My Cataclysm Christmas List

Happy Holidays everybody! I hope everyones enjoying the holidays however you celebrate them, and in the spirit of modern day commercialized Christmas I'm making a Christmas list, but not for Santa, this ones for the good folks at blizzard.

1. Read my post Pride's Call and steal my idea for a BM-Talent call second pet spell. On a two or three minute cooldown it could be just like Feral Spirits and give BM a much needed boost. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first one to make one of these, and I'm pretty sure you thought about it, but the mechanics are already there they just need tweeking.
2. Give us a non-talented melee strike for Shamans. I want to be able to play like an enhancement shaman even before i put points into talent trees, and a melee strike would be a helpful ability when leveling with any spec.
3. Mirror Image for arms warriors. I'm not a fan of plate classes but the arms warrior always seemed cool to me, mostly because they were like the awesome blademasters in WC3 yet mages got Mirror Image and they didn't. That kinda sucks.
4. Spears for Shaman, Thrown Weapons for hunters. Shaman can use two handed axes, and two handed maces, but not spears? even though the itemizating for Enhancement on spears is just as good for them as Druids and Hunters, not saying that we'll use it, just saying why can't we. No swords makes sense, but spears? As for hunters and thrown weapons 2 words: Shadow Hunter
5. Mawr Petz, and not just new skins, more families, and old untameable skins, like the green mage hunters from Battle for the Undercity, made tameable there's a guy in shadowmoon valley with tamed felboars, i want one too.

Please and Thank You

Jukebox

Building a Hunter From Lore: Melee Hunter

In the days long before my hands touched wow, when the level cap was 60, pets didn't despawn when you mounted, and spirit bond was ungodly powerful, the survival tree provided a unique opportunity for hunters it was a melee attack tree. Its talents focused on giving you bonuses to melee and traps and abilities like Deterrence, but most importantly it gave a fourth melee attack

However, this had one serious issue, Mongoose Bite, and Coun

terattack were not viable as endgame strikes because they require you to dodge or Parry, respectively. This was the same issue Wolverine's Bite had

with Cunning pets, because in any group particularly a raid, hunters as DPS should never have to Dodge or Parry. Still the idea of a melee Hunter did not seem so out of place. Sadly this went the way of the dinosaur and survival became more of a ranged damage spec and Lacerate was replace by Wyvern Sting as its final talent. However a num

ber of talents remained Counterattack, Savage Strikes, and Resourcefulness all still benefit your Melee attacks, so how do you build a melee hunter? Three things you need to remember, Ignored ranged bonuses, improve traps, improve pet.

Your Talent Build for a Melee hunter is going to be sort

of an inversion of the Beast Master Build, where as the Beast Master you focused on the pet, here you focus more on you.

Starting with SV your going to basically ignore anything that requires a ranged attack, Survival Instincts being the exception as it reduces damage you take from attacks. The bread and butter SV talent, Lock 'n' Load, gets ignored because we will not be using Arcane Shot, ever, and don't even take Explosive Shot. Instead Savage Strikes, Improved Tracking, Survivalist, and Deflection are going to be more important talents for you. Everything that improves your traps also goes into this build. Shifting over to BM you are going to grab Intimidation ignoring taking everything except Improved Aspect of the Hawk, Improved Mend Pet, , and Pathfinding. This will add to your damage and survivability and give your pet a bit more bang and the utility of Intimidation.

For glyphs the defense bonus of Glyph of Raptor Strike will be helpful. Since Aspect of the Monkey and Aspect of the Beast are going to be your primary aspects the damage bonus from Glyph of the Beast will be a definite benefit. Finally Glyph of Immolation Trap will improve one of your primary DPS abilities. Rotations wise your going to alternate between Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite

dropping Immolation Trap and Snake Trap whenever they're up.Scatter Shot and Counterattack should be hit whenever their ready as well. Fire a sting a sting as you charge the target and use Disengage or Wing Clip to gain some distance to refresh, or after a Scatter Shot. Utilize Frost Trap to gain the benefit of Point of No Escape if you're not trapping additional targets. Weaponry for melee hunters will in my opinion focus on dual wielding, with a good ranged weapon for a stat stick. Engineering makes for a good Profession as it adds additional abilities for you to use in combat. Grenades make a great filler in between Strikes and Bites, and the Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket is a great additional attack to boost anyones DPS. For the melee hunter you should fire it every time you use a sting or have some distance on your target. As your focusing on melee combat you'll probably prefer leather over mail in order to reach the expertise cap, and some armor pen might help as well. Enchants like Mongoose will do a lot for your DPS as you can now proc its effect and weapons with procs will also be better choices now. Any pet will work for the most part, but pets like Birds of Prey and Wasps or similar abilities will be helpful.

