Barely A Week As Survival

After returning from my unexpected break from WoW, I felt something was missing. I needed to shake things up. A few days later, I was having a discussion with a fellow guild-hunter about Survival Raiding. I plunged head-long into research and posted several times on my guild forums asking people what they thought.

The key insights that I will share with you here are as follows.

Survival raiding is all about support. If you have a regular raid group filled with warriors, rogues, feral druids & other hunters (but not other survival hunters,) then your Expose Weakness can be a major boost to the raid. If you are willing and able to take yet another dip in personal dps, you may have 3-4 spare points to add to Improved Hunter's Mark.

Before even considering Survival, you must be willing to sacrifice. Your personal dps will go down. You will spend a ton of gold & mats to maximize your agility. If you were a beastmaster, you will feel slow. If you were a marksman, prepare to learn "new" slick tricks. Scatter Shot & Silencing Shot are replaced by better trapping & Wyvern Sting.

The most painful thing for me was the math. To consider Survival, you've got to be able to boost your agility over 700 & your crit to 33% (before buffs.) Lightning Reflexes will only go so far, so do your math. Even then, SSC & TK gear may not be enough. Re-gem'ing to all +agility gems may not be enough. You may find yourself, like I did, scouring the server for enchanters who could do expensive +agility enchants.

There aren't a lot of great discussions or guides to Survival Raiding and there isn't a "cookie cutter" way to build one for Raiding. Some of it depends on what you are raiding. Do you need improved traps? Some of it depends if you plan to do other stuff and want Wyvern Sting. Still, if you look at the specs of enough survival hunters and talk to enough people, certain obvious trends come out. You must take Lightning Reflexes & Expose Weakness. You should try and get Mortal Shots from the Marksmanship tree. Much of the rest appears to be personal preference. You can boost your own DPS by taking 7 points in Beastmaster for Focused Fire. You can take the aforementioned Improved Hunter's Mark. OR, you can round out more points in Survival to improve your general PvE & PvP potential.

Last week, I went ahead and bought about 400 gold in new gems, raided my stash of crafting mats, paid for the re-spec and got myself into places like Kara & Heroics for practice. As I played with it, my base agility & crit hovered right around the minimum, which was fine for practice.

My Issues:

My first real issue was my Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle. At a base speed of 2.7 seconds, it's ideal for Beastmaster. (I run at a base 1.9 sec.) However, with my gear, I found myself at 2.3 seconds. You wouldn't think that being 0.4 seconds slower would be a problem, but it was. At 2.3 seconds, my shot macro timing was off. It was too slow to get into a rhythm. It was also too fast to weave other shots. I was still forced to stop casting Steady Shot in order to cast Arcane Shot or apply Scorpid Sting. This lowered my dps further and kept me from doing my most important job, keeping Expose Weakness up as much as possible.

My second problem was the amount of sacrifices I made (based on my gear) in the way of gems and other bonuses to get a barely good enough agility bonus. How could I justify swapping to Survival at just over 700 agility when other hunters in my guild could swap and be closer to 900?

But hey, there will be gear coming right? Yeah, I considered that. As I looked at the best upcoming hunter gear, I saw that most has haste boosts. How can I even consider Survival when I'm salivating over a potential base attack speed of 1.5 sec?

My final issue was and is personality. Even if I got a new, slower weapon & continued to get Agility gear, I have a rapid fire personality. I like the speed. I love BIG RED pet. I knew this going in. And, I probably would have learned to like survival if not for the gear obstacles.

It's not surprising that so few hunters like survival. I'm glad I tried it. I don't mind having wasted nearly 1,000 gold (not including enchanting mats) swapping to and then back again. The push was rewarding. I picked up some new gear. I learned some new tactics. I got a ton of badges. While my gem swaps had to be replaced, my attack power to agility enchantment conversions can stay right were they are.

Would I be willing to do it again? If my guild asked and if I could meet a number of basic criteria, yes. I would want to have a base (unbuffed) 800+ agility & 35% crit to consider it. I would want to have a slow-fire weapon like the Serpent Spine Longbow.

