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Quitting

I go away for almost a year, and my next post is regarding STOPPING playing the game. Heh, go figure.

There’s too much sometimes. It’s not just the money thing, although that’s certainly part of it – there are so many jerks in randoms, so much frustration in the raids I lead, and I just got too fed up with it. It’s just time to be done.

I’m playing a lot more StarCraft II these days, though. I’m still only Silver League, but come September 27th I’ll have a lot more time on my hands to make a push up to Gold or higher. Should be fun.

So I guess the question is really how much did I accomplish in WoW? Looking back, I’ve finished most raid content every expansion since BC, helped out what seems like every NPC in the game, written a blog for a couple of years about the game, and earned a ridiculous amount of achievement points. For $15 a month, it wasn’t a bad deal – I guess eventually I could only take so much.

I might reopen this blog to talk about how I’m doing in StarCraft. We’ll see. Either way, it’s been a fun ride.

Decisions

I apologize for the extended silence from my corner of the Internet for the last little while. Long story short, I’m struggling with some issues right now, both in-game and IRL. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to end up doing in Cata, but I’ll figure that out later. For now, I’m still raiding actively with Cloudy Day on my paladin, where we continue to have some issues with bosses that we’ve downed before, especially heroic Frost Wing. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t take the person who’s obviously the best DPS in the guild and usually pulls around 30%+ of total damage. Meh.

Obviously, I disagree with some of the ways that raids are being run right now, and yes, I’m frustrated with some of the people in the guild still, but it’s not my job to make policy anymore, so there’s not much I can do about it. Maybe I made the wrong decision when I gave up the GM spot – but that’s neither here nor there. What’s done is done. Guess I didn’t realize just how big of a deal it was to me that I had an active voice in guild policy. I mean, I still do, to an extent – I was a pretty influential voice in determining the way that the guild would be raiding in Cataclysm – but I’m coming in from a much more outside perspective than I was before.

I still have some issues in RL as well, a pretty tricky class coupled with a complicated prospective relationship means that I usually have a lot on my mind, and don’t really have time for blogging. To that end, I’ll be going on hiatus for a while from blogging, not sure when or if I’ll be returning. I can still be reached at velinath (at) cloudyday.net or via commenting on my blog.

Thanks, everyone. Whether I come back to blogging or not, it’s been a fun ride.

DRAKES

http://cloudyday.net/killshots/Drakes/

YES WE DID. Got our All You Can Eat on Thursday, which gave 4 separate people the meta. Fantastic stuff.

Fire magery in 4.0: my experiences to date

Well, I finally gave up the GM spot – about time I did, to be honest. It was getting way too stressful for me. Now that the most I’m doing is raid leading, it’s a lot easier on my stress level. I’m not necessarily agreeing with what the new leadership is doing, but it’s nice not to have to worry about the decision-making and just be a regular member again. If things go way past where I can really stay with the policies of CD, then that’s another story – but at the moment, things are fine.

Anyway, on to what this post’s actually about – playing a mage in 4.0. I’ve played around with a couple talent specs – both Fire and Arcane – and I’m pretty happy with the changes that were made. Feels like Mage Armor is the best thing for Arcane right now with the new mastery, which is pretty cool – each spec having its own armor that’s suited to the playstyle and so forth. Neat stuff. Onwards to Fire, though.

After speccing on Tuesday night, I spent some time benchmarking with the test dummies in Orgrimmar, just like everyone else. Pulled around 10k DPS without any uses of my Impact proc, so I was really looking at just a basic Patchwerk-style single target fight. All in all, I’m fairly impressed with the new tools they’ve given us, including the cool Hot Streak proc chance on non-criticals. That said, the coolest talent in Fire tree is probably Cauterize – I spent last night thinking about the bosses with “nuke” mechanics that we can ignore if we spec properly now. Festergut and Algalon, of course, are the first that I can think of. Definitely looking at offspeccing Fire as well as my main spec just so I can have the option to pick that talent up.