Making Beast Mastery more Mastery-ier

The final talent in the Beast Mastery tree for hunters, gives the ability to tame exotic pets like Devilsaurs and the elusive Spirit Beasts, plus gives 4 bonus pet talents bringing the total up to 20. Even if you don't run with an exotic, though truthfully Devilsaur DPS is scary even compared to Spirit Beasts, the 4 points means you can spec Cobra Reflexes Rank 2, Dash, Culling the Herd Rank 3, Spiked Collar Rank 3, Blood Thirsty Rank 2, Soider's Bite Rank 3, Rabid, Call of the Wild, Shark Attack Rank 2, and Wild Hunt Rank 2 that's every straight DPS talent in the ferocity tree, still BM lacks the power that other trees bring and Beast Mastery falls behind Chimera Shot and Explosive Shot for final talents, there was even a time where the optimal BM spec completely ignored the talent in favor of Readiness from MM, of course back then Readiness worked on Bestial Wrath. Now a days you won't see a self respecting Beast Master without it and at least one Exotic, either in the stables or with them right there. Still people aren't quite happy with BM, or exotics, particularly spirit beasts. Ever since the first Skoll people have felt slightly ticked. Spirit beast had two abilities Spirit Strike and Prowl Then Skoll showed up in the data files. People hoped for Furious Howl and spirit strike. A new precedent pets in the same family with different abilities, or maybe even a new family. For as rare as spirit beasts are it wouldn't have been so strange. Sadly he was just a regular Spirit Beast, a ghost cat with a wolf skin, the same arguments occurred with Arcturis the new Bear spirit beast (a bear without swipe and a ferocity its a ferocity pet). For some folks that's awesome, they can raid with a bear with out sacrificing the already lower BM DPS. For other's no new Tenacity (or cunning) exotics, with ferocity still holding one more exotic clan over the other two. Many people have discussed letting hunters chose which tree their pet is spec'd into, but I like many other people feel like that sort of reduces the value of having multiple pets, and is completely contradictory to my hope of obtaining more stable slots, but for a Beast Master it shouldn't be difficult to teach a boar to be more aggressive, or a gorilla to be calculating. If we can tame loa spirits what's stopping us. So here's my proposed new Beast Mastery.

• Improved Beast Mastery - You master the art of Beast training, teaching you the ability to tame Exotic pets and increasing your total amount of Pet Skill Points by 4. In addition your skills allow you to train each pet you own in a secondary specialization from one talent tree it does not already know. Changing specializations reduces pet happiness by 50 and shares a cooldown with Call Stabled Pet. Cannot be preformed in combat.

This isn't meant to be a DPS increase, it's just supposed to be cool and would make a lot of people happy. The crutches on the ability are that 1.) It's a BM talent, final tier at that, and 2.) It only allow a pet to have one additional tree, while keeping the same one. You like bears and want to raid with one, then off spec ferocity. You want more PVP viability for your cat, off-spec cunning. With this Arcturis can be the tank he was meant to be, and Ravagers can reclaim their place in raids that they lost when WotLK made them Cunning Pets. This is not going to make some pets the optimal raiding pets, in fact some pets, like Chimeras and Wind Serpents might take some tweeking to keep them in line with non-magic dealing pets (Chimeras could be at spirit beast dps levels), Some abilities are more suited for one roll than the other. Tallstriders and Hyenas would make great cunning pets, while self healing Moths could be great tanks. All the while still maintaining this also add versatility, but without having to switch pets and losing any buffs already applied to the pet from party members. This would make the BM talent more appealing just from casual versatility standpoint. You doing Faction Champs and your pet keeps getting stunned? Switch over to the cunning spec with Bullheaded and get back in the fight. You just finished a raid and ready to do some dailies? Wait you were raiding with your bear, switch back over to Tenacity and keep that massive fortitude buff going while you plow through some cultists. This way it gives more versatility and choice for their pets without cheapening the Pet Talent system.

Explosion!

With the knew Misdirect and the Buff to Explosive Trap, every hunter should be dropping one of these badboys on trash pulls. but running up dropping and then running back can be pretty annoying so give this macro a try.

