How to buy your way into a raid.

No, this isn't about how you can literally buy a raid slot, much like Gevlon did many months ago. This is more about how to spend your money to get great gear. It may seem a little obvious, but it's a lot easier to learn how to make money on the auction house and then buy epics than to run hundreds of heroic dungeons to get geared up. Ideally you should be doing both but making money will dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend in the dungeon finder queue. I recently (with a lot of help questing from my wife) leveled a hunter alt to 80. A mere 3 days after I hit 80, most of my gear was at least an iLvL 200 epic. There's a ton of great crafted gear out there for new 80's to buy. Before I even hit 80, I had the Crusader's Dragonscale chest and wrists for a total of around 6k gold and those are iLvL 245 pieces. Just spend a few days shopping around and eventually you can get a good deal on enough epics to get you into ToC 10 man raids.

On a related note, I recently came into possession of Rowan's Rifle of Silver Bullets, which is a tanking gun that drops off of trash in Icecrown raids. I was reluctant to take it at first, because other than Hit, it has NO hunter dps stats. But, one of the hunters in the raid made a very good point. He suggested I take it anyway and use a hunter dps spread sheet, like the one from http://www.femaledwarf.com/ to see if it would be an upgrade. So, I did and I was shocked. My hunter had been using the True-Aim Long Rifle from ToC 5 non-heroic. It's a good starter hunter weapon and better yet, it's a gun and no self respecting dwarf would be caught dead with a bow. I plugged the Rowan's Rifle into the spreadsheet and found that it was a 311 dps increase! I then wanted to compare it to other ranged weapons and found that it was higher dps than the iLvL 232 crossbow that drops off of Ick in Pit of Saron heroic. Compared against the BRK-1000, Rowan's Rifle is only 11 dps lower (unbuffed).

So, for all you fresh level 80 hunters, if you can find a good deal on Rowan's Rifle, pick it up and you'll be using it for a long time. Just be prepared to defend yourself if someone inspects you and sees you using a gun with tanking stats. Better yet, prove them wrong by showing them your dps in Recount.

The benefits of farming

So, it's been tough lately to get some quality mining time in so I can get accurate numbers for my mining experiment. Between leveling my hunter alt (the most fun I've ever had leveling a character), raiding and helping the guild with brewfest stuff, I haven't had an uninterrupted hour of farming time. A side note, I was part of the first successful AUO 10 man Onyxia raid on Saturday and it felt gooood. We got her on the 7th attempt. She truely is a loot pinata, dropping about 5 or 6 items (I can't remember exactly) which is awesome for a 10 man raid. I won the spellpower sword because I was the only one that could use it. I love winning loot by default! I don't need no stinking /roll.

On to the heart of the subject here. Mining does have it's benefits. I was doing a few laps around Icecrown and decided to head into Sholozar Basin. I had hit 3 titanium nodes in less than 10 minutes and was feeling lucky. I normally head into the Basin and turn left, flying clockwise mining as I go. I decided this time to turn right and go counter clockwise. Good thing I did. As I land to mine a saronite node, I notice the star on my mini map marking one of the spawn points of Loque'nahak, the spirit beast. My wife's hunter has all 3 spirit beasts, so I normally don't pay much attention to these spots any more, but this time I decided to take a look behind me after I mined the ore. Sure enough Loque was there! I quickly did a /gchat shout out for all hunters interested to head to my location asap. Darallun (of afkautoshot) quickly replied and hauled ass out to Sholozar. Luckily, no one else showed up and he had an easy time taming the beast. So now, Darallun has his second spirit beast! It was like the stars had all aligned that night. Darallun usually raids as Survival, but I think he needs to start going Beast Master and bringing out his new kitteh.

So, as we can see, sometimes farming has benefits that transcend the accumulation of gold.

Engineering ammo changes

A Blizzard developer mentioned recently that he thought that hunter ammo expenses were too high and they wanted to change that. After some reader responses and a few calculations, I found that hunters do indeed spend a lot of gold on crafted ammunition. The costs are so high that one of our guild hunters (read his blog here) recently said that he has stopped using crafted ammo all together and that he’s still doing exceptional DPS. Well now we know that Blizzard is going to go forward with their ammo changes. Here’s the breakdown:

Currently, engineers create ammo crates which hold 10 charges of 200 pieces of ammo. Each crate = 2000 shots and at 20 gold per stack of saronite and cobalt ore, cost roughly 30 gold per crate for saronite razorheads and about 21 gold per crate for mammoth cutters.

