Scattered Shots: Hunter community resources
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.
Hunters are more than an amazing class; hunters are an amazing community. The hunter community is hands down the best class community in WoW. We have more intelligent and generous players willing to dedicate their free time to helping each other out than most classes have intelligent and generous players.
One of the great things about the hunter community isn't just the quantity of hunter sites and resources out there, but the phenomenal quality of those resources.
Today, I'd like to highlight as many of those phenomenal hunter sites as possible. If you're a regular reader of Scattered Shots but don't get out across the rest of the hunter community much, you seriously have to check some of these sites out. And if you're a die-hard hunter who can't get enough hunter news, I bet I've even got some sites here that you haven't heard of yet. Join me after the cut for the gateway into the best community in the game.
Hunter resource sites
For the sake of providing some division of the massive collection of hunter community sites out there, I'm going to divide them into hunter blogs, forums, and resource sites. The resource sites are the ones that either don't fit into any category or are just so universally useful that they stand out from a blog or forum.
Female Dwarf
www.femaledwarf.com
Female Dwarf, run by Zeherah, is unquestionably one of the gleaming highlights of the hunter community. On Zeherah's site, you can import your character's armory, set your rotation and buffs, and with a click of a button, calculate your theoretical DPS potential with a breakdown of where each point of damage is coming from. You can then tweak your talents, gear, gems, reforging, glyphs, rotation, buffs, and anything else to see how they affect your damage.
Female Dwarf is a powerful tool that gives us a lot of theoretical information, but be aware that like any tool, it can be misused (or rather, used foolishly), and the information is theoretical. In particular, FD models a stand-still fight with no movement and perfect execution -- and even then, the haste values can still be a little wonky. Female Dwarf remains, however, the gold standard for the hunter community. With Female Dwarf, you don't have to be theorycrafter to experiment with different optimization; Zeherah will do the theorycrafting for you.
Petopia
www.wow-petopia.com
Petopia is the ultimate hunter pet resource. On Petopia, you will find listed every hunter pet, every hunter pet ability, and every hunter pet model and skin and level. Do you want to know where you can find a white bear pet tamable by a level 33 hunter? Petopia can tell you.
WoW Hunters Hall
www.wowhuntershall.com
WoW Hunters Hall is a relatively new site that I started to make monitoring, participating, and promoting in the vast hunter community easier. This site is maintained by the hunter community and will show you at a glance outtakes of every hunter blog and hunter news across the hunter community, with links to the original site. It also provides weekly recaps of the various forum discussions, so you can keep up on forums in a nice digest version without having to, say, read through the entire Elitist Jerks discussions.
WoW Hunters Hall also lets hunters sign up to write articles of their own, and you'll see the occasional original hunter opinion piece as well as the news from across the hunter community. It's a great way to see in a glance what the entire community is saying.
Hunter forums
If you want to join in hunter-related discussions, see what other hunters are saying, or ask other hunters for assistance, there's no better venue than forums. We hunters have a lot of forums to choose from -- most of them are generic WoW forums with hunter areas, but we also have hunter-specific forums as well.
Forums have a bad rep as places filled with trolls and asshats and ranting teenagers frothing at the mouth and name-calling. This reputation is, in general, well-earned. But not all forums are that bad, and even the ones that are can have a lot of interesting discussion and insights among the junk. It's worth noting that the hunter-specific forums tend to actually be quite pleasant places -- it's the hunter sections of the more general forums that are not. Coincidence? I think not.
Petopia forums
forums.wow-petopia.com/
The Petopia forums are a wonderful meeting place for hunters to discuss their favorite thing: their pets. Petopia forums of course also offer discussions of hunter in general, with fan art, creative writing, and roleplaying forums included. The Petopia forums are a delightful place, and they prove that it's possible to have online forums without it devolving into trolling, name-calling, and hyperbole.
Huntsman's Lodge forums
huntsmanslodge.com/forum/
Another hunter-specific forum, the Huntsman's Lodge forums get a bit more crunchy than Petopia and are another great place of hunter refuge. These forums provide some nice UI, addon, macro, and PVP discussions as well as the more common hunter discussion topics of optimization.
