS.

Total chaos...dogs and cats living together mass hysteria!

I think i did pretty good as as Elemental DPS, no major boo boo's didn't pull threat and topped out at almost 2200 DPS in my healing gear with a cobbled together Ele spec, I choose talents cause they looked cool, I didnt follow a proven build because I though I would only DPS solo.

I truely believe I landed in bizzaro WoW. Everytime someone I knew asked if I wanted to run something it was pst...wanna run heroic CoS? Wanna run heroic HoS. "Sure let me grab some water and switch to heal spec" pst..."You wanna dps instead of heal, we have a healer?"

The only down side to running DPS and letting someone else heal. I had a real difficult time not throwing heals around the group. Old habbits die hard.

The other down side, running with new healers that have no idea. I had hundreds of gold in repairs from new healers letting the tank die and the group wiping.

Last thought, I know this is kind of rambling. But come on...seriously guys, some of you RetPallys, FuryWarriors, and DK's drop the G and buy dual specs so you can tank. Farstriders /2 was awash is LFG Tank for... all weekend. we need some tanks.

SFGate

So just finished reading this weeks article from John Carrol in SFGate. It was enjoyable as usual and I loved the video links...except the chick from England singing. Can't figure out why everyone is so nuts over her.

Was entirely entertained by this little video though. Well worth the price of admission. Now I need to figure out how to get my wife and her students to do something like this at a BART station...without getting shot by a BART police officer on the edge.

Happy Friday

So in addition to it being Friday, my favorite day of the week. The chain-smoking too much perfume-wearing loud and angry woman who shares a cubicle with me called in sick, the boss is off and all the big-Whigs are out of the building today!

My plan for the day:

1.) Continue re-reading "The Icewind Dale" trilogy. My son, wife and I have all been reading the novels from start to finish. It is awesome to share books I enjoyed in high school with my son as he is getting ready to start high school himself.

2.) Try to figure out this whole blogging thing.

3.) Convince the wife that she really wants to go to Santa Cruz this weekend. The surf is up, it has been a long winter, and we have not been in the ocean since September. (The wife is back in school getting her Masters Degree and is bogged down in home work. I have to force her to take breaks to have fun every now and again)

4.) Post my thoughts on 3.1. I finally got to play around with the Agrent Tournament, but missed Ulduar 25 due to family game night.

The 12:00 pm break

OK so I just got got back from my mid-morning break. I take lunch at 1:30 so 12:00 in mid morning...shut up.

I have decided to use my powers as king of the universe and declare no more work today, as it is seventy five degrees outside, not a hint of wind and probably the most beautiful day so far of this spring.

I got back into the office, announced this to the room and the boss said "shut up and get back to work".

Although he did say it in a loving kinda way...if you can say shut up with love.

Turns out i am not the king of the universe after all. :(

So no WoW last night

Last night was my friend Dawn's 45th birthday. Her wife invited us and 42 of their other friends over for Banana Splits for the little party. They have some weird thing that they get to invite as many people as their age. So as the years go by their parties get bigger and bigger.

The wife has me on a short leash tonight, have to work in the garden and do laundry. If I gat all that done I may see Ulduar or Argent Tournament tonight, and post my thoughts tomorrow.

OK I know I said no showing off loot but...

So last night after servers came back up I got on my hunter and repaired, bought ammo (yay for 1000 arrow stacks) respeced survival to try it out (boy do i miss 1500 dps pets) and headed over to Ulduar for the scheduled raid.

Invites went out, and I patiently waited for my invite...I waited some more...and some more. Then I noticed most of the 80's online in Ulduar. But not me. Sad Panda. But alas we did not have enough people for 25 Ulduar, the elite core raiders sallied forth to try the first 2-3 bosses. I was left standing in the cold north, my trusty cat beside me, with nothing to do but watch my friends enter Ulduar.

So whats a hunter to do? Switch to my Shaman whom will one day be my main of course.

At 10 minutes to 9:00 pacific time, someone in guild chat said "Hey I think we have enough extra people on for another 10 man Ulduar" I looked lovingly at my wife and said "oh please oh please oh please! It is the new raid please please please!" She rolled her eyes and said "One hour, or you sleep on the couch tonight with the dogs"

So the raid forms, we enter the instance and the raid leader says "So uh...anybody know what to do?". Much comedy ensues, we slowly figure out how to get started. We ever so smartly put healers as pasangers in the catapults...you know so they can heal. We clear the trash to Flame
Leviathan healers are catapulted to the top of him, and we realise healers can not DPS the tourets there is much panic and we all die.

Take Two: Healers re-asigned to drive the demolishers, dps'ers ride the catapults all is good in the land. We get him down to 1.5 million hit points and we wipe.

Take Three: We figured out this fight, it is 10:30 Pacific time, I am 30 minutes past my point of no return, Flame Leviathan is toast, nice tank plate wrists drop as well as this fine healing mail.

I am the only mail wearer in the raid, so RNG be dammed I win the gear. Eventhough everyone in the raid decided to roll against me. I /rolled a 12. Bloody 12! But since i actually could use it I get it.

p.s. Hope to one day figure out how to do that spiffy link where you hover over it and the item tool-tip pops up. I hate linking to the wow-wiki page for the item.

Can you tell I'm new to blogging?

So I hope to figure out how to post some pics and make this blog look a little more "moved in to" tonight. At the very least I should figure out how to get armory links for my toons up.

Ulduar Dropped today

So today The secrets of Ulduar were unveiled. Due to a heavily negotiated deal with the wife, I have cut my WoW playing to 2-3 nights per week. What does this mean to me? It means I wont even be able to logon and purchase and allocate all those tasty talent points until Thursday at the very earliest. Worse yet, as I joined my guild back in the BC days as a DPS hunter, they will not let me raid as a Shaman until we have 10 man on farm. We are a hardcore casual guild. Which means we raid 4 nights per week, but attendance isn't mandatory.

So my Shaman should start seeing Ulduar around mid-May. I guess not so bad in the overall wheel of time. I look forward to running the first few weeks as DPS so i can learn the encounters with out having the stress of healing unfamiliar bosses. I figure let the "real" guild healers figure it out, then tell me what to do when they drag my sorry arse through the bosses later.

Welcome to ShamWoW

Welcome to my new home on the interweb-tubes. I will be posting regularly on this site my trials and tribulations of a soft-core raider, part time Restoration Shaman, part time Beast Master Hunter (boo "Great BM Hunter Nerf of 2008" I still havent found my DPS, as I refuse to spec Survival)

I will not be theory-crafting, or improving your raid or party DPS and healing. What i will be doing is sharing my many misadventures. From causing raid wipes (as anybody who raids with me can attest I do with more style and flare than anybody out there) to first time boss kills. I will not be showcasing my epic loots, because we do not run with DKP and the RNG hates me. But I will be happy to show you any pitty loot that gets thrown my way.

Lastly I hope to bring a little humor into my corner of the internet. So dust off your jackets, sit down and have a beer on me.

p.s. I may from time to time share with you my latest experimental beer recipe I brewed over the weekend, stories of my kids, and the ginormous cluster f*ck that is the family I married into.