Speaking of gear, I’m coming to the realization that that I could be marching on Icecrown Citadel with my current gear set.  Assuming an early December release for patch 3.3 (I’m thinking 12/8), there just aren’t many shopping days left.  Still on the wish list are Ranged, Melee, Legs, Trinket, and Belt; in that order!  I’m going on vacation the week after Thanksgiving, so given my raid schedule that leaves two Onyxia and VoA runs, and one TotC (25) run.  This had better be one heck of a lucky week in terms of drops and rolls, or this may be as good as it gets.

Ten Things I’m Thinking About

1.  There’s no point in me checking the guild calendar every 10-minutes to see how many hunters are signed up for Tuesday’s run.  It may only be two now, but there’s no reason to believe there won’t be four when sign-ups close.

2. I couldn’t make the guild TotC (25) run this week so I pugged with another guild.  New group, same result; Anub lives to fight another day.  Maybe it’s me?

3. Just checked the combat logs, number one on most fights and no deaths except on Anub.  It’s not me.

4. The group I pugged with is going after Anub tonight.  Can’t say the same for my current guild which couldn’t get him down this week either.

5. Anub has three items I could use.  Legs, polearm and belt.  I rolled a 97 on a trophy and lost.  During our run there were a total of four rolls of 100 for various items.  I should probably hope that none of my stuff drops.

6. The guild I pugged with might soon have an opening for a ranged dps class.  I will probably take it.  Finding the right guild is a lot like finding the right company to work for (that’s not necessarily a good thing).

7. Loque’Nahak is the coolest pet ever!  I will have to bring him to face Arthas at some point.

8. My old guild’s forums are dead.  They used to be a lively place where the officers hung out.  My decision to leave was probably the right move.

9. The Redskins suck this year, but they beat Denver (a team with playoff hopes).  Did I mention that my wife’s family is from Denver and are huge Broncos fans?

10. My wife and I disagree about how much lettuce should go on sandwich.  Some battles just aren’t worth fighting.  I need an office rabbit.

As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

The recipes themselves are tied to the new Ashen Verdict reputation. What’s also interesting is that arrows require Gnomish engineering to make and the bullets require Goblin engineering to make.

It looks like engineers may have a new source of income.  We’ll have to see how this plays out.

Now I don’t know about you but I especially like it when my fellow raid members compliment me on my dps.  I like it even more when they compliment me on the other stuff too.  One of those other things involves a situational spell and a giant monkey named Icehowl.

The other night I was in ToC (25) where someone had the misfortune of getting rammed by Icehowl.  Luckily for our raid, I was ready for this and the King Kong wannabe only flashed red for an instant before he was returned to his more passive state.  Normally we keep vent quiet, but this time silence was broken by the raid leader to say thanks and find out just who was this Johny-on-the-spot hunter that saved our bacon.

I guess my zeal to see how good our tanks are at generating threat, and my faith in our healers to heal me through Legion Flames as I stand there so as not to let Sniper Training drop-off probably eliminated me from consideration.  But like they say even a blind squirrel can find a nut.  So yeah, it was me

The key to this is raid awareness and planning.  While I hope nobody will get hit by Icehowl, I play it as if they will.

What this means is once I’m stunned, I focus on DBM and wait to see who he’s targeting.  Once I get a name I then move my camera around and try to locate that person.  DBM is pretty good about placing a skull over their head.

Once I have this information in hand, I plan my route.   I want to follow Icehowl to his location without getting in his way.  As I run I have my finger poised on the Tranquilizing Shot button, so that I can fire it as soon as he enrages.

If you do this right, you’ll be in firing range as soon as he enrages, and with one press of the button everything will be back on track.  No deaths and no extra healing.

It should be noted that accolades do not translate into any special loot privileges.  It won’t net you a crusader’s trophy, nor will it prevent the raid leader from giving the feral druid the Lupine Longstaff even though you rolled higher.

Good Hunting!

P.S. – Yes I know icehowl is a yeti, but my raid group likes to refer to him as a monkey.

