I'm coming back, and I may need some help...

[NiteFox]

Decided to come back for Warlords; it's something I've mulled over for a while, and I have had opportunity to do so previously but found myself discouraged due to various reasons. Anyway, I found the expansion pack cheap today (£28 in the Tesco on my way back from work, compared to the RRP of £35) and had a few time cards sitting in a desk drawer for a few years. It's time to come back.

Well, almost time. There's a few other immediate concerns, and not just the current queue fiasco. My ISP is doing speed checks on my connection, and I'll no doubt return a lower speed than I had before and will have to spend a few days on the phone to customer support to get me back up to speed. Plus there's the whole post-launch queue fiasco to deal with, and the fact that my realm went from a medium population to full is a little worrying. My starter edition character can't even get less than position 4,000 in the queue. Hopefully everything will work out in a week or so.

Come to think of it, I remember that my ISP did speed checks around the launch of Mists.

Anyway, in the meantime I need some help getting back up to speed. I left the game back in 5.1, so I think there's probably a lot to catch up on.

Mechanics

I'm talking both generally here and specific for the worldview of a hunter. How are things different now? Have they overhauled the talent system again? How about Glyphs since Blizzard seemed to love rewriting that system every other patch? I'm also seeing people from other servers as I poke around Camp Narache; what happened to individual server identity?

Is gearing still a case of stacking agility, crit, and tweaking hit? Anything different about pets? There's a whole lot of stuff I'm curious about, but that's about all I can think of that I wouldn't like to go blindly into.

And a minor thing, have they updated the Death Knight start any, or is it still a case of starting at 60 and then getting dumped on Outland's ancient content doorstep?

Add-ons

This is the fun one, and part of the reason I didn't come back sooner. Nothing like wasting a day or two of a sub trying to get my UI back up to scratch. I'm hoping to be able to use a starter edition character (on a low-population server, naturally) to rebuild my UI and then transfer all the settings to my main.

My old UI was the evolution of many years of trying different add-ons, and it was a bit of a kludge by the time I quit the game. Since then I've gone through another PC build, and I neglected to transfer my old interface folder from my old PC. It's gone forever, and I'm feeling a tad nostalgic for the old vanilla days where you could get away with just CosmosUI for casual play and as a foundation to build your own UI on.

Bartender handled my actionbars: I have a lot of extra buttons on my keyboard and mouse (Logitech G510 keyboard with 18 keys on the left, and a Logitech G600 mouse with 12 thumb keys and a few other rebindable modifiers). I'm going to need keybinds for all these keys, so a list of the game's default keybinds would help here.

I used Curse's client to download as many add-ons that I could remember that I used to use; DBM, Atlas, TitanPanel, Bartender... a pretty long list. Most of them work, but several are still listed as out of date - I'm not sure if this is because the authors are still in the process of updating them for the current version, or if they've been dropped. Does anyone know the status of the following, and if they are officially discontinued what are some good alternatives?

• AtlasLoot suite
  
• Mounted
  
• ReforgeLite
  
• Sexycooldown
  
• TitanPanel Raid ID plugin
  
• TitanPanel Durability plugin
  
• X-Perl suite
  
• XLootGroup
  

Lore

A brief one, but can someone give me a cliff notes version of what exactly happened during the Kung Fu Panda arc? Again, I was a 5.1 leaver, and only got as far as level 88 with only Stormstout Brewery completed. From what little I played I honestly wasn't paying much attention, and Farmville and the fact that so many rep factions were tied to growing turnips was part of the reason why I left.

I plan on ploughing through the Pandaren overworld content, but it'll likely be done so fairly mindlessly without paying too much attention until I get to Draenor. So what exactly happened to get us to this point in the story?

I apologise for this post being a little weighty. Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated. Now let's see if I can stick with the game longer this time than I did before.

[LavCat]

Hit is gone.

I understand there are a few other changes, so best to read the patch notes.

Welcome back.

[kandrathe]

Is gearing still a case of stacking agility, crit, and tweaking hit? Anything different about pets? There's a whole lot of stuff I'm curious about, but that's about all I can think of that I wouldn't like to go blindly into.

Let me answer one of your questions for now. Maybe others later. All characters now have a 5% chance to crit, with agility classes getting a 10% bonus.

The entire damage equation has changed, and the world rebalanced;

• Each point of Agility or Strength now grants 1 Attack Power (down from 2). All other sources of Attack Power now grant half as much as before.
  
• Weapon Damage values on all weapons have been reduced by 20%.
  
• Attack Power now increases Weapon Damage at a rate of 1 DPS per 3.5 Attack Power (up from 1 DPS per 14 Attack Power).
  
• Attack Power, Spell Power, or Weapon Damage now affect the entire healing or damage throughput of player spells.

Agility is still the Hunters primary stat, and who ever has enough stamina?. I believe the secondary attributes are also affected by your primary, and are critical strike, haste, mastery, multistrike, and versatility.

For a beast matery hunter, the stat priorities would be Agility; Multistrike; Critical Strike; Mastery; Haste; Versatility. For a MM hunter, they would be Agility; Critical Strike; Multistrike; Haste = Versatility = Mastery.

So this new thing, multistrike seems pretty important.

Multistrike gives most abilities up to two separate chances to hit their original target an additional time for 30% of the original amount in PvE. For instance, if a player has 25% multistrike, abilities have two chances at 25% probability to strike again. In PvP only one such chance is available. This chance applies to damaging attacks, either single-targeted or area of effect, and also to heals, but not to status-affecting attacks like [Polymorph] or [Fear]. Additionally, each tick of a DoT or HoT has an independent chance to land a multistrike. Multistrikes crit independently of the original attack—that is, the main attack does not have to crit for the multistrike to crit.

Multistrikes are treated as procs, not additional casts. In general, multistrikes will not proc other effects, but there are a few class abilities that depend on a multistrike landing, much like the handful of class abilities that react to crits landing.

While versatility seems less important for hunters;

Versatility increases outgoing damage, healing, and absorbs and to a lesser extent, reduces incoming damage. With 5% Versatility, players do 5% more damage and healing, enlarge their absorbs (like [Power Word: Shield]) by 5%, and take 2.5% less damage. The healing increase applies to self-heals like [Recuperate] as well.

Tanks types also have: bonus armor, and healer types have spirit.

Then, for PVP: power and resilience.



Probably the best way is to compare my stats at level 96 un-enchanted, un-buffed, with questing gear to a level 100 high end raider who already has ilvl 661.

Me: [attachment=218]

Yooz@Kazzak: [attachment=217]

1000 more agility gets 1000 more AP, and DPS, and more stamina is better.

tl;dr Everything is different really, yet play feels pretty much the same. I don't think stats are the fussy thing they used to be now.