Peter's Blog

Changed Realm

I have moved Maevyn and Pook to eu-eonar where they could be with an alt I was fond of. Eonar is a bit quieter than aerie peak and I prefer it. The tranfer process only took about half an hour despite all the warnings about not being able to play for five days you get while signing up. I left Sissle and the old auction alt on Aerie Peak. I have gone off levelling a priest, the range of offensive tools sounds limited.

Maevyn

Maevyn is currently level 66. Since I figured out that steady shot is far more efficient than arcane shot I have altered my grinding macro as follows:

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

Two steady shots uses slightly more mana than one arcane but gives twice the damage. Result? Killing average mob takes circa twenty seconds and thus is tolerable. I press a mouse button four times and wait for mob to die. Mana lasts a few minutes of constant killing, longer if I switch to Aspect of the Viper where the extra mana dribble makes up for loss of dps from Aspect of the Hawk.

Mae has died about three times in the last three or four levels, twice through falling from high places and once through being dismounted when riding through a camp. Mini-map tracking and being aware of ones surrounding s ftw

She has joined the scryers, primarily because it is not fatal to fall off their lift...

At level 66 and still fighting level 63's in TK forest things are easy but quest rewards are for sub-optimal gear. Doesn't matter much against sub-optimal opposition. Armed with a nice blue gun Mae and Tiddles tooltip dps is about 320 compared to pook's 125.

Tiddles

Tiddles is level 64. Have tried the following pets:

ravager

very good dps pet, didn't come with dash and so was slow into fights and didn't run it long enough to train it up. Got a random whisper asking me how I got it's armour so high: over 7000 with no training and comparable to pooky! Some of that comes from Mae's armour and her predilection for +agility.

warp hunter

the warping into a fight is great but again didn't aquire enough training points to train it with bite/claw so it's dps was noticably lacklustre. I definitely trained a level 64 warp hunter from the bone wastes in TK forest but as soon as it was tamed it's label changed to warp stalker. Warp stalkers are to be avoided as pets as they have caster stats. If you don't know what that means then good luck running a hunter.

I realised that while I was messing around with other pets Tiddles levelling was lagging and as pets level VERY slowly > 60 I'm concentrating on Tiddles to make sure she reaches 70 at more or less the same time as Maevyn.

Pookypoo

He's now my auction alt. I can't be bothered to run him, paladin grinding is beyond tedium compared to hunters (two kills and a mana break). I've done research and I think his problem is his gear is crap: he's got lots of +spelldamage but as a retribution paladin he ought to have AP, strength and agility. I'm working on changing his gear but each item change seems to be costing him stamina. I recommend the Ratings Buster addon when gear shopping.

Maezyn

My new Dranai huntress with a Nightstalker cat called... Pook. Level 13 and taking about eight seconds to kill the average mob. I plan to level her as marksman to see what that is like. I run her while Maevyn gets rest bonus: I am refusing to waste my time levelling Maevyn without it.

Maezyn is skinning but I've vacillated about her second profession going through mining, leatherworking, engineering and then mining again. I feel that crafting professions other than alchemy are a waste of time until the point where you can make level 70 epics which is too far away for Maezyn to worry about. I think Maezyn will skin and mine and make nothing more than money.

Alchemy

Maevyn is about 353 alchemy. She can transmute primal mights but there isn't a lot of money in it without farming materials so she is still transmuting arcanite for fun and profit. Borderline tempted to farm Sporeggar rep for the easy-money transmute primal earth->water recipe but it involves killing 432 naga.

Maevyn rarely uses health pots and the drops she gets suffice. She uses unstable mana pots using the ragveil from Zangarmarsh when she needs a quick mana fix. These are the only pots she bothers to make.

Incidently you can buy the primal might transmute recipe from a bird man in shattrath, although it's green it isn't a drop. Don't get suckered into buying it from the AH like I did

Secondary professions

Fishing

got it over 250. Found that by binding a key to cast and using auto-loot one can catch maybe four fish a minute and hence go at a more reasonable pace. Must be in mood for it. Need about 500 more catches to get to level 300

Cooking

267. Deciding whether to level cooking with or without fish. Without means returning to Silithus to farm sand worms, with means fishing in Azshara at a point where level 250 ain't good enough, even with +75 baubles. Ultimately enough meat drops to keep tiddles happy and Mae is productive enough without the buffs from cooked meats so I would only level these up for completeness.

