My thoughts about the DK Frost Spec

or: With a corn cob pipe, a button nose, and two eyes made out of coal.

I won't lie, I have really enjoyed playing the Death Knight class. I have to add that there is just something really cool about watching a Tauren use a 2 handed weapon to beat down an enemy.

Melee with Berthold has been up front and in your face, which is a switch from the ranged Hunter and stealthy Druid Kitty classes I leveled before.

The blatent OP of the class has been a fun way of quickly moving through the Burning Crusade content...yet again. Solo'ing the group quests in Nagrand was a lot of fun, and gave me an idea of how an extended PvE fight will go.

Leveling Bert has been fast with the new streamlined system. I completed 98% of the Hellfire Penninsula quests and when I was done I was level 64. This time around I gave Zangarmarsh and Terrokar Forest a miss and went straight into Nagrand. My plan is to skip Blades Edge, do a nice chunk of Netherstorm and then level halfway through 70 in Shadowmoon Valley.

I would like to do this to get some good quest reward armor to take into Northrend, and it never hurts to be half at least half a level ahead of any new zone you are starting.

I started out in the Unholy Tree from 58 - 61, then switched to Blood until level 66. Now I am test driving the Frost spec and find it solid for play. I like being able to have my diseases up throughout the entire fight, and the added armor from Frost Presence adequately covers the lack of self healing.

Here is my current spec.

Current spell/attack rotation is:
Plague Strike ->Icy Touch->Blood Strike->Blood Strike->Obliterate->Frost Strike

I got this rotation from Nicolai on Elitist Jerks, along with the dps spec.

The rotation starts by getting up two DoT spells and then uses strikes that create Death Runes and give a bonus for each disease you have ticking on the mob. By the time you hit Obliterate all your Runes are on cooldown, and this is easily covered with Frost Strike which uses the Runic Power that your melee had built up.

Other notable skills that I will use situational:
Unbreakable Armor, Howling Blast, Lichborne, Death Chill, Death Strike

Lichborne and Unbreakable Armor are buffs to armor and help to resist movement impairing spells.

Death Chill will force your next Icy Touch, Obliterate, or Frost Strike to crit. I personally like to use it with Obliterate.

In all it seems all three Talent Trees are well designed, and from what I have read each is viable to tank with. Blood was enjoyable, I liked all the self healing; Frost is going well, but I had the most fun with Unholy I think.

When I hit 69 I think I will swap back to the Unholy Tree to see if I still like it best and then make my decision about my Talent spec just prior to hopping the Zeppelin to Northrend.

Holy Crap! What do we do now!!??!!

or Life in World of Warcraft 3.02

Alas poor Ilidian I knew him well....

WoW 3.02 is currently being added to the servers, and soon we will emerge into realms that appear the same, yet all will have changed.

These are exciting days ahead. The next month will be spent learning how the new game mechanics function, and planning out how we want to approach the expansion. Some will want to charge ahead to level 80 and the new endgame content, others will go hit up the new Death Knight class, still others will be sleeping in Inns and building up a bit of XP to stay just ahead of questing level requirements.

If you were around for the 2.0 update you are probably patiently keeping an eye on the Realm Status web page while doing other things, dishes, work, laundry...you know.

This is old hat for us, for we remember the old days when our worlds would fall apart once a week, but would usually be back up by 11:00am.

Sometimes not.

OK, most of the time not.

And usually we would spend the next two or three days getting our add-ons straightened back out.

For those that are Burning Crusade babies who came to the game in the times of rolling restarts and short scheduled game maintenance... DON'T PANIC!

I repeat DON'T PANIC!

We will get through this.
What we are going to do is get back to our roots and once again start paying attention to all the other research sites, QQ'ers, and hunter how-to bloggers that got us from huntard to hunter the first time around.

We are also going to try things on our own FEARLESSLY. These changes bring exciting new things to WoW that will enhance the game and hopefully make things more fun.

Sure things will be off balance and wacky for a bit, but that is to be expected. Adequately testing a game for 10 million people to play is one heck of a task for our developers, so to this end we will also be Patient. Let the huntards and @ss hats piss and moan and complain, while the rest of us take things in stride and enjoy all the new adventures ahead of us.

The advantage is we are heading into the expansion informed and experienced. We can do this gang, we have been here before, and don't forget that there are new people out there that will need our help on the way.

One of the great things about the Hunter community is our willingness to stop what we are doing and show someone else the tricks of the trade.

*sings* Its a whooooole new wooooooooorrrrld, a fantastic point of view!

