Preparing Professions for Mists: Fact 3.5

Facts 1-3

  To continue just a bit on that last point I made, I want to speculate just a bit on the future of Blackfallow Ink. Right now it is typically the cheapest method of making any glyph other than those using Shimmering Ink (which I continue to be stumped over). In Mists, however, it is expected that the new ink will be the one to trade in for lower level inks, leaving very few outlets for an entire expansion of herbs. Herbalists will still be leveling, so a large supply will be there, with a greatly reduced outlet.

BM vs MM Hunter PVP: CC Options, Buff/Debuffs, and Pets

   Pet selection as a Hunter can be game changing, especially where it comes to PvP. Since Cata came out, I've maintained that a Hunter should be familiar enough with the buff/debuff system to know which pet will benefit a group best in any given situation. This is just as applicable to CC options as well.

BM vs MM Hunter PVP: Ability Comparisons

  I've been running a bit of Arena and trying to run as many Rated Battlegrounds as I can on my Hunter. Usually it's my Priest that gets in the group, so she's actually geared better and has higher rating. I want to break 1800 on my Hunter, though, so I'm going to focus on that character over the weekend.

  Part of that will be relearning MM PvP. There are a lot of fundamentals that are the same between all specs, like scatter-trapping, disengaging, ect. These are all Hunter basics, so I want to focus on spec specific differences.

Offtopic: Gripes About Shooters

  I'm no stranger to shooters, but my experience is mostly limited to Halo, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and Rainbow 6. Aside from Halo, these are all what you would call "Military Shooters", i.e. "Realistic." I'm here to tell you, there's hardly anything realistic about them.

  Never mind the health packs, regeneration, shields, whatever allows a player to take hits and keep on trucking. That's just an outright suspension of disbelief. The disbelief I personally find difficult to suspend is the way ammo is treated.

  First off, reloading in most of these games before running out only brings you up to magazine capacity, not capacity+1. Also, when a partial magazine is taken out, I kind of expect to run across it again in series, after all full magazines are used. The Clancy games do this, and I like that. It's a small touch, but having some real-world experience with firearms makes me appreciate these kinds of things.

  Second, reloading is way too fast. New recruits often come into the military with the "I'm gonna be Rambo" idea, and this kinda feeds that. They think they can get their reload time down to 3 seconds. Reloading properly takes about 10 seconds with an M16. Remove the magazine, place empty magazine in your LBV, oriented upward to show as empty, pull a full magazine out, place the magazine in the well, drive the bolt home, tap the forward assist, resume firing. Ever play America's Army? Yeah, kinda like that, but hurried up with a harder tap on the forward assist. This kind of lag would be completely unacceptable in the fast paced gameplay we've become accustomed to, so we just speed it up.

  Side-note, one of the reasons we carry pistols is because switching to a sidearm is faster than reloading. This is actually something shooters do right, even if it's still a bit too fast.

  Finally, in the already ridiculous situation where one is carrying weapons in both hands, what's going on just below the viewpane? Are all these shooters secretly Goro clones? Do they instead all come with the getup Lara Croft has in the movies? What gives?

  My biggest complaint by far, however, is the underwhelming effect of explosives. A real Claymore's blast zone is the size of a football field, and a real A-C130 would obliterate any one of these maps in moments.

My Pets

 
  A Hunter should like his pets enough to name them, at the very least. Some diehard MM Hunters can hardly be bothered to "Name their dots", but if you want any heals on your pet, it'd better have a name at the very least.

  Some Hunters go a step further and start to hold an emotional attachment to certain pets, and might even imbue them with personality. I'm not a roleplayer or anything, but I do think of my pets as friends.

Preparing Professions for Mists: Facts 1-3

  I've been stockpiling here and there, and doing a lot of forum searching for what other people are stockpiling, and I've come to the conclusion that a lot of people are crackpot crazy. Some raise valid points, but then veer off into some serious speculation. I prefer to base predictions off of a few, simple facts.