Trapping, Old School Style

Everything comes back in to style eventually. Cataclysm brought CC back in a big way. I remember back in the ol’ days, when UBRS was a 15 man mini-raid, as hunters we had to know how to trap. When we finally were given the ability to drop traps in combat, we had to learn how to chain trap. What is this chain trapping that I speak of I can hear you asking? Well, it’s the art of keeping a mob (or sometimes 2) locked down in ice. Most, but not all hunters could do this. You had to be able to trap a mob at least once. The more you did it, the easier it got.
You had to keep an eye on several different things while chain trapping. Distance, situational awareness, aggro management, and communication were the keys to locking a mob down until it was it’s turn to die. The perfect example of the need for chain trapping was Morse in Kara. Morse came with 4 adds. The standard for taking them all out to shackle 1 or 2, then trap one, while then burn down the last add or 2. After that the shackled add, or adds, were killed. Our trapped add was usually low man on the kill order. We had to keep our add locked down until our target was called.
To effectively chain trap you have to know how long your traps hold, how long they have til they rot, and how long the cooldown is. They’ve made it easier on us by keeping the cool down on traps to 30 seconds. Once we’ve laid our trap, it stays there for 1 minute. Now it would seem that we would be able to have more than 1 trap out at a time, but we’re only able to have 1 trap of each kind out at a time. Now once our target hits our trap, it will freeze them in place for 1 minute, or until someone sneezes on them. Yep wet tissue paper is more durable than our freeze traps.
This brings us to our next point for chain trapping, situational awareness. You need to let your group know where you are going to be trapping, and where they are going to DPSing the kill target. Nothing sucks as badly as having your locked down mob break early because of careless AoE, while your trap is on cool down. Now the other half of being aware of what’s happening is your initial pull of the trap target. Depending on the fight, and the area you’re in, is going to determine if you have to pull the mob with distracting shot or putting up camo and launching a trap. The changes that Blizz are making to distracting shot in the patch are going to make it even easier to use than ever. No more /stopcast macro when you don’t want to auto shoot anymore. So your target is frozen in a block of ice, now what do you? Well, you multitask. You need to keep an eye on your target, while burning down the kill target. You want to make sure there is as much room as possible between you and the trapped mob. Now if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that your trap is off if cool down before your first trap wears off. That’s a good thing, it makes trapping your focus target that much easier. Now you want to tag the mob with a distracting shot, which will cause it to run straight at you and hit your next trap. After you have the mob frozen for the second time, put some distance between you two again and go back to shooting the kill target. Rinse and repeat as often as needed.
Now it’s time for you to go and practice your chain trapping. I recommend Nadrand. It’s spacious and there’s plenty of room. Just choose your target, and see how many times you can trap it. You should be able to trap it at least twice, but aim for 3 or more. See if you can start with the mobs south of the throne of elements, and chain trap it back to Telaar.
So, that concludes today’s lesson on crowd control for hunters. I hope that you learned a little, and I didn’t bore you too much. So until next time don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.

Blogroll Cleaning

Like shoveling the snow away from my car this morning, I am doing a little bit of cleaning up on the old site. I went through and removed some blogs that haven’t updated in over a month. Small clean up for a snowy day.

Ding 85… Finally…

So I finally hit 85 this weekend, and now the fun really begins. I’m starting to run instances to get geared up for raiding. Before I hit 85, I had only ran Black Rock and Throne of Tides. Both of them weren’t that hard, as long as people paid attention. I had heard horror stories of how horribly bad and difficult, tough
and evil they were. But after running those 2 dungeons, I didn’t believe it.
Then I hit 85. It started with my first pug, a Stonecore run. We weren’t even in the instance for 5 seconds when the tank leaves. While we’re waiting for another tank, someone gets the bright idea to head back to Ironforge to finish putting stuff up on the auction house. So after a few minutes, we get our tank. Then seeing that one of the DPS was at the AH he decided to go there too. That torqued off the healer who then dropped group, which started a chain reaction of drops from the group. That was
more than enough frustration for one night, so no instances for me that night.
The next night went better. I got in to the Lost City. Every thing perfectly. The tank asked who hadn’t done the instance before, and then proceeded to explain the fights in detail as we went. We only had 1 wipe, and that was when we doubled back for the second captain.
So after that great run, I queued back up for another run, hoping that it would go as smoothly and as easily as the last one. Well I ended up getting Grim Batol. GB is one huge check point for you. It is a gear, DPS, healing, aggro, and teamwork check. I haven’t felt that much stress in an instance, since BC heroics. Our healer dropped before the first boss, but we lucked out and had another one fast. I lost track of the number of times it came down to me and my pet, and either the ret pally or shadow priest barely alive after a bad pull or boss fight. Blizz has really turned up the heat with the new instances. You have to be on your toes, you can’t go in with the same AoE mentality that came from WotLK. That kind of thinking will get you killed fast. Oh, and one more thing, if you want the hunter to trap a mob, for the love of god don’t drop a consecrate/death and decay/thunderstomp right next to it. When you want us to CC a target, remember our traps have a 30 second cool down. Let us either get in position to launch a trap, or drop in to camo, or pull to the trap first. Well after over an hour and a half, we finally finished the instance. It was the most stressful 5 mans I’ve ran since BC.
If you are planning to just waltz in and AoE down everything like you did in WotLK, think again. As we get further in to Cataclysm I’m sure they will get easier. I’m still working on getting geared up enough to start heroics, and finally start raiding again. So until next time don’t forget to reload, so you don’t run out of ammo.

Altoholism, I Haz It

So Cataclysm came out earlier this month as we all know. I know I’ve been quiet about what I think of it so far, but here’s my take on it so far.
I love the look and feel of it all. I dabbled in Hyjal, till I decided to head out to Vajir, and did all of the
quests there. I like the flow of the new zones, however its felt very linear. You will only be able to access the next quest hub if you finish all the quests at the one you’re at. I’ve been noticing that as I work my way through Stonecore as well. However, the scope of the quests has gotten much larger to make up for that one
problem it seems.
Then there’s the Worgen. What can I say. I am in love with them so far. Everything just feels right about them, that is except their dances… The starting zone and quests have the
doom and gloom feeling of the old Wolfman movies. Their story is
compelling and tragic. I’ve started 2 so far. My furry fury warrior
Fuzzbaal, and a rogue named Wombatt to level with Wife. We’re getting to point now where I’m thinking of switching to Fuzzbaal when we’re running together. Her dog has always had issues with
holding aggro. Besides, Fuzz has a sweet eye patch, and Wombatt doesn’t. Now Wife is a few levels higher than Fuzz, but between the heirloom gear and the 10% guild xp bonus I should have no problems catching up to her. I just have to do a few quests and I’ll beright
where she is.
Now I recently tried a goblin also. I’m not impressed with their starting zone yet. It’s definitely a slower start than
the Worgen. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to keep him, he’ll probably end up like the rest of the Horde toons I start, and get scrapped early on.
So far everything is going great and I’m really enjoying the expansion. So until next time don’t forget to reload, so you don’t rub out of ammo.

An Open Request to WordPress

To whom it may concern At WordPress,
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD MAN FIX THE DAMN IPHONE APP!!!!!!
I am tired of working on a post to only have the changes I’ve made vanish like a fart in the wind. I use my iPhone to write most, if not all of my posts. There are few things more frustrating than almost finishing a post, then saving it, coming back later to finish it, and finding ABSOLUTELY nothing was saved.
Thank you for listening to my mini-rant,
Gweninu and Sushi