Here is my list of Hunter Research sites.
Some old and some new, all of them friendly and all are passionate about our fav class.
Keep these handy for when you are stuck and want a little help, or maybe a good laugh on a realm maintenance Tuesday.
Edit: This is looking like my new side bar....

Hunter Blogs
Big Red Kitty
Aspect of the Hare
The Hunter's Mark
Gun Loving Dwarf Chick
ReNoobed
Twisted Nether Wiki - Blogs of all classes listed here.

Hunter Forums
BigRedKitty Forums
Elitist Jerks
WoW Hunter Forums-Official

Research Sites
Petopia
WoWHead
WoWWiki
WotLK Wiki
Kaliban's Loot Lists

Podcasts
The Instance
Twisted Nether
World of Warcast
Big Red Kitty

Double Trappin'

Or: Would you like one lump or two?

I got nice screen-shot of my first ever, non-premeditated double trap.

In the past I've double trapped just fine, only it was part of the plan of attack or I was practicing. This is the first time it happened instinctively.
/woot!

The setup for double trapping is pretty easy. Set up your Freeze Trap down and wait for the traps cool down timer to expire. The trap will remain primed for another 30 sec, so pull the first mob into the trap, and when the trap activates immediately drop another trap at the feet of the second mob.

*Bing*

Two trapped mobs.

In this case I had three mobs, one caster and two melee. I dropped my first trap and waited for the cool down to expire, sent the pet after the caster and fired a Multi-Shot. The Multi Shot brought the two melee mobs to me while my pet then tanked the caster.

The first melee mob hit the trap and froze, I backed up a hair and dropped the second trap. All the while Auto-Shooting the caster.

You can see that my pet Shepard has Bestial Wrath activated which means he is doing an additional 50% damage to his target.

Pretty nifty.

41/20/0 Trapping in Heroics

Prior to the onset of my graphics problems I was just beginning to run heroics in hopes of getting some of that phat new badge gear.

Being new to heroics I jumped over to BRK's Hunter Forums and asked this question:

I was just wondering how to tweak my game for trapping in Heroic dungeons with the 41/20 spec.
I can chain trap most regular instances with no problems. I have spec'd both the pet and myself with keeping the pet alive during combat in mind.
I am hit capped and my crit is just under 24%.

Now that I am in Heroics is the trapping game basically the same? And is it worth dropping MM points to pick up Clever Traps (I'd rather not if at all possible).

I got several great replies, and this post from Zball is my favorite:

With proper planning and management, trapping in Heroics as BM is easy. I never had an issue and I've done it as BM, MM, and SV.

Things to look out for and keep in mind.

-Communicate. Your tanks need to know to wait until you give the go ahead on any pull where you will be tasked with trapping. Healers need to tell you if they're being attacked. You have to keep your party in the know about the status of the trapped mob. Let them know that blue square is yours and yours alone until it comes up in the kill order.

-Blue square is your responsibility. In Heroics the mobs hit a lot harder. Get used to it. Have another trap ready. Be ready to have your pet tank the square until your trap is off cooldown in case the trap breaks early. Be ready to kite. And do not Feign Death while Blue Square is alive. You have bandages and pots. Use them. Do not ask for or expect a heal when dealing with your responsibility.

-Mind your traps and pet. Be careful and be ready to blow Intimidate on a mob that has broken free. Your pet is a tool in an instance. Use it. Sacrifice if you need to. You are more important than your pet. You are less important than the healer.

-Do not outlive your healer. If you do, you're wrong. You die first. Those mobs hit you before they hit the healer. That's part of your job as a DPS class.

All in all, trap talents aren't going to make or break you. As long as you have knowledge of your class and keep on top of things, Heroics are easy- mode.

Thank you for the words of wisdom!

2.4 & OOM

Along with all the Sunwell goodness, the 2.4 patch also brought us some mana regeneration issues. Not such a big deal inside instances where I tend to top off my mana anytime I hear another character munching or drinking, but out on the grind I found this to be a little bit annoying.

I haven't tried any PvP since the patch hit, but I imagine that is where it will hit us hunters hardest since burst damage is king in that venue.

In order to adapt we will need to pay a little more attention to our mana usage in the field. Here are a few suggestions for conserving your mana while grinding PvE.

Kick on your Aspect of the Viper; get your mana regeneration going. While grinding we want to build our DPS on a slow curve to avoid pulling aggro off our pets anyway, so switching over from Aspect of the Hawk will be benificial for more than one reason.

Your first shot should be a sting. Personally while grinding I like Serpent Sting. Since I'm sending in my pet Kaylee with a Mend Pet cooking I don't worry about reducing the damage she is taking. The faster the mobs die, the faster I'm grinding. If she comes back low on health I just top her off with another Mend Pet.