#showtooltip Explosive Trap

/cast Explosive Trap

/cast Disengage

This'll drop the trap and disengage you, and it's a pretty simple macro. Cast Misdirect, hit the macro and then start volleying, there's usually a second or two before the first the misdirect triggers so you can get the volley going. I'm not a great macro writer so if anyone has a better version of this macro let me know but this simple one will work great for most people

Troll Love

So Everyone should know I love trolls, in fact warcraft trolls are one of my favorite races in all fantasy literature. They're a good shift from more common trolls which are huge lumbering creatures. Instead they seem to be a fusion of the two kinds of troll, but that's not what this article is about (Wikipedia trolls if your curious) this is about Troll's or lack there of in world of warcraft lore. Off the top of my head i can name five prominent troll character's who are not villians Zabra Hexx, Sen'jin, Vol'jin, and Rokhan. Aside from those 4, well 3 since Zabra hasn't completely vanished after Ashbringer, there's really no troll representation in WoW for the good guys. On the other hand, Zul'Aman, Zul'Gurub, Zul'Farrak, Gundrak, Drak'Theron Keep, Temple of Atal'Hakkar (Sunken Temple), and Jintha'alor (which used to be all elites) are all troll themed zones. There is no shortage of troll villains to go around. But trolls are the said to be the oldest race on Azeroth predating even the night elves yet the only trolls in the entire War of the Ancients trilogy is a small group controlled by Deathwing with what seemed like mind control gems on their heads. Trolls are the ancient enemies of all elves yet from a lore perspective we get none of that. Trolls have been with the Horde since the second war and are the right hand race to the orcs, so why don't we ever see them? Part of the reason is because they get overshadowed by their greenskinned brother's in arms. The lore for the Darkspear tribe in game pretty much ceases to exist after level ten and you kill Zalazane, but don't recover the echo isles. We don't even get to see Vol'jin's awesome Shadow hunter skills in the battle for the Undercity, he has to wait outside. He's not even part of the achievement Black War Bear Achievement like some kind of gnome, even if they outnumber us (just barely) Vol'jin is right there with Thrall, you can skip the gnome. But the game started as Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. So the emphasis on those two race is obvious. With the introduction of the night elves and their rich lore in Warcraft III trolls became sort of an after thought. Still there are only three troll tribes considered "good" Darkspear, Raventusk, and Shatterspear, and one neutral the Zandalar, we still don't see much more than a few random bands of trolls in the Warcraft lore. But there's a little more to it than that. Since most of the novel occur before the Third War in some way "good" trolls don't exist yet, however i don't believe there were no trolls who fought against the demons in the War of the Ancients, especially if Dark Trolls really exist, and may have been the ancient ancestors of night elves. The major troll events that could be novelized are the Troll Wars which would be a largely elven story, The Twin Empires which would be Trolls vs Qiraj, and the Soulflayer which would be the history of the sunken temple. The first two of which reach back farther than the war of the ancients. With Cataclysm coming Twin Empires might be a good one, as the Qiraj report directly to the old god C'thun, which could give some interesting info on the old gods. Now with Cataclysm coming we will see a new surge of post Third War stories. Aside from Manga stories, Night of the Dragon, and comic stories most wow stories take place before the third war, thus before the formation of the new horde. However Christie Golden's Cataclysm Novel and Stormrage by Richard A. Knaak provide a new chance at some troll lore and with Troll Druids and the Coming of Cataclysm giving us our own home city, but stepping away from that Horde conflicts with the Amani in Ghostlands, Gurubashi in Stranglethorn, and the Drakari in Northrend would all make potent stories, and just who do Vol'jin and Thrall entrust Trol'kalar too? A troll warrior carrying a legendary troll killing sword, then give him a team (I'm thinking Tauren Priest/Shaman, Blood Elf Warrior who thinks he should carry the sword, a Dark Ranger/Mage, and a maybe another troll druid/shaman to commune with the loa spirits) and send him into Zul'Gurub to face Hakar, and finally let us meet King Rastakhan. As more story are revealed of the post third war world we have a better chance to see some troll stories come to light, and may they be as awesome as that troll rogue in the 3.2 wallpaper.