First Aid

got a billion netherweave cloths and could get it to 375 at will but can't be bothered. A stack of netherweave bandages vendors for 2g.

Money

Through vendoring her Outlands drops Maevyn has already got enough cash for the basic flying mount.

LOTRO

I bought a copy of Lord of the Rings Online but can't get past the first quest (which for some reason it makes me repeat whenever I start the game up, and once I've done that quest I'm bored and want to do something else). It's like a WoW clone with higher resolution graphics but choppy frame rate, even on 2.6GHz dual core. The loader program is buggy: I never recall WoW showing me a stack dump. I've cancelled the subscription.

Old 32 inch Hitachi TV in computer room was getting annoying:

• generally poor picture quality: lousy colour
• very poor picture quality when using scart lead: hence had to connect to PVR with phono so whenever I turned it on I had to manually switch it to EXT2.
• randomly turned itself off once a day or so, causing babies to start screaming at loss of 'In the Night Garden'. My hack had made this happen a lot less but it still happens at annoying times (e.g. ending of Titanic). Once it is in the mood it won't stay turned on for more than a minute.
• electric shocks when I fiddled with the aerial cable (turning equipement off when fiddling with cables is for wimps).
• original remote long lost by previous owner, programmable remotes can change volume/channel but not colour/settings.

So after some scouring I bought a 42 inch plasma TV. It's a Philips and it was £650 from amazon (compare to £899 for a 40 inch LCD in Currys). Ok Philips isn't the most popular make but reviews I read were enthusiastic. Picture is amazing, very sharp if a little too bright, everything is a bit cartoonish. Setting picture to 'soft' makes it ok. It seems to be lacking in front panel connectors but I never use those anyway. I was initially reluctant to buy a plasma as I heard they degraded faster than LCD's but apparently modern ones aren't so bad and we're talking 20,000 hours to degrade to half brightness on a tv that should only be on a couple of hours a day so it may be something to worry about 27 years from now.

I've connected it up to an AV amp and a big pair of speakers and it is fantastic. The built-in sound is ok but the amp and speakers put it in a different league. The TV has freeview (DVB-T) built in but the PVR is a much nicer thing to use: for example the guide in the TV is reluctant to show you what is on beyond the next program and doesn't show a picture. It also changes channel sluggishly.

Time to break out Dean's Firefly DVD set, now I have something decent to watch it on. One question though: is it better to watch Serenity before or after?

Kill Command

How could I do a catchup and not comment on Kill Command? This is a new talent bought at level 66. While fighting a mob, if you get a critical hit then the Kill Command is enabled for a few seconds and if you hit the button in time your pet will deal a 100 damage or so. The problem I have found with it is that during a fight I am staring at the button on the action bar, waiting for it to become enabled so I can bang it. I know some people write macros that spam Kill Command and suppress the error messages that come up if it wasn't enabled but I hate banging exception handlers like that. Maybe I could study the numbers that float up during a fight and recognise a crit but it would be a bit like those guys on the Matrix staring at the green screens.

In my grinding Kill Command isn't the difference between living and dying, ultimately I will probably forget it is there.

Another Tip

I have found mapping the V key to arcane shot very useful. It is easily reached by my left hand to quickly stop runners. My right hand is normally on the mouse these days, running my grinding macro. This macro is so good that I even use it to deal with adds. It is getting so that I almost forget what the 1 to = keys do. Of these the one I use most often is probably Disengage: I only use Feign Death as a last resort if a number of mobs are targetting Mae. Two Disengages are usually enough to stop Mae being attacked by a single foe.

H is mend pet, and I use this in almost every fight.

