1914 in 2v2 as Hunter / Rogue

Another week of solid 2's performance gets us up to 1914.  The huge buff to Aspect of the Hawk definitely increased BM's damage, maybe gave us an extra game out of the 13 we played.  We went 10 and 3 this week.  Not quite as good as 10 and 0, but we'll take another 100 point increase.

I do not enjoy vs'ing Priest / Feral.  I hate Feral Druids without a healer.  I think we went 2 and 1 vs this comp but it was super scary.

I enjoy vs'ing Mages.  They are predictable and squishy.  I feel like I control the fight since I can chunk their health.

I enjoy any team that thinks they can outlast us without doing much damage since we can both heal ourselves decently.

Well, I think we can hit 2k, perhaps even by next week.
   

Removing the Sound of Aspect Switching

Hunter

• Aimed Shot damage has been decreased to approximately 160% weapon damage (at level 80+), down from 200%.
• Aspect of the Hawk now provides around an additional 2000 attack power at level 85.

Hunter

• The changes to Aimed Shot and Aspect of the Hawk announced yesterday have not yet been applied to live realms and should not go into effect until after the holiday weekend.

Macro'ing Aspects to your shots (the ! before the Aspect makes it so you never remove your aspect, since it will keep casting it over and over):

/cast !Aspect of the Fox
/cast Cobra Shot or Steady Shot

/cast !Aspect of the Hawk
/cast all other shots


The ! before the Aspect makes it so you never remove your aspect, since it will keep casting it over and over... which brings me to how annoying that sound is.

This is a great post on the forums detailing how to remove the sound of aspect switching:

Arånann        
Hello everyone, I've been playing around with macros to put me in hawk and fox depending on the shot I want and like the rest of you that tried it I found the constant CAW CAW CAW sound to be horrible.  So I started googling and playing around and figured out how to remove the Aspect Sounds from the game.  It's not against the ToS, we're not modifying MPQ files here, just substituting our own sound files just like fonts.  This functionality is built into wow, that's why we can just make a folder and the game picks up the substitions on it's own.  No addons or hacking needed.

With the latest batch of blunders (i.e. hotfixes) from Blizzard, imo it will be beneficial to switch to AotH for certain shots since AotH will give either 2k+ AP.  You should know that aspects share their own weird cooldown system and when spammed can have strange effects on your shots and may delay them slightly.  Enough rambling here's what I did:

Downloaded this addon to get a proper blank .wav file, Blizz is picky about .wav files and they have to be saved with certain attributes.  Not all blank .wav files are equal, don't ask me why, I'm no sound engineer

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/humbuzz-b-gone.aspx

Create the following directory:

YOUR WOW INSTALL\Data\Sound\Spells

Copy the blank .wav file from the addon you downloaded to this folder.

Make two copies of this file

Name the first copy AspectofTheHawk.wav

I'm pretty sure upper and lower case would matter here, but I have not tested it.  Make sure you name it exactly as I typed above.

Name the second copy Pathfinding.wav

I think that should do it, I personally went one step further and made more copies of the blank file and named them the following.  This was mostly done in my troubleshooting phase trying to find which file was creating the second sound.  Renaming AspectofTheHawk.wav removes the CAW CAW CAW, but there's still a whoosh sound every time you change aspects.  That whoosh sound is Pathfinding.wav,  so here's the whole list just in case you want it.  Pay attention to case and spelling:

_HU_AspectofTheFox_01
_HU_AspectofTheFox_02
_HU_AspectofTheFox_03
_HU_AspectofTheFox_04
_HU_AspectofTheFox_05
AspectofTheBeast
AspectofTheCheeta
AspectofTheMonkey
AspectofThePack
AspectofTheSnake
AspectofTheWolf

You'll find it interesting that there are aspects we've never heard of in there!  I, only renamed them trying to find the whoosh sound.

Have fun!

EDIT - Shot Macros

I've been using the following to change aspects automatically -

#showtooltip SHOT NAME
/cast !Aspect of the Hawk
/cast SHOT NAME

Substitute the aspect name as needed for steady and cobra macros, I'm playing with castsequence macros too to see if I can make it any more elegant.  Thought some folks might want to see the macro, when you spam it, that's when the Aspect sounds become annoying.
                                

1817 in 2v2 as Hunter / Rogue

Siphter and I have finally got back into playing some 2v2 now that Hunter's have been buffed a little bit and made a little bit more viable.  Last week we went 6 and 4 but developed some very good general strategies against most teams.  This week we went 10 and 0, and the last game was freaking epic.

So this week during our 10 and 0 streak this was how our games played out:

• Mage / Healer or DPS: Always on mage, blow mage up, take almost no damage from the mage and he can't cc very well.  He goes down almost instantly every game as Subtlety Rogue and Beast Mastery Hunter can just chunk his health.
• Holy Pally / DPS: Always on the dps.  Surprisingly this comp used to be our toughest but now its one of our easiest.  We lock down the dps target and cc the paladin.
• Ret Pally / Disc Priest: This was our last fight to go undefeated this week.  The first minute of this fight looked like a big time loss.  We focused on the Ret Paladin but he was laying into Siphter (my rogue) pretty heavily and Siphter couldn't heal the damage.  I told Siphter to run and kite and kite he did.  With concussive helping Siphter out he was able to kite the Ret Pally around the entire Sewer Arena for a couple minutes to get back to 50% health with recuperate.  Then we switched to Priest and downed him after a good 10 second burst on him.  After that we were able to finish off the Ret Pally.

The major strategy we use is that if a target is on me (hunter) Siphter will help me out by being on that target.  So I can kite that target and heal through my Spirit Beast.  We can outlast a lot of healer / dps comps because of Spirit Mend and because of Recuperation (rogue heal).

Being able to have a slight heal as double dps in arena really opens up the possibilities and allows longer games which is a lot more fun than just zerging and winning or losing in the first 30 seconds of every battle. 

After this weeks games Siphter and I both have renewed energy in playing WoW and trying to see where we can eventually be at in 2's.  We have been playing a lot of Rated Battlegrounds with our guild, but it hasn't infused us with the same energy that this weeks 2's did.  The road to 2000 has been laid, will we make it?