P.S.S. – Yes the Lupine Longstaff was given to our feral druid >.<

]]> http://thebrewhall.com/2009/11/03/shock-the-monkey-stroke-the-ego/feed/ 2 Darkbrew Icehowl http://thebrewhall.com/2009/10/31/the-hunting-party-podcast-episode-12/ http://thebrewhall.com/2009/10/31/the-hunting-party-podcast-episode-12/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:50:07 +0000 Darkbrew http://thebrewhall.com/?p=730 ]]> Hi folks! This week, Darkbrew and Euripides have the pleasure of interviewing Scott Johnson, from The Instance and the myextralife.com comic. Scott has also just started a new podcast called The FilmSack- honestly, I don’t know how this guy finds time to sleep

This show, we talk to him about leading the largest guild in WOW (and probably any MMO), Alea Iacta Est, as well as ask him a bunch of silly questions in a tribute to the Quick Fire Questions segment on The Instance. These ones are all hunter related. Well, mostly.

As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to outdps@gmail.com or thebrewhall@gmail.com, and mention “podcast” in the subject.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

Click to Enlarge

Here you go folks, a primer on how Deadly Boss mods works. I’m going to assume that you’ve downloaded and installed the mod.

Okay, so in case you hadn’t noticed we’re fighting Koralon the Flame Watcher from VoA (you know the jerk who throws fire underneath you and then gives you T9 gear when you win).

1. DBM Timer Bars - DBM has a variety of countdown timers it displays in the form of animated bars. By default these bars appear on the right, but I’ve customized DBM for me and put them on the left.

In the screen shot above we can see that Koralon will be casting meteor fists in 14.2 seconds. We also can see that we’ve got 3:57 seconds to get him down or he’ll enrage. Go, go, go!

2. Critical Warning - DBM does a great job you letting you know when bad things are happening to you. In this case the jerk through threw fire underneath me. Note that this text warning comes with an audio warning as well (Run away little girl  ).

The important thing to realize is that the warning is in giant blue text right in the center of my screen (this is by default, right out of the box, no assembly required). Seriously if you have DBM there is no excuse for dying in the fire.

3. Spell Timer. As events get closer to happening DBM will move the timer bar from the left (see item 1) and put it in a more central location. Please note that I have customized my DBM for me.

The point is DBM attempts to put this important information in a place where you can see what’s about to happen.

In the above screen shot the jerk is casting Burning Breath. No big deal because the healers all have DBM, saw that it was coming, and were ready for it.  Right healers?

4. Boss is Doing Something. Again this is another alert in big text in the center of your screen. In this case it’s reminding us that the boss is casting Burning Breath.

Click to Enlarge

In this second screen shot I wanted to point out some additional DBM warnings.

1. Raid Warnings. Here you’ll see two warnings for Meteor Fists. The first one that reads “Meteor Fists in 5 sec.” appeared on the screen about 5 seconds earlier letting us know meteor fists was coming. The text right above it is now the Meteor Fists event happening. The five second warning message is about to drop-off.

2. Boss is Doing His Thing. Okay, I’m not 100% sure that this one is a DBM message. It may actually be a Blizzard message built into the encounter. Still that’s a lot of warnings for Meteor Fists, which explains why our tanks never die from it because the healers have DBM and are always prepared.  Right healers?

3. Chat Warnings. Finally if all those spell timers, audio warnings, and giant text in the center of our screens wasn’t enough, DBM broadcasts all of this to our chat window as well.

So that’s basically it, DBM is designed to provide lots and lots of information regarding these raid encounters. Each encounter will have it’s owns set of alerts, but the basic placement of these alerts is pretty standard.

If you have a free moment, I encourage you to go into the DBM general options and run a test mode. This will give you samples of it’s alerts and warnings. It only takes about a minute to run.

RUN AWAY LITTLE GIRL!!

I’m a couple of days late on this one, but oh well.  Today I’m going to take a quick trip down memory lane, for it was on October 14, 2008 that patch 3.0.2 Echoes of Doom was launched.  This of course was the pre-cursor to Wrath of the Lich King.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year already, but here we are.

