Azortharion's 6.2.2 MM Hunter Guide

[Niix 169]

Updated BiS sims / added a highmaul BiS list, talents, , stat priority, as well as added a import for AMR stat weights.

[Iridar 80]

About gearing up: so BiS lists are nice, but it's still a long road before you hit even one gear piece from that list

 

So I welcome you all to share your thoughts and experiences in preparing to raid. 

 

Some things I have noted:

 

1) PvP gear for PvE

 

There are 3 levels of PvP gear: basic, honor and conquest. 

For PvE, basic gear is ilvl 600, honor is 620 and conquest is 660. 

 

For comparison, heroic dungeons drop 630 ilvl gear, so as you can see, the conquest gear can be extremely useful, especially the weapon, as weapon damage is important for MM. 

 

2) Crafted gear: if you want to craft your own gear using professions, then you're pretty much required to use Garrison buildings that duplicate your profession, Tannery for Leatherworking, for example. 

 

Crafted gear requires components that you can craft only on daily cooldown, and if you only craft those components yourself, it can take well over a month just to get one gear piece.

 

But using a garrison building, you can craft more of those components. 

 

3) Heroic dungeons: to get into heroic dungeons you need ilvl of 608 and silver rating on challenge arena. It's easy to get the ilvl cap by buying PvP armor for maneuvers at Nagrand, near the coliseum-like building. A goblin sells 660 ilvl gear for 50 gold a piece. Armor itself is useless, but it will help you "fool" the ilvl requirement. 

 

When you ding 100, a quest from your garrison will direct you towards the challenge arena, so you won't get lost

Silver rating is extremely easy to achieve, and you don't need gear for that. 

 

I've done ~5-6 heroic dungeons, and enjoyed them quite a lot. Bosses themselves are not super hard, I've been in random LFG parties, and we killed half of bosses from the first pull, though there are certainly some very challenging fights, especially if your healer is bad, and you can't just zerg your way past fight mechanics, at least not with these gear levels. 

 

A hunter-specific dungeon tip for Skyreach: when Rukhran summons a Solar Flare, it will take it ~3 seconds to fixate on one of your party members. Most likely you will be MM with Lone Wolf, so use this time to cast AiS into the Solar Flare. If required, throw in a Chimaera and Kill Shot, and you should be able to solo kill it very quickly, before Solar Flare has time to move.

 

A LOT of fight mechanics can by completely bypassed by Deterrence (I mean negating damage). 

 

In Upper Blackrock Spyre, on the last boss, Warlord Zaela, make sure to take off Glyph of Disengage (increased range), because you will be fighting on a small platform, and with the Glyph you're likely to fall down from the platform. 

 

Something I have noticed about Lone Wolf: because you're not using a pet in combat, you can summon any pet with any ability whenever required. Normally you would need to dismiss your current pet first. Mostly you will be using this for battle res and bloodlust, but you can also summon a pet if you need to use Master's Call. Though with LW you will need to dismiss your pet afterwards, so there's that. Aspect of the Fox will help you dismiss pet on the move, if need be.

 

Summoning a pet or dieing as Lone Wolf disables the buff you give to your party, so make sure to reapply it after you die or dismiss a pet. 

 

Unrelated note: some of the pets require you to manually use their buff ability, at least I have noticed this on my PvP Silithid - he won't buff me until I explicitly click on the buff. I just added it to my mount macro so I don't forget / don't have to do it manually each time. 

 

With Aspect of the Cheetah minor glyph, there is no reason not to be in AotC as much as you can, so you can add AotC to your mount macro as well, /cast !Aspect of the Cheetah. The exclamation mark ensures you won't disable AotC if you already have it enabled. 

 

As Lone Wolf, you can't use Spirit Bond, but out of combat or during downtime in combat you can use Camouflage to regen lots of HP quickly. 

 

Do not use Barrage for heroic dungeons, because if you accidentally pull additional mobs, you're likely to wipe your group. 

 

4) Apexis crystals: as soon as you hit 100, get a daily quest from your garrison. Completing this daily will yield 800 or 1000 apexis crystals, and you need ~5000 of those for second stage of legendary ring. Apexis is otherwise hard to get, so make sure to do this daily, well, daily. 

 

5) I have noticed that Focusing Shot is now not a 3 second cast, but a 2.5. Why this wasn't in any of the patchnotes? 

Edited November 16, 2014 by Iridar

[Niix 169]

About gearing up: so BiS lists are nice, but it's still a long road before you hit even one gear piece from that list

 

So I welcome you all to share your thoughts and experiences in preparing to raid. 

 

My thoughts are this for pre-raid.

