MMQB: Vacation Incoming

My company is kind enough to give me four weeks of vacation each year, and because I stayed in school I have a tiny piece of paradise that I’m going to visit this week. Now I will have a laptop with me so there’s no reason I couldn’t post something, and I likely will, but if you’ve read some of the other blogs lately, there just isn’t that much to write about. But that’s not stopping us today.

My New Guild

It’s been nothing but awesome so far. We’re still working our way through ICC (25) normal and we’ve gotten to the point where we can do 10-bosses in three hours now. I suspect they’ll get Sindragosa on Monday and begin working on the Lich King while I’m gone. Here’s a few things I’ve managed to achieve in the last week.

1. The Crimson Hall (25)
2. The Plagueworks (25)
3. Boned (25)
4. The Secrets of Ulduar (25)
5. Drive Me Crazy (25)
6. The Descent into Madness (25)
7. The Keepers of Ulduar (25)
8. I’ll Take You All On (25)
9. I Could Say That This Cache was Rare
10. Nerf Engineering (25)
11. Heartbreaker (25)
12. Three Sixty Pain Spike (25) (this was on heroic and a complete accident, heh)
13. Two victories each against TogC(25) Beasts, Jaraxxus and Chumps.
14. Grand Black War Mammoth (this has nothing to do with the guild, but I’m contributing its acquisition to the karmic goodness that seems to have come with this move).

One other thing I’ll say about my guild is that we’ve got some pretty darn good hunters. I already knew that Euripides could ball, but we’ve got another guy who manages to edge us both out almost every time. He’s doing it as Survival too. I figure he must be playing on an AMD Opteron-based Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer complete with the Wow mosaic mural painted on its side.

Coming into Focus – Ghostcrawler Speaks

Last week Ghostcrawler made a few comments on their vision for hunter rotations in Cataclysm. You can read the full post here. The way I interpret things is this,

They want hunters to use the same number of shots in their rotation as they do now. The difference is we’ll be managing our resource much more than we do now. Firing the highest damaging shot may not always be the best option.

GC also stated that abilities with long cool downs may not cost any focus. I take this to mean things like rapid fire, readiness, deterrence, and disengage. They don’t want us banking focus for utility shots. I hope this ends up being the case.

What we still don’t know yet is what our actual focus regen will be once haste and talents are applied. Right now though our only way to regen lots of focus is through Steady/Cobra shot. In other words we have to do it actively and not passively, and we need to be standing still.

This is definitely something we need to keep an eye on as it impacts our movement, especially in PvP. Remember back in Wrath Beta when Aspect of the Viper did not regen mana passively? It seems we could be in a similar situation now. Viper was changed, and I’d expect lots of changes once Beta begins.

Mission Control

Finally we take sneak peak into the Blizzard’s War Room as they figure out how to fill the gap between now and Cataclysm. Maybe hard modes and the Ruby Sanctum will do it. We’ll see, but this is kind of how it feels like right now.

Good Hunting! Wasting Away Again in Margaritaville!