A Return to WoW

Real life has a way of screwing over my virtual life. Thankfully, after weeks of being sick and weeks of recovering, I'm actively playing again.

Like Riding A Bike, Only Not
Right before getting sick, I had dramatically altered my UI and promised to post about it (Ooops!) Well, the promised post isn't showing up anytime soon. Lord, it's hard enough to remember how to play. My first night back to playing Beroth, I went on a raid. The joke of the night was about me finding appropriate buttons. Thankfully, I remembered the basics like send pet, my shot macro & feign death. The rest, however, was not like riding a bike. Even though my basic structure was similar to my old UI, I didn't know it...and I hadn't looked at it for almost a month. Still, DPS was fine. I didn't drag the raid down. I didn't wipe us. We did farm content, so I generally remembered the pulls. It's all good. Tonight could be harder since we'll probably be doing stuff I haven't seen before.

Affliction: Better than Chicken Soup!
While I was sick, I would log on from time to time and try Alt'ing. I needed something mindless (no thinking and easy to do) to play. Since I already have a hunter a friend recommended Warlock. My friend even went out of his way to write me instructions (that's how sick I was) on casting rotation and talents to pick by level. If you've never played a Warlock, I suggest trying it. I thought Hunter was easy for farming. Dot, dot, drain...Oh is it dead? Well, that was easy! Rule #1: If you can fear it, you can kill it. Now that I'm feeling better, I hope I can work this toon into my play-rotation.

25 or 6 to 4!
Until yesterday, I had only been to Sunwell once. I know people who are walking around in exalted Sunwell gear and I wasn't even Friendly until yesterday. So, feeling better and having a quiet day to myself, I decided to make up for lost time. I think I went a little over-board. Instead of just doing the Sunwell dailies, I did the maximum. If you've never done 25 dailies, try it once. You can stack most, but not all of them. I made well over 300 gold before selling greens or the leather I skinned.

The key to doing 25 dailies is time-management. You can do about 15-16 dailies in under 2 hours, if you're smart. The bulk of the Netherwing & Sunwell dailies are stackable. The trick is that you'll also need to do some others. I filled up the remaining slots with the Skyguard bombing runs, the cooking daily, and the Outland-related Sunwell quests. Quests that I did but would recommend avoiding (because they are complete time-sinks) are Disrupting the Twilight Portal & A Slow Death.

Operation Alt-Squad Update
Rhus & Co are all level 58 now. We stalled when I got sick. I'm not sure if it's because I'm the tank or they are just such good friends, but they all waited for me to get better. Over the weekend, we did the tribute run in Dire Maul North. I did the run a few times back in the day. At the time, we had level 60 toons (and most had Pre-BC raid gear.) That said, it was still the smoothest tribute I've ever seen. Some of that is the 2.3 nerf. A lot is our no longer being complete n00bs. Still, I like to think some of it was my tanking skills. I really like Druid Tanking. How much do I like it? I've even wondered if I might want to swap mains in the expansion. *gasp*

Your Own Private DE'er
My other project of late is making my own disenchanter. When I farm leather or run instances, I often come out with a bunch of green-quality gear. Most is not worth the price of an auction, but the mats are valuable. Being able to DE it without mailing it to a friend would be great. Here's what you need: A level 35+ toon w/ 275+ enchanting. This will allow you to DE level 65-70 items. This can be done fairly quickly with a mage or warlock (pick tailoring and enchanting.)

How's my project going? Well, I dusted off gnome mage and finally got him to level 35. Admittedly he's stalled at 225 enchanting. I need to farm or buy silk/mage-weave to keep going. This has to take a back-burner to getting Beroth back into form. I'll keep you posted if I come up with any tricks to get from 225-275 without actually questing in the appropriate zones for the mats.

Missed this Blog
Admittedly, I missed writing in this blog and I hope I didn't lose too many readers for being gone so long. Blogging can be a tough thing. There's little to no tangible reward to doing it. You put yourself and your thoughts out there for anyone to bash. Unless you're a professional, your blog(s) aren't exactly a top life-priority. It's easy to be forced to deprioritize a beloved blog. Hopefully, we can dust this one off together.