I was browsing the WoW forums the other day (something that I rarely do, as I’m not particularly fond of the official forums), and stumbled across this thread which asks simply, “Who or what inspired you to play a hunter?”

And I decided to post my answer here rather than at the forum.

Why am I, Pike, playing a hunter?

Well let me take you back to Spring of this year, as I was just finishing up the last of my senior projects at university. Now that I was almost out of school and had nothing but “working” going on in my near future, I was mostly looking forward to playing some console video games when I got the chance– when you use Linux as your main operating system, it’s often more trouble than it’s worth to get most PC games up and running (though I did manage to get StarCraft and WarCraft III running with varying degrees of success, which made me happy.)

Then, one morning, my boyfriend informed me that he had installed WoW and had been up into the wee hours of the night playing it. Now you have to understand something: the two of us had spent the past year or so up until this point purposefully avoiding WoW like the plague. We both had seemingly endless amounts of friends who were, in our minds, addicted to the game: they did nothing but talk about WoW and they liked to inform us that “Oh you’ll start playing someday, you just don’t know it yet.” This annoyed us to no end so we vowed never to play it.

So when my significant other told me he had started playing, my initial reaction was one of shock, but it was replaced a few seconds later with “Well why did you start without me?”

I had a trial copy of WoW laying around, which I managed to successfully install on Linux thanks to WINE and an awesome guide, and after several hours of waiting for patches and stuff I was in game, ready to make my first ever character.

I knew nothing about any of the classes. I had never played an MMORPG before, the concepts of “tank”, “healer”, and “DPS” classes were completely foreign to me. I have played some D&D, not as much as I would have liked, but enough to know how to play the game. In D&D my main character was a half-elven ranger. I always thought they were pretty cool. They had this ability to talk to animals once a day (or something like that), so once in a game I used a spell to talk to a little bird and have him go scout around for me. That really stuck in my head as a neat ability.

So I was thinking of that experience. And I was remembering how one of my WoW-geek-buddies had given me a run-down of all the classes and informed me that hunters were one of the best (if not the best) for solo’ing, and I sort of figured I’d be doing a lot of solo’ing.

And… that’s it. That’s why I rolled a hunter. I knew nothing about them at the time, I’d never played the game before. I had no idea they got traps. I had no idea they got Feign Death. I even had no idea they got pets. All I knew was that they got a bow and arrow and were sort of like my D&D character and were good for solo play.

(As an aside here, yes I rolled a night elf. I figured they were closest to half-elves that I could get, since humans couldn’t be hunters, and I liked the night elves in WCIII. I had no idea at the time that “night elf hunter” was the biggest cliché in the game, or I probably would have thought twice about rolling one. Actually I’m going to be completely honest with you guys here, I really wanted to roll a tauren and play Horde but my boyfriend had rolled a human ‘lock and I wanted to play with him, so Alliance I was! I have a couple tauren alts now though, to make up for it.)

And so, here I am. Here I am thoroughly obsessed with my class which was chosen purely based on a D&D game and some random advice given to me by a friend.

And yes, here are my boyfriend and I, thoroughly “addicted” to the game in general, now that most of our friends have grown bored of it and moved on. =P Heehee.