Rotation feels pretty much the same as it did in 4.0, with the welcome change that I don’t really need to worry about Scorching now – Pyroblast procs pretty much cover it for me. The only real difference is going to be watching for Impact and Fire Blasting that – whether that’ll come in handy on single target fights, I have yet to see. Combustion changes are interesting – I’m looking for an addon that tracks the strength of my Ignite DoT right now, as it should help a lot – any suggestions?

edit: found one! Check out CombustionHelper, it works great. (of course, this addon had the added side effect of making me worry about Frostfire Bolt. Since I’m pulling 14k DPS on some fights without it, I’m not too concerned.)

Mastery stacking is questionable right now from what I’ve seen. There’s a nice bonus straight from training; if anything, I’m dropping only haste and not crit to pick up a bit of mastery. We’ll see how it turns out. I think it won’t make too much difference until we hit Cata and there’s actually gear with mastery on it.

Pity fire mages are getting a slight nerf soon. Hopefully it doesn’t affect too much.

In other news, the tankadin changes are nice (after 12 seconds – once we get to start pressing our shield of the righteous button, you know, the one that can hit for 40,000) and the new druid tree form that got revealed is absolutely fantastic – although I may have to glyph the old one and switch it in/out depending. I really liked the old treant model too.

Fun times…not so much

Cloudy Day downed H Sindragosa this past Tuesday – after working on her for three weeks, it was nice to finally get the kill. People finally started actually coordinating and getting stuff done, which was great – on the kill, things went smoothly in P3, which in itself is a feat on Heroic. We followed this kill up with our guild-second H Putricide kill – which, again, was one of those things where we spent a night wiping in stupid ways, and then things just came together on the last attempt. I was so happy to finally see him go down again – it got a lot of guildies the H Plagueworks achievement.

This is really just a roundabout way of getting to the actual point of this blog post, though. I’ve been GM of Cloudy Day for, oh, about three months now – started leading before that, but officially got the GM spot around July 9th or so. I’m pretty burnt out on it, though; having to deal with some people being bad as well as the regular day-to-day drama is not something I’m really cut out for.

Essentially, I took the position out of necessity; our GM at the time had been AFK for the last 4-5 months, and someone needed to step in. As our other officers had either left or had RL stuff come up, I was basically the only person that was already in a leadership position and also had the time required to be a GM – so I took the job rather than letting the guild die. Three months in, though, it’s getting pretty tough for me to keep going.

At the same time, it’s hard for me to give it up – I feel like so far, I’ve been fairly unsuccessful as a GM, and I don’t want to leave without having the opportunity to give something to the guild. I decided the best option would be frost drakes, and those have been going well. If things keep up, we should be getting our first sets of drakes in the next week or so, and should be able to finish off the achievement for most of our top raiders before Cataclysm hits.

After that, though, I really can’t justify being GM any longer. It’s become more of a job than anything else, and that’s tough for me. Maybe it’s because at the moment I’m both GMing and raid leading, and that’s putting quite a stress on me – I don’t know. Either way, though, it’s not too fun anymore.

I figure the best thing to do is finish leading during WotLK, and then transition leadership as the guild heads into Cataclysm and level 85. That way I don’t try and switch leadership while we’re still actively raiding, and also allow the new GM to start taking charge and getting things ready to go before we start raiding again.

This was supposed to be my blog post for recently. Unfortunately, I had a pretty terrible night tonight. Two of my guildies got into a pretty big fight, and I didn’t step in or try and break it up at all. It kind of woke me up to how much of not a GM I really am. I ended up essentially resigning as of tonight, and whoever wants the GM can take it.

Why a faction change was a great idea

Obligatory Alliance resto druid post.

A quandary

I’ve been GM of my current guild, Cloudy Day, for two to three months now, and basically an officer for quite some time before that. After as long as it’s been, though, leadership is getting pretty old. I’m tired of babysitting people through raids, I’m tired of dealing with little petty feuds and drama, and I’m tired of the expectations. Oh, the expectations. Even as an officer, I could get away with taking a day or two off every now and then, but here, especially as a tank for what is now a 10-man guild, I need to be on for every raid. In addition, if I make a mistake, ANY mistake, someone jumps on it.