Some of the general highlights included,

• The Achievement system
• The Barber Shop
• 51 point talents
• Stormwind Harbor
• In-game calendar
• Mount and Pet changes
• Massive nerf of existing raid bosses

Overall hunters received one of the biggest overhauls of any class, and we’ve been evolving (and in some cases devolving) ever since.

Auto shot was fixed so it wasn’t clipped by Steady Shot, which meant we could throw away our silly spam macros.  We got the awesome Kill Shot, and the not so awesome Freezing Arrow.

We got additional stable slots and pets got their talent trees.  That meant no more running around taming throw away pets just to learn a new rank of Bite.

The patch introduced exotic pets and Beast Masters smiled as the stomp, stomp, stomp of their Devilsaurs and Core Hounds literally shook the screens of anyone around them.

Speaking of Core Hounds who doesn’t remember standing in line to tame the Kurken in the cave by Azuremyst Isle, or having a go at taming Uvuros.

Of course it was also the birth of Gorilladin and the short-lived Rhino Bowling.  I remember running down to Un’Goro and taming Lightbrew, the white gorilla who fought by my side as I leveled in the snows of Northrend.

It’s been a fun and very fast moving year of this expansion, and I’m amazed at how much fun I’m continuing to have playing my hunter.  The content in Outland seemed to get old very fast, but for some reason Northrend still seems new fresh.  Maybe when I’ve pried Frostmourne from Artha’s cold dead hands will it start to get old, but I doubt it.

Happy Hunting!

]]> http://thebrewhall.com/2009/10/16/echoes-of-doom-a-look-back/feed/ 2 Darkbrew Echoes of Doom http://thebrewhall.com/2009/10/13/the-hunting-party-podcast-episode-10/ http://thebrewhall.com/2009/10/13/the-hunting-party-podcast-episode-10/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:35:22 +0000 Darkbrew http://thebrewhall.com/?p=656 ]]>

- Jim Lovell, Apollo 13

.

.

Well this was long overdue, but satisfying nonetheless.  Phase I and II are crazy easy now, but those drakes are still a pain in the rear.

I was curious to see if Blizzard is on a faster track for delivering content for this expansion than they were with the Burning Crusade, and if so just how fast?

Today I’m going crank up the Wayback Machine and compare Burning Crusade’s patch releases with Wrath of the Lich King’s.

I only focused on the major patch releases and not the minor ones.  I also know that patch 3.0 was released on the October 15, 2008, but decided not to include that.  As you can see, however, the length of time between patches for this expansion is not that dramatically different from what was done in Burning Crusade.

Now I don’t think there’s any argument that the amount of content Blizzard has been pushing out for the expansion pack is greater than what they did for TBC.  Every one of Wrath’s patches has been similar to what we saw in 2.4.  From that perspective Blizzard has certainly improved.

The big question now is what’s next after 3.3 and when will it happen?  While we can certainly expect a few 3.3.x patches, I’m pretty sure that Blizzard isn’t looking to do a 3.4.

It wouldn’t at all surprise me if patch 3.3 were to be released right around the holidays.  If the expansion were to be released in November 2010 (which fits in with the Blizzard time line), then we’d be at almost a whole year with just patch 3.3.  That just seems way to long an interval to go without a major content patch.

Let’s speculate with some arbitrary dates.  If patch 3.3 were to drop on December 15, 2009 and Cataclysm were released on November 9, 2010 (both Tuesdays of course) then that’s 329 days between major content patches which is about 98 days longer than patch 2.4 and the release of Wrath.  Now maybe Arthas will be that tough, but I doubt it.

So maybe Cataclysm beta in February 2010 with release sometime in June?  I’d be happy with that.

Happy Hunting!

P.S. – patch release dates were taken from wowwiki and not gathered through any official Blizzard source.

]]> http://thebrewhall.com/2009/10/07/the-blizzard-wayback-machine/feed/ 0 Darkbrew Mr. Peabody and Sherman Major Patch Timeline