Monday Random Thoughts

- I've always been a fan of the little things.

- I noticed one of those little things this weekend.

- Remember the caterpillars in townlong?

- You know the ones around the trees and rocks that seemed to have an aggro range of roughly six and a half miles and moved so damn slow.

- They would keep you in battle and force you to run to get out of range of them or to try and find the offending caterpillars so you could kill them.

- And they had a long leash so if you did not go back to kill them you could cover damn near half the zone and they would still have you caught in battle so you could not mount up.

- Well, they are neutral now.

- Color me surprised.

- I was leveling my monk through there this weekend and as per habit I was taking the long path around where they were just so they would not aggro on me when I noticed something odd with my name plates.

- They were not red.

- I stopped and took a closer inspection and they were not aggressive.

- It wasn't that way the last I can remember.

- When I leveled my lock through there last week I thought I was just getting better avoiding them.

- I wonder when they changed it.

- As I said, I am a big fan of the little things and I really like this change.

- BTW, that said monk is now 90 too.

- I did not intend on leveling it.

- I popped on sunday and was going to queue for the LFR on my rogue when I decided, screw it, I really do not want to do the LFR.

- So I popped on my level 87 monk and figured I would play a little bit.

- 6 1/2 hours later I was 90.

- I can't believe they are speeding up leveling, it is fast enough already.

- When you can get from 87-90, three full levels and the last three levels at that, in one sitting on a weekend, leveling is way to fast as it is.

- But I like it.  I think the timing is just perfect in my opinion.

- If anything that 85-87 time needs to be sped up.

- While I do not know exactly I would guess it took 12 hours to do 85-87 and 6 to do 87-90.

- 12 hours for 2 level and 6 hours for 3 levels?  Who designs these things?

- In all honesty I did kind of dilly dally in the 85-87 range which did waste a fair deal of time.

- I probably just went around gathering and doing nothing but that for 4 hours of that time.

- Had to catch up the skills you know.

- Nice to see that my monk did not suffer the same issues every other class in the game did when hitting 87, or 88 however.

- All classes suffer from stat deprecation and really start to feel it at 87 or 88.

- Not my monk.

- Was doing 40K in all leveling gear at 87.

- Was doing 40K in all leveling gear at 88.

- Was doing 40K in all leveling gear at 89.

- And when I hit 90 I am doing 40K.

- Not sure how the design of monks is.  Either they are awesome at scaling with gear, so as I get more quest gear and upgraded, I stayed the same, or if there is some other effect going on there.

- Either way, I have leveled everything to 90 with a DPS spec except paladin and warrior which only have tank specs and none of them could do 40K the moment they hit 90 in all quest gear.

- I did my normal, finished out the klaxxi area to get all those nice 450s, hit exalted with klaxxi because of those warbringer tokens, and got my 489 ring.

- Now, with a 442 item level from quest gear only, I can pull 48K on the dummy self buffed, and of course, no gems, no enchants and no reforges.

- I can't wait to see how this goes.

- I am going to guess as I get more gear it goes up extremely slowly.

- Kind of like hunters were before this expansion.

- Hunters were always great out of the box and scaled horrible and always needed buffs later on.

- But when you first hit max level, hunters ruled.

- I am going to guess that is how the monk DPS spec will work, because I can not see building on 48K at only a 442 item level.  That would mean once you hit 500 item level you should be doing roughly 200K and I don't see that happening.

- It is just sick to see those types of numbers come out of a class I consistently see doing poorly in random content.

- Monks, of all specs, seem to go two ways.

- They are either great or they suck.

- I can't see anyone sucking too bad at a DPS monk however.

- You do not even need to look up the rotation, it is rather self explanatory.

- I remember when I first decided to look it up and saw it.

- That is what I am already doing.

- I must say that monks, in that sense, are the easiest class in the game.

- Even knowing nothing about them, there really was no issue figuring out a rotation for them without even trying.

- Simple rotations are nice sometimes.

- Better than hunter whack a mole where you always need to be hitting something and there are usually 3 or more things available at any given time.

- And you need to use them all.

- So what you hit and when you hit it makes a difference.

- So nice to see a rotation that is just hit what is there and that's it.

- Might be a nice change of pace.

- Too bad monks are melee and I hate melee.

- And too bad I am liking the DPS because it is so easy and OP, it might keep me from trying healing like I want to.

- One spec will be tank, there is no choice there.

- Any class that can tank, I tank with.

- Really that simple.

- Don't work that way for healing with me.