The change for patch 3.2 is that engineers will no longer create crates but stacks of 1000 arrows/bullets. The materials cost for 2000 razorheads is now 4 saronite bars. For 2000 mammoth cutters it’s 2 saronite bars and 3 cobalt bars + 1 crystallized water. The materials cost for 2000 razorheads @20 gold/stack of ore should be ~ 8 gold. The materials cost for 2000 mammoth cutters should be ~ 7 gold. That works out to be a materials cost of about 25% of the previous cost.

I don’t know what to think of the change. I don’t sell a lot of ammo crates because there is more competition and it seems fewer buyers. Lately with school being out, it seems there are a lot more buyers for my ammo stacks. I guess more casual players are picking up the game again for the summer. What does this have to do with anything? Well, ammo crates are going to go away for good. All crafted ammo will now be sold as stacks of ammo. This is good and bad for me. It’s good because it means more customers, it’s bad because it means more competition. Since the price of materials is going down by 75% it also means more room to undercut. It’ll be interesting to see how much ammo goes for after the patch. On Bleeding Hollow, the price of a stack of 1000 has stabilized to about 35-37 gold. Will we see prices drop by half? What will the competition be like? Ammo sales are my primary source of income, so I am a bit concerned.

More on hunter ammo

I was a little shocked to hear how much ammo hunters use in raids. I had always assumed it was maybe 1000 arrows/bullets for a full clear on Naxx. Once I read the comments on how much hunters are spending on ammo, I decided to do a little math to support their assertion.

Assuming that 1 shot of ammo is used every time a player clicks an ability that causes something to fly out of the end of their bow/gun and (for the sake of simplicity) an auto shot speed of 3 seconds, we can calculate the burn rate of ammo as (t/1.5) + (t/3), where the first number is ammo used by hunter spells and the second is ammo used by auto shots. That also conveniently works out to be 1 round of ammo per second as we can reduce the formula to Burn Rate = (.66t + .33t). Math is fun! And you thought algebra was dumb and you’d never have to use it after high school.

Let’s assume also that it takes 5 minutes to down a boss in Naxx and since some bosses have an enrage timer of 5 or 6 minutes, your hunter won’t be using ammo face down in the dirt after an enrage wipe anyway. Sure, a well geared raid can burn a boss down in less than 4 minutes, but we’ll just use 5 minutes as a hypothetical median. There are 18 bosses in Naxx and sometimes there are wipes and always trash to clear, so we’ll go with 20 bosses worth of ammo consumed.

Here are the numbers:

300 seconds per boss = 300 units of ammo used * 20 bosses = 6000 units of ammo used in a full clear of Naxx.

That’s 3 crates of ammo for one raid.

I was shocked that my original assumption of how much ammo a hunter uses was so low. Some of the commenter’s numbers are probably a little conservative too. Even if the hunter were to buy stacks of ore to give to a miner/engineer to make ammo, he’d still be spending about 90 gold on saronite ore to make 3 crates of ammo. Add on top of that the costs of repairs, flasks and buff food and it can be very expensive to be a dedicated raiding hunter.

It almost makes me feel bad about making money from ammo sales. Almost, because I’m sure Blizzard will nerf engineering/change hunter ammo soon and I’ll lose a major source of income. Because Blizzard hates Paladins AND Engineers.

Interesting blue post on ammo

Ghostcrawler responded to a post from a hunter on a range of subjects. You can find it here. There are a few interesting comments made.

But we did design the hunter around having potent CC, and we don't think their CC feels scary any longer. Traps are probably in most need of some attention here. We'll try and go into more detail in the class Q&A if it isn't too far away.

First, it seems the developers are really getting the point that hunters in PvP aren't anywhere near what they used to be or should be. I can only hope they made some changes soon so my arena partner Krys and I can get our 2's back to a more respectable rating.

The more interesting comment is this one:
We agree with the comments that ammo costs have gotten too high. It was acceptable when hunters realistically did not die as often, and thus didn't have high repair bills. But it has gotten too high now.

I certainly hope Ghostcrawler is talking about vendor ammo and not crafted ammo. I know they have plans on redoing how hunter ammo works. This plus the comment above doesn't bode well for us Engineers who make a living from ammo sales. I really have no idea how much ammo a hunter goes through in a week but I'd guess that a raiding hunter that does some light questing/skinning on the side doesn't spend as much on repairs and ammo as a tank that does the same. I'll have to gather some data from the guild hunters to see how expensive things have become.