Archive for the “hunter” Category

Tonight I went into TK and helped slap down Void Reaver. That was fun. What was even more fun, but totally on a personal level, was seeing this:

Aww yeahhhh…

Once we got done with VR, the guild leaders did some chatting and decided that since they didn’t have the raid makeup they wanted, we’d go on and beat up Gruul instead. Beatings did occur, and while the High King and Gruul did drop lewts for their guild, I had my humbling moment early on in the High King fight.

See, back when my guild was doing the 25 man stuff, I was one of two hunters that Nature resist tanked the shaman. It got to the point that the Class Lead and I were doing it in our sleep, and on good nights we could get him almost dead with just the two of us before the raid came to kill him. This guild we’re running with now asked me if I could help NR tank, I said sure, watched where they were going to tank him, put on my gear, buffed, ran in… and died in 10 seconds.

I sat there with my jaw on the floor, blinking, then started swearing at the computer. The Boyfriend glanced over to see what was going on while he was tanking something else and said “oh, I think your healer got feared.” Oh joy. So for 4 minutes, I chatted in another channel while the rest of the raid went and killed the High King. End result of the evening? #3 on DPS and Damage Done. Still a good evening.

Ah WoW: you know how to humble us right when we start to feel good about ourselves, don’t you?

Real Life has been a mess. We’re still trying to get my house sale done, the store is slowly coming together, my Mom bummed up her knee, thus necessitating scope surgery on it, etc. It’s just been one thing after another. So what so I do to take off some stress?

PLAY WOW!

I couldn’t join the raid last night, because after 11 hours of going over art materials and ordering them from a vendor (even if he was a very nice man) fried my brains. So I came home and collapsed, sighing somewhat over the fact I couldn’t get into raid right before I fell asleep.

But today… mmm RAID! TK Raid too! But instead of running to Loot, erm, Void Reaver, the Powers That Be said “Hai guyz! Go read up on Solarian and Al’ar!” Gah. One hour of frantic reading later, off we went to TK.

Al’ar? Owie. Mucho pain. Fire bad. But we now have food for thought on the fight. Solarian? Well we only got one shot at her before the repops started to hit for us. Ah well. But ah man it was nice. #4 on overall DPS and #3 on Total Damage. :;happy purrs::

Tomorrow night? More TK. The rest of this week? Who the hell knows. I have more Real Life stuff trying to chew on me, so we’ll see what happens.

I got an invite to SSC fun last night with the guild that The Boyfriend and I had run TK with Wednesday night. They were up to Leo, which they haven’t managed to get down as of yet. Sadly, last night they weren’t able to get him down last night either, even with some insanely close calls. The last attempt was with him at 3k health left. That one just made everyone cry. After we were done, the other hunter in the group and I hung out for a while talking hunter macros. I showed her what I had and I think she has some plots now for some of her own.

A couple of days previously, I’d talked to some of my friends in WoW and asked if I could use their shadowcloth cooldowns. They were gracious enough to say sure, and I sent off the mats. My mage is still frost spec (and happily so), and in desperate need of the Frozen Shadowweave set. After I got their shadowweave back, I found I had enough cloth to make the last piece of the set: the robe. So as of last night (or early this morning, I kinda lost track), my mage is now decked out in all her Frozen Shadowweave goodness. /cheer

(Now if I can just get her a better weapon, get rid of the green pants, and get some new shiny trinkets…)

Today? Here’s hoping that I can get into some Heroic Ramparts or Heroic BLood Furnace runs on Sia. I need Exalted on her with Honor Hold and had some volunteers to help get it for her. ::grin:: The rest of the weekend? Who knows.

Friday night, the guild met up and went into TK for the 3rd (or is it 4th?) time. We haven’t officially raided 25 man content in over a month. We were there to kick some serious ass.

I don’t think the poor (ha!) mobs leading the way to Void Reaver ever knew what hit them. The guild was there for blood and phat lewts. There was a lot of good-natured ribbing, a lot of really bad jokes, and a LOT of laughter: just the way we like to have raids go.

Then we got to Void Reaver. He’s still borked up with his globe attacks and the non-announcements by addons. There was a bit of adjustment to that, then the guild started chewing away on him. We had one more shot before things would respawn in bad places (we took more time than we liked. there were too many jokes involving “balls” and “face” and we were all being too damned silly) and then…. Boom. Dead Void Reaver.

So the guild went to TK, we saw VR, and all I got was some shoulders. Such a nice WoW birthday present, even if it was 3 days prior to my actual birthday! (Yes, my birthday’s today, like Fimlys posted earlier on his blog. Sing away. ::grin:: )

Like I said earlier in the week, reputation grinds are the bane of my existence. I just get too easily distracted and want to go do something “fun”. Sometimes though I manage to buckle down and plow through a set amount of grinding and just get it done. Don’t bother talking to me while I’m doing it, cos I’m oblivious to everything else. It’s how I made it through the Netherwing grind this past weekend: purely from gritting my teeth and saying “no, dammit, I’m finishing this TONIGHT!”

