His name is Vanhellen, and he’s a level 20 retribution paladin!

I know, I KNOW! This is a hunter blog! But, I’m extremely excited about this character for a number of reasons.

First, he’s completely outfitted in heirloom gear. He has [Polished Spaulders of Valor], [Polished Breastplate of Valor], and [Reforged Truesilver Champion].

I would have liked to kit him out with a [Bloodied Arcanite Reaper], but I lacked the emblems, and had a surplus of Stonekeeper’s shards available to me. He also has various and sundry greens that I picked up supercheap, or got as drops while running my wife’s warlock through the Deadmines.

[wowcd character=Vanhellen]

The second reason I’m extremely excited about this character is that it’s completely different from what I am used to, and I find that fun. The downtime is nil right now, and I kill things very quickly. I dinged 20 in Warsong gulch, after kicking the everloving snot out of the horde up and down that map. I even got some cheeves for capping the flag, and doing a buttload of HKs. With hand of freedom, the human racial, and my damage reducing cooldowns, I was extremely tough to kill.

Another thing I’ve noticed is this: levelling my hunter was painful, as it was my first toon. I didn’t even BEGIN to have a solid grasp of how to play the game well until I hit 70 and joined AUO. My first time around, I thought more armor = better, and just randomly used my abilities until the mob died. Now, with a downright nerdy obsession over the mechanics of the game, as well as a better defined sense of what stats to look for and how to use my abilities, I’m finding the levelling process so far to be much more intuitive and familiar to me, and I’m making significantly fewer dumb decisions. I am armed with a popular levelling spec, two gathering professions with good buffs attached to them, and the skill required to topple challenges that I wouldn’t have been able to on my hunter.

And perhaps the most exciting, I’ll have a tank! Bashing things in the face and keeping their attention rather than keeping the attention off me is a new and exciting prospect. As soon as I hit 40, I will have a prot offspec.

Tank LFG Deadmines, PST!

I promised my buddy Doominus a post with some of the do’s and don’ts for level 80 hunter gearing and whatnot, as he is unhappy with his DPS output. He rerolled to hunter from DK (thank the gods) and claims he’s not realizing his full potential.

Honestly, his gear has only minor problems… But, in an effort to assuage him (cuz i know it’d bother me) I’ve come up with a few do’s and don’ts for gearing a hunter. If you need help with shot rotations, My earlier post (minus the part about macroing, since killshot triggers the GCD now) still applies.

Do’s

• Get hitcapped via gear if you can. Hit points via the talent mean that you’ve put talent points there that could otherwise be used for pure DPS talents. Try try TRY to get hitcapped via your gear.
• Attempt to get gear-hitcapped without resorting to gems/enchants that add hit. Once again, a hit gem is a gem that COULD be used for agi.
• Know what gems are good for you. For a BM hunter, it’s AP. For an SV Hunter, it’s AGI, all the way. AGI also is affected by kings.
• Gem to activate your meta, and gem for hit if you need to. After that, it’s STRAIGHT AGI/AP, ignoring the socket bonuses.  Think about it. Using a stamina gem to get a 4agi socket bonus… does that make sense when you could just plug a 20agi gem into the socket in the first place. There is no requirement to put certain color gems into certain sockets.

Don’t

• Wear gear with expertise. I understand that some of it may be an upgrade for the blue that you had there, but there’s entirely too much good non-expertise gear available. Rings is where i see this most often… that goddamned Hemmoraging Circle. There’s a ring from Valor emblems (which can be converted from Conquest emblems) and a BoE ring from EoE 25 that’s cheap now (Surge Needle Ring) There’s also a crafted ring and a ring from Triumph emblems.
• Wear gear that isn’t enchanted properly and then expect raid invites.
• Spend a ton of money on crafted gear. There’s another soft reset coming, and I made this mistake… The raids/heroics will soon drop triumph emblems. I bought some boots then had better ones drop in a Pug.
• DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT use green quality gems. There’s no excuse now. The blue ones are cheap, and the epic ones can be had for a mere 10k honor each, which is one wintergrasp. Don’t do it.
• Don’t use a meta if it isn’t 21 agility/3 percent crit damage.

Pugging Your Way to Greatness, Courtesy of Lassirra from The Hunters Mark!

This is a great post for those like me, who can’t make it to a lot of guild runs but still want to raid. I had tried to concoct a similar post and failed miserably! Thanks, Lassirra!