Let me first apologize, I feel that for the last year (and yes, Quel’s hunting corner is indeed over a year old) I have been making and breaking promises almost constantly. Now it isnt that I dont like writing; as my guild can attest, I have no problem talking someones ear off, and as someone that has spent a vast amount of time contemplating and procrastinating, I do not have a problem cataloguing my thoughts.

The problem I am faced with at the moment is life – but not in a bad way.

I am not sure about the age of my fellow bloggers and hunter pals, I know some are older, and inevitibly some may indeed be younger. I started this game at the ripe old age of 19 (I think), and that is indeed a good age to start in my opinion; I was not a young little dirt bag ruining the game for others with QQ and bad mechanic understanding (although, I have met some exceptional young players, I doubt that I would have been one of them). I was attending university at the time, and didnt ever play WoW to a large extent until I had a patella realignment (for those who arent overly familiar with bones, that is a movement of the knee cap). This was a chronic injury that I had to get fixed, and the result was an increasing amount of time sitting (and mostly lying due to keeping my leg relatively straight) around at home. This was during my university break, a fantastic way to spend an Australian summer.

With some creative furniture arrangement, I was able to play through the early days of WotLK, slowly falling in love with the game and the general grind. I discovered Achievements and all the addiction that was associated with them. I was a WoW nerd and fine with it.

That was all well and good when the majority of your time was spent avoiding study and working casually to pay for weekend madness with friends. Yet I am past those years now.

I am swiftly approaching my mid twenties, and have started my first (proper) job. My first step in my career as a college teacher. I am full time, meaning I am responsible for 5 different classes, and I love every minute of it. This does allow me some reprive, as I cannot wait until I can enjoy school holidays from the other side of the fence

Why unload all of this life story? Well apart from letting you know more about the awesomeness that is indeed “Quelys”, I want to outline why things have been slow here.

I currently raid in a fantastic Australian guild. I made the move from my old home in Conclave to Nocturnus Vexilari – the number one guild on my server (a server that indeed has seen better days). We are not ‘hardcore’ raiders, yet we managed to kill Sha of Fear heroic before patch 5.2. With my now busy schedule of teaching, I have to make sure I not only maintain a good attendance and commitment with my guild (I love raiding, and I love this game – especially hunters, so this is something that is important to me), I also have to make sure I remain an involved and interesting teacher, and leave enough time for a social life outside of games for my less digitally inclined bretheren. All of this pretty much puts me in a sour spot for blogging.

Term one for Australian schools is coming to a close soon, and I hope that now my first term at this new job is out of the way, I will finally start getting a hang of all the ins and outs. This should allow for a more relaxed time, and increase my amount of posts.

I have a couple of posts in the works at the moment, and just brainstormed a few more… Some of these are;

- Heroic Jin’rohk guide (we killed him first week)
- Normal mode compendium, similar to my MSV compendium (the HoF guide was half done, then I let time get away from me).
- Many other aweome posts that I dont want to reveal too much about!

With my compendium post, what I like to do when researching new fights is run through strategies, videos and ability lists that are available, and use all of this information to create my own mini-list that is encounter specific. This covers encounter specific information for me (I ignore tank swaps etc, that doesn’t change how I will pew pew), and spec choice that will most likely be optimal. Hopefully I can expand on it and throw it up soon

Regards, ye shooty lover people!

I am pretty

Blizzard have released the official trailer of patch 5.2, and I must say this is what I love about Blizzard and their games – it makes you really want to play it. Hopefully this proves to be a formidable test for raiders, don’t forget there is only about two weeks before this bad boy is released (general guestimate, not a legitimate date).

