OK, the warlock help situation is on hold for a little bit. She’s making a concerted effort to figure some stuff out so we’ll see where she is in a week or so.
The guild hunter, on the other hand, may have been a much easier fix.
Our hunter just hit 80 sometime last week I think. She’s very much a casual player – plays as often as she can, has a few add ons, but doesn’t have an interest in memorizing hit rating tables and whatnot. But she listens when we make suggestions to her rotation and wants to improve so she can be more helpful.
We took her through Halls of Lightning with another reasonably fresh 80, our enhancement shaman. (I <3 totems. Little portable fountains of yummy mana. Om nom nom.)
She pulled around 900 DPS for the entire run. Poor thing, her Recount settings are jacked, she thought she was only doing 600.
Take a look at her gear. Um, wow. That’s level 70 stuff, a couple Northrend quest items and a chest piece a guildmate snagged off the AH cheap for her. No gems. No leg kit. 2 enchants. Eek.
Peek at the spec. Good, not mind-blowing excellent, but good.
Another guildmate is working on his level 70 hunter on another server so he’s been digging around the vast interwebz looking for useful hunter stuff. Lo and behold, he found http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/.
This site has pretty nifty lists for gear that you can get as a fresh 80. You know what this means?
Makeover, World of Warcraft style!
We have a blacksmith in guild that was able to whip up a couple nice swords with hit rating. I popped some decent enchants (sorry, I can’t quite go all out for the ones that require 6 fucking abyss crystals) on them. Got her a belt buckle. Gems for the buckle and her chest piece. A scope for her bow from the guild engineer. A new pair of boots from a leatherworker in the guild, leather courtesy of another guildmate. Threw an enchant on those too.
Mailed the whole mess off to her and shipped her a spec that will give her some more hit rating without sacrificing anything in her play style. Also gave her instructions on a macro to make using Misdirect a little easier for her.
All told, I think 5 of us in the guild chipped in cash and materials equal to about 500g, give or take. With that, we were able to get her hit capped for 5-man content, boosted her attack power, and raised all sorts of other stats all over the place.
If she was riding 900 with scrub gear, I can’t wait to see what she does with some better stuff! Squeeeeee!
Unfortunately, her internet is borked up and we haven’t been able to take her new wardrobe out for a test drive.
Now if only the guild warlock didn’t already have good gear…
PS – If anyone is wondering about all the edits to the older posts, I finally figured out how to make it truncate the posts. Go go WordPress forums!
clearcasting 
OK… Now you’ve really piqued my interest, being a Hunter and all. What spec did you suggest? Conventional wisdom says that lower gear favors BM specs, but the best DPS later is in survival. I have 2 pieces of T7, though, and can’t pull off the Crit rating for survival… Need to have around 35% for that to really work. So, I have a mix of crafted, Heroic, and Naxx gear and am doing 2.5k DPS with a BM spec. It sounds like you found some good info for the hunter already though.
LikeLike
All credit for finding anything goes to my guildmate that actually plays a hunter.
She really enjoys the BM tree, I expect that she would stay there regardless of the numbers that can be produced somewhere else. (Had an SV hunter in a 25-man vault that rocked the charts. I couldn’t touch her with a 15-foot pole.)
My guildmate tweaked the spec found at the Raider101 site (http://www.raider101.com//wikka.php?wakka=HunterBeastmaster) to account for not having full hit cap from gear. He may have shifted a couple other things; she’s a casual player so we don’t want to make things too complicated or “not fun.”
We ended up sending her: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/hunter/talents.html?tal=512002015252120431005310510253050300200000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Probably not the best spec in the world, but it should suffice for 5-man. I hope. I honestly have very little in the way of a clue for hunters. =)
LikeLike
So, I don’t know if you feel like discussing it, but I can’t help but wonder about the Improved Revive pet and Spirit Bond. These are typically used for doing a lot of soloing. In an instance environment, as I understood the plan was, the idea is that her pet shouldn’t be taking damage. Is she using a Ferocity pet? I personally suggest the Devilsaur for doing DPS, as it has the highest output. If she is, taking the pet talent Bloodthirsty, her pet will heal and regain happiness by attacking. This pretty much makes your pet health/happiness a non-issue. The Hunter Talent Animal Handler is a much better use of points, I think. I’m a little fuzzy still one when expertise helps, but 10 points is pretty good. I’d also suggest putting at least some points into Efficiency. It has helped me a lot. One of the biggest DPS killers for Hunters is oom. Anyway, good build beyond that.
LikeLike
She does a lot of solo content for questing.
And she has a cat. A very pretty white one with spots. It seems fairly ferocious to me, but I have no idea if it’s a ferocity pet. It’s her favorite and I don’t know that she would change it for a big, hulking dinosaur.
My guess is that the Revive Pet and Spirit Bond were left in to keep her up and running while she’s doing quests. As a casual gamer, we don’t want to burden her with re-specs and the like.
I haven’t seen her OOM, but we haven’t tested the new build yet.
My hunter knowledge is pretty much limited to the fact that you get your first pet at level 10 and everything on the BM Raider101 page.
I did level a hunter to 20-ish… about a year ago. I wasn’t terribly good at it.
Hoping to drag her through something this week and we’ll test it out. If it needs any tweaking, I’ll be making your recommendations.
Thanks!
LikeLike
Cool. The cat is the second favorite of Hunters for DPS, so no worries there. I know I love my Dino, but that’s just me. I can totally see the need for the talents then, if she does a lot of soloing. I know for me, it works out a lot better to have Efficiency than Improved Sting is all. So, since it really depends on play style for those kind of tweaks, I’d say her build looks good. Most important thing is that she enjoys the style of play it offers. Lets face it, if she doesn’t like it, she won’t play.
LikeLike