Shocker, I was playing World of Warcraft last night. Tuesdays are the usual day for Karazhan runs in my guild. I went for a slurpee run and came back to full raid, ready to go. Then the main tank (let's call him Asshat) leaves, saying the group was insufficient to complete the instance.

Some background on Asshat, he has nine level 70 characters and a few level 60+. Getting a character to level 70 takes (guessing, haven't leveled 1-70 since they sped up the process) nine to eleven "play days", which means 9x24 to 11x24 hours of playing that character. This guy is the very image of a WoW addict.

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Now that you've killed High King Maulgar and Gruul a bunch of times, it's time to move onto bigger fish. I actually think the Mag fight is easier than Gruul. Gruul's Shatter ability is really annoying and does lots of damage. Mag has earthquake, that bounces you around, which is annoying, but much less destructive.

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As with my Karazhan hunter guide, I assume you've read up on the basics of the Gruul's Lair, and are just looking for details specific to the hunter class.

Gruul's Lair is lovely, it's so fast to clear. Two trash pulls to the first boss, five more to the last. Five badges for about 60 minutes of work

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The other component to cf_armory, FactionCapture, is a mess!! A while ago I added the option to chose what factions to graph, and I just changed it to only store faction history for 6 months (filling up my database!), but the page is still so ugly. I'm thinking this is a good candidate for a Flex app. I love the idea of graphically seeing your faction values change over time, but the current conception of it that I have stinks.

So I played with some Flex and came up with this design mock up... The new mock up

After a year of ignoring it, I've finally gotten back to enhancing UpgradeCentral. I used JQuery to break up the data into tabs. Now you'll immediately notice the tabs are too much to fit on the screen, so go into a weird second line. That's because I don't know jack about JQuery ... yet.

Note, UpgradeCentral uses Armory to determine what is an upgrade, based on the character's current spec. And a lot of it is rubbish. It generally ignores items with a "chance on hit" sort of bonuses.

Next I need some check boxes to unselect locations. I don't care to see upgrades from Sunwell, Black Temple, or PVP with my hunter and nothing over Gruul's with my priest.

I first saw a post about iArmory a few weeks ago and was blow away by the idea. Elad at Omen of Clarity has developed and is still developing a front end for Blizzard's WoW Armory for iPhones and iPod Touches. It runs great, is very easy to use... I'd love to post some screen shots of it, but it's designed for MobileSafari, and breaks apart some in FireFox. Keep an eyeball on Elad's blog for the first public release. Being able to very quickly reference your +shadow damage while driving to the grocery store may seem like a silly idea. But I've used iArmory a lot already. The full armory site just about breaks my laptop when I load a profile, so my iPhone is really unhappy about the the bulk site.

For the most part, hunters have it easy in Karazhan. Nothing frenzies, you don't have to pull, and only one boss fight might require you to kite. This guide / cheat sheet only covers hunter-specific things to the boss fights. I'll assume you'll find the general strats elsewhere.

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Blizzard posted some new info this week about the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I've been loosely following blog posts and have some thoughts and ideas for the expansion. None of this is fact, just my ramblings

Attunement

Getting keys and/or attuned for dungeons in The Burning Crusade was a big thing. Getting the key for Karazhan is a looooong quest chain. Then the next dungeons all required some level of progress in the previous ones. Sounds like a great idea, forcing guilds to start with the 5 man dungeons, building up to 10 man KZ, then to 25 man places. But that also requires that every player, on every character, go through all those quests. Attunement and keys are good to ensure you're ready before venturing into some new dungeon, and that you've seen the content that some hard working Blizz employee slaved over for hours. ...Poor Molten Core, BWL, and AQ designers... QQ

Hero Classes?

The Death Knight is "the first" hero class in the game, implying there will be more. But you make a new character as a Death Knight. I'm the sort that prefers to just work on one character a LOT and prefect playing that one class, rather than have a lot of alts. As such, I'd rather go through some quest chain and unlock a hero class that my hunter will convert into. I'm seeing a Beast Master class that has two pets, Marksman with HUGE amounts of "ignore armor" and a 60 yard shot (aka a sniper), and Survivalists surrounded by traps. Having a "hero class" for all nine classes' three talent trees is a LOT of hero classes. And what about the priests that respec holy for the night's raid, then back to shadow to do dailies? Maybe it would be more like you do some quest or process to unlock the 51 point talent at the bottom of each tree. Once you unlock that talent, you can put the point in it, even after a respec. If you mouse over a talent right now, it'll say "Requires: 10 points in blah". Just change that to "Requires 50 points in blah and 'Quest name'".

Less than 5 man dungeon!