It’s not fun anymore.

To combat this, I transferred my druid off-realm to play with some real-life friends. I do some casual raiding on the weekends, not leading or anything. It’s relaxing. I don’t have to dissect everyone else’s gameplay, I don’t have to deal with the drama, stuff like that. Playing like that is something I haven’t done in over a year, probably, and I missed it.

Maybe I’m meant to be a leader. I don’t know. It certainly seems like it – I’ve risen to an officer level in both guilds I’ve been in without really trying. It is frustrating, though, having to deal with everything – which is why I plan on giving up the GM position in Cataclysm and raiding casually both on Gul’dan and on Lightbringer with my RL friends. I enjoy raiding more than I do leading, and I think it’s for the best.

Of course, this leads straight into my quandary: I’ve told a couple close friends in Cloudy Day about my plans for Cataclysm, and they’re not exactly happy with my decision. I’ve heard from a couple people that they think I’m essentially abandoning them, which hurts a little – especially since I’m not planning on just up and leaving. That’s half the issue – the other half is that I can’t think of anyone that I want to give the GM spot to. Finding someone who wants to uphold the ideals of the guild, is also not cynical and jaded from being an officer/GM before, and is a good enough player/administrator that they could do this job – that’s tough, and I haven’t found that person yet.

What would you guys do? I love the guild I’m in, but I just don’t want to lead it anymore. What’s the best way to handle this?

On progression

Not to sound like a total elitist prick, but sometimes I wonder how following simple directions can be SO VERY VERY DIFFICULT for some people. This week, the guild that I lead, Cloudy Day, downed Arthas 10 for the third or fourth time, but the first in a few weeks. In large part, our repeated failures at downing him consistently didn’t come from that fight – rather, we had so many issues getting past Sindragosa that we didn’t even have time to try LK each week. Sometimes we wouldn’t even be able to kill Sindragosa.

Before I get the comments of “Hey, Sindra’s hard!”, trust me, I’m aware – but this guild downed Sindra 10 waaaay back during the days of only 5% pity buffs. We’re a mere 3 achievements away from getting the first guild frost drakes – All You Can Eat, H Sindra, and Long Time (LK). Just trying to kill reg Sindra, though, is apparently sometimes beyond the grasp of some. We scraped by this week with no hope on the achievement – we had people getting ice blocked 2 and 3 at a time, melee wasn’t moving away, pretty much everything that could go wrong did. We ended up with what is probably the sloppiest Sindragosa kill that I had ever seen – especially for a 10/12 hardmodes guild.

After that mess was over with, I made the silly decision to go ahead with my plan for the week, which was to kill LK and do the 30-stacks-of-Plague achievement. People still couldn’t bring themselves to listen when I (or another of my officers) said “HEY, X, PLAGUE ON YOU”, or “RUN TO THE OFFTANK”, or pretty much anything to that effect.

Oddly, once I made the decision to give up on the achievement, things went fine. People paid attention – or at least enough attention to get by – and the LK kill didn’t look horrible.

I don’t consider myself the authority on how to play perfectly all the time by any means, but I do expect some modicum of attention from my raiders. I ended up having to give a little speech at the end of the night last night, which is something I absolutely despise doing. I feel like I shouldn’t have to treat people like they’re in kindergarten – if I can pay attention to what I’m doing, watch bars for other people, and fill my role successfully, it really shouldn’t be my job to babysit everyone through a raid. I shouldn’t have to say “X, ice tomb on you. Y, Z, Q, move away. MOVE AWAY. MOVE AWAY FROM THE GUY WITH THE SKULL ON HIS HEAD AND AN ARROW POINTING AT HIM. MO-goddamn it, aoe, go.” That shouldn’t happen – and yet it does. Frequently. It just boggles the mind.

This is why I’m considering rerolling for Cata, to be honest. I have some good RL friends that play this game, and a few of the people who I don’t have to yell at all the time want to come with me. It might be worth it, just to get away from the mess that things have become in my current guild.

