It never ceases to amaze me how expansive the blogging community is, even in a single subject (in this case, WoW.) I’ve been finding myself linked to in blogs and even mentioned in blog posts (thanks again Matticus! It was a very interesting article too) so I keep finding more and more blogs to read. I’m afraid I may run out of room in my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder before long. I need to find a nice, easy way to keep track of all the blogs I read– is Google Reader good? I need some recommendations.
While we’re on the topic of blogs, I also want to mention that I do in fact read every single comment that is posted here, thanks to Gmail notifications. I even read the ones made on really old posts. I just wanted to mention that because I’ve been getting some comments on older posts recently, and I wanted to make sure everybody knew that they are all read and quite appreciated.
Anyways, I’ve been coming up with a lot of things I’ve wanted to write about lately; but I think this post is just going to focus on… bad hunters. Yes, hunters seem to have a bad rap for having the highest quantity of bad players. To be quite honest I’m not surprised. The amount of people I’ve run into who don’t have “Hunter 101” down is astonishing. (I think Hunter 101 probably consists of one sentence: “Send your pet in to hold aggro for you and shoot things from afar.” Seriously I think some hunters have not yet made that connection.)
I once grouped with a level 40-something hunter whose strategy in an instance went like this: use multi-shot or volley to get as many mobs as possible to aggro onto you, and then melee everything. Yes, I’m serious. Now, it’s one thing to be a self-professed delusional hunter and do stuff like that for fun 😉 , but it’s another thing to seriously use that as your main method of attack in an instance. (For the record, that guy wound up aggro’ing everything in a particularly bad room and everybody died except me, and I even managed to dispose of all the offending mobs. I was pretty proud of being able to survive such a bad wipe. It’s moments like that– moments where the odds are stacked against you, and you experience the thrill of coming up with a way to survive– that really make me love being a hunter.)
It’s even worse when other people are grouped with bad hunters and then they feel less inclined to group with hunters again, later. My boyfriend occasionally runs instances while I’m gone or busy; many times I have returned home to be met with “Pleeeease get on WoW and group with us, we just had to kick this horrible hunter who can’t use traps/feigns death at the worst times/can’t control his pet/keeps wiping us/*insert something else here* and we need you.” It’s flattering that he and his friends turn to me when they need a reliable hunter, but it’s sad that it’s so hard for them to find reliable hunters in the first place.
Now maybe it’s just easier for me to pick out bad hunters because hunter is really the only class I know much about. Maybe I’ve grouped with lots of bad players of other classes and just haven’t noticed because I’m not very experienced yet. But I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I have met poor players of other classes (the rogue who was out-DPS’d by my pet, when I was Marksman-spec’d, comes to mind… granted I don’t know much about rogues, but that struck me as rather, erm, less-than-stellar), but bad hunters are just everywhere. It sort of makes you wonder why that is so. Maybe this is just one of those classes where you really need to have a “Eureka!” moment before you finally get it. Or maybe it’s a more gradual process… or maybe it just depends.
There are definitely good hunters out there, though. And it always makes me happy to see those. As I have said before, that’s what I’m aiming for… being a good hunter. I don’t think I’m there yet but at least I know I’m not bad. It warms my little huntery heart to see really good hunters in battlegrounds, even if they’re of the opposing faction and beating me into oblivion =) So keep up the good work, guys!
I’ve found Google Reader to be just amazing (although I freely admit that I haven’t tried any others!). But it made a big change in the way I appreciate blogs.
Instead of remembering every now and then to check in on a blog I vaguely remember, I now track over a hundred blogs — and the Google Reader page is my first stop in the morning and my last stop before bed. It’s like having content piped straight into my brain.
The biggest problem I have is that I read everything and want more, so I add 10 new blogs, then I get behind for a day and have 200+ posts to read. But then a day later I’m out of content and ready for more, so I suppose it all works out.
Mania pretty much covered it. Google Reader…just…works. I do most of my reading and blogging from work, which blocks a lot of content. I can’t get to Mania’s blog at all, for instance, except by reading the feed.