Gift of Blizzard

Maezyn, being a draenai has the racial spell 'Gift of the Naaru' which is a nice little heal over time. She found it very useful in solo meleeing bosses before she got the pet. It seems she can now cast it on her pet and I am looking forward to trying out both Mend Pet and Gift of the Naaru to see how tough the pet can be.

As a Draenai Marksman she is not looking forward to running around ridden with diseases: no Stoneform, no Improved Mend Pet.

Since I got my Dell 2405FPW 24 inch Widescreen Monitor I have overall been happy with it apart from it's annoying tendency to show certain pixels pink. It looked as if certain colours were transposed to pink so a mountain for example may have pink stripes where it happened to be a certain shade and colour. On the whole it was distracting and sometimes it would degrade to the extent where the image looked like something the Predator would see.

My solution to the problem was to give the monitor a thump at a certain point on the back panel towards the left. This solution was reasonable and normally i would need to do it at least once per session although sometimes I would have a few pink-free days.

As time passed the problem got worse, thumping would reduce the amount of pink but not completely eliminate it. Sometimes I would thump the monitor and the screen would turn white or freeze which was most annoying when trying to play WoW.

By yesterday the problem was so bad that I was having to bang my desk with my knee as I played to avoid the freezing problem.

Time to have the back off.

The back of the monitor came off using the time honoured prising with a flat-blade screwdriver technique: there were four screws under the mounting point for the stand but the case was snapped on around the edge. Interestingly the circuit boards were all marked 'Benq'.

The fact that thumping would relieve the symptoms made me suspect a loose connector so I checked all I could see. No problems apparent so I plugged it into the computer with the back off to try banging it in various places to locate the problem. Unfortunately the screen was now dead. This was disturbing but I decided the only course was to further dismantle it and look for more connectors. I managed to get the LCD panel out quite easily. It was surprisingly light, most of the weight of the monitor was in the metal chassis. This panel had a circuit board on it with two flat ribbon cables, the kind where a flat flexible circuit plugs into a connector. The one to the right came out of the connector too easily, as if it had been loose. The cable itself was stuck down with transparent tape and it looked as if whoever assembled it had left no slack at all.

I put it all together and was relieved when it showed it's normal start up screen with no pink pixels.

I'm happy, the picture is now perfect.

Moral: be brave, get the screwdrivers out, rip it apart, what can go wrong? Oh, and warrantys are for wimps.

Why the V

I remember now why I mapped V to arcane shot. I had a go at kiting and V was a more convenient place for it than the 8 button.

My first attempt at kiting was with a ravager in Hellfire Peninsular. Essentially I did the following:

• set pet on passive (don't want it interfering, grabbing agro etc)
• target ravager
• shoot at it
• run away
• aspect of the cheetah
• whenever cooldown is up, jump, spin 180 degrees, fire arcane shot, spin back, carry on running

It was actually much easier than I though it would be. My main problem was not waiting long enough for the arcane shot to cooldown. Also ravagers seem to make this easy as they don't run very fast, I had to keep stopping to let it catch up. Anyway the V key is close enough to ASDW for me to be able to run in the right direction, spin with the mouse and shoot.

Satisfied with the ravager I tried a Raging Colossus, a level 63 elite. I tried kiting it along the hellfire road but they move very slowly and it was too easy to get out of agro range, so it would turn back and go home. After a few trys it seemed as if there was some kind of barrier to stop them being kited.

Next try was Boglash the elite marsh walker thing in Zangarmarsh. I kited him (her?) to the Cenarian place nearby and the cenarians hacked it to bits for me. Nice but I didn't get credited with the kill No drops, no quest complete, nothing. Bah.

I tried again with the level 63 elite at the pools of watsit but I had big problems there keeping my kiting path clear of demons and slime things and eventually I gave up.

I forgot about kiting after that as nothing required it. I've killed a couple of elites but mainly through firepower and dextrous trapping (e.g. the guy who splits into three). Then this weekend I had two goes at trying to kill a level 65 elite bird, one try ending in a wipe (albeit very close), the second a pet death and feign death (which caused the elite to vanish). Only later did I remember the kiting option. I may give it another try only I have to kill another bird some distance away to get the meat to attract the elite and I have to do this on every attempt. It would be cool to kill the bird, apart from the satisfaction of soloing a group quest the reward is a nice trinket.