My personal raid team is working on Heroic Sha. Unfortunately we hit a bit of a wall with the loss of a couple of DPS for a few weeks. To put it in perspective, when we had our full strength team two weeks ago, we had a 17% wipe. We are now just managing to reach that same level, so it is a bit annoying – yet that is the nature of such a social game. Storms have been ravaging Australia, which has meant a few of our raiders have been fighting the disconnection boss (Australia’s net is notoriously bad, that is until the National Broadband Network is finally rolled out nation-wide). All of these problems is something we will hopefully get passed, I myself have missed more raids than usual due to events that seem to crowd February (Soundwave, Valentines [wink], late meetings at work). This

Sunday we will have our full strength back in one place, with heroic terrace already cleared to Sha. It is safe to say I am extremely excited to get in there and see what this new sha-touched weapon can do! I hope your teams aren’t suffering as much as mine is, and you are progressing well! My HoF guide has had to sit to the side for a bit due to the hectic few weeks I just had, but hopefully that will be up (and I will throw the TotES guide up also) by the close of this week – hopefully not more empty promises!

As we approach closer to the patch date, are you getting ready? Will your raid team move swiftly into the new raid? I hope so!

Happy hunting!

MM FINALLY IS GETTING LOVE!

This is the sort of love that I have been talking about! I know it isn’t completely terrible, but as people will quickly point out – having 0 niche market for the once beloved spec of many has seen it cast aside, brought back for boredom or to fool around with (or for those that do not need to take a particular aspect of the game too seriously). I have played around with it a few times, and it just didn’t pack enough ‘oomph’.

So what are the buffs you say? BEHOLD!!!

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

• Aimed Shot damage +10%.
• Chimera Shot damage +50%.
• Steady Shot damage +20%.
• Black Arrow and Explosive Shot damage +15%.
• Hearing lots of concerns about Power Shot in PvP, so we may need a PvP-specific tweak there.

So there we have it, AiS, Chim, and ss all getting nice little buffs – my favorite by far is the chim shot change, it definitely did not pack the wallop it once did, and it is good to see that it may now be back to it’s glorious self-healing self!

Time to dust it off!

So MM enthusiasts, rejoice! for those who had pretty much abandoned the spec, dust it off and prepare to enter 5.2 as deliverer of pain! I for one look forward to it. It has been said time and time again that MM does not do as much AoE as surv, or as much single target as BM, yet this may close the gap with the single target issue, allowing it a viable (and very reasonable) choice for some fights that are not constant AoE (non-windlord-esque fights). I can’t wait!

Only thing left on my wish list is to bring entrapment back as a talent or glyph (glyph might be the better choice there). If it was baseline, then we would have possible issues with our pet being destroyed while kiting (and killing) certain adds [anyone who has been on Rage duty on heroic Will as BM can sympathise].

Things are looking up guys

PS: Keep in mind this comment

You can’t just apply these to 5.1 numbers. You need to keep the entire suite of changes in mind. I say this because we always get a few players who only see -20% on some ability and get all “Don’t nerf me, bro.”

Sorry for being away for so long, between the Christmas season and my PC dying on me, I have not really been able to keep up with a steady post schedule.

I would like to dedicate this post to a great friend of mine; Sam.

To us on Dath’remar he was known as Mothrakk, and he was one of the best people I had the pleasure of meeting in game and becoming friends with. A fellow hunter I always looked up to in my early days of playing, he always supported me in my goal of becoming a good raider and player – and that was just in game.

Out of the game Moth was a great guy. Together with other mates (mainly Deciuss, a dirty mage) we played many other online games, spending a lot of time on skype; talking shit to each other and generally being good friends. Through this game that we all take pride in, I was able to meet one of the best people I will ever know, and just last week I was talking to him about my holidays and we had agreed to swap stories once I had my PC back up and running.

Mothrakk took his own life last week, leaving a lot of his in game friends saddened and confused.
RIP Moth, you will be missed.

If you ever find that you can’t continue, or things are getting too hard try to talk to someone about it – Lifeline Australia can be reached by calling 13 11 14.

PS. He also carried me through a Herald of the Titans run on my mini hunter, and defended Org against attacks by dancing naked amongst them.

Naked Quel and Moth, just dancing for peace

I had to recently get the help of my tech friend (who pretty much takes care of my site-related needs) to control the spam of my site.. H-O-L-Y crap was there some spam; I think even my spam had spam (and that spam brought some spam-in-a-can, something I have not eaten, and now will never try due to being put off by comment spam). The site is now cleaned up with a new filter in place, and after deleting about 6,800 spam comments, I feel that we are back in control! Quel – 1 Spam – 6800

So with that, if you have commented on the site within the last month, then I may have sorted it with the spam… It was practically impossible to manually sort through the amount of crap that had filled up my comments section. The validation system seems to work fine, as once I have approved a posters comment, they seem to have no issues getting another one up (as long as it is posted under the same identification) and I don’t even have to approve it from that point on!