 

1. Garrison level 3.
2. Legendary ring.
3. 631 ilvl
4. Challenge modes.
5. ????
6. Raid.

Point 1: This is the most important thing you can do. You need all your plots to be useful to your raid group so do this FAST.

 

Point 2: Get your Apexis Crystals ASAP. This is your reward.

 

Point 3: Heroic spam, heroic spam, heroic spam. That's it. Just do heroics.

 

Point 4: Challenge modes are hard, but you only have to complete it, there's no time requirement. Find a group. It drops 640 gear.

[Iridar 80]

Point 4: Challenge modes are hard, but you only have to complete it, there's no time requirement. Find a group. It drops 640 gear.

Wow didn't know that. 

[Iridar 80]

Quick note: apparently, you don't need 5k apexis crystals to get 680 ring, the crystals are for the next phase. 

Also, I haven't tried it myself yet, but I think the "group" daily that gives 1000 apexis crystals is quite soloable for a hunter. 

[Airoh 0]

Quick note: apparently, you don't need 5k apexis crystals to get 680 ring, the crystals are for the next phase. 

Also, I haven't tried it myself yet, but I think the "group" daily that gives 1000 apexis crystals is quite soloable for a hunter. 

 

Anyone tested this out? I'll try it tonight when I get home from work but wondered if anyone was able to do the group daily solo.

[Iridar 80]

Anyone tested this out? I'll try it tonight when I get home from work but wondered if anyone was able to do the group daily solo.

I'll try to solo it tomorrow, might even record a video. 

[Atrais 38]

Anyone tested this out? I'll try it tonight when I get home from work but wondered if anyone was able to do the group daily solo.

 

My guildie has the 580 ring, skipped the crystal part, so you dont need it at this point, but you might in the future.

I have done the 1k Daily three times now.  The first two days (Sat and Sun) I got "Assault of the Pit".  Its definitely possible solo, I did it solo on Saturday with a ~615 ilvl, but its much faster and easier with a group because the mobs hit like trucks and have a ton of health.  With clever Camo usage, you can sneak around, get ammo, and blow up orcs without having to battle much, but it will take a lot longer than just getting some friends to help.  The mobs there also drop a lot of Apexis Crystals and Primal Spirits, so youd be missing out on that.  When I did it with guildiies (3 DPS, 1 heals, 1 tank), we were done in about 5 min and then spent 10 min farming.

This morning I got a PVP one as my 1k daily instead of the group one, which has you collect 1 fragment from mobs in Ashran.  Took me about 30 seconds....

Edited November 17, 2014 by Atrais

[Atrais 38]

My thoughts are this for pre-raid.

 

1. Garrison level 3.
2. Legendary ring.
3. 631 ilvl
4. Challenge modes.
5. ????
6. Raid.

Point 1: This is the most important thing you can do. You need all your plots to be useful to your raid group so do this FAST.

 

Point 2: Get your Apexis Crystals ASAP. This is your reward.

 

Point 3: Heroic spam, heroic spam, heroic spam. That's it. Just do heroics.

 

Point 4: Challenge modes are hard, but you only have to complete it, there's no time requirement. Find a group. It drops 640 gear.

 

Only thing to add to this is PVP gear.

If you are looking to get above the 610 threshold to queue for Heroics, then buying Honor gear is a viable option IMO.  I have ~3500 honor saved from 6.0 launch, so I was able to buy two pieces as a fresh 100 and boost my ilvl considerably (it gets scaled to 620 in PVE content).  There are also 4 bonus objectives in Ashran that give 500 honor a piece, which is enough for one piece by itself.

[Orthios 271]

Only thing to add to this is PVP gear.

If you are looking to get above the 610 threshold to queue for Heroics, then buying Honor gear is a viable option IMO.  I have ~3500 honor saved from 6.0 launch, so I was able to buy two pieces as a fresh 100 and boost my ilvl considerably (it gets scaled to 620 in PVE content).  There are also 4 bonus objectives in Ashran that give 500 honor a piece, which is enough for one piece by itself.

Even better is that if you're standing in ashran when you queue, the honor gear is counted as 675 gear, which helps boost ilvl to get into heroics. 

[Atrais 38]

Even better is that if you're standing in ashran when you queue, the honor gear is counted as 675 gear, which helps boost ilvl to get into heroics. 

 

The game also seems to consider "best in bag", not "best equipped", when determining your ilvl for purposes of Heroics, so if you have a 620 Int neck in your bag, for example, but a 600 Agi neck equipped, it considers the 620 neck in the calculation.  We used this exploit to help run fresh 100s in our guild through Heroics by passing around some BoEs.

[Orthios 271]

The game also seems to consider "best in bag", not "best equipped", when determining your ilvl for purposes of Heroics, so if you have a 620 Int neck in your bag, for example, but a 600 Agi neck equipped, it considers the 620 neck in the calculation.  We used this exploit to help run fresh 100s in our guild through Heroics by passing around some BoEs.

