Mania’s Arcania

Actually, TKA Something looks like it updated on June 24th, but I guess I didn’t notice. I’d gotten out of the habit of checking the site during it’s long vacation. Anyway, the News page mentions that Fritti added/updated some guides, so I checked out what she has an noticed this fascinating (albeit technical) guide on how to build a /castsequence macro (by Uncas of Hellscream). I don’t actually know if this is one of the ones that’s been added or updated, but regardless I found it very useful (… to help explain one of those things that I generally don’t pay any attention to whatsoever).

A mystic and apparent hunter called (oddly) znodis at Home of the Mystic has some interesting ruminations on how increased hunter damage post-Burning Crusade has impacted the effectiveness of non-DPS pet families. (znodis was also kind enough to share his or her thoughts with us about pet skills when I was laying out my own thoughts on pet skill choices a few weeks ago.

In brief, we hunters do so much extra damage at high levels that only high-DPS pet families can keep up with the aggro we generate. I suppose that this is primarily a problem when you are hunting solo (or in a small group without a tank), but since I am strictly a solo hunter (yes, even at level 70) I have been a bit concerned about this. Even with my cat Cloud, a full Beast Mastery build, and laughable equipment I was having some problem with aggro my last few levels. But I’m not exactly a great hunter, so I wasn’t sure if this was a problem for other hunters.

Anyway, I found it a thought-provoking post. By the way, I am actively looking for other good hunter blogs to read, so if you know of one I should check out please drop me a line.

Since I hid a pretty neat tip down in the Mangeclaw Misadventures post, I thought I’d repeat it here under it’s own title.

Ghost travel involves dying on one continent (for example, near Orgrimmar), then taking a boat or zeppelin to the other continent while you’re dead (say, the zeppelin to Undercity), then running slowly and tediously as a ghost to wherever it is you want to be (for example, Loch Modan), and resurrecting at a Spirit Healer there (say, outside Thelsamar). It only works if you die on one continent and resurrect on the other — if you die in Silverpine, run to Loch Modan and resurrect, you’ll be teleported back to the graveyard in Silverpine. But apparently when you zone between continents, the information about where you died is not preserved, so the server let’s you choose your resurrection spot.

(more…)

I haven’t been paying enough attention lately to hunter gossip, so I know I am really late to the party on this one. But I was intrigued to learn today about some of the interesting side effects of Scorpid Poison– and how you can use those side effects to your advantage.

Basically, it goes like this: Scorpid Poison (known as SP in this post, so I don’t keep misspelling it every sentence) is a pet ability that only scorpids can learn. It’s a damage-over-time (DoT) effect that can stack up to 5 times on a single target. Each time the applied spell ticks, it does damage for each poison in the stack – so if your target has SP stacked five times and a single SP would have done, say, 10 damage (a completely made up number, by the way) then the entire stack will do 50 damage this tick.

The interesting thing is that, even though you can think of the stack as being made up of individual applications of the poison, the entire stack actually acts as a single entity in most ways. For example, when a new posion is added to the stack the time left on the entire stack is reset.

(more…)

 The Big Stu asked in a comment on my Mangeclaw Misadventures:

I was wondering if you have ever taken a poll to see just how long people have spent trying to tame a pet. I am not talking about parking next to Humar’s tree and logging in every hour to see if he is there yet, I am talking about sitting in front of the screen waiting…or what ever you would have to do for another pet.

(more…)

Oh, I forgot to mention — I have a new e-mail address: mania@maniasarcania.com. I’ve also added it to the navigation bar on the side there so it’s always handy.

I’ll still be checking the old gmail address, but this new one will be quicker.

About ten weeks ago I started up a blog based on my work with the website Petopia. I’ve been maintaining Petopia for over a year and although I truly enjoy researching hunter pets and keeping the site up to date, it’s sometimes rather dry. Petopia tries to be a very factual site, and I wanted a place I could be a bit more chatty about my thoughts and experiences as a hunter. And what do you know — I found I really enjoyed the blog! In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I decided to expand upon it, invest more time in it, make it more permanent — here, with this blog hosted on my own domain.

(more…)

If you are ever bored and looking for something to do in WoW, try jacking up all your graphics settings, zooming into first person mode, turning off the interface, and taking one of the long, cross-country flight routes. I was surprised at how enthralled I was just watching the landscape go by. Areas I think of as boring were absolutely stunning when I actually paid attention.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately running new hunter characters to level 10. My main goal is to research the level 10 pet quests for a new top-secret project that I’m working on, but since that requires several new characters I’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone and set these characters up for my Grand Experiment as well.

(more…)

Having issues with your pet bar not showing up when you dismount or when you call your pet? I’ve been hearing about this for some time now, and although it doesn’t happen to me much it does happen — and it is really annoying! But thankfully, it looks like Blizzard is making a concentrated effort to gather information about the problem as demonstrated by this post on the Bug Report forum.

In addition, there’s a useful post on the same forum about known issues in Patch 2.1.2. As of right now, the only hunter-specific thing I see in there is that Hunter’s Mark does not properly update itself when re-applied.

And finally, the Bug Report forum also has an interesting post on issues that are not bugs but that people keep trying to report anyway.