Last time I had this filter in place, some friendly fellow hunters brought to my attention some interference that the filter had when they were trying to comment.. This is not great, so please let me know if this happens again by emailing me direct at admin@quelshuntingcorner.com

Comments are rare anyway, so I won’t hold my breath

Site updates are still on the way – I was inspired by our Heroic Garalon kill to begin writing a guide for it the following day. This should be up later this week – I find throwing this up would be a good (although unorganized) start due to the past performance we as hunters have on this particular raid encounter (and our inability to cleave). We now perform quite well, if not very well, compared with the other classes, and to be sat for this encounter for being a hunter is now unacceptable! (yay). With the Garalon guide, I feel compelled to complete the rest of my guides as well, I am still tossing up between a multi-layered guide encounter-by-encounter, OR a big “MSV” guide, highlighting tactics, tips, and tricks.. If you feel game let me know in the comments!!!

Bug goes squish!!!

In game we managed to secure realm first heroic MSV clear last week, as well as taking down blade lord and garalon… hopefully we keep up this pace! The server first spam is quite satisfying
I’ll quickly mention that we hunters are utility gods on heroic will of the emperor!

I look forward to putting up my encounter guides (don’t forget, they are generally hunter specific, not raid guides) as well as updating my spec guides now we are knee-deep in mists. Hope that your particular azerothian adventures are just as fruitful!

<3 Quelys

PS. Feel free to check out our Holy Pallys PoV of our first Heroic Will of the Emperor kill – you can see my sexy hunter trapping skills

Well, I am still here… just flat out with everything!
RL has me swamped atm, and when I do have a bit of free time for WoW-related goodness, I tend to spend it playing rather than writing. I do have several drafts in the works, including a summary guide to normal MSV (to be followed up with HoF and Terrace), a discussion on the validity of ‘epeen’, a guide on how to be a good raider (regardless of class), and a few other sneaky bits!

My team is currently 5/6 heroic MSV, with everything else being knocked out on normal. This week we hope to finish off heroic Will (and get a certain sexy hunter a sexy heroic bow!) and start work on heroic HoF. I am liking a lot of the fights at the moment, yet I am constantly bombarded by QQ about hunters performance. I really want to dive further into this topic, but for now I will just say that Paragons 10m team had a hunter on every heroic kill of MSV, minus Will – to me that alone shows they aren’t too shabby… Yet we all know the ‘current state of dps’ posts/cries/anguish that have been floating around, and I agree we need some tweaks, but as I said, I will leave that discussion for another day.

My last little point I want to throw out onto the interwebs is this; IF you do not currently raid the end game content on your hunter, and your experience extends to LFR, work on your playstyle and gear/spec/reforging/talents before taking to the forums to make long winded re-hash posts of how hunters are terrible and you never top the charts – it is not a proper sample of data to have a bad LFR run and scream that the sky is falling.

Bear tea bag… sigh

Hope everyone is smashing out their own raids and enjoying BM burst pre patch!

- Quelys

There is nothing better than a good UI related post, so I plan to make this an exception (lol).

With one of my recent videos (a joke about ‘tips’ for Spirit Kings), it was made extremely clear that my UI was bad. Now I knew it was bad, I really did! I was justmuch too lazy to do anything about it. In the coming weeks I hope to be able to produce more encounter guides, as well as some humerous (well, my kind of funny-ness) videos, so I felt it was important that I finally got off my rear and put my UI modification actions into gear.

People are direct, I appreciate it.

Initially I was going for a UI package – new expansion, new guild, same awesome hunter; why not a brand spankin’ new UI?? I looked into a couple of available packages, and these are some of my favourites

Gar UI

Garwulf over at the Huntsmans Lodge has had his UI available for sometime. As well as providing detailed set up instructions (for those of us who are a tad less ‘tech savvy’), it provides a beautiful clean look, while still providing the valued tools for raiding/pvp.