The regular questing is getting very samey and I am having motivation problems (another bird camp to attack? Yawn). Soloing group quests may lighten things up.

Money Money Money

I had a nice blue jewelcrafting design drop from an infected tree thing. It sold in less than a day for 150g, the most I have ever sold anything for. I think the buyer may have put it back up for 400g but I'm happy. Allakhazan had it's median price as 250g but I prefer to sell things fast.

I invested the profits in primals and made another 30g selling a single Primal Might and I still have the mats for another one. Primal Mights need five other primals to make (Fire, Air, Water, Mana, Earth). It is not economic to buy them all but I had Earth and Fire from my grinding and that makes the difference.

I had enough Netherweave to make 81 heavy netherweave bandages so I made them all and vendored all the stacks but one for 4g80 each, getting first aid to 375 in the process. Netherweave would probably auction for more but if vendoring profits involve the letter g I'm not all that bothered. Besides, with so many clothy green drops in the game it's not like I'm depriving the clothy classes of their raw materials.

As I was flush with cash I bought 25g of herbs to get my alchemy to 360 (Super Mana Potions). It doesn't seem that far to the magical 375 mark. A splurge in the Ah would probably see to it but I would need a very good reason to do that: decent (i.e. useful to me) recipes are few and far between, this is the only thing on my must have list.

There don't seem to be any BoE blue weapons in the game between the Gunblade at 65 and the epics at level 70. This makes levelling quite economical, lots of money coming in but not much to spend it on apart from powerlevelling professions.

I need to be One more Friendly

My research into the Alchemists Stone told me Maevyn would need to be honoured with at least two factions and revered with a third to make it. Mae was already honoured with the Cenarian Expedition and needed to be honoured with Honor Hold (Honor hold is the name of the place so I won't correct the spelling of honour) to get the recipe to transmute a Skyfire Diamond (presumably cheaper than buying one from the AH). I am further motivated by the Elixir of major agility that Honor Hold would sell me, a hunter pot if ever I saw one. She was 4995 friendly, she needed just 1005 to get to honoured.

More research and I found a quest I hadn't done 'Drill the Drillmaster' that involved killing a level 62 elite and gave 1000 reputation. I did this quite easily, the trash mobs were level 63 and green, it was typical routine grind. Mae was running at 80,000 XP/hour (with rest bonus) and hitting 450dps (including Tiddles) according to DamageMeters and that's with Aspect of the Viper for the mana dribble rather than Aspect of the Hawk for more damage. Despite being an alchemist Mae doesn't routinely use buff pots, she's too mean. The elite wasn't tough, just poured steady shots, arcane shots and multishots into him.

How to get just five more points? I decided to go into one of the Hellfire Citadel instances and kill some trash mobs, I only needed one for five points. So I sent Mae into one of them (Blood Furnace? can't even remember, first one I found) and met a pair of 61 elite guards. Tried to pull one, got both, froze one and killed the other and got four reputation points. Hum, strange only four points, need one more. Killed the frozen guy but no more points. Looked at the character pane and realised Mae was 5999/6000 and had hit some magical barrier where Honor Hold stopped being impressed: soloing instances wasn't good enough.

I left it there, I need to find a way to get one more reputation point. My options for getting that one point may be restricted to:

PvP

but I am proud of my 0/0 tally: so often people say how many thousand kills they have but you never see how many times they have been killed. Mae is on level pegging. It's no less honourable than going to a battleground and hiding behind a bush AFK.

instances

running more instances in (horror) pugs: I could do the typical pug thing of going in, getting my one point and then cya/hearth.

quests

the only honor hold quest I know I have left is Overlord which would be tricky to solo and it would be a bummer if I still wasn't given the reputation.

UPDATE: with 20/20 hindsight, I should have got the instance rep BEFORE doing the last soloable quest. Bah.