Then there are the rep grinds that I don’t even realize are happening. Violet Eye from Karazhan would be that kind of grind. I mean, yeah, my brain realized that there was grinding going on, that I was getting reputation from killing all these mobs. But it’s not til the green flash of light goes off that I realized that “Hey! I’ve been getting rep for the past two hours! Sweet!” I like those grinds.

I’ve found that the Shattered Sun Offensive is a similar rep grind for me. No, I still haven’t set foot into Magister’s Terrace, either the 5 man or 25 man versions. The only rep I’ve gotten has been from doing the dailies which I haven’t been doing daily. More like every 3 or 4 days. Maybe. Yet yesterday I still managed to hit Revered with SSO and pick up a new sword from the rep rewards for Siana. I suppose that once I get Siana Exalted, I might as well start doing them on the mage again. So I’m slow at dailies. Sue me. But I just can’t sit there for 2 hours and do them all, then do it all over again on another character. It would make my brain pop.

But I still have a list of reps that I want to grind out for Siana. I want to get a Talbuk for her. I want Exalted from the Consortium. I still need that last bit of Honor Hold rep to get Exalted. And so on. Will I get them done? Hopefully. And when I get them done, maybe I can go back and finish getting all the Alliance racial faction up. Noooo I’m not slow at all. Why do you ask? >.>

A lot of my friends can tell you I hate rep grinds.

No, wait, I loathe rep grinds. I get bored, start to get really distracted, and pretty soon I wander off in disgust from the whole thing. This is why Siana doesn’t have the original 4 Alliance races, Argent Dawn, Cenarion Circle or a thousand other old world reps at exalted. Hell, I’m lucky I have some of them at revered.

So when Blizz made all those factions in Outlands, complete with keys to buy and really really REALLY nice patterns and other goodies at various levels of reputation, I sighed and started to buckle down on getting rep for them. I was really pleased to see the faction start to climb, since it seemed like everything had faction attached to it: quests, mobs, items the mobs dropped. Perfect for the easily distractable like myself. Granted I still don’t like rep grinding. I lust after the Kurenai mounts, but have yet to grind my way to one. I still need to go grind my way through some Consortium rep. But it’s not heavily pressing on me. But the important ones, the ones for keys, those I got up. Then I got up the rep to use the Marks of the Illidari. So I do rep grind. I just bitch and moan then get distracted.

Once The Boyfriend surprised me by getting the rest of my epic flying mount, I knew I’d have to deal with the Netherwing rep grind. At least it was all in the form of quests, so I didn’t feel like I was just mindlessly killing for no reason. There was a purpose! Yes! Even if the drop rates on some of them suck (Fel Glands, you suck). But last night, I got to see something I hadn’t seen before. I got to see Illidan, at least in projection form. And right after that, I had to go see a man about a dragon.

My kitty mount is Kenshin (long running joke). My regular gryphon was Yuki (it was white, and Yuki means “snow”). The epic flappy was Kyo (another joke, one involving the manga Fruits Basket and the previously named Yuki). So now, I have Mizu. No anime connection this time (at least that I know of). This one is just Japanese for “water”. What? He’s blue! It made sense at the time! Just cos I only had 4 hours of sleep then as soon as I got him I went and passed out… :;sigh:: My dragon, my name, so nyah!

Tonight? I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m sure something will come up. Who knows, I might start working on Kurenai faction again. Mmmm Cobalt Talbuk…

Wow, okay then! I know I’ve been a bit sporadic lately, but I blame that on real life. >.> On the plus side, my new floors look awesome. (And yes, for the morbidly curious, I will post pics at some point.)

I’ve made some nice personal WoW progress, actually getting dailies done (shock!), helping with the SSO faction, and getting closer on getting some other factions to exalted. I even had some time to get some SSO dailies done on my mage, which was a REAL shock to me. Raiding has been a bit slow recently, as we have quite a few people away on vacation, personal time off, or dealing with the last few weeks of school. But last night, we tried something crazy. Really crazy.

We tried to kill Doom Lord Kazzak.

Yeah we failed spectacularly, but I don’t think anyone really expected us to take him down. What we did have was a great time being silly and making a group effort at something none of us were anticipating doing when we all logged in. So what if we didn’t kill him. We had fun, and that’s what this is all ultimately about.

All that said, I can’t wait til we get more people and higher DPS and we go kick his tail around til he begs for mercy. ::evil grin::

In real life, I’ve been preparing a house to sell. Yeah I know, crappy timing with the market being what it is, but I have a nice job change waiting for me in another state 5 hours away. That kinda necessitates selling my house. It’s also becoming spring where I live, which means Spring Cleaning in all it’s insane glory. So I’ve been cleaning out the house of old things I don’t want/use, visiting home improvement stores practically daily, and talking to installation people about appointments to come to the house. It’s more than a little hectic over here.

