(P.S. Yes Bear, I’m working on that gear guide for you.)
Monthly Archives: August 2008
A Tale of Two Trolls
Tauren and Trolls are, without question, my favorite two races in the game. Anything that would come in third (probably gnomes; gosh I wish they could be hunters) are a very, very distant third. It is perhaps ironic that overall I still prefer the Alliance lore and aesthetics over the Horde lore and aesthetics, and I’ll always be a Stormwind Girl at heart, but when it comes to races, there is no contest; Horde win.
My love for Tauren (especially female Tauren! <3) has been manifested in my adoption of Thunder Bluff as my Hordeside home, making my blood elf character an adopted Tauren, and of course, making about a zillion Tauren characters such as Lunapike who is my Hordeside Main (and honestly, probably my New Main these days).
And my love for Trolls, well… wait a minute, I’ve failed to ever get a Troll character past level 17 or so.
I know, it’s horrible. My Troll characters, as much as I adore them, have all met bad ends for one reason or another.
One of the first characters I made was a Troll Hunter on Silver Hand. I named her Shantizar. I ran her to Dun Morogh when she was level ten so she could tame a Snow Leopard. I have a screenshot of her /flirting with my boyfriend’s main, who was like… level 30 at the time. That’s how long ago this was.
Unfortunately my initial impressions of Silver Hand Horde failed to catch my eye and that character sort of fell by the wayside. When I next gave Horde a shot, it was an all new server– The Venture Co.– and the server immediately gave me a “this is home” feel, the same one I get on Silver Hand Alliance. So basically all my hordies since then have been on VeCo.
Anyways, flash forward several months. I wanted to give the Survival tree a shot but I couldn’t bring myself to respec one of my current hunters away from my beloved Beast Mastery and on top of that, I think one of the best ways to really get a feel for a talent spec is to level through it. I considered resurrecting Shantizar of Silver Hand but she was broke and I wanted to give a boar a shot, so… I rerolled entirely. Shantizar the Second was born on a completely different server, she tamed an aggro-monster of a boar who she named Niels, and she got to about level 17 as Survival.
Then… things happened. Boars got nerfed (so sad, I loved Niels “Boar” /sniff), the server never really gave me the “home” feel that I look for in a new server, and I decided that as much fun as exploring a new talent tree was, spec’ing something other than BM is just hard for me to do. I can’t help it; I’m a pet fiend.
And so The Survival Project was put on hold and yet another of my poor Trolls never saw level 20.
But something interesting happened the other day. I logged onto Shantizar the First, with Scraps the Snow Leopard by her side– this character hadn’t been touched in months– and I got that feeling. The “home” feeling. The one that hadn’t been there when I’d originally made her so long ago.
So… I’ve started playing her again. Just a little, on the side. No rush, no pressure.
And I think I’m gonna respec her to Survival. And I think I’m gonna level her in the Ghostlands, a zone which I have never been able to get into before.
It’s about time I had me some jungle lovin’, right?
P.S. Someday I swear I am going to make a hunter named Schrödinger and tame the Ghost Cat.
Letting Go
When I first took over guild-leadership of my guild from my boyfriend, I was relatively certain I could do it. Unfortunately, as time went on, I found that it was not to be. Being a Guild Leader requires a lot of time and energy to devote to the guild, and I had neither; my work schedule makes it near-impossible to be online during peak hours and even on my days off I am prone to hanging out on different servers, alt’ing around– that’s just how I am.
It got to the point where I would log on and people would ask me about guild ranks, the guild bank, or other important stuff and I would have to say “…I don’t know.” It was rather embarrassing. The guild leader doesn’t know what’s going on with her guild? It was true, though. It worried me a lot; I felt like I was doing a poor job as Guild Leader. And on top of that, I have never been much of a “Leader” type person. All that stress was making it hard for me to enjoy the game.
So, not too long ago, I made a thread on our guild forums stating that I was resigning from guild leadership. A good friend and long-time officer has taken over for me. I’m glad that it was able to work out that way, because I feel that a lot of pressure has been taken off of me, but it’s also awkward to watch, at the same time.