In for the Kill

I'm still using Kill Command and I realise now what it is for. I start each fight with my quota of two steady shots which takes enemy health down to about 50% then I wait for it to die. Kill Command is something to think about during this time, it's a little mini lottery game to play, you sit there hoping a crit will happen and the button will light up. It's a bit like fishing. The reward is a pet hit that can do 400-500 damage and the mob dies one or two seconds faster. I'm almost serious, it does make the last half of the fight less boring!

Thanks to reader Spikeles for the floating combat tip, I am now trained to recognise the crits that will set it off without having to concentrate too hard. A big white number does it, sometimes big bright yellow does it but big dirty orange never does it.

So Near

1.7 hours till level 67. Level 68 will be more interesting, snake trap and the option to choose an alchemy speciality. The specialities are transmuting, pots or flasks. To get the latter two you have to run instances but apparently you can also take transmuting and then pay 150g to switch. Specialising gives you about a one in six chance that while performing your alchemy you will get more than one item produced which means pure profit.

Why do I Solo?

If anyone has picked up an emphasis on solo play there are a few reasons:

• I get more satisfaction from soloing: anyone can go in a group and kill elites. Killing that damn level 65 elite bird would make me about 100 times more happy than if I got a 70 to help me (don't think I've given up on it: I am formulating stategies).
• I play in the mornings at erratic times so being in a guild and following a raiding schedule is not an option.
• Bad pug experiences

So why do I play a MMORPG?

• I am hooked on WoW
• Having other players around adds atmosphere.
• It makes auctioning things more interesting: selling things to an AI wouldn't be as satisfying. Would an AI pay 100g for a Dark Whelpling? I think not.

I find the way that the game forces you to group or deliberately restricts the options of those who don't is annoying but not so annoying that I am going to stop playing.

Bird Killing Tactics

A list of tactics to remember for killing the damn bird. The longer Tiddles can stay alive, the more chance of success, hence:

• start fight with stamina scroll on pet
• eat +stamina food
• Elixir of mastery (+15 on all stats including agility and stamina)
• pause fight with freezing trap to bandage pet
• once pet dead, kite bird.
• scope on gun?
• remember to switch from Aspect of the Viper to Aspect of the Hawk
• have run away trinket ready

Pet Levelling

When she was 64 Maevyn experimented with Warp Hunters and such before realising that as Tiddles was still 62 she really ought to concentrate on levelling her, Tiddles being the favourite. Since then she has not run any other pet. It was only ten minutes before Maevyn dinged 67 that Tiddles dinged 66. I shudder to think what could have happened if I hadn't concentrated on levelling Tiddles: it is probably not realistic to level two pets at the same rate as the character, especially when always running with rest bonus (which I don't think applies to pets). You really don't want your pet struggling to hold agro at these levels.

Cats may not be the absolute best pets compared to warp stalkers (warp/tanking), ravagers (dps), boars (charge) but Tiddles is good enough. A level 70 Ghost Sabre is a rare and exclusive pet and one day she will be one.

Spec Tweek

I decided to tweek Maes talents a tad. Here it is. It is intended as a soloing/grinding/levelling spec. I can summarise the changes as:

Out went:

• all points out of Catlike Reflexes an increased chance for Tiddles to dodge: not regarded as a good talent, maybe 1% less damage to the pet
• a point out of animal handler
• all points out of 'Go For the Throat': I still have 'Bestial Discipline' which should be enough

In went:

• three points in Improved Aspect of the Hawk for a tad more dps and to dump some points somewhere
• Bestial Swiftness: when dash is on cooldown Tiddles is too slow into a fight. A point here should fix this. The alternative is levelling a Boar or a Warp Stalker.
• Solid point investment in both Improved Hunters Mark and Efficiency

For reasons even I don't understand I have buffed up the Aspect of the Hawk even though I tend to run with Aspect of the Viper for the mana efficiency. I have picked up some other mana saving talents as I hate stopping for a drink. Part of my emphasis here is grinding speed: beast fast into fight, kill mob, get on with next fight without sitting around for 20 seconds slurping dranaei water. Save the mana pots for emergencies as they are worth a couple of gold a pop (or send them to Pooky who needs them MUCH more).