The Legendary Issue

Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros, Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian, Thori'dal, the Star's Fury, the Twins Blades of Azzinoth, Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings, and now Shadowmourne, These are the eight legendary weapons available in the World of Warcraft, though there's a mount too. As the name implies they extremely rare weapons and the best for their respective roles, in their respective tiers. With current gear levels reaching upwards of 280 weapons like Sulfuras and Thunderfury, with their tiny ilevels of 80, are nothing even compared to greens. The idea makes sense from a mechanics point of view, as the level of content rises weapons become less difficult to get and thus if everybody's toting around these easy to get super weapons everything else becomes obsolete, but from a lore and continuity standpoint it's a complete conundrum. These are supposed to be the most destructive weapons in existance that have existed for hundreds if not thousands of years, yet after a few swings or tugs from a player they turn into total crap. So how do you solve the problem, simple, make it HARD. The first step is to set up a scaling mechanism for the Legendaries like the one for Heirlooms, simple enough to reuse an already great mechanic, but this is only the first step. Instead of Level this will be tied to completed quest IDs. Since 3.3 add-ons can now grab a character's complete quest history from the server, so we know for sure that Blizzard can, so if character has quest ID #### completed ilevel on Legendary A goes up to 280 or what have you. These quest don't have to be something super complex, just super hard. Create and NPCs in Dalaran call them Grand Artificer Brokkar (dwarf) and Head Librarian Sindiri (elf or human). When a player talks to one of them with a Legendary they give a special dialog, and says something along the lines of "But it power's seems to be waning after all these years, but i think we might be able to restore at least some its power." Then they offer you a quest to talk to the other guy who tell you to collect 50 Primal Saronite, 20 Titansteel, and some other item depending on the weapon (Something like 50 Eternal Something). Once you bring him that he begins reconstructing the weapon but it doesn't work quite right, at this point your legendary is replace by a high level epic item. Which will suck, but there more to it. You talk to the first guy again and he tells you something like "We seem to have accidentally sealed away the weapons magic but i've found something here that may just work to fix that." This is where it's become a bit more particular. Each legendary requires items from a different set of bosses. Thori'dal would require something from Malygos in the Eye of Eternity, Something from Freyja in Ulduar, and Blood Queen Lana'thel in ICC. Then set them to a low drop lower drop rate for the higher instances. Finally make the quest chain unfinished and add another quest at the end of the next expansions. You could even stretch it out allowing one part to be available per tier so players can begin the quest. The key is making the boss drops difficult to get, while keeping the quest's fairly cookie cutter. and a big key is while the player is doing the quest they don't have a legendary, you have an epic weapon that used to be a Legendary Weapon,

That's a very scary idea for some people, but when you're finished you have something like this.

(ups to Wow Item Creator! for the awesome sight)

Pride's Call

One of my first posts was about my dream hunter abilities, one of which was a spell that summoned a pet from the stable to help you fight. The idea was a talented ability that played off the mechanics used in abilities like Feral Spirits that summon multiple pets with a single pet bar. Well I've been thinking about it recently and I come up with some more specifics about the ability.

• Pride's Call - At your Command your pet lets out a loud call summoning a random pet from the stable to assist you for 30 sec. Summoned pet follows the lead of the pet that called it and will autocast any abilities it possesses. 3-5 min cooldown

So making it a random pet from the stable is just easier than making it a specific one. The other option is to modify the stable screen with a slot marked on call which will allow the ability to summon that pet. The pet will do what ever your active pet does, attack, following, or just watching. They will attack the same target unless something pulls aggro on one of them the same way feral spirits will sometimes attack different targets. They will use the normal priority for pets, and will autocast all abilities including talents, so when the pet is summoned they will cast call of the wild if they have it, or roar of recovery if you need mana, a summoned cat will start the fight prowled, and will charge as soon as it's summoned if it's able. The duration and the cooldown depend on how powerful the ability is in combat, 15-45 sec is a standard time for most temporary summons and 3 minutes is the usual cooldown. Assuming that a BM hunter's pet will have 4 bonus points I'd lean closer to 4 minutes for the cooldown but that all depends.