I’ve found that the “change everything!” mindset has invaded my WoW-space as well. In my collection of alts, I had a human rogue named Duvesa, that I’d gotten to level 57. She was my first major alt, and until I got off my butt and leveled my mage up, she was my highest level alt for the longest time. However, she was permanently stuck at 57. Why? I just couldn’t get into her anymore. I’d loved playing her, but somewhere along the way, I fell out of love. It just wasn’t fun for me any more. I could not find anything that made me interested in playing her anymore. So yesterday, after not playing her (other than hopping onto her and unlocking a low level lockbox for a friend) for almost 2 years, I sold all of her equipment and items, mailed the proceeds to my bank toon, and deleted Duvesa.

Did it hurt? A little. But I’d found myself with no connection at all to her, and was starting to hate the fact she was in the second slot on my list, right behind Siana. Why have her there if I was never going to play her? So I deleted her and once the faint pangs of character deletion were over, it felt as if a weight had been lifted. To celebrate, I did the next obvious thing: I deleted another character. This time it was a Night Elf warrior, Ravaria, that I’d had wandering around. Only level 27, but she’d been a NE priest, a human pally, and then a NE warrior before getting deleted yet one more time. That name is one that I’ve had in previous MMOs and I have sentimental attachments to it, so I created a placeholder character with it. Will I ever play it? Who knows.

So after deleting two characters, I decided since the house feels weird with all the new paint and what not going up, I needed to change up Siana a little. So I did something that made several friends fall over into shock: I respec’d. Right now, she’s the “standard” 41/20 BM spec after being heavy MM spec (my usual choice). I raided last night with it and said I’d give it a couple more days of playing around with it. But once the time is over, I’ll be respec’ing again, this time to one of the MM/SV builds.

Why am I doing this? I’m trying to shake my mind out of any hunter ruts it’s gotten itself into. Specs are always a polarizing element in WoW, with this build or that build being held up as the Holy Grail for whatever your attempting to do, whether it’s PvP, leveling or raiding. But it’s not that simple. There’s not really one “perfect” build for each class/situation. There’s always something that affects the end result: latency, gear, random chaos, and most importantly, the person actually playing the character. It’s that human element that makes two identically geared, identically spec’d hunters have different DPS. It’s what each person brings to the table in personal experience and gaming style that affects the end results.

So I’m playing with specs, rediscovering what does and doesn’t work for me, and having a grand time doing it. I have a feeling I’ll be going back to my usual spec, but it’s always good to shake things up.

Tomorrow? I’ll be watching guys install new flooring into my house and trying to minimize the destruction to my belongings. I’ll get some daily quests done, maybe even work on some quests with my mage, or over on Moon Guard with the About Last Night group over there. Or I could say to hell with it all and hide in the bedroom with the two freaked out cats.

No pranks from me, but please feel free to check out the official WoW website for the annual silliness. A host of bloggers all have “questionable” blog posts, and I encourage everyone to go read them and enjoy.

I have -finally- gotten back to WoW and took my first rather, erm, whirlwind look at the Shattered Sun Offensive quests, along with the other new dailies. I can say that the new dailies look interesting and I’m sure I’d say the same about the SSO ones, except I don’t really remember them. I got dragged around at top speed, so all my impressions are of the quests are killing and mass destruction with npcs randomly handing gold and packages out. I’m hoping that I can get some quest time early in the mornings this weekend to really take them in.

Tonight, the guild goes back to raiding, after having a week off. It’s back to SSC and here’s hoping we kick much butt again. I did notice that the mana drain was a lot higher last night for me, as well as pulling aggro off my pet a lot faster than normal. :;sigh:: bloody changes.

This weekend I finished up the majority of the painting that was keeping me from WoW, so now I’ll be back to actually playing WoW instead of wishing I was playing WoW rather than putting pale sage green paint on the walls of my den. Of course, now that 2.4 is out, there’s all these dailies for me to try (ha!), and a new 5man to go into (maybe tonight), but I also would like to get back to leveling my pally and working on my mage. Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen for a while, at least not on a long-term basis. ::sigh::

But I did manage to get some WoW time in this weekend, mainly on Sunday. I started getting back into the groove of the daily grind, and wow, the hunter mana issue sucks. I’m already dreading the first raid back on Tuesday. After doing some of the dailies on Siana, I wandered off to the Moon Guard server to the latest project I’m in: About Last Night. Yep, another toon, this time, one that’s on an RP server. I’m doing something I haven’t done in a loooooong time (RP), on the Horde side (all my toons are Alliance), as a male Blood Elf priest (I play nothing but female characters, and mostly DPS). This… should be interesting. Right now, we’re all working on getting to the same level so that next weekend we have a full group ready to rock away. Now to remember to set up priest-y addons. ::makes notes for later::