Gar UI – out of combat

In combat the UI comes to life

Kripp UI

Kripparrian is one of the most talented hunters in the world – this guy knows his hunters. His UI has been around for a while, and looks amazing. I will definitely be looking into running this myself in the future, yet at the moment I find my current setup suits me just fine.

Kripp UI – made by Hunters, for hunters (well.. made by a hunter)

See it is action on Kripparrian’s YouTube channel, he updates it regularly with awesome gamer-related goodness (of which a massive chunk is hunter related)

Tuk and Elv UI

I put these two together as they are made by the same peeps (I believe). Tuk UI is generally a low use UI package, so may run smoother on an older machine. Elv UI has much more customization options (if you are unfamiliar with the non-sexy programmer language) to alter the look and feel. They both look smooth and impressive; a lot of people swear by these and they are definitely worth looking into.

I personally stayed with my own setup. It is far from the magesty of the above options, but I like it.

Current setup – a few things have been tweaked since, yet it is pretty much my old UI but cleaner.

Some of the addons that make up my UI (that are obvious) are;
Pitbull
Bartender
Sexymap
DBM
Masque
JS Hunter Bar
TellMeWhen
Skada
Tipsy
Mik Scrolling Battle Text
OmniCC
Quartz
Errorfilter

All of these addons are available from Curse

I no longer run a chat addon, and there are a few ‘behind the scenes’ addons that I won’t get into now. In the below video of my guilds first kill of 10 man Heroic Feng the Accursed, you can see the difference (if you look at the Spirit Guard video).

Are there any UI mods/packages you use or know of that deserve to make my favourites? let me know in the comments

Good luck with the Heart of Fear!

<3 Quelys

Last week my raid team got Heroic Feng the Accursed down, and I managed to fraps the fight. I have attached a few tips throughout the video, and will write up a full writter guide (as well as stone dawgs heroic) in the coming days.

NV destroys Feng

Pretty sloppy play personally, it was literally the last attempt of the night, and we were missing some key players of our raid. Fun boss nevertheless, and all about execution.

This week my guild Nocturnus Vexillari took down Heroic Stone Guards, I will be updating this blog with some heroic guides and videos, so stay tuned for that (I also have some normal mode footage I am playing with, along with a sweet death on our normal clear via spirit guard ‘wall-of-death’ adds).

A few tips

• Make the ‘crystal running’ your priority: when these bad boys are up, the bosses die quicker
• Deterrence is sweet: Glyph it for the extra reduction, and spec into crouching tiger, hidden chimera. Deterrence is not only useful as a good personal CD, it also mitigates the cobalt ‘bombs’ ENTIRELY, allowing you to quickly clear some floor space for dance moves
• Make sure to aspect dance: If you don’t have a macro, make one. There is a fair amount of movement in this fight (during the crystal-running), so dpsing on the move helps
• Be aware of your surroundings: clear cobalt ‘bombs’ for your tanks and healers, stay near your fellow raiders if Jasper is up (you don’t want to be far away if chained)
• Masters Call (yay for PvE utility!): this will break the petrifaction effect, allowing you to escape disaster or close gaps with chained raiders. It also breaks the rooting effect of the Cobalt bombs.
• If you micro manage your pet on passive, make sure it is on the right target!
• Blow CDs when the damage stacks are high, make the most use of them to quicken the fight.

I will leave the rest/more details for the upcoming guides! Good luck!

Ps. Feel free to check out my Pally mate Nphh and his Holy PoV of our kills, he gives a good indication for raid movement and positioning.

Bring on heroic modes!

So it begins! The raiding week got off to a great start, with my guild clearing all 6 bosses. We are now winding up for the best part of raiding – heroic modes.

Our Holy Paladin Nphh recorded some of our normal kills, you can’t really get a good hunter idea of the fight, yet it gives a good indication to the strats we used and where we stacked for certain phases etc. Hopefully I will start recording the heroic fights so we can make dual PoV videos.

Hope everyone is enjoying the grind