A final note: As some of my tweets have indicated, yes, I am indeed in the Cataclysm beta. I may post some screenshots in the next couple days – there’s some great stuff to see. Leveling is also fun again, which is nice – quests are well-paced and there’s a nice amount of lore included. The only thing I don’t agree with is that you have to explore a dungeon entrance before you can queue for it – seems needless, IMO.

“You are an Orc Hunter and your name is Tednugent.”

This is the beginning of what has become the single greatest original content to come out of the WoW community. Alamo? Ragnar-Os? Kologarn? This one surpasses them all.

Back in 2009, Dusk of Uldum started a thread on his realm forums – the beginning of a story, with a relatively simple premise – you start out in Razor Hill as a level 80 hunter, but all of the NPCs are missing. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more involving – there are parts that will just have you giggling as well as some masterful tension-building. This all leads up to a stunning climax that I, for one, was awed by.

It’s written in the style of a text adventure such as Zork, but the writing incorporates not only the WoW world but also elements of Silent Hill – the player interaction leads to some pretty hilarious situations, especially early on, but it’s also interesting to watch the characters develop.

Dusk’s writing is very high quality – it reminded me of Terry Pratchett at times, which is a very good thing. He’s writing a book right now as well, and I fully expect to be camping out outside my local bookstore the day it comes out.

The story’s been backed up on http://thelittlestmurloc.com, or you can find the original thread stickied on the Uldum realm forums. I’d definitely recommend reading this one – it’s absolutely fantastic. (From what I’ve heard, it’s somewhere around 225,000* words, so expect to spend some time).

*see comments, I was way off originally

edit: As Dusk noted in the comments section, Tednug and Scratchfever are going to be NPCs in Cataclysm! There’s a nice screenshot from beta here.

Guild drama

I feel so helpless.

My current guild, which I joined due to its great atmosphere and ultra-charismatic leadership, is dying. It’s not a fast death by any means; ever since the GM when I joined quit, we’ve been on a downhill slope. The next leaders started to steer us towards a more hardcore style of raiding, and some people had some issues with that. After they left, we did all right for a while, but our current GM is indefinitely AFK – perhaps permanently – and our current leadership isn’t really working out.

Not that I don’t like the people in charge right now – trust me, I do – but there are conflicts. Attendance is the lowest it’s ever been, with all of 8 people on some raid nights – and remember, I’m in a 25-man guild. I’m supposed to be the raid leader, but I haven’t been doing much of that – one of our officers has been mainly leading raids recently, and his style clashes – to put it mildly – with both the raiders and my image of what Cloudy Day was when I joined. One of the friends I made from this guild actually /gquit tonight over sdrama in raid, and a few more guildies are getting pushed close to the edge. The whole passive-aggressive thing that’s going on right now isn’t helping at all. Our other officer is kind of semi-inactive right now too, so he can’t really do much to keep things going.

The other thing is, I’m not really a leader. Yeah, I study the fights and know what I need to do, but just like it used to be in Neo Imperela (my old guild), I just don’t really fit into a leadership role. I think that’s what most missing from CD right now – a really good leader – and I don’t know where to look for one right now.

I hate to see something like this happen to a guild that I once really, truly loved being in. I need some suggestions as to where to go from here – should I stick it out and see what happens, try and pick up some slack and step up into a leadership role, or just give up and go my own way, as much as that would hurt? What are your thoughts?

Catching up

Hi everyone. I know it’s been a while since I posted; I’ve gotten a full-time job for the summer, and that combined with raiding has made it difficult for me to keep up with blogging.

So I went back Fire a couple days ago, just to see how it is these days. Supposedly, with a high enough gear level, it’s the top DPS spec for mages now – and it’s really awesome to have Living Bomb on LK phase 3. I figured the weekly this week, being XT-002, was easy enough that I could get away with trying a spec that I was unsure of. I ended up pulling 10k DPS, so I’ve been gearing towards Fire now rather than Arcane, as I’ve always enjoyed Fire more. Yes, I’m “hardcore” enough to go after the FotM spec, but if I can, I’ll take Fire hands down.

