Peter's Blog

Zomg Wtf

While grinding in Nagrand I was contemplating my grinding macro. To recap it was thus:

/petattack
/castsequence [reset=18] hunter's mark, scorpid sting, steady shot, steady shot

When using this against elementals the scorpid sting is always resisted so I contemplated whether it was worth having in the macro.

When I glanced at the tooltip for scorpid sting I had a shock: it uses 235 mana! A Steady Shot uses 110! I could be doing two more Steady Shots for the price of the Scorpid Sting!

I changed my macro accordingly:

/petattack
/castsequence [reset=18] hunter's mark, steady shot, steady shot, steady shot, steady shot

While using this I started thinking about 'shot rotation' in as much as after each steady shot I waited about half a second for the following autoshot.

The results were impressive.

Fights against level 65-67 monsters are now over in less than twenty seconds, that's about five seconds less on average than before. And this is against huge clefthoofs which surely ought to be tanklike? The second half of the fight is no longer a wait for a kill command, after four steady shots the fight is normally over. Before each Steady Shot I can check whether a Kill Command is possible and use that rather than Steady Shot to help the pet keep agro.

The Scorpid Sting was reducing damage to the pet by 5% but shortening the fight by 25% will save a bit more!

There are two small problems:

• Maevyn is drawing more agro: 900 damage crits on the steady shot
• Because the fights are often less than 18 seconds the castsequence does not reset for the next fight so I start the next fight with a Steady Shot before Tiddles has got agro and Mae draws direct agro.

Mana wise this is probably more efficient than what I was doing before. I've discovered my stack of Ravager Dogs give stamina and spirit and hopefully the latter will help with the mana somewhat (spirit isn't a hunter must-have but it's a use for the food buff slot).

My primary source of damage is the Steady Shot rather than the Auto Shot so things like Rapid Fire are of little help. I am also a little disappointed with 'Bestial Swiftness'. Another respec?

Summary: I've increased my grinding dps by, what, 33%? and at no extra mana cost and I could have been doing it since I got Steady Shot three levels ago. Level 67 and still a noob

Problem: how am I ever going to enjoy running a pally now?

UPDATE:

As luck would have it, I came across an excellent test of grinding efficiency, the Nesingwary Safari and their requirement to kill 90 beasts. The beasts are non-aggressive and there are many around so it is merely a test of how long it takes to kill so many animals. I found a reasonably time and mana efficient strategy:

• Select Aspect of the Viper as it generated about 400 mana per fight, which just about covered the Steady Shots. Including Mend Pet when needed, mana did decline over time and a drink was needed every ten minutes or so.
• Find a beast to kill
• Hunter's Mark and send pet in
• Wait for pet to do damage. I found that I wasn't waiting long enough before, by waiting a second or two longer the pet got agro more firmly and things were ready for some blasting.
• Steady shot: this takes about 1.5 seconds to cast.
• After steady shot wait about 0.5 seconds for auto shot. Auto shot happens every two seconds, by firing Steady Shot in the gaps I fire two shots every two seconds which is good.
• After auto shot, activate Kill Command if it is available, otherwise another Steady Shot

Doing this I was cruising at 100,000 XP/hour (with rest bonus and no quests turnins) which equates to 100 kills an hour or a kill every 36 seconds, including finding, targeting, sending pet, killing and looting.

I am wondering whether to go all out to improve this or accept it. Ways to improve would be:

• I am consistantly looting before starting the next fight, where possible I could send pet to engage before looting
• I wasn't having inventory problems but I was cherry-picking the loot. If I had enough empty bag space I could autoloot and worry about it later. I would also have MASSES of vendor trash that would be worth good gold
• One silly change I could make: my Z key still toggles between Aspect of the Hawk and Aspect of the Cheetah. If I changed it to Aspect of the Viper and Aspect of the Cheetah I would be able to sprint between kills. I would save Aspect of the Hawk to situations where killing power was more important.
• I found a 12 second reset on my grinding macro was optimum. Since four Steady Shots complete the average kill at a two second fire rate, this works out at four seconds for the pet to engage and eight seconds that Mae is shooting. A boar or warp stalker could shave maybe two seconds from this and give me 105 kills an hour which isn't worth neglecting my beloved Tiddles for.

Thinking now, probably the number one improvement here would be to empty my bags more and auto-loot. Faster grinding AND more gold. I would definitely need more mana breaks though as Aspect of the Viper would have less time to do it's thing. If mana breaks are inevitable maybe sod it, run with Aspect of the Hawk?

Nagrand seems to have a number of farmable rep turnins (Consortium, Halaa) with nice rewards. As Mae's future is likely to involve little more than farming and rep grinding it is good to make it as efficient as possible. Ironically I could grind for the 18 slot bags that are on offer.

Tiddles at 67

Also as an update on my pet levelling observations, Tiddles dinged 67 when Mae was about 75% of the way to level 68 so if I did want to level more than one pet along with Mae I would have had to spend extra time specifically pet levelling. Luckly, Tiddles is all I need. She has 9500 armour and her own private healer!