- I can paladin heal.  I can druid heal.  I just refuse to do so.

- I do not like their style.

- And as I am so fond of saying, if you don't like doing something you will not do as good at it as you could.

- So you are better playing a class and spec you enjoy playing.

- Hey, if anyone sees a post from Bashiok on the forums, quote it and reply, "but whatever".

- I think he should be shown the same disrespect as he shows everyone else.

- Perhaps we could make a call out to the forum trolls to go after him, quote him every time he posts something with just a but whatever.

- I would love to see that.

- I won't be doing it myself however.

- Two reasons really.

- No authenticator here, so I would not be able to log in anyway.

- I never post on the forums.

- Not exactly sure who would either.

- If you post on the forums this is what you get.

- Called a noob by anyone that has more progression than you.

- Called an elitist by anyone that has less progression than you.

- Get insulted for your gear choice, transmog choice, or spec choice.

- Have trolls find something to pick on you for, be it your name, guilds name, arena teams name.

- And lets not forget that they will pick on your BG raiting, arena rating, honor kills.

- And god forbid you say you do not PvP because that just means you are a baddie if you can't even PvP.

- All that fun stuff and the knowledge that the forum moderators never take action against these people for creating that toxic community.

- And if you voice a problem and speak it clearly just to get trolled by the masses don't worry sooner or later you might get lucky and have a blue answer you.

- Their answer will just be a blow off however and they will disregard everything you say with a "but whatever".

- And you wonder why I do not post on the forums?

- I wonder why people do post on the forums.

- Speaking of little things.

- I finally got [got my money on my mind] for 200,000 gold.

- I would have thought I would have gotten that one a long time ago with the amount of soloing I do.

- Speaking so soloing.

- I would love some more hunter healing.

- It is putting a crimp in my style on soloing.

- Still only 1/8 in DS heroic because I can not heal through the next two bosses.

- I will have to find a trick.

- Rule #1 of soloing.

- There is always a trick.

- Went and soloed the hour of twilight heroics because I never had.

- Two bosses seemed as if they might be impossible.

- Just needed to find the tricks that worked.

- Got the moonguard achievement on my hunter finally because of it.

- Of course the healer took no damage, there was no healer.

- Got lazy eye too.

- So much easier when there isn't someone else to screw it up for you.

- But as a hunter I cheated.

- Don't tell.

- I found a nice corner and just hit feign death.

- Used the move command to put my pet as far away as possible, and all the eyes kept going to him, checking him out, looking around a little and then went back to him.

- It looks for targets, when you are dead, you are not a target.

- So unless you get unlucky where one just happens to path over you, you won't get hit.

- See, I said I cheated.

- Or would that fit more in the clever use of mechanics category?

- Thought the azshara fight would be a bitch because when she put the hand on me, as I was the only target, I would be in trouble, but as it works out, if there is only one target to choose, she does not cast the hand and that fight was a push over thanks to our insane DPS now.

- I knew the baine fight would be hell and it was.

- Another case of I wish I had some healing on my hunter.

- But with some decent timing and directional disengages and move command on your pet so it does not try to fight in lava and all was well.

- Just took me a couple of wipes to work it out.

- Slyvanas is the only fight I have not had yet to try.

- It is always two of the other three.

- Did it a few times now and still no love on that last fight I need to do just to say I did it.

- I will keep going until I get to her.

- They are not really hugely challenging but I want to be able to say I did them all and not just assume I could do them.

- Of the three dungeons the only other fight that was an issue was Asira Dawnslayer.

- When she drops the smoke bomb your pet loses aggro and can never get it back.

- And by never I mean even if you feign death, the second you pop back up she comes after you.

- MD constantly to pet, nothing.

- Kiting, nothing.

- Can not be slowed, stunned, snared, or anything and she moves so much faster than you do.

- So what is any self respecting hunter to do?

- Go BM and just send your pet in and go get a drink.

- When she hits kill shot range, throw in a kill shot to make sure you get the physical tag, and the fight is done.

- I am sure I could have done it another way, but that seemed like the simplest solution.

- The other two bosses in there are just flat out DPS races.

- First and third will kill you if you do not have enough DPS.

- First you can get by before it kills you with around 90-100K would be my guess.

- Third, you need at least 130K DPS to out pace the damage.

- I did it as survival and did 138K and barely survived.

- Next time I will do it as BM, the burst from that will make it trivial.

- If not BM however, you must be over 130K to out pace it.

- Didn't really try to solo anything stressful recently, just fun stuff like those heroics.