As a side note, I actually had a chance to put in some LK 25 attempts on my mage yesterday, and managed to pull 13k DPS and be top 5 in meters – not bad at all! I’m actually pretty proud of that, although I’m sure I could do better with slightly better gear.

While I’m on the subject of ICC, I’ve been doing a pug on my druid every week recently. Last week, we knocked out 11/12 hardmodes  – and then this week we went after our Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquishers. Those things are unbelievably sexy – after we finished the last achievement (stack Necrotic Plague to 30 before killing LK), I grabbed mine, and am probably going to drop my flight form off of my bars. Very cool stuff. We’re actually going for Bane of the Fallen King, I heard, next week, so that’ll be a bunch of fun. I love actually progressing; even if I’m not doing it in guild, the people that I run with are a lot of fun.

On a completely different note, how about that RealID stuff? I’ve got a few close friends that I’ve made on WoW as RealID friends, and it seems like a really nice feature. That said, I’d like to be able to use an alias instead of my full name – heck, a lot of my in-game friends whom I consider close call me Vel anyway, so I don’t see the problem with going by that. Just seems more sensible to me. That said, cross-realm chat and cross-game chat is a really neat feature, and I’m definitely going to get a bit of use out of it.

I’ve been leveling another character recently – a priest this time. Bought dual-spec, so she’s Holy and Shadow – at 62, Shadow’s already melting faces really quickly. I’m a huge fan. Plus, healer queues are essentially instant, so there’s very little leveling downtime for me. That said, the instances aren’t always the best – being in BC instances means I end up in groups with 3 to 4 death knights all the time, and usually they have no idea how to play their class. I’ve seen some pretty epic failure in the last couple days.

One thing about the priest that I thought was neat, though, was that you could get [Going Down?] by dying in midair as Holy and falling to the ground as the Spirit of Redemption. I was somewhat shocked when I got that achievement! I had been flying back from Shadowmoon Valley after getting all of the bonfires, and autoflew over Honor Hold. The gryphon riders ended up killing me.

Transferred my 60 warrior onto my main account too, so I get to play that as well – full MC/BWL epics are pro! I’m probably gonna take him Prot, but right now I literally have no shield – I can get away with using a one-hand DPS sword from MC, but I can’t do much without a shield. Not sure what to do there, as Wall of the Dead, the world drop, is around 6k gold on my server.

Starcaller

As if last night wasn’t enough, we rocked Algalon last night. The titles have just been coming in like mad.

As a guild, no Rusted yet, but I did have the key – only took 2 nights of attempts, so it didn’t feel nearly as awesome as Kingslayer. Oh wells. It’s a cool title, nice to get things done, so thumbs up.

The Fall of the Lich King

It took us a really long time after we downed Sindragosa – something like two and a half months – but we finally killed the Lich King tonight after about three hours of attempts. That fight has been wearing on me for the last two months, to the point where I was getting like horribly legit stressed over it. People were having trouble with P2, mainly; Val’kyrs weren’t dying and people weren’t getting out of Defiles.

I knew tonight would be different from the first attempt. We hit phase 3, even with one new person to our strategy, and we didn’t have ANY screwups in P2. We still had issues in P3 with our offtank dying with too many Raging Spirits on him, though. (There are 4 that spawn in the P2-P3 transition, as well as increased frozen orb spawns – we were having trouble getting the raging spirits down fast enough).

After four more attempts (one of them a wipe in P1 for some inexplicable reason), I noticed I had frost resist gear on. We had planned on a Sindragosa 25 attempt or twenty tonight, but we couldn’t get the people, so we just did 10 instead – I forgot to take off my 400+ frost resist set, though. Finally noticed, and started dying less. Our best attempt for the next few hours came shortly after – a 17% wipe. That was our first time below 35%.

