Loot system in cross-real dungeons March 7, 2010
Posted by mavrande in Uncategorized.add a comment
My level 44 rogue encountered a hunter the other day in a random Marudon instance, who rolled need on two pieces of plate gear. There are a few issues with this:
Being that the loot system was on need/greed, the hunter in question shouldn’t have been able to need plate pieces. That’s the point of need/greed.
We couldn’t kick him after the first time he did this, and so he then ninja’d a second piece of gear (that he couldn’t even use) before the timer let us vote to kick him.
Of course, I submitted an in-game ticket about this, since the loot system shouldn’t have allowed this. The responding GM gave no information on why he could loot this, or why we were not allowed to kick him, but rather suggested that perhaps his behavior was acceptable – something about the loot system allowing that. He said to use the suggestions forum to make changes to the loot system – I’ll cross-post this to the blizzard forums later – even though I am not suggesting that the loot system be changed. He didn’t seem to understand that ‘need before greed’ shouldn’t allow mail-wearers to loot plate.
Anyway, if anyone else has seen something like this, either poor behavior or a bug in the loot system, feel free to share your experiences.
Rotface Down March 2, 2010
Posted by mavrande in Raid Reports.add a comment
So I finally took down Rotface last night. Not a guild first, but a personal first for a few members of the raid, including myself. It was far from a clean kill, but no one died but the boss, so it was a success. I seem to have lost the combat log from this, though.
We also had our best Festergut kill, down in 4:31 with 34654 total raid DPS. There were a few times over our two attempts on Festergut that I lost a lot of DPS due to, presumably, either moving or being made to vomit. I’ll need to continue to work on that, but I think I can finally say that we have him on farm. It has always taken a few attempts, but I think that this time we could have taken him down without heroism or speed pots.
I finally got Exalted with the Ashed Verdict, with the title and updated ring that goes with it. The biggest part of that ring is the socket, and it sims as a 30 DPS upgrade for me. A few other people got ring upgrades as well.
I also got a new staff, the Shaft of Glacial Ice. That’s a major upgrade for me, simming as 70 DPS, which I can believe – it’s better in every way than the polearm I got out of heroic HoR. I still need to go and gem it.
The priest got Lockjaw, which seems nice, someone got Abracadaver, which is fun to play with, and the tank got some new hands, which I guess are nice. I don’t know about tanks, but stamina and strength sound helpful :) It actually might have been given to him as offspec, which makes sense because I don’t think hit is a very tankish stat.
We got a few attempts in on dreamwalker, and everyone’s getting used to the fight. We’ll probably take Wednesday to get these 6 down, and maybe some time on Friday, and then make some attempts on blood princes and dreamwalker. We got a guild first down of jarraxxus in TotGC10 this week, and might go and try to kill faction champions as well. We aren’t extending raid lockouts though – still a lot of people who can benefit from loot and badges from the first 6.
Hunting ICC: Hunter Gear from Trash March 2, 2010
Posted by mavrande in Hunter's Guide, Hunting ICC.add a comment
So, one of the ‘top searches’ that WordPress is showing me is ‘hunter icc trash loots’. What I figure is that that means people want to know if there’s any neat hunter loot that drops off ICC trash. Most of this loot is BoE, meaning if you have a ton of money, you can probably find it on the auction house or in the trade channel, if you look hard enough. But what’s out there?
Well, you can use a Wowhead filter for this have a look at:
http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=qu=4;minle=254;maxle=300;cr=3:16;crs=1:4812;crv=0:0
There’s some silly stuff in there, that isn’t really a zone drop. In all, I see 15 zone drops in ICC, though some aren’t really zone drops – Carapace of Forgotten Kings, for example. Silly Wowhead. Only one of these is any good for hunters.
Wodin’s Lucky Necklace is a pretty popular hunter necklace. I’ve seen this selling for a lot, and with good reason – apart from the necklace that drops off of heroic 25 Sindragosa, it’s best in slot for SV hunters, though perhaps the normal mode Sindragosa necklaces which come with Armor Penetration would be better for MM hunters that are going for the ArPen build.
I’m afraid that’s all you get in terms of trash drops. As for loot from bosses, there are a few other great posts out there, Wowhead and the official armory have all this information, and you can always use Rawr or Simulationcraft to check to see if something is an upgrade for you.
Hunter Addons – Ammo-Matique March 2, 2010
Posted by mavrande in Uncategorized.add a comment
I know. I didn’t think I needed it either. I mean, really, I’m a hunter. Ammo is my thing. I think I can manage to equip the epic ammo for raids, and then the regular ammo afterwards.
But after one too many random heroic wasting epic ammo, or one too many raid where I realized I had the cheapo ammo equipped, I remembered reading an old blog post that recommended this very addon, fired up the curse client, and downloaded the addon.
The first thing I liked is that it popped up and politely asked me to configure my settings. You can configure dungeons, outside, and each raid individually, and raids can be configured separately for 10 and 25 man, heroic and non heroic, and trash and bosses. The first time you enter each raid, you configure that raid to use either premium or standard ammo. You can then select which ammo is premium and which is standard, and tell it how much you want to keep on hand, and then when you talk to an ammo seller, it will automatically stock up. You can even have it store all your ammo in one bag.
The one issue is that, due to limitations put in place by Blizzard, no addon can change your gear, ammo included, while in combat. For ToC, for example, when you can’t target the boss before you enter combat, you’ll receive a warning to change ammo. This warning simply says wrong ammo used, it doesn’t say which ammo is equipped or which it thinks should be equipped – I wish it did, just to streamline it all while you’re pressed for time in a boss fight.
In all though, this is a great addon that I strongly recommend to any hunter who is using multiple types of ammo on a regular basis. This makes it trivially easy. The UI is well-designed, you never need to go looking for configuration, the addon tells you when you need to give it information. Highly recommended. Hopefully the author, Anyia, will keep it updated through Cataclysm if we still wind up with more than one kind of non-consumable ammo.
Hello Hunting Lodge March 1, 2010
Posted by mavrande in Uncategorized.add a comment
I just finally listened to the THL podcast episode 25 (I really have been gone all week) and saw that I was mentioned. So now, you’ve all came, seen that I haven’t posted anything for a week, and thought I wasn’t a good person.
While you’d be right, I do fully intend to follow through with this whole blog thing. Just have way too much real life going on. Thanks for the free press, and keep reading :) – you’re always welcome to drop an email or a comment if there’s anything you want to hear about.
Oh, and it’s pronounced like Maav-rand. The a is soft and the e is silent.
This isn’t a real post. Nothing to see here, move along.
In other administrivia, I’ve changed the theme of the blog because I needed it to be a two-column theme, so that the links section would show up over there, so I could advertise the blogs and podcasts that you should all be reading. I’ll make it look pretty sometime.