That's been true for awhile now, at least it was that way for me when running MoP heroic dungeons to get gear (I had found a few world drop epics that I couldn't use).

[Iridar 80]

Another way to trick your way past ilvl requirement is to buy the PvP gear for "maneuvers". It costs 50g a gear piece and has ilvl of 660. Gear itself is useless, but it helped me to get into heroics without me even realizing. 

[Iridar 80]

Apparently, getting 680 ring without gathering 5k apexis crystals was a bug, which got hotfixed. I got the ring without crystals yesterday, but today after a server restart my guildies couldn't get the ring. 

 

Group daily for apexis crystals appears to be soloable, but there's no reason to solo it - every lvl100 in your guild will want to do it, so there's no reason not to use their help for that. You don't really need full "healer-tank-DPS" group for that. 

 

I went to solo the daily today, but stumbled on my guildmaster's group, and we finished the daily together much faster than I would solo. 

 

So if you relish the "challenge" you can solo it as BM, here's some broad tips for that on WHU website, but it's not really a challenge, more like a tediously long quest.

[Iridar 80]

For those who are interested in getting 660 PvP epics for PvE purposes: until the arena season starts, the only way to get Conquest Points appears to be the Ashran victory "daily" - after winning a battle for the first each day you get a purple chest with random PvP gear items and 350 Conquest Points. You also can once get some conquest points by doing Ashran introduction quests.

 

For now, the easiest path to victory on  Ashran appears to by killing mobs for Artifact Fragments and bringing them back to your base. Once enough fragments are gathered by your faction, a huge NPC character will appear and begin assault on enemy base. You can then use Alarm Flares (consumable) to call for help near enemy's base. 

 

Obviously, how easy it is depends on your server's faction balance, I'm not sure Ashran regulates the number of combatants. 

 

I know this isn't really a PvP forum, but that 660 epic gear seems to be worth the trouble, especially the weapon. I remember playing with 359 PvP weapon for a really long time during Cataclysm. 

 

Even after two upgrades the crafted engineering gun has ilvl of 655, and so does the weapon that drops in raids in normal difficulty. 

 

That said, you will need to get a ~7200 conquest points before you can buy the PvP weapon, so it may take a long time. Gun itself costs 3500, so you can spend the rest of the conquest points on other 660 gear pieces, like trinkets.

[Niix 169]

[Niix 169]

I just find this funny. One piece of my gear has haste on it.

 

[Atrais 38]

Even better is that if you're standing in ashran when you queue, the honor gear is counted as 675 gear, which helps boost ilvl to get into heroics. 

FYI, this doesn't work anymore:

 

[Atrais 38]

I just find this funny. One piece of my gear has haste on it.

 

 

I'll happily trade you some of mine for some of your crit

[Niix 169]

I just accidentally erased my entire guide switching the AMR weights to code..

[Iridar 80]

I just find this funny. One piece of my gear has haste on it.

 

Same here, got haste only on my cloak. 2.4 - 2.5 AiS casts make me sad. 

However, I'm exhilarated regardless. I've always dreamt of two things: being able to play without a pet in raids, and doing only a few powerful abilities rather than a plethora of weak ones. Case in point: enhancement shamans. Pre-WoD they had ~15 sources of damage, and it felt like none of your abilities had impact. Or those warrior and rogue, where autoattack was number 1 source of damage. Feels like "why do I even bother casting any abilities". 

 

With new MM I feel like a freaking mobile artillery, and my killshots tear enemies' heads off.

Edited November 20, 2014 by Iridar

[Atrais 38]

Isn't the Highmaul BiS list basically the Highmaul ONLY-in-slot list (excluding gear with Bonus Armor)?

[Niix 169]

Isn't the Highmaul BiS list basically the Highmaul ONLY-in-slot list (excluding gear with Bonus Armor)?

 

Basically it's just a BiS list for the next few months until Foundry opens. Since the ilvl is higher in Foundry none of the Highmaul gear will be any good anymore. I'll re-word it so it's more clear.

[Atrais 38]

Basically it's just a BiS list for the next few months until Foundry opens. Since the ilvl is higher in Foundry none of the Highmaul gear will be any good anymore. I'll re-word it so it's more clear.

 

Yeah, I was pretty sure Highmaul only drops one item per slot for Mail DPS (again excluding bonus armor gear), just confirming

[Niix 169]

Yeah, I was pretty sure Highmaul only drops one item per slot for Mail DPS (again excluding bonus armor gear), just confirming

 

Wow, um yeah there's very few options.. Considering removing that section now..