They’re Tameable

Okay so here’s the new strategy for the Stone Guard in the Moshu’gan Vaults. Gather three to four Hunters and some healers and get your tame on. In a mere few seconds you will have defeated the Stone Guard by turning them into faithful companions. Note you should only apply this strategy if you don’t care about loot. Also your Hunters might need to be level 93.

I had an opportunity to experience this first fight last night in both LFR and normal. LFR isn’t even worth talking about, other than to say you should run it every week. Normal on the other hand has a lot more going on. For a good strategy you can check out this guide at Marks-365. Also check out the Wow Hunter’s Hall for a variety of Hunter raid videos. We’re still in the learning phase so I’m not able to report a successful kill yet, but I can give you some quick impressions.

All fights require raid awareness, but some require more than others. This fight is in the “more than others” category. In a nutshell this fight involves avoiding stuff on the ground, switching targets and DPS’ing on the move.

At some point in the fight you’ll get chained to another player, and you’ll have to stick with your partner for a long as you’re chained. You will need to stack together and move together as a unit. You will learn a lot about your fellow players’ raid habits from this mechanic.

You’ll see who likes to move around whether it’s necessary or not. You’ll see who is fast at reacting to stuff on the ground and who is not. You’ll discover who likes to zig and who likes to zag, and you’ll learn to hate blink if tethered to a Mage. You won’t hate the Mage’s DPS unless you’re hoping to compete with them.

I think the jury is still out on where Hunter DPS stands, but I’m going to say that single target DPS seems a bit on the low side compared to other classes; I ran as Survival by the way. Now that raiding is in full swing you can expect Blizzard to start tweaking the classes. Let’s hope that Hunters are recipients of buffs and not nerfs.

It’s nice to be raiding fresh content again and despite the wipes I like this first encounter. Have you started raiding yet? Killed any bosses and what are your impressions about Hunter DPS?


5 Comments on “They’re Tameable”

  1. Thanks for the link!

    When it comes to DPS, I think you’re right. I do feel like single target DPS is a little on the low side (I’ve been running BM). Though in fairness for some of the first couple days, I was running without Focus Fire on my bar, and that probably didn’t help much. I do have the successful kill on the Stone Guard, I liked it, especially because it gave me 2 pieces of loot (1 from normal loot, one from bonus roll)

  2. Hah. Nice idea for when we get to be lvl 93.

    Single target DPS does feel low. I also have been running as SV. I just barely got i460 (thanks pvp gear…) but swapped down to i459 once in. I do expect that many of the people in LFR the first day it’s available are pretty aggressively decent players. At least more so than what we’ll see carried along in the weeks ahead. That said, I got 4th on the damage charts for a few of the boss fights with a DK guildie getting 3rd. I’ll try out some BM in raids as soon as I can get my fingers bound to its feel.

    Oh… but AoE damage is pretty awesome with 3+ tools at our disposal.

    1. Stone guard is an interesting fight. Some week it’ll be incredibly easy (like it was for us last week), and others (primarily when chains are up) will just smack you down if you don’t know what you’re doing. Last night I was chained to a ret paladin and I felt like his little pet hunter bitch. :-/

      As for low DPS.. I run SV on this fight, purely for the abilitty to do more DPS on two targets at once. Whilst BM’s ability to be a viable AoE spec is definitely better than it was pre-5.0.x, it’s still not as good as SV’s, especially if you’re using explosive trap for more LnL procs.

Comments are closed.