- Tried to solo some of the current heroics a while back but no luck finishing any of them yet.

- But I will get there.  That is part of the fun, figuring out each boss.

- I think when 5.3 comes out I am going to choose to get gear for off spec on my hunter.

- Just to confuse the system.

- Not to be sarcastic or anything but there really are pieces that favor one spec over another for hunters based on the secondary stats that come on it.

- Any hunter that studies like I do sometimes I am sure has looked at a piece and said, that is a survival piece or that is a beast mastery piece.

- There is a difference.

- It is just not as pronounced as a piece of plate with intellect is a holy paladin piece and a piece with strength is not.

- I think it comes into play more for trinkets than for gear.

- Some procs really do favor one spec over another.

- Its just the way things are in a game of numbers.

- I think I am going to craft myself some cheap 476 gear and 458 PvP gear and get my monk into the LFR.

- Maybe that will be a lucky character.

- I just want to play one lucky character this expansion.

- One that seems to win everything all the time.

- Like my shaman was last expansion.

- It won everything.  Lock box greed, I win.  Items disenchanted, I win the materials.  Item I needed, I won.

- Everything except the damn healing shield in DS that a retribution paladin won both times.

- Why was a retribution paladin even allowed to roll on it and get the roll + bonus for an intellect shield?

- I put in multiple tickets about it and not one person every gave me a half way decent response.

- Funny as it sounds with my horrible luck, only having won three pieces over all so far this tier, my horrible luck has been fantastic.

- What do I mean by that?

- While I basically won nothing, the three things I did win, are all for slots I could not fill in with a temporary item from valor.

- So even my bad luck has been, oddly, good bad luck.

- Still, so few pieces in so many runs, I can see why some people are leaving in droves.

- As long as there is a valor gear net for me however, I feel I can at least stay only half a step behind.

- It is an issue for the people that do not want to grind the reputation or do not have the time to do the LFRs to get the reputation from them, as they need it for the valor gear, and that becomes an issue.

- But in the now immortal words of Bashiok, "but whatever".

- Apparently, that person does not count.

- Ran into a hunter while on my rogue doing one of the LFRs doing 160K+.

- He had slightly better gear than I do, but nothing really excessive.

- I wonder how he was beating my numbers my 25K.

- I poured over the logs.

- Yes, I log these things for personal use only.

- I use them to try and get better myself, and in a case like this, to learn from others.

- I found something really odd.

- He was not, repeat NOT, hitting explosive shot on cooldown.

- Had nearly half the explosive shots of the other survival hunters in there.

- I could not figure out what he was doing for the life of me.

- But he was basically neglecting his signature shot and doing more DPS than I do because of it.

- There has to be something to that.

- Something I have not read about anywhere yet.

- Research time.

- If I can pick up 25K ignoring my signature shot, who am I to keep hitting it.

- Screw that shot, lets get us another 25K.

- From the little I saw it seemed he prioritized everything above it.

- If I am reading the numbers right, glaive toss was his #1 priority shot.

- It looked like he never missed one and fit in the exact number you could have been able to meaning he never delayed it for anything, like an explosive shot, which is what I do, delay it for explosive shot.

- Outside of that one little detail I could not see anything else really jumping out at me.

- I wish I were there on my hunter so I could do a direct comparison instead of being on my rogue and playing the guessing game comparing him to other hunters.

- Still, I did learn something from him, explosive shot is not your top priority as survival.

- Glaive toss and black arrow are over it, based on his numbers, and it might even seem arcane is too.

- But that arcane part I can not be sure of without my own numbers on the same fight to compare.

- See, everyone says LFR is a joke, and I agree it can be.

- But there are also people like me that use it as a training tool.

- I use it as a way to get better.

- BTW, got my rogue almost up to doing 100K on non gimmick fights.

- I am quite impressed being I suck at being a rogue.

- To real rogues it might suck, but to a hunter, 100K on my rogue is pretty damn impressive.

- I can not wait until I get the 2 piece set, I am sure I will easily break 100K then.

- Heck, most of my gear is 483, once I get all 502 I would not be surprised if 120K was the normal.

- But running one LFR a week and nothing else on my rogue is not exactly the best way to get him geared.

- But I am in a new mode now.

- I am taking a break from the treadmill.

- I will run when I feel like running on alts and if I do not feel like running, I will not get rep, I will not get gear, and I will not get valor.

- Screw it if the game passes my alts by because they can't play it any more.

- That is what blizzard wants.

- Just ask Bashiok, he will tell you, but whatever.

- Have a great day.