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Blizzard just dropped a nice graphic with the T13 Warrior set.

Looks like they are taking cues from Deathwing himself. What do you think of the set? What can Blizzard do to improve tier sets, or are you happy with what you’ve seen so far?

Hit up the source link for a look at warriors up to this point.

Source

With 4.2, Blizzard has injected the new content with eight new hunter pets, all of whom are not only rare elites, but are specifically designed to WTFpwn you if you swoop in and try to tame it like a “normal” hunter pet. This had a significant impact on my decision to resub to WoW. My exploits taming pets in the game are documented on here and stalking the prey, taming and forming a relationship with the pets that I tame is the reason that I have always run BM, even though it is pretty much a garbage spec as far as DPS goes. I really enjoy seeing hunters in Stormwind with exotic pets and trading stories about the taming process. Maybe it is because I am on an RP server, but all the BM hunters that I have talked to are of the same mindset.

Having tamed a couple of the new hunter pets, I can say with certainty, that there are two distinctly different experiences that I had encountered while huntering. Hunting Ban’thalos, is a tricky affair. Ban is a spirit beast owl, yes an owl, that is way up in the air above the Sanctuary of Malorne. Like way up there. I had to park myself in a tree and then mount up and fly up some more to tag the owl. Drop into the tree, freeze trap, and tame beast. Bam sounds easy right? It always sounds easy on paper. Read more…

Yesterday was a pretty awesome day for me. A pretty fucking awesome day for me, one of those days that I know that I will remember for a very long time. Because if there is one thing that most of us WoW players have in common, it is this: If you make something almost impossible to get, we are going to want it all the more. Maybe I am really selling players out here because we all want things that are impossible to get: Like Victoria Secret Models. There are things in the game that some of lust over, mostly involving loot with ilevels upwards of 360, but there are other things in the game that a very select group of dedicated  players hunt for. (No not PORNshire.) I am talking about those crazy Beast Master Hunters. Read more…

After a half dozen progression attempts on Chimaeron last night, I sat back to think about what a difficult job healers have.  The analogy that popped into my mind was this: healers are just like your mom.  Think about it; they’re always there to clean up the mess you’ve made and you never thank them.  Healing is one of the most thankless jobs in WOW.  It’s only when a healer makes a mistake that they get any type of attention at all.  Most times, they quietly and heroically do their job, bailing you out of the fire and keeping the tank up, all the while managing their mana pool and responding to the same mechanics as the rest of the raid.

Healers  hold a tremendous weight on their shoulders during dungeons and raids.  A DPS can step away mid cast to respond to a mechanic without any real impact to the raid.  Sure your DPS will dip a little bit but no one will die as a result of your decision to leave early.  Now put yourself in the shoes of a healer.  In a split second, they have to decide if they need to take the damage on the chin from the mechanic and finish their cast or hold off on casting and fire off a quick heal on their target when they are done responding to the mechanic (all the while hoping that their target won’t die in the mean time).  When was the last time you faced a decision like this as DPS?  Maybe once or twice a raid cycle?  Healers face it multiple times on every boss.

If healer’s have such a tremendous amount of importance placed on even their tiniest decisions during fights, then how can you accurately judge a healers performance in a fight?  Measuring the performance of a healer is an incredibly nuanced exercise that is way more difficult than pulling up their HPS.  Is there any meter that shows whether or not the healer cast the right heal in a given situation?  How about a meter that shows how quickly the healer responded to life threatening damage on a raid member?  Unfortunately, there are no standard meters that measure any of these things.  What you can rely on is your healing class leader helping to analyze the decision making of all healers in order to help improve their overall performance.  And, like most complex analyses in life, we should leave this to the professionals.

In conclusion, I’d like to give a big thanks to the Healing Team of Bound and all other healing teams out there who have saved my ass (and the asses of thousands of other tanks and DPS) countless times!

Outside of raiding, I’ve spent most of my time healing on my Paladin.  In a couple short words, the healing game has changed quite a bit.  Gone are the Holy Light bomb days when you could splash AOE heals on your tank and melee DPS.  Flash of Light has transitioned from a Paladin’s bread and butter spell to a costly Oh Shit heal used only in the most dire circumstances.  I’ve learned some painful lessons on mana conservation over the last month (at the expense of many PUG tanks) that I can hopefully help you all avoid.  Below are a couple tips that I’ve picked up healing in Cataclysm.

Tip 1: Don’t burn your mana healing the DPS.  This may sound cold and calculating but take a look at recount and see who is providing the most damage for your group.  I then want you to heal that person more often than the other DPS.  Tell the group that avoidable damage is called avoidable for a reason….players need to avoid it.  You simply don’t have enough mana to heal all of your party through stupidity.  This is doubly true if the aforementioned stupid player is also not pulling his weight.  Simply put, if they aren’t doing their job let them die.

Tip 2: Choose your heals carefully.  Does the tank really need a costly Divine Light or will a Holy Light suffice?  Do you have enough Holy power for a Word of Glory or is the party taking a lot of damage, in which case should you cast a Light of Dawn?  Is your Holy Shock off cool down?  What is the damage pattern for this fight?  Are you going to be called on at some point to drop some mega heals?  If you are going to be called on to drop said heals, are you properly conserving your mana for this moment?  You should be asking yourself these questions throughout the entire fight to avoid needless overhealing.

Hopefully these tips can help you save your mana for when you really need it and heal your group successfully through some Cataclysm Heroics!

This is part two, of a two-part mini-series on the topic of re-rolling. If you missed part one, you can find it here. To briefly recap, in part one, we focused on when it’s right to re-roll, in this article we will focus on the why. It wasn’t until I started talking with other individuals, listening to the Rawrcast pod cast, then writing a pro’s/con’s list, and started writing this very article, that I had a epiphany on the topic. I will share this “epiphany” with you, the readers, later on. If you read part one, you know that I‘m not just pulling this topic out of thin air, it‘s something that has plagued me for weeks/months now. Along the way, there are many pitfalls to stay away from, but on the flip side, there are some very valid reasons to re-roll. I’ll investigate both with this in depth look at, The PvE perspective: Why is it right to re-roll. Enjoy Read more…

For those of you not familiar with the term “re-roll” it refers to a point that you change focus from your main character, to an alt. There is a veritable smorgasbord or reasons as to why one would re-roll, which I intend to cover in part 2 of this article but for now we will focus on the when. With that explanation out of the way, in weeks leading up to patch 4.0.1 I have asked myself this very question, no less then several dozen time. Furthering my opinion that the topic needed a harder look on this weeks podcast several people called/wrote into the show, asking about this very topic. So with out further a due enjoy The PvE perspective: When is it time to re-roll? Part 1. Read more…

I ran across this while reading one of my favorite hunter blogs, Huntsmanslodge.com. It looks like GC is all spirit-beasted out and looking pretty fricken awesome. It looks like he is a level 85 crab, with HoT and an agl and str buff. It looks pretty, and I can only imagine how much this guy is going to be farmed.

I imagine that this is going to be one of those rare mobs that Blizz turns out on the “Have fun trying to figure THIS spawn out guys.” Like the spirit bear that I still have not tamed, some mobs just don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason to their spawn timers. My money is on this mob getting killed over and over again as hunters compete over him.

Anyway, there isn’t a whole lot of information out on him. Are you going for him?

Ever wonder if BRK has anything to do with all of the new BM builds in the Beta?