At the end of the night, people were getting tired. We took a 5 minute break, and decided these were going to be our last two attempts. Our first one, we hit the transition, and the offtank died again to too many raging spirits – we had been saving the Bloodlust to burn LK faster in P3. For our last attempt, one of our shamans – new to the guild and to the LK runs – suggested we Bloodlust to burn the Raging Spirits down. I agreed, and implemented it for our last attempt of the night.

The pull started off pretty well, P1 went perfectly. All the cleanses went off great, and we got LK to 70% very, very quickly. Once the transition hit, we got each Raging Spirit down before the next one spawned, and we had the third one down before the first Val’kyr came up. Defiles came off perfectly – most out on the edges – and we got to the transition with everyone alive. We got to positions smoothly, no deaths, and Lust went up – and the Raging Spirits, earlier such a hindrance, just melted. When we hit P3, we had one Spirit up with 20% health, and managed to get it down shortly after the first wave of Vile Spirits.

One of our healers died when they got the Harvest Soul debuff, and I got a little scared. Fortunately, two druids meant battle rezzes were available, and we were able to get her back up – and off we went. There were a couple scary moments with Soul Reaper on me, but I had cooldowns available on the times when Ardent Defender wouldn’t be able to proc, and managed to survive.

The last 8 percent felt like an eternity. We’d kill a wave of Vile Spirits only to see another one spawn immediately, only getting a couple casts in on Arthas. Every time Harvest Soul, Soul Reaper, or Defile went out, I freaked out. (May have overmanaged the last bit slightly, but I can’t really be blamed, can I?) Each time, we got things done and kept going. Finally, just as a new wave of Vile Spirits spawned, the boss hit 10 percent – and cast Fury of Frostmourne.

Vent went absolutely nuts. We knew what was coming, and we knew we had our titles absolutely locked up – it was just a matter of waiting 2 and a half minutes to go berserk on him. Bloodlust was back up since Arthas killed us all, so, as the RP ended, we hit it and went to town. The cutscene that followed, although we’d all seen it in Dalaran before, was epic. We had earned it, for sure.

And after all of this, what did he drop? A 2-handed mace that got offspecced for a druid tank and a fist weapon that went for fashioncraft.

Go figure.

http://cloudydayvideos.com/killshots/arthas/

Raiding easy-mode: AVR + RaidWatch 2

I’ve been doing some experenting with new raiding addons recently. Deadly Boss Mods was all well and good, but it was getting a bit old, and honestly – it looked pretty ugly. Certainly not in keeping with my nice, sleek, modern-looking UI. I stumbled across the post on MMO-Champion about AVR , and thought it looked pretty cool – and then when I made my way over to the Curse site, found out that it was compatible with a boss mod called RaidWatch 2, which included bars, timers, pretty much everything DBM had – and it even looked nicer! I took a couple of days to set it up, and it ended up looking pretty nice. Bars come up in about the same places that I had them in DBM, but it’s just a much sleeker look to the UI.

I'll be explaining some more aspects of this screenshot later.

What I ended up doing was reworking some aspects of my UI – it’s still a little cluttered, but it’s honestly not too bad right now.  (Of course, I’ve ended up designing different UIs with different addons for each of my characters – still using X-Perl on some characters – but I do make a point of keeping some elements of my UI, such as boss mods and damage/threat meters, consistent). I’ll probably be posting some about the druid’s healing UI in a future post, and you’ll get to see what I’m running with now then, but for now this is a pretty serviceable image as far as what RaidWatch 2 looks like. I really like how the bars look – and that there are 3 possible locations for bars depending on length rather than 2, so I can put long timers like enrages somewhere unobtrusive and they won’t get grouped with the other >10 second timers.

The other addon that I downloaded was AVR - and I actual feel somewhat silly right now, but I actually managed to not get a screenshot of the addon in action. I’ll try to get one up at some point in the near future, though. Promise.