I had a dream last night I was playing and went into a one man dungeon. It's really a fun idea. It's solo content, without the competition from everyone else doing it. I like going back to older dungeons with my sister and tearing the place up. I'd love to see content that's tuned for that, where you don't need a tank, healer, three DPS and CC. For the less social people that just want to hang out with one or two friends. But still want to get some nice loot. If the new raid dungeons will all have 10 and 25 man options, add a 1 and 2 man option to the 5 man places!

I hit 600 agility the other day unbuffed. It made me remember when I went over 300 raid buffed for the first time... Ah, memories... But it also made me wonder what spec is best for the raid. As much as I love having high personal DPS, if I could lower my own to overall raise the output of the raid, I would. I considered how much the three hunter raid/party buffs will increase raid DPS and how often, and under what circumstances, the buff will occur. The three buffs are Ferocious Inspiration for Beast Master hunters, Trueshot Aura for Marksmen, and Expose Weakness for Survival spec hunters. The numbers are based on a number of assumptions, in a 25 man raid.

Ferocious Inspiration ... On pet crit, raises all damage by party members by 3% for 10 seconds. FI affects all damage; dots, spells, physical. I have about 650 DPS with a plain shot rotation, so the FI buff is 19.5 DPS for me. Burning some cooldowns, I can hit 1100 DPS, so 33 DPS bonus. Assuming the other 4 people in my group are about the same, FI is +97.5 to +165 raid DPS.

I took the data from my guild's 4/27 Serpentshrine Caverns raid, figuring this was an average raid with average buffs to figure my pet has about 13% chance at landing a critical hit. I took his total crits over the total hits, rather than considering the crit chance of the individual abilities.

My cat has 1.26 second attack speed. He also does Bite (10 second cooldown), Claw (1 sec GCD), and Kill Command (5 sec CD). In 10 seconds, he'll have 8 autoattacks, 1 bite, hopefully 2 KCs, and depending on focus regeneration, maybe 6 claws. 17 hits in 10 seconds. So on each hit, there's overall a 87% that it WON'T be a crit. A 9% chance (.87^17) that FI will NOT be reapplied while it's already active.

Trueshot Aura grants 125 AP to your party, which is 8.9 DPS for a hunter (AP/14 = 1 DPS for a hunter, AP/15 for a rogue; we'll use AP/14 for all to make it easier). +44.6 raid DPS if I'm grouped with all physical damage dealers. TSA stinks... It's great before you have the gear to support a different spec. Hopefully they'll change it to scale with hunter AP and drastically increase the range of effect. It's totally overshadowed by EW. It's a buff to the player though, so useful if party members are not attacking the same thing at the hunter.

Expose Weakness applies a debuff to the mob that increases AP against it by 25% of the hunter's agility, lasting 7 seconds. At 600 unbuffed agility, EW would be 150 AP. If I had EW, I'd have 15% more agil from other talents, so 690 agility and 172 AP, 12 DPS. Assume the raid has 14 DPSers in the raid (not sure of the actual numbers) and half of them (7) will be able to use the buff from EW (physical damage dealers, not mage/warlock/boomkin), so +86.2 raid DPS up to +120 if there are 10 physical DPSers. Other classes will get more or less out of the 172 AP than a hunter.

EW with 3 talent points has a 100% application chance, as long as the hunter shoots the target once every 7 seconds. FI depends on the pet's survival and a pet crit. TSA is always active (while the hunter lives).

It's hard to say which is a better raid buff, except we can all agree TSA sucks.

Trueshot Aura is better if... A) You can't do more than 300 DPS total (to defeat FI) or B) you have under 500 agil after all telents and buffs (to defeat EW).

Expose Weakness is better if... A) The hunter has super high agility (750+ after all buffs), B) the raid is heavy on physical DPSers, C) the fight isn't pet-friendly (Leotharas, Void Reaver, etc) so the pet can't survive in range of the target to land a crit.

Otherwise Ferocious Inspiration is the best DPS boost.

I'm not completely happy with my solution, but it works. It goes through Blizzard's armory to search for the item and get the item number, then uses wowhead.com to help make the popup.

Like yesterday's post, add a code block to blog.cfc to look for {item ...} code fragments. This is where I'm not happy, I wanted [wowitem ...] to work.

This references armory.cfc, so make it and add these two functions...

getItemLinkFromName

makeHTTPCall

Then add somewhere in your page, a script block for WOW Head ...

The magic in that script will add the popup to all links to wowhead.com, woo! If the item isn't found in the armory, it will just print the name of the item. Problem though, is if more than one item is found, it'll make a link to the first item. This is needed though. Boots of the Crimson Hawk is made from Pattern: Boots of the Crimson Hawk. Doing a search for the boots returns the pattern as well. I'm guessing armory returns items in alphabetical order.

So what happened with making a [wowitem ...]? It was fine when there was only one in the post, but could wrap the first "[wowitem" with the final "]" if there was more than one. If someone with better regex knowledge than I can solve this, please share!