As some of you know (those of you who follow me on Twitter), I’m in the midst of planning a move. For my day job, I accepted an awesome new position at a company in Boston (currently in Minnesota) and I’ve been frantically doing all the stuff you need to do to move across the country — well as much of it as I can get done while still working at my current job.

Today is my last day at BestBuy.com, and I arrived in the office to see this waiting for me:

Yes, not only do all my co-workers know I play WoW, they also know enough to do a Google image search for “Frostheim’s Cloak” to include the Recovered Cloak of Frostheim on the cupcake tribute.

So even in the midst of corporate America, I’m known as a hunter blogger!

Also, this is why I’ve been notably absent from the blog (and occasionally the podcast) — you would not believe how much time this moving & looking for a place to live in an area you don’t know at all sucks up. I’m still reading all my regular WoW blogs, but haven’t really had time to write much — and of course there hasn’t been much big hunter news, so I’ve felt okay stepping back (if there were news, I’d certainly make time to write about it).

I’m flying up to Boston this weekend and early next week to get a place to live, but my hope is after that I’ll have more time again for the WHU. After all, without an 8-hour workday every day eating up my time, I can get more done and have more time for WoW and the WHU!

Several years ago, I made a request for hunter poetry, or general (original) WoW poetry, in anticipation of the first WHU live BBQ in Frostheim’s hometown. I did the same the following year. These were a great success, and have appeared sporadically in podcasts and articles over the years.

But they’ve never ALL been posted. Until now.

This is the beginning of a series where I’ll post every hunter poem I have in my collection. Wherever possible, I’ll post the name of the hunter who contributed it. There may be a few where this was lost, but I’ll do my best. This first installment features a couple of my own, but dozens of hunters contributed to the collection and will be featured in coming weeks.

And if you’ve ever submitted a poem to me, thank you. And to everyone: enjoy!

Elves vs. Dwarves (by Årth) (NSF children)

Poop in a stall, avoid a big brawl
For I am a delicate elf.
Climb a big tree, see what’s to see
For I am a tree-hugging elf.
Let out a sigh, when I see a butterfly
For nature is one with an elf.
I abhor all guns, a bow is more fun
More fun for this gun-hating elf.
A dwarf walks toward me, he is short and silly
Not worth the time of this elf.
He punches me in the face, there’s blood all over the place
The blood of this delicate elf.
He kicks me in the head, shoots his gun till I’m dead
Feel bad for this poor, poor elf.
He treats me like a whore, has his way with my corpse
This cackling dwarf on an elf.
He gives me to his bear, and other animals to share
They take turns devouring this elf.
I finally reach heaven, to be with my brethren
A final rest for this elf.
But there are no elves to see, Just dwarves torturing me
An eternal hell for this elf.
So take it from me, when you’re at the character screen
Pick a dwarf, not an elf.

Haiku to Haste (by Årth)

Haste is a great stat
It does many different things
Except make any sense.

Untitled (by Dannok of Whisperwind)

I enter into Blackrock Caverns and gasp
Fire and targets waver before me
My bow tenses
My fingers tickle the feathers of a notched arrow
I wait, breathless
I see the paladin run in and hit Rom’ogg
Once,
Twice,
And then I fire gustily,
Greedily, like a hunter starved
For I am…
For the death of my enemies
But, only five arrows decorate the chest of Rom’ogg
Before his baleful gaze lights upon me
I grab my chest,
Drop my bow,
And pitch forward
The taste of ash and rock fills my mouth as I count to ten
Then, up I fly
Grabbing my bow,
Nocking an arrow,
And let fly
There is no holding back now
My shots fly faster and faster
Chains of Woe hold no terror for me
And the small, scrabbling elementals may impress others
But my bow sings to the misery of such
Rom’ogg feels my sting
As he falls
To the ground
Ruined

Tabana spotted a series of tweets about hunters from WoW PvP designer Holinka. He talks about a couple of changes being made for PvP reasons, that have some PvE implications — fortunately they seem to be considering the PvE implications.

Specifically he clarified that the shared diminishing returns for Scatter Shot, Freezing Trap and Wyvern sting announced for patch 5.3 will be reverted (thus we should never see it). However, to compensate, BM will be losing the 30% reduction to pet cooldowns that comes from the BM Exotic Beasts.

Holinka then made a fascinating clarification: responding to another person who complained this was a PvE nerf, he then said that pet abilitiesused in PvE would have their base cooldowns reduced — he didn’t explicitly say by how much, but in theory we’d hope to see the full 30%.

The interesting effect of this is that BM in PvE should (in theory, if it’s a full 30% reduction) see no change in their or their pet’s dps. But MM and SV will suddenly have reduced cooldowns for their pets’ special abilities.

Will this mean a tiny boost to MM/SV dps? Or is it irrelevant because MM/SV pets won’t have enough focus to use their abilities any more often anyway (since they often don’t have enough focus to use them now).

This is something we talked about on the podcast a couple weeks ago (and maybe touched on even earlier), but my email box tells me that I never actually posted about it, so…

Right now for most hunters, your secondary stat priority is going to be Crit >mastery/haste (an argument can be made on the order of the last two depending on spec and gear).

Semicolon however comma…. for some hunters, haste is first

The effect of many pieces of the new RPPM gear is being felt. This started with our trinkets using Blizzard’s Real Proc Per Minute system, that was designed to give us a random feel of procs, but with some predictability as well. The meaningful part of RPPM for this discussion is that your RPPM proc rate is boosted by haste. Thus more haste means you get more procs per minute, on average.

This gets added to the fact that haste starts to get a bit more valuable anyway at very high gear levels, and the fact that you can get more RPPM effects than just the trinkets, and suddenly at top gear levels haste is looking more attractive than even crit for all specs.

Again, this is at top gear levels.

Not only does it require good gear, but it really does require that you have several RPPM items (I’d say at least four) — trinkets, set bonuses, and the RPPM meta gem.

Zeherah first brought this issue up with me many weeks ago, and we had some discussion on it — and I do very much want to get her back on the podcast, by the way, so we can have a more in depth conversation on it (alas I’ve been sick as a dog this past week, and we already have an awesome guest lined up for this coming weekend) — and somehow I never actually got around to mentioning it on the site, despite answering all these emails on it.

Where the Fight Starts

There isn’t much question that haste becomes your best secondary stat with great gear and all the RPPM items. The point of endless disagreement is going to be exactly where the line is — when does haste cross over from a low-rate secondary stat into the top secondary stat?

I can tell you right now that there is no one “right” answer, and for a good amount of space on either side of the line the picture is going to be messy. As always with haste, some of the benefit depends on your actual ability to take full advantage of it: in a world where human optimization decisions are made on computer performance models, when you’re riding that line you may not get what you’d expect (or you may get more).

The good news is that if you’re anywhere near that line — remotely near it — the difference one way or the other is going to be so small that you won’t even be able to measure it!

But what I want to stress to hunters is that haste uber alles is not going to be the right strategy for everyone. Much like armor pen back in the day, you need to reach a certain gear level before it actually becomes better than other secondary stats (and of course agility, ranged dps, and being at the hit and expertise cap are all more important still).