For now, though, a short explanation will have to suffice. Basically, what AVR does is allow raiders and their addons to draw shapes on the ground or centered around characters of a specific radius, as well as draw arrows pointing to important things if necessary. This allows for quite a lot of cool things – like, for example, my personal favorite, Rotface. RaidWatch 2 uses AVR to draw a circle around every person in the raid during Unstable Ooze Explosion, giving you an easy reference for where you need to be to avoid taking any damage. So far, it hasn’t led me wrong, and indeed has managed to make that fight a lot easier for me. Used to be, I’d run way way out to make sure I wasn’t in an AOE effect – but after getting AVR, I’ve minimized my movement, which helps especially when I’m healing that encounter.

Paladin’s UI with DBM. Kind of an old screenshot, but meh.

Back to RaidWatch 2 for a minute, though. This screenshot’s, again, a bit old, but it really shows the difference between the two addons. DBM’s kind of ugly and bland, while RW2 just looks nicer and is, I think, a little easier to pay attention to, especially for announces. Plus, the AVR compatibility is a huge plus.

Being a raid leader for my guild gives me a pretty large say in what addons are mandatory for raiding. I’ve already recommended that we switch over from DBM to AVR and RaidWatch 2, and I’d suggest that you and your guild do the same. They’re really nice on fights where there’s any sort of ground effect – definitely something to take a look at!

Now that I’m done with my shameless plug for that addon, I’d like to add that originally, this blog post was supposed to include some stuff about my druid healing UI. However, my computer crashed, and I decided to just cut it here rather than rewrite the entire other half of the blog. I’ll be working on a more polished overview of my healing UI – specifically, healing with PitBull instead of Grid, as well as a couple other things.

AVR on Rotface - red circles are where not to stand during ooze explosion

AVR on Festergut. Here, red circles indicate the radius of the spore effect.

 

Hunter follies

I have to be the luckiest player on the planet – here’s a little story to show you exactly how lucky I am.

I’ve been leveling my hunter recently. She was stuck at Lv67 for about 6 months before I picked her back up again and got her to 72 – when I promptly abandoned her for another month in the middle of Howling Fjord. A couple of days ago, I started seriously leveling her again, and she’s currently at 78 – not bad, eh? The few epics I have from getting carried through Gruul’s/ZA have helped a bit; I got Dragonspine Trophy and the T4 pants out of Gruul’s Lair, and also picked up Berserker’s Call from ZA. Managed to replace the pants, but I’ve kept both trinkets so far – that’s how excellent they are.

A friend of mine stopped playing his hunter, so he sent me all of his ammunition – I’ve got around 28000 of the engineering arrows, and another 30000 or so bullets. As I was using the white-quality arrows before, this was also a pretty big upgrade for me – I do pretty well in instances now, for sure.

Anyway, I’ve been leveling out in Sholazar Basin recently (from 77 onward), and earlier tonight decided to make a sweep – my first – for Loque’nahak. Being Beast Mastery, I really wanted to pick up a laser cat for my pet, as I love the model. I didn’t really expect to find it, though. I figured there’d be no end of level 80 hunters out looking for it, or other achievement-minded people looking to progress on their Frostbitten achievements. Amazingly, though, only two minutes after I started looking, I came across him in the northwestern part of the zone, near where Shango spawns (I was flying that way for a quest; figured it wouldn’t be out of my way too much to hit the northern spawn points.) I may or may not have started hyperventilating; certainly it was a little nerve-wracking to have found him so soon. I landed, dismounted, and abandoned my old pet (as sad as this made me, it was of course worth it!). Before I started doing anything, though, I hit Loque with an Auto Shot to discourage anyone else from killing him – then I tossed a Freezing Trap, kited him through it, and started taming.

It was about at this point that I looked at my health bar and realized I was almost dead; not sure why, but I was around 3k health. The trap broke with 4 seconds left on the tame, and he came over and started hitting me for 700. With me almost dead, below 1000 health, the tame cast finally finished, and I had myself a brand new spirit beast.

I’m just amazed that I was able to find him so quickly! I’ve heard stories of people camping the spawns for days on end in order to try and kill or tame him – being able to get him within two minutes of starting my search didn’t even cross my mind as a possibility!