Google Reader is super simple to use (especially if the blogger’s taken any effort at all in enabling feed buttons) (and feed buttons for comments as well as posts are Very Good Things!).
There are other readers out there, of course–one of them I wanted to try, but couldn’t even get to the reader’s website from work…so scratch that.
And there are things you can do to improve your blog for readers; FeedBurner is just one example.
Bad hunters suck, but I’ve had worse experiences with bad druids. Like that one time… *refer to blog for mo’ info on evil healy druids”
-Pea
Google Reader’s the way to go. If you already have a GMail account, you’re set anyway and you don’t have to set up another feed reading service. I subscribe to hundreds of feeds (Gotfrag, IGN, Law.com, CNN, Fark.com, WoW Insider, WoW Blue Posts, etc). It’s got the spiffy categories that you can use to organize all your different feeds.
It’s a smart service too. I don’tt hink you need an exact URL to a blog’s URL feed. Just the base URL seems to do the trick.
Bad hunters in instances always seem to provide me the most grief on my warrior tank. I am still practising tanking which means lots of PuGs (plenty of practice with group disasters there).
Hunters always seem to be the ones that have no idea about the mechanics of playing in a group, or realise the necessity of having things beat on the meatshield. I get snippy when I have to fight for aggro on every single mob from someone determined to use their pet to unnecessarily offtank instead of following the kill order.
I personally use bloglines. I’ve never used google reader 😉
I’m half tempted to start a guild called L2P and start tutoring people. Hunters aren’t the only class with problems. Tanks are another set of players I’ve had problems with.
Grats on the new cat! That is a damn hard cat to find! I tried for days and finally gave up on him long ago.
I only wish there was video of you doing it as a leper gnome! That is comedy gold right there!
I may be delusional, but those delusions fade the moment I get into a raid. It’s all business in there when 24 other people are involved. However , if an OT dies… you can safely bet that I’m doin my best to pull aggro and tank the baddy!
Truly, a bad hunter can really wreck a group. I remember back in the glory days of UBRS… ugh. Get to the egg room and some nimrod has his pet on aggressive!
Wipe! Kick the idiot out and start over.
Weird thing is, pet control is about the easiest thing a hunter ever has to learn. How hard is it to click the passive button or type /petpassive?
Hunters really are one of those classes where you can suddenly realize you can do things better another way. I find it exciting that I can learn new things everyday with my class.
Hi Pike,
It’s like I said to Karthis in the reply I made to him recently…I honestly think that the reason why there’s so many bad hunters in the game is because we’re a difficult class to play. As you yourself actually noted in this post, there are just so many different things to keep track of.
@mrshalak
Actually, I find the reverse to be true. Hunters are very easy to get going with and are very solo friendly. So, when the huntard gets into a group, he often tries the same tricks that worked solo , but now cause wipes in a group (ie, feign death and send the mob to the healer).
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be an ignorance of game mechanics in some cases either. I’ve recently been running my warrior with a hunter that has a lvl 70 warrior, and his pet pulls aggro with an AoE, the big flappy wings get in my way for tanking, and he goes all out on DPS from the get go. /refer to BRK and hope he gets it….grrrr.
Rysteranch and PuddyTat
Re: Readers…
I… wasn’t that impressed with Google Reader. It seemed to me to just be yet another site to visit on a long list of daily stops. Instead, I set up RSS feeds in Thunderbird, which is my email client of choice. With it, I can check both my email and RSS feeds simultaneously in a quick, clean interface. And since I have Thunderbird open almost constantly, it’s actually quite convenient to be checking blog feeds that way as well.
To be honest, it was kind of a pain to import all the RSS feed URLs at first, since there was a long list of sites to include and finding solid links to their RSS feeds was sometimes a bit of a chore, in the long run, it’s saved me quite a bit of effort, so it’s worked out rather nicely.
Thunderbird is definitely something I would suggest as a means for getting blog feeds. Particularly if you’re already using it for email.
Just my thoughts.