Prowl: Ferocity Tier 1

Deviate Stalker, Silvermane Stalker, Ridge Stalker, all three are tamable, all three are ferocity pets, all three are stealthed mobs, but only one can keeps that ability after it's tamed. That fact the cats and spirit beasts are the only pets that have two family abilities has always seemed off to me. Prowl as the cat special ability made sense in the pre-wrath days when you had to tame pets to learn skills and they could learn Claw and Bite, but in todays game it just seems unfair. Ferocity pets are for the most part the dps group, Cats, Raptors, and Wolves always rank among the the top raiding pets, but only Cats and spirit beast get Prowl which gives a damage bonus to the attack that breaks stealth. Stealth itself isn't a must have ability, so there no major reason for it to become a talent, as was the case with Thunderstomp, but its a cool ability that all Ferocity pets could benefit from not just cats and spirit beast, and with Arcturis the bear spirit beast it makes almost no sense. It strange that only 2 families out of 32 have an extra ability that could fit just as well with any of the pets in the tree. The only issue I see in the format of the talent trees. The 4x6 tiered layout means there's no space for it until tier 4, which is to low in my opinion, but the only viable option to me would be swapping it for Boar's Speed and moving that to tier 4, but that's iffy. Still i feel that it would be better suited as a ferocity, (and cunning picture stealthed spider webbing an unsuspecting priest) talent.

Of Ax Throwers and Shadow Hunters

With the onset of Cataclysm we will see the disappearance of our old enemy Consumable ammo. For to long we hunters have been restrained by the ever present thread of running out of ammo, and will only have to worry about durability becoming shot, so we'll still probbaly carry one or two extra depending on how they balance the durability loss, but that's not what this article is about, this is about something deeper than that, this is about thrown weapons. Ax Throwers, Headhunters, Shadow Hunters, lore says that hunter are master's of the wild and ranged combat. We have the ability to use thrown weapons, but gain no benefit from them. None of are abilities can be used with a thrown weapon, and we can't auto-throw. Yet in the case of the Horde (minus blood elves and goblins) thrown weapons were the primary form of ranged damage, but ranged physical dps completely ignores them. Why? The answer, in my opinion is consumable ammo. Hunter's are balanced around the need for ammunition so when that's removed things get a little crazy. That's why the highest DPS bow in the game still does 100 less DPS than the best Wand and 30 less than the best Thrown, and the thrown and the wand are more a stat sticks than anything so dps doesn't matter. That's why Thori'dal was so awesome.

With ammo as a normal item it brings it more inline with other ranged weapons, which is the perfect opportunity to allow hunters to use thrown weapons. For thrown weapons there's already a hierarchy, Axes for Warriors and Daggers/Shuriken for rogues. The third type of thrown weapon in the game is spears though there are a limited number of them, and none above rare quality from what I know. The spear could be the hunter ranged, but it doesn't have to stay that way. Since Rogues and hunters share pretty much the same itemization, and will even more so in Cataclysm letting hunters use thrown weapons properly would be to the benefit of both classes. Even though rogues will have to compete for the drops, there will be more of them because they aren't the only class that can use them. Blizzard has stated that more classes being able to use a weapon allows them to drop more of them (in the case of rogues and axes) so hunters have more options from a rp end and rogues get more options for their thrown. Hunter's are still gonna want to go for a ranged weapon with ammo because of possible bonuses from ammo (like a portion of damage being fire damage with fire arrows) and should still give priority to rogues on them just like daggers. I want my troll hunter to really be a shadow hunter, complete with a glaive.

Side Note: I also think Shamans should be able to use Polearms, they can use 2H maces, and 2H axes, itemization on a spear is great for Shaman, just like druids and hunters, but they'll always give it up in favor of dual wielding, but from a lore perspective it makes no sense.

Building a Hunter From Lore: Wilderness Stalker

The Wilderness Stalker is master of the wilds, and the horde's answer to the ranger's of Quel'thalas (though they are now members of the horde too) and the Sentinels of Darnassus. Orcs and Trolls are the the prime examples, but Tauren and Mok'Nathal are also Wilderness Stalkers.

The Wilderness Stalker Specializes in using the terrain to his advantage. The Wilderness Stalker is going to focus mostly in survival with a few points in BM, bu

t there's a good bit of flexibility in it.

Something like this:

The first problem is one that is reoccurring when it comes to translating lore to game, in that according to the lore Wilderness Stalkers prefer Thrown Weapons. This in part is due to the consumable nature of ammo, with cataclysm and ammo becoming a regular durable item there's a chance of letting hunter's use thrown weapons (but we'll save that for another post) so for the sake of looks carry a thrown weapon and set it to the action bar for quick equips, but otherwise a bow is going to be the best choice. Like most other hunter builds Improved Tracking is a must have not only as a damage boost but also from a lore perspective as nearly every hunter in lore is a skilled tracker. In order to capture the essence of the Wilderness Stalker's use of terrain the build focuses on traps as the primary form of damag

e, and good use of CC. Explosive Shot,Lock 'n' Load, and Explosive Trap are left out for lore reasons but feel free to drop a points in if you're looking fore better damage output. Talents are going to focus around being tactful and using the environment like Master Tactician and Hunter Vs. Wild. Over on the BM side Pathfinding is a good lore talent for most hunter spec, and the added survivability from Endurance Training and Thick Hide is always a plus. This leave a few points left over, which i tossed into Focused Aim but you can toss pretty much anywhere.