Use your Sting's DoT countdown as a timer to apply one Arcane Shot every 14 secs. That's all you really need to do. Your AutoShot will take care of the rest. If you are like me and don't simply spam a macro, feel free to hit Kill Command when that procs, we need to keep those reflexes sharp.

Each PvE fight looks like this for me:
1. Send in the pet via my Pet Attack/Hunter's Mark macro:
/petattack
/cast Hunter's Mark

2. Let 2 or 3 Growls go by.

3. Open with Serpent Sting and follow with a quick Mend Pet if needed. Here is a spiffy macro for that:
/castsequence reset=5 Serpent Sting, Mend Pet

4. When the the DoT counter shows 5 seconds remaining I pop off an Arcane Shot.

5. I hit my Kill Command hot key when that ability procs. I am currently using the add on Critical Alert which allows you to assign a specific sound to your Crits. When I here "bwoop", I mash button #5 on my Speedpad.

Usually I don't have to re-apply the sting before the fight ends.

When I get a little bored of the routine I will practice various skills. I will lead a mob around with freeze traps. I like to practice my Misdirection pulls, double trapping, jumpshots and kiting too. But the whole time I am really working on my managing my Mana pool.

My goal is to be aware of my mana usage to the point that in a boss fight I will have jut a smidge left as the boss dies. Mana not used is damage not done.

Its kind of a balancing act.

Anyhoo, with the new changes in Patch 2.4 hunters will need to spend a little time relearning some Mana control, but not to worry before long it will all be as rote as it was before the changes.

Bomb Them Again! Strategy

The bombing run in Ogri'la can be a real pain in the patooshka!

It finally ocured to me that I was approaching a 3D problem with two dimensional thinking.

This strategy works like a charm after a little practice.

The Set Up
1. After getting the quest, and before entering the bombing zone get some altitude and hit the "auto run" command; on my computer that is the Num-Lock key.

2. Set your flight trajectory to a 45 degree downward angle, and use the Straight-Up key to gain altitude at a 45 degree angle. This is the same key you use to jump, the default key is the spacebar.

This set up should allow you to strafe up, down, left and right with one hand. The other hand is using the mouse to control where and when you throw the bombs.

The key is to never stop moving forward.

Practice, practice, practice.
You will want to practice moving about in friendly territory first.

Once you have good control over your flight pattern go practice flying around in the bombing zone for a while. Don't worry about completing the quest at this point, just concentrate on avoiding the flack from the canons below you.

When you can fly through the bombing zone without getting knocked off your mount you are ready to add throwing bombs at the targets.

The Bombing Run
Here is my approach to the bombing run.

I think of each battery of guns and ammunition piles as an island. I fly to the center of the island at a 45 degree down angle. As I start the approach I will already have clicked on the package of bombs to activate the spell's AOE targeting.

As the canons shoot I will fly up and to the left or right for a count of 3 to avoid the flack and then return to my original course.

When I am close enough to the ground to see the green AOE target I throw a bomb at whichever pile of ammo is convenient. After I throw I leave the area by flying up and to the left or right.

Rinse and repeat. It only took a little practice to get to where I was able to do this quest in just a few minutes.

Lowbie Hunter Taining; Intro to Kiting

Kiting is one of the vanishing arts in WoW. You just don't run into many jump shooters these days.

However, just today I was asked to kite in the Underbog. I was needed to pull one of three Bog Lords down and away from the group while my partners handled the other two. This is a hunter skill that will set you apart from the pack.

BRK just posted a fantastic Lowbie guide for playing a hunter through levels 1-9, and it doubles as a great introduction to kiting. There isn't a lot in the game you can't kill as a hunter if you have the room to run. Kiting is also an essential PvP skill for Ranged DPS classes.



The shot rotation you will see BRK use here is:
Concussive Shot
Serpent Sting
Auto Shot

Strafing, or running side to side is done by pressing the "E" or "Q" keys.

You will be able to shoot any instant shot while running, so put those on your action bar where you can either "hot key" it or press it with your mouse.

As a side note, running side to side is usually a better solution to get away from a mob than backing up as it allows you to move at full speed.

You can see all of BRK's posts on his blog site: www.bigredkitty.net

Just plain fun to watch!

Logged in over on BRK's site this morning to find a new Lowbie Hunter Movie!

This one covers taming pets. Grab some popcorn, this one has teddy bears and spiders!

http://www.bigredkitty.net/2008/01/03/brk-intro-to-pet-taming-and-spells/