Can We Talk Hunters for a Minute?

Milo is acting out my hunter frustrations

Out of all my toons, the patch changes to hunters are my least favorite. Go figure. The very first thing I did, even before transmog, was switch Maruka over to beast master from marksman. As a hunter, I feel that being able to have pets out is one of the most, if not the most, important aspect of my class. What's a hunter without a pet?

I've raided with her as bm twice and I've run all the lfrs with her for the last two weeks. My numbers are fine. I'm first in our raid and usually #1 or #2 in LFR. Whatever. Who cares? What bugs me is the rotation. Take out the legendary ring, my trinket proc, and a couple cds, and I have three buttons to push. Kill command, dire beast, and cobra shot. It's BORING! And what's more!! It's ANNOYING!! All the whistling with dire beast is freaking annoying. Amiright?? On top of only having three main abilities to use, it seems like they're always on cool down or I'm waiting for my focus to regen. Granted, my gear is specced more towards marksman than bm and as such, I'm light on haste, but still.

Everyone keeps telling me to be patient and wait until I get my artifact weapon. And I am. I still consider Maruka to be my main and as of right now, I plan on raiding with her in Legion. I have to wonder though, is it more sentimentality that has to do with keeping her as my main or because I actually believe she'll be more fun with her artifact weapon? Time will tell I guess.

Mists of Pandaria: Hunter Pets

**I apologize for the darkness of my screenshots. I took them at night and it was raining. Also, for pete's sake, don't look at my armor. It's hideous. I'm not to the point where I want to transmog it yet so I'm doing my best to ignore it.**

As a hunter (Hunters RULE!!), one of the things I look forward to most about a new expansion is taming new pets. Finding and taming a new pet is always fun, finding new pet families is fantabulous fun. MoP has six new pet families including the two that came out with the pre-release patch.

• Basilisks
• Water Striders
• Cranes
• Goats
• Porcupines
• Quilen

So far, I've tamed a water strider, crane, and porcupine. I think, at this point, my blue porcupine, named Petunia, is my favorite. I really like the skins on the porcupine family. I actually traveled to Zangarmarsh when the patch came out to tame a blue Fen Strider because I'm the impatient sort and had to have a new pet right away. I have to say, I really love the Surface Trot ability, which gives the hunter the ability to walk/ride on water. That can be such a convenience. I also like the Still Water buff which increases spell power by 10% and critical strike by 5%. 

Lots of new pet looks were also released with MoP. Unfortunately, I am pretty disappointed with all but one of the new cat looks. I really don't like how the cats are so lumpy. It's like they're the Hunchback of Notre Dame of WoW. The one cat that I like, and have tamed, is the Hunched Jade Cat (See??? Hunched is even in the name.). I'm also unimpressed with the look of Pandaren turtles. I tamed one (a brown dragon turtle if I remember correctly) just so that I could have one, but I stabled it and doubt very seriously if it'll see the light of day. Frankly, they're just dull-looking in my opinion.

One of my favorite new looks, however, is the water strider. I had to have one of those as soon as I saw one and they also belong to the Water Strider family (obviously). Very nice-looking water bug. I also like the silkworms. I would kind of like to have one of each, blue, green, red, and yellow. I think they're all pretty cute.

As for the pet families I have yet to tame, goats, basilisks, and quilen, I'm excited to add them to my stable, more so for the goats and quilen. The quilen have a very handy skill, Eternal Guardian, which will allow for the resurrection of a party member. I think this will be extremely welcome in an instance or raid, to have an extra party member with this ability. It's just too bad that it can't resurrect the hunter. ;) I just think the goats are cute.

If you'd like more specific and detailed information on the newest pets, check out Petopia. The new pet families are just one more thing about the expansion that I am vastly enjoying. Any other hunters out there with MoP pet likes or dislikes??

Hunter Variety

When I first rolled Maruka, I went MM with her and this was before the days of dual talents. When dual talents came out, I resisted for quite some time paying for her to dual spec. I felt very loyal to MM. I eventually decided to give it a go and went for BM so that I could tame the cool pets. Turns out, I don't have the patience to camp out for the rare pets, lol. Nope. I flew around ONE time looking for some rares. I found the rhino, I can't remember it's name right now, and tamed that but I really wanted a spirit beast. Again, no patience and I wasn't really all that upset about it.

I concentrated on learning the rotation for a BM hunter then deciding which I liked best. Honestly, I don't think I have a real preference between the two after being all dramatic about it and swearing that I didn't need to dual spec. Grr! That totally turned me off to even giving survival a try at all. Until this past Saturday night.

I did a Google search and found a couple different blog articles comparing the dps output for all three hunter specs. Survival came out on top by quite a significant percentage. (And no. I don't have links to the articles cuz I'm dumb and didn't save them. Perhaps I'll search through my history (which happens to be on my other computer) and update this post at some future time. My apologies.) I caved to the pressure and swapped out BM for SV. Or maybe it was MM for SV. Christ on a crutch. I don't remember. After figuring out my shot rotation and practicing on some dummies, I headed into one of the HoTs and gave it a go. I beat the other hunter in there with me by very, very significant numbers but the tank and the other DPS kicked my butt. Granted, their ilvl was about ten points higher than mine (as was the other hunter, hmm) and it was only my second time in that instance, but I was a bit disappointed with my showing.

That being said, I grudgingly admit that SV is a fun spec. I like the shot rotation better than the other two. It just feels like explosive shot and black arrow add some much needed variety in the hunter rotation. At least those two shots have a cooldown that provides some challenge when it comes to focus regen whereas BM and MM only have one significant attack with a cooldown. At least in my rotation. I also seem to be doing about 2k more dps but it's too soon to say.

P.S.

I tamed the purple spider in the Firelands, I forget its name, this past weekend which makes #2 in the rare pet tames. Go me!

P.P.S.

This post has made me realize that I need to WoW blog from the same computer on which I play WoW. I have no screenshots, browser history, and few bookmarks on my laptop. It makes for bland, unreferenced posts, lmao.