Aspect of the Beast is gonna be your primary aspect, Aspect of the Wild is also a great choice lorewise, but still very situational. This spec want's you to CC and move, swapping points from BM to MM to grab Aimed Shot isn't a bad idea. Use Freezing Arrow and Wyvern Sting to move check enemies and make sure to drop snakes. Pets with control abilities are great for this spec.Birds of Prey and Spiders for Cunning, Tallstriders and Hyenas for Ferocity, and Crabs for Tenacity. Cat's Prowl make them a solid choice as well.

For glyphs Glyph of Freezing Trap and Glyph of Immolation Trap will give you some extra bang out of your traps, while Glyph of the Beast is a straight power increase. Minors are standard, though you could swap Glyph of Revive Pet for Glyph of Scare Beast.

Professions dual gatherer Herbalism and Skinning is a great choice on the lore point, Leatherworking or Alchemy combos are also solid since they imply using things from nature, plus the three secondaries.

Building a Hunter From Lore: Beast Master

Our first installment of Building a Hunter brings us the Beast Master, the most iconic being the Mok'Nathol Rexxar. The Beast Master appeared in the Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, as a Neutral hero, at all times he was accompanied by a Bear, but could summon other companions for aid temporarily, furthermore it was a melee based class, which is the biggest difference between the Beast Master and the WoW hunter.

When building the Beast Master your Spec is going to forsake many of the standard hunter abilities because of the focus on melee combat over ranged. Here's a Sample Spec. I'd avoid using this spec if you intend on doing some hardcore raiding.

Now let's take a closer look at the spec.

The Marksmanship tree is completely ignored and all of your points will be either in Survival or Beast Mastery. Since we really don't care at all about ranged damage we nix Improved Aspect of the Hawk which is used in almost every hunter build. Instead we take talents that improve our own survivability and our pet's damage and survivability. Talents like Cobra Strikes which rely on ranged attack crits are pointless in this build. Savage Strikes is going to be important to improve your melee damage, and improved tracking is a gre

at choice both lore and damage wise. Survival Instincts can be combined with any of the three other talents in the tree talents in the tree to move to the next level, however Survivalist and Deflection are must have's for the build. This leaves 1 point left. The interesting thing is that the Beast Master does not have to take the Beast Mastery Talent. Counterattack is a great way to add another melee attack into the rotation. For those who opt out of Beast Mastery more points can be moved over to Survival for Killer Instincts, Hunter Vs. Wild, and Scatter Shot (which is yet another close range ability), this is more viable with a Tenacity pet, such as a bear which means you have to worry less about your pet dying.

As with any melee hunter build you're going to rely heavily on traps to inflict damage. You'll want to always take full advantage of Freezing Arrow to C

C. You should also utilize stings whenever possible, opening up with a Serpent Sting is always a good idea. Don't be afraid to put some distance between you to refresh your sting and throwing in the occasional Arcane Shot while you're out there isn't a bad idea either. Aspect of the Monkey and Aspect of the Beast will become our primary aspects for Defense and Damage respectively. Since there's no Aspect of the Dragonhawk equivalent for aspect of the Beast, a cast sequence macro to swap between Monkey and Beast is a good idea. For the most part though you're going to rely on your three melee abilities (Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, and Wing Clip) and white damage using a first come first serve priority, making sure to drop traps every time their up. Take full advantage of Bestial Wrath and Intimidation, and keep Mend Pet up on your pet at all times.

Glyph of the Beast will increase the attack power bonus of your Aspect of the Beast, Glyph of Raptor Strike will Give a bonus to defense every time it's used. Gear Other major glyphs worth considering for this build are Mending which will help keep your pet fighting and Immolation Trap for the straight damage boost. Minors are a standard hunter set of Mend pet, Revive Pet, and Feign Death.

