Recently, Rilgon and I had a discussion over Twitter about the Darkmoon Card: Greatness giving the +90 Agility. Rilgon has stated on his blog (Stabilized Effort Scope) that he has a problem that a “Best in Slot” item isn’t a dropped, but is for all puposes dependent upon one farming enough gold to buy it. (link)
Now before anyone thinks that I’m here to start a feud with the Giant Blueberry, I’m not. I am here to explain my view on how to accomplish being a Raiding Hunter on a tight time budget. And at the same time, hopefully express my views on why having crafted items as being “Best in Slot” is not a bad thing.
So here we go.. How to be a Raider but on a with an extremely tight timeline. The answer to this one is actually simplier and less complicated than it seems at first. It is all a matter of prioritization and time budgeting.
You see, some people have the luxury of playing as much as they want. But others, like myself and Rilgon, have EXTREMLY limited play time. This means that for every hour we decided to allocate towards playing, we need to make sure it’s focused on something and achieves some goal.
Now for a raider, this could become difficult, because much of your budgeted play time is actually spent in raids. This will leave the player with an extremely difficult choice. Do you spend your time raiding and having fun, but knowing that you won’t be getting a “Best in Slot” item or do you spend some time farming up gold.
Now if everything was a drop and was at the whim of the RNG gods. Then this discussion wouldn’t really matter. However, those days are gone. Blizzard introduced some really good only achievable through PvP Battle Grounds or Arena. With Wrath we see that you can get some really good epics (Nesingwary 4000 for example) that requires farming of mats or gold.
So if your a raider, you’ll now need to spend hours of your play time farming up the gold for a best in slot item vs. running an epic raid. Is this fair?
As a player with limited time and knows that every hour counts, I have to say yes. You see, if your a raider that is honestly concerned about min/maxing for best in slot, then where you get that item won’t matter. You should budget your time to acquire it, even if this means spending copious amount of time farming gold, PvP Honor or even Arena Rating to get the gear you need.
The only other option to you, is to accept that you just may not have the absolute best gear. A 15,000g trinket might be out of the question. If it is, then you might need to find other ways to achieve similar DPS or face the fact that you just can’t aquire the item.
How is this fair? Well, back in the BC days some items were only accessible in Arena, but you can’t find an Arena Team to achieve the rating, or farm BG honor to get the item. This left some players without a way to achieve those items and forced to find other items to get near to the desired result. These raiders realized that they may not be the best Hunter out there. But they knew they were the best they could be with the restraints given them.
And this is what you need to realize also. You need to be the best Hunter you can be, but know that this means some gear may just be out of your reach. Whether that reason is due to gold, honor, arena ratings, or even possibly because you just can’t find a regular raid group.
