As most of you know by now, the NDA has been lifted, so the internet has been flooded with information. Over at wowhead, the WotLK section has just gone live, with talent calculators. I have had a quick play around with them - it looks like BM is still going to be the build for the raiding hunter. With the key new talents being Longevity and Aspect Mastery. Over on the MM tree, Careful Aim will also come into the build.

I can also see some hunter love for arena. There are some new talents that I think will help the hunter and his pet do a lot better.

One other thing to note, is the SV tree. This sees some interesting changes. We might even see a few more raiders sporting this tree. With the new talents Hunting Party and Sniper Training, people might actually start to to like the hunter in their party.

My build focuses mainly on what we have now, along with the new talents. I still have to do the maths as to how the new talents will affect the DPS output. I am also unsure of my 3 points in thick hide - I’m thinking of putting them in Improved Aspect of the Hawk (I can’t put them anywhere else, as you need them in the first 2 tiers to reach the next tier of the BM tree). Also taking Beast Mastery is for the 5 extra skill points. We will not know fully how this will affect us until we know more about the pet trees.

Let me know what you think, or if there are any changes I can make.

Just an update on Beta invites. From looking around, there have been a select few invites go out, but the main wave is yet to come - a lot of people are picking Monday in the US. That’s just two days away. My guess is sometime this week. There was a blue post saying that it would be up on the front page when they send out invites. So don’t start to /cry just yet that you have not got one.

Well, if you have been living under a rock, or not paying attention, WotLK is meant to be coming out this year, and overnight there has been a lot of things happening.

Yesterday the NDA was lifted on WotLK, so a lot of information has flooded onto the internet. It has all been coming out of what has been in the alpha, which for the past month or so has been live in testing.

There has been reports that the EU invites for the beta have come out, but I have not seen too much on this. What I have found really interesting, is the fact that the beta site is now live. Now this is progress. Most people picked that the beta would come out at WWI next month, but with this coming up so early, one must guess that it will be only a week or so.

I have also seen a few screen shots floating around of the beta downloader and also the login screen, which looks really really sweet.

I’m still waiting for my beta invite and I’m hoping for it to be here today or tomorrow. I’ll report back here if I get one. In the mean time I’m going to get my Priest man his mount.

So we only had nine for the upper part of Kara. What ever would we do? Well, take a lvl 68 holy pally of course! Wouldn’t you? But that’s not the good part, oh no.

What made it even more fun, was when on the guilds first shot at NightBane, our two main dps go down at 50% (stupid Mages - some people say its lucky to have Mages die, so they gave us double the amount). What do you do at this point… well, as a hunter, I was running for the door about to FD… but why not stay and give it a go any way. That’s just what we did, with only 4 dps, 1 tank, 2 heals, plus our 68 holy pally - who was on heals.

A few minutes later we were still up - then over Vent; “We could actually do this if we have enough mana and there is no enrage timer.” Who would have thought we would need to know that? One of our lucky Mages piped up (after alt-tabing to find out); “umm I don’t think so”, so on we pressed.

Guess what? 13 minutes after the fight began, it was over. That’s right, we downed NightBane. No one knows how our mana lasted that long, but it did. Might I say that our healers are awesome - our 3 healers that is - well done guys, that was a big effort on your part (even Rusty was still alive).

So the Quantum Butterflies are now 11/12 in Karazhan in just 2 weeks. ZA next week anyone?

Well, I dont know about fun, but some people do really enjoy it, and that’s cool. Me, I don’t know. But for the past couple of days, I have been taking a break from my main and rolling in the BG’s on my priest man. He was 27 at that stage and I wasn’t expecting a great deal out of him.

Well, I was right to some extent. I was getting one shotted by lvl29 twink rouges, which really was not cool. Nerf them I say. Wait - they did in the patch! /shoot for joy.

Anyways, what I was really surprised at, was the amount of heals I had compared to everyone else. I was getting over 10k worth of heals total - without trying to hard - and no one else was coming close. Most were only getting around 6-8k worth. I found this a bit strange, so I went to do a bit of digging.

I headed over to Warcraft Realms to check out the Census, just to see what was going on with the healing class - everyone has been saying there has been a lack of them.
So lets look at the numbers:

• Priest’s make up 9% (2328)
• Shaman’s make up 8% (2001)

Now that’s out of a total of 25,539. What I also found interesting, is that the Alliance make up 68% (17,238) of the server and the Horde 33% (8301).

Those are some intersting numbers. For one, the number of Horde there are could contribute to the lack of people. This, taken with the low percentage of healer class apart from pallies, leads to a not very good state. You could also throw into the mix; Do people who play healer classes actually heal during a BG?

Maybe I’m just reading to far into it, but these are some interesting numbers nonetheless.
In any case, if you are in a low lvl BG, you might not get heals

Go check out the numbers for your realm, it’s very cool stuff.

Yes, well, I know I’m late but hey, I have had lots to do this week… well… not really, I have just put it off. Well, here goes.

The second half of Kara was not like the first…

First up on the list was Aran. Key thing we learnt from this fight - don’t move during flame wreath. Yes, I was guilty of moving during it once. I really like this fight, because as a hunter there are a few things we actually have to do; we have to move, move well, and don’t move during flame wreath. It took us a little while to get the hang of it, but after about 5 wipes he went down pretty fast.

Prince went down without to much of a fuss, except for a few wipes where we had unlucky Infernal spawns - but hey, you can’t help that now can you. Chess was also done, of course. Illhoof didn’t put up much of a fight at all, going down on first shot.

Netherspite on the other hand, was far from a good fight. We were all pretty tired by this stage, and not getting anywhere after 2 wipes, we called it a night.

So, it was not as good as the first half, but we are still learning the fights, and next week is another week. We didn’t even get to Nightbane, but he will keep untill next week.

Some good drops came up as well. Nothing for me, but that’s ok, I was just loving being a part of the raid and wiping time after time. Yes, I said it - I loved the wipes too. Maybe I will write on this later.

Thats right - a few nights ago, I walk into Kara for the first time. This was not only my first time, but also the first time we - the Quantum Butterflies - had put together a full Kara team. Only half of us were first times, the rest had been rolling with another guild every week and were mostly T4 with some T5 gear.

I could hardly contain myself. I had been working towards this for way too long. I had spent the last few days farming mats for food and buying elixirs. I had done everything I could to prepare myself… but even so, on the first pull I had no idea what was going on. There were so many people. Now don’t think that I hadn’t run any 5-mans before because I had. I had been running at least 1-2 a day for the past 4 weeks, trying to gear myself.

I don’t think any amount of time or effort put into reading about the boss fights, or running 5-mans, could fully prepare you for the coordinated chaos that is a Raid.

We were moving though the pulls like mad men, with the command from the main tank to “hurry up and only drink when I drink.” I was still trying to work out what was going on when I was asked to trap! The marks went up and I was trying to get over the fact that they wanted me to trap, when the MT pulled. I fumbled my way though it and managed somehow to pull off a chain trap, and maintain some sort of dps on the kill order.

It took a long time for things to settle down and for me to get my head back in the game. We one shotted everything, with only one wipe on trash before Curator. We then all laughed it off and just went right ahead and put down Curator. Which we decided was enough for one night on our first guild run of Kara. What can ya say really, other than what a run it was.

We were not expecting much going in, as a lot of us were first timers. I have to give a big thanks to the more experienced guys who made the run go as smoothly as it did.

I will make sure to let you all know on how the second half of Kara goes, just as soon as we decide on a date.

To make it even better, Legacy dropped. Can you say OMG