'Feroscious Inspiration' is a highly regarded group buff but I don't think it's worth it for a soloing build like mine.

I kept Aimed shot although I never use it as it is a requirement for 'Mortal Shots'. I still spent umpteen gold buying the remaining ranks of Aimed Shot: if I do use it I would prefer it to be as effective as possible.

When Mae hits 70 I will be very tempted to bin 'The Beast Within' in favour of 'Shatter Shot'. I will see what life is like at 70 first though.

Question: the 'Rapid Killing' tooltip says something about after killing an opponent your next aimed, arcane or auto shot gives 10% more damage. Does this only apply after using Rapid Fire (which I very rarely use) or does it apply to every kill? If it applied to every kill I would like to try starting my fights with an aimed shot as 10% on top of 870 is not to be sneezed at.

Maybe I should respec again and find out? It's only play money.

Cooking Spree

The benefits of Sporeling Snacks (+20 stamina for the pet) and Warp Burgers (+agility for the hunter) were too good to resist so I decided to level up Maevyn's cooking but not the fishing (sorrt but just too boring). She was level 266 and I worked out that she could make it to 300 on Monster Omlettes or Tender Wolf Steak as both go grey at 305. The Omlettes use two soothing spices rather than one but still decided to farm the owlbeasts in Winterspring for their giant eggs as there was a faint hope of XP. As it turned out a few of the birdmen were level 59 and only these gave experience. The drop rate for the eggs was about one in four and I gathered forty of them: go figure. Since bags were full decided to go and cook them but couldn't find a fire in Everlook and ended up in Darnassus looking for a fire. This got me up to 294 so farmed for thirty more eggs. Hearthed back to Shattrath and made the omlettes and the very last one dinged the cooking to 300.

Flew to honor hold and bought the master cookery book from the Cook in the inn and raise the cap to 375. Also bought the recipe for ravager meat from the Innkeeper. Had 20 lots of ravager meat so cooked it all. Flew to Zangarmarsh and went to visit the Sporregar and got the Sporeling Snack recipe. Had 21 Strange Spores so made a big batch of Sporeling Snacks. Flew to Allerian Stronghold and got the Warp Burger recipe from the Supplies guy in the tower (the Innkeeper also sells them but she was sold out). Made 8 warp burgers. Also got a basilisk recipe and cooked up some basilisk meat I was carrying.

All in all Maevyn was carrying enough ingredients to get the cooking up to 356.

The sporeling snacks and burgers work a treat and the good thing is that they complement flasks and scrolls so Maevyn can have an extra buff up.

While in Honor Hold visited the Alchemist trainer to see what was on offer. There was an Intellect/Spirit pot available which I noticed was a guardian elixir. This would be a nice complement to an agility elixir and may help the mana last longer when grinding.

The Damn Bird

Back to the Bone Wastes for more grinding. Was in the area of the elite bird's girlfriend so decided to kill her just to wind him up. Took her carcass to the totem where he spawns and did a studied attack:

• ate warp burger and drank elixir or mastery (+15 to all stats). Also drank water to make sure mana was replete.
• laid an immolation trap ready and waited for some of the cooldown. The immolation trap is about 1000 damage so worth doing.
• put Tiddles on aggressive and fired intimidation to make sure she immediately grabbed agro. When the bird appeared previously it seemed to go straight for Mae and since it comes down and is very large it is initially difficult to deal with. Putting the pet on aggressive means the attack starts automatically.
• laid down carcass to summon bird
• laid down dps and pet heals. Maevyn got agro once and feigned death to lose it (no messing with disengage)
• killed bird
• jumped up and down
• /dance
• Mae health about 30% so bandage up
• /bye

This made me REALLY HAPPY, both because I soloed a group quest and because the reward is a nice trinket that gives +140 attack power for 15 seconds in every minute and a half. A decent trinket at last! She has one that gives +140 dodge but hasn't bothered to use it and she never seems to use the running away trinket from Badlands.

