Our guild has started having heroic races, which is super, super fun. The guild bank puts up a pot, and anyone can put together a 5-man team to compete. We have a judge who chooses a random heroic on the spot (so no pre-knowledge) and we zone in, wait for the word, and go.

I love speed runs. Not just because they’re fast, but because they make heroics once again challenging. When you’re pulling several packs of adds as fast as you can, wiping suddenly becomes a possibility again. Mistakes are gonna be made and then you have to react and recover from those mistakes.

I recorded our run of Ahn’Kahet for fun. We screwed up the first pull badly — went far out of range of the healers (nitro boosts), causing both hrist and the mage to die before the healer even got there. So then we lost over 20 seconds to rezzing, not to mention how much longer the pack took. There were some other packs that we thought we could avoid, but turns out we couldn’t, so we had to double back for them.

Despite that, we still managed a time of 8 min 30 seconds, which isn’t bad at all for old kingdom.

Depressingly, we did not win that race. Someone had formed a team of all stealthers and they just walked past almost all of the trash. They beat us by about 30 seconds or so.

Also, AFK Rogue formed up a team to challenge, but amusingly most of them didn’t show up so he joined the stealth team.

For future runs the judge has declared stealth teams against the rules. I can’t wait for next week’s races!

Here’s a brief overview of the latest news on Cataclysm stat changes. For some deeper thoughts and speculation on what it may mean, you can read my WoW.com hunter stat change article.

• Stamina: we get lots more — almost as much as tanks. So does everyone else. This is another BC-style stamina jump.
• Intellect: going away, we don’t have mana, so we don’t need it. It won’t be on our gear. We aren’t sure what the int on our current gear will turn into.
• Attack Power: going away as a stat on gear (will still be in the game). Agility will now give us 2 attack power. AP on existing gear will be converted into agility and stam.
• Agility: giving us 2 attack power per agil, but to compensate it will give us less crit rating.
• Haste: will increase our rate of focus regeneration.
• Armor penetration: going away as a stat on gear (will still be in the game). ArP on existing gear will be converted into crit and haste.
• Armor: we’ll get more armor, and in fact our armor level will be closer to that of plate gear.
• Resilience: pvp only, no longer reducing our chance to be crit.
• Hit: staying around, but hit gems will now be blue.
• Crit: staying around, but our crit percentages won’t be nearly as high as they are now.
• Mastery: the magical new stat that will scale based on our tree. We still don’t know exactly how.
• Reforging: You’ll be able to convert one stat on your gear for 50% that much of another stat. You can’t get rid of your stamina. This is mostly intended for stuff like converting away excess hit rating on gear when you’re already capped.

The next Hunting Party live podcast will be tomorrow, saturday at 4:30pm central standard time!

We’ll be talking about the latest round of hunter news, the latest developer Twitter chat and of course answering your questions live.

You can access the live chat at www.huntingpartypodcast.com

I feel like there has been some misunderstanding about the BM dps changes announced in patch 3.3.3. The change is incredibly minor, and does almost nothing for the beleaguered BM spec.

Today I thought it might be nice to walk through some of the math to see exactly how the BM changes affect overall dps. As is my general preference, we’ll be doing some qualitative theorycrafting rather than absolute — the most accurate way to theorycraft (when you can) is to use actual raid results as your base numbers. It’s not always possible, but for changes that are a percentage change to abilities, it’s very easy.

So for BM I’m going to pop over to World of Logs and find the highest dps BM hunter report for Festergut, since I think we can agree this is someone doing it right Just to be on the safe side I also took a loot at other high dps reports to verify that the shot breakdowns were consistent, and they look to be pretty spot on.

Our hunter did 8,778 dps on Festergut — impressive!

Let’s take a look at the breakdowns:

Hunter: 5,638 dps (64.2%)
Pet: 3,140 dps (35.8%)
Total: 8,778

Breakdown by Shot

• Auto Shot : 46.6%
• Steady Shot: 27.4%
• Arcane Shot: 13.6%
• Kill Shot: 4.6%
• Serpent Sting: 4.1%
• Multi-Shot: 2.7%
• Quick Shot: 1.1%

So here we know that Steady Shot is about 27.4% of the hunter dps (about the same as for me as well!). So we know:

27.4% * 5638 = 1544.8  [total steady shot dps]

Further we know that Arcane Shot is about 13.6% of the hunter dps. So we know:

13.6% * 5638 = 766.8  [total arcane shot dps]

The Changes

Now let’s take a look at what’s changing in patch 3.3.3. First we have our Ferocious Inspiration changing to an aura. That could be nice for people far away from us with the 100 yard range, but the way FI works now is it already provides 3% damage buff to raid and party members whenever our pet crits, and lasts for 10 seconds. In other words, it’s basically a 100% uptime as long as our pet is attacking.

So even ignoring that the same buff is provided from other classes, this is not a dps increase for BM hunters. They already have the 3% damage increase from FI. The FI changes expand the range and will stay up if our pet dies, but don’t really change the dps that we get from it. So no change to our dps there.

The big one is that instead of giving us (not other hunters btw, just us) a 9% boost to arcane shot, it will instead give us a 9% boost to steady shot. This is good, since as we’ve seen, we get more damage from our steady shot, because it’s fired more often than arcane.

So, the total changes that we’re seeing is a loss of 9% damage to arcane shot and a gain of 9% damage to steady shot. Well, we’ve already calculated our steady and arcane damage, so let’s see how it changes our overall dps.

1544.8 * 9% = 139  [steady shot dps gain]

766.8 * 9% = 69   [approx. arcane shot dps loss]

139 – 69 = 70  [total dps gain from changes]

The Final Result

Now instead of the hunter doing 5,638 dps, he’s doing 5,708 dps, and of course the pet is still doing 3,140 dps. Thus:

Old dps total: 8,778
New dps total: 8,848

Total dps Increase: 0.8%

In other words, the BM change is netting less than a 1% gain in BM dps.

Of course the easier way to calculate the same thing would just be to take the percentages — hunter percentage * steady shot percentage * 9% steady gain and subtract hunter percentage * arcane shot percentage * 9% arcane loss.

(64.2% * 27.4% * 9%) – (64.2% * 13.6% * 9%)

1.58% – 0.78% = 0.8%

I think we can agree that BM need more to be competitive. Hopefully they’ve got more planned for the patch!

Today is the very last post of the Hunter Bet over at WoW.com, and I think it’s a fun one. I take a look at the stat of the ammo, and then have a bit of discussion over how cool our ammo could be (and I hope it is).

So please, please, hop on over and leave a comment. Pitch in with how you think ammo should work, or what your idea for some awesome kind of ammo is. Or heck, Go over to the general Scattered Shots listing and revisit each article once to boost our pagecount on everything for the month. This is our last chance to prove we have a more dedicated community than the druids.

When last we checked, the druids were in the lead by a small amount. Let’s knock them out of place once and for all!

But ever since Blizzard first told us they’d be removing consumable ammo we hunters have been dreaming of how awesome our ammo could be. It might burst into flame on impact, or cut through armor, or heal us, or heck, for all we know it would serve as a mount so we could fire gnomish rogues into the face of bosses! ..Read More.

WoW.com Dreaming of Awesome Ammo