Gear wise your going to want to stick to mail for the survivability, however a few pieces of rogue leather would give some expertise which is necessary for any melee build. For weapon's I personal prefer Dual Wielding for hunter melee, in my experience it gives more stability to the melee rotation, with Raptor Strikes and Mongoose Bite cooldowns alternating, so you have one or the other most of the time. Make sure you still have a good ranged weapon, since even if you're not using it it will still improve your damage output.

For the Beast Master Leatherworking and Skinning are probably your best choices as far as professions go, however skinning and herbalism would also make a good choice. Keeping cooking and fish up would be good as well.

Building a Hunter From Lore

Lore is a passion of mine no matter what I do. From reading mythology and folklore from the Americas to Asia and everywhere in between, to researched the stories behind mmos I don't and may not ever even play. One of the things that draws me into a game, particularly mmos is the story behind them. But unlike D&D there are limits one how great your customization is (i recently creates a hybrid Beastmaster/Shaman multiclassed as a Bard and a Druid with a cat familliar, a cat spirit, a cat companion, and the ability to shapeshift into a cat!) This is the case with WoW like any other mmo, but there exist in lore these awesome character types that have no true correlation in game. Paladins and mages are pretty much what you see is what you get, there lore and rpg partners are pretty much locked in in most incidents. However some other classes take a bit more, and often times it works opposite to maximizing your characters performance. Some are easy, a Troll Witchdoctor would best corralate to a shaman or a shadow priest with alchemy. Others are nearly impossible to make work, A battle mage, equally skilled in melee and magic would require max sword skill and a focus on close range quick cast spells, not safe and not very efficient either. For hunters though the lore characters are very vibrant and actually viable, or at least playable in some cases. In the coming days i'm going to look at the hunter class from a lore perspective, using the iconic hunter's of lore. We'll look at talent builds, weapon's and gear, as well as a few other things to build, Beastmasters, Wilderness Stalkers, Rangers, and Shadow Hunters

Why I Love the D&D Character Builder

So I'm a big fan of D&D. For the longest time it was just the granddaddy game that my used to reminisce about, but a couple years back I bought the D&D starter pack for 4e and now i wonder why i waited so long. Everything about it seems tailored to an would be fantasy novelist, in fact a job at wizards of the coast is now up there on my dream jobs list (though to be fair it was up there back in the glory days of Pokemon cards too). The one thing I lack is a campaign group. One day I'll get around to finding one but until then i mostly DM custom dungeons for my younger brother and cousin every so often. DMing is great, building a story and setting your friends against it is fun, (can't wait until the encounter builder gets added to the DDi adventure tools they old one was pretty good already) but it means I never get to develop my own characters. Sure every so often i get to sneak a npc helper in to fill in gaps in the group but normally i just design the encounter for the number of players. My real passion comes in creating interesting characters. The greatest thing about D&D is if you think a rogue with wizard powers would be awesome, you can do that. There's no limit to your customization, especially with the new hybrid rules. I've come up with some really interesting characters, a Ranger who transforms into a wolf and fights beside his wolf companion. A Arcane hunter, Swordmage/Ranger with a wolf companion and hawk familiar who fights with a polearm and has ungodly perception, and most recently a melee sorcerer who can kill with daggers just as easily as his spells. Where the character builder is updated monthly, but its usually with the last months updates which means awesome stuff you just read in Dragon isn't in it after the update, but it does it's job fantastically. The feature that i love most though is the Level Up option. You can take a character all the way up to 30 (max in 4e) and level by level upgrade the character. You can fully plan out your character with everything he/she needs including paragon paths and epic destinies. You can see you character at the pinnacle of his/her power. Then once its saved you can use the View At option to print a character sheet of your character at any level you chose. You can go in and select the ideal items for your character, not assuming you'll get them but if your buying them, or the DM gives you a choice you already know which ones you want. Plus the View At will only show magic weapons and items you are capable of using at the chosen level, so if you have a +3 longsword (lvl 13) and a +6 axe (lvl 28) if you View At level 15 only the +3 will be listed in your characters inventory, while if you view at level 30 it will show both. The power cards that it creates shows the bonuses for attack and damage rolls on your attacks and you can tell it which weapons to display on the cards. The character builder lets you fully realize a character even if you may never have the chance to play him/her in an actual campaign. Plus it makes a great starting place for creating characters for fantasy stories unrelated to D&D. The building process is one way to develop the character and can help fully flesh him/her out. How they act in combat, and the skills they possess are directly representative, in part, to who the character is.