Elitist Jerks hunter forums
elitistjerks.com/f74/
The EJ folks get a bad rap as being ... well, elitist and jerks. And that rap is often deserved, but there are also some very kind and helpful people there. Just remember, when you're in their house, you play by their rules. Be sure to read their strict posting rules, and be ready to follow them. The EJ forums built their rep as a place for serious discussion of mechanics -- it's not a place for friendly conversation or to ask how to improve your DPS. But there is a wealth of phenomenal hunter information for top-end raiding available at Elitist Jerks.
Wowhead hunter forums
www.wowhead.com/forums&board=4
The folks who brought you tooltips for every item in the game have forums, too, and their forums have sections dedicated to each class -- hunters as well as the support classes. Expect a slightly more common forum experience here ... which is to say, the presence of trolls and the pollution of non-hunters.
MMO-Champion hunter forums
www.mmo-champion.com/forums/271-Hunter
MMO-Champion's forums also have a hunter section. Be warned that while arguably better than the official WoW forums, there are plenty of trolls and doomsayers here.
Official WoW hunter forums
us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/1012664/
I have to include the official WoW hunter forums in a list of hunter forums, but it's not someplace I hang out unless someone directs me to an interesting post there. The forum has useful gems in the rough, but the signal to noise ratio is horrible and the trolls and hyperboles fly faster than our bullets.
Hunter blogs and other sites
Finally, we have the host of hunter blogs, the many great voices of the hunter community. I find that I'm running out of space, so I'll try to keep the hunter blog section succinct. But if you're looking for insights from fellow hunters, analysis of what the latest news or blue post means, or just another interesting way to burn some more time at work, the blogs are the beating heart of the hunter community.
35 Yards Out A hunter blog focusing a bit on marksmanship hunters, but also with excellent research and insights into the hunter class as a whole.
The Brewhall The home of Darkbrew, one of the hosts of the Hunting Party Podcast, The Brewhall is a comfy home for dwarven hunters (Darkbrew has, at last count, four dwarven hunters).
Hunter's Rhok Phyllixia's blog whose namesake is the epic Rhok'delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers.
Hunting Party Podcast An all-hunter podcast hosted by myself, Euripides, and Darkbrew that broadcasts live every week. HPP often has special guests, including such luminaries as Kruf from Paragon, Kripparrian, Zeherah, and Mania from Petopia, and BRK himself makes the occasional appearance.
The Huntsman's Lodge The blogging home of Garwulf and home of the Huntsman's Lodge forums. Garwulf covers a good amount of hunter PVP and UI/addon topics -- something that can be very hard to find elsewhere in the hunter community.
Kripparrian Kripparrian's YouTube channel includes videos of a leading progression guild's kill videos from a hunter perspective, as well as some great guide and instructional videos from a top hunter.
The Master's Call Valilor's blog about hunters. I'm particularly fond of the delightful images that he manages to put into almost all of his posts -- though I wish it had an easier way of navigating through older posts (hint, hint).
Marks-365 Morynne's hunter blog, dedicated mostly to markmanship hunters but also a fantastic source for current raid strats for hunters, including heroic raid strats.
OutDPS The general hunter blog maintained by Euripides of the Hunting Party Podcast and Eidotrope. While Euripides has faded into the background, rolling naked in his piles of gold, Eidotrope continues to have excellent insights into the hunter class.
Scattered Shots You're reading it. Weekly hunter info and entertainment, in long form.
Scruffy Hunters A newer hunter blog, Scruffy blogs about hunters and (at times) wider WoW issues in general.
Warcraft Hunters Union My blog with hunter news, guides, and entertainment, updated five days a week or more.
Scattered Shots is dedicated to helping you learn everything it takes to be a hunter. From leveling your hunter through optimizing for heroics, pre-heroic loot and pre-raid loot, then on to choosing the right spec for the right job and how to "aspect dance" to maximize your DPS, we've got you covered.