The Beast Within

I think I have figured out at least one good reason to keep the 'Beast Within' talent rather than respec to Scattershot (hence the anathema 40/21/0 spec). It should (I haven't tried this yet) prevent her being dazed or stunned or whatever when she tries to run away. Previously I always used it for the extra dps (ignoring Rapid Fire because of the longer cooldown) and overlooking this defensive possibility.

Ogga's response to my question yesterday makes me inclined to respec again to pick up Rapid Killing, reduce the cooldown of Rapid Fire to three minutes and to ACTUALLY USE IT. On the owlbeasts it put Mae's tooltip dps up to nearly 300. If Rapid Killing boosts the next attack then that's icing on the cake. Pity it doesn't seem to apply to Steady Shot though.

What's Pook Up To?

Apart from being the auction alt, I have a long term plan to gear him up. He is working on putting together a set of retribution pally gear (Strength, agility, attack power) to replace his lacklustre spellpower gear. I am having trouble replacing his Fel Iron gear which apart from being more suited to tanking also means that the lower half of his attire is bright green and the top half is dark: he looks half dressed.

Mae had a level 53 blue plate belt drop from an owlbeast and Pooky has even equipped that as apart from an armour loss it was overall an improvement on what he had.

UPDATE:

Nagrand

UPDATE:

Couldn't resist a screen shot:

Kinda ironic I found it while looking for the damn flight path.

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!

Optimising one's Killing Spree

Following yesterdays analysis I made the following changes to my grinding:

• made plenty of bag space
• always autoloot

I put a load of herbs I was carrying around (Ancient Lichen, Fel Lotus, good stuff that I have no recipes for) in the bank, mailed spare health pots to Pooky and had about twenty slots free.

Off to Nagrand.

Strolling across the plains killing level 67 bull Elekks Mae was sustaining 130,000 XP/hr (with rest bonus, no quest turnins) according to Titan Panel, better than two kills a minute. The attack vector was unchanged from before and since autolooting is so quick there was no need to start another fight before looting. The main thing I noticed against the Bull Elekks was I was having to almost constantly Mend Pet to keep Tiddles health up. WTB an easy way to tell whether Mend Pet has finished.

She reached a big crystal surrounded by level 66-67's and small crystal outcrops that can be collected for consortium rep and thence a nice +15% attack speed ammo pouch at honoured. I found that I could simply go round and round the big crystal, killing the guys and picking up crystals and maintain 120,000 XP/hr (the crystals took time to open and hampered progress somewhat). By the time Mae had done a lap the monsters had respawned and so she could continue until she ran out of bullets.

Less than two hours, 75 crystals, over 20g of vendor trash, Three of Lunacy (? but blue), oodles of netherweave and silver and about 250,000 XP. Oh, and level 68!!!

(UPDATE: three of lunacy leads to this, which sounds fantastic).

A typical quest gives 10,000 XP which is equivalent to ten kills and also involves killing (say) ten guys so in total gives maybe 20,000 XP. While grinding Mae could kill twenty guys in ten minutes. With the questing overhead of finding where you are supposed to go and returning for quest turnins, I suspect it would be faster overall for Mae to grind the two levels left till 70. That would leave her with oodles of quests to do at 70, all rewarded by gold, and she could do them on a flying mount.

There are two things about that plan I don't like:

• after two hours running in a circle killing the same guys it gets a bit repetative.
• the quest rewards are probably nice greens which would be ok to a 68 but crap to a 70.

Anyway, Mae has some things to do:

• Get the training for Snake Trap which sounds like it's fun but useless.
• Venture to Netherstorm to find the Transmute speciality guy. Epic flying mounts don't pay for themselves.

Incidently, some of the guys defending the crystals would stun Tiddles and attack Mae. I found it fun to drop an Immolation Trap at their feet. It does over 900 damage, rather more than spamming raptor strike. Burn baby burn.

Oh and the decent Halaa rep rewards involve PvP. Mae could get a useless sounding alchemy recipe and a single unique-equip 18 slot bag using the non-pvp rep grinds. She will probably pick up the recipe, the bag isn't worth farming 160 powder samples for.

Summary: level 70 is maybe 16 hours of grinding away.