The face of the guild has changed a lot in the past few months. People that defined the guild in the early days have left and new people have come. We have had an official “guild clear” of Karazhan now– which I couldn’t attend, because our raid times fall during my work hours– and now that I think about it I don’t think a single person who was in that recent “guild clear” was part of that initial group of us that started raiding way back in the beginning. It’s kind of weird and very surreal to think about.
My officers basically took over for me a few months ago when I made it clear that I wouldn’t be around very often, and now that I have stepped down, it has been made even more official: ranks have changed, guild policies have changed, this guild is no longer at least partially “my” guild the way it was back when my boyfriend and I were co-leading it. I’m not going to say it’s a bad change, and I do think the officers are doing a solid job– but it’s very different, and somewhat awkward to deal with.
It’s hard to say what Tawyn’s future is at this point; what the guild’s future is and whether the two of them will continue to coincide. A part of me would like to try to squeeze into more raids and at least get Epic’d out before WotLK hits, so I can say I did it; another part of me knows that will be hard to do with my schedule and sort of doesn’t really care enough to work around it. We will just have to see.
Now I promise it’s not all doom’n’gloom, in fact, mostly I’ve been having a blast. I still adore the game and my hunters and I am excited about the prospect of my second level 70. Thinking back on it, after the initial “Just-dinged-70-funk” wore off, the process of getting geared for Karazhan was one of my most enjoyable experiences in WoW and I’m looking forward to doing it again.
And in other news, I still don’t have a Beta invite yet. Not that I’m dying for one– in fact I feel like I have too much left to do in Burning Crusade to focus on Beta– (not to mention a lot of awesome hunter blogs have been thoroughly covering it already; I like being one of the remaining non-Beta hunter blogs) but gosh, I’m starting to feel like the kid Blizz picked last in gym class! =P
So You Want to Play a Hunter? Part 8
Levels 21-30 are fairly straightforward although they do culminate in an awesome prize in the name of Feign Death (and these days, a mount.) Let’s see what sort of goodies you’ll get:
Scorpid Sting is what you will learn at level 22. This reduces a target’s chance to hit by 5% for several seconds. Not really as useful as Serpent Sting in early-level grinding, but your friendly neighborhood tanks and healers love it on boss fights in instances and raids. Just remember to keep it “refreshed”.
Beast Lore, ah, Beast Lore is great. You learn it at level 24 and will show you information about any beast in the game; its armor, hit points, the amount of damage it does, and (most importantly) whether or not said beast is tamable and if so, what moves it teaches and what foods it eats.
It has occurred to me that we have not yet talked about taming pets for skills. Basically, you will want to continually update your pets skills and the ranks of their skills as you level. You can learn some abilities from the hunter trainer, but others you have to go out and “find” in the wild. Once you find a pet with the skill you want, you tame it (be sure to put your previous pet in the stable first), feed it and teach it growl– and then go out and fight with it. After a time, when it uses its special ability, you will get the message “You have learned a new skill: [Pet Skill and Rank]” in your text box, which means you are now free to teach it to pets who are able to learn it.
At level 24 you also learn Track Hidden. Track Hidden does not work quite like the other tracking spells; as in it isn’t going to put every rogue or stealthed mob on your mini map (that would be nice, but alas, it doesn’t happen.) What it does is increase your stealth detection and puts mobs that you detect on your minimap. This is a handy tracking spell for quests with lots of stealthed mobs (such as those prowling panthers in Stranglethorn Vale) and also in PvP if you think there might be a rogue or druid close by.
At level 26 you learn Track Elementals, which works like most other tracking spells against anything that says Elemental on the tooltip.
Level 26 is also when you get Rapid Fire. Rapid Fire is good for: emergencies when solo’ing when you have to get something down fast (be sure your pet has a solid hold on threat), boss fights when you want to unleash the DPS, and PvP to get an edge vs., say, other hunters. Post-Steady-Shot hunters, you will have to be on your toes to continue a shot rotation while under the effects of Rapid Fire but it’s certainly not impossible to manually-weave one in there.
You learn Frost Trap at level 28. It’s good for escaping mobs that you’d rather not fight (or that overwhelmed you), and it’s really good in PvP. Put one at a choke point in AV (such as on the bridge), or my favorite: put one at the entrance to the tunnel right before your flag-carrying teammate runs in. All those guys hot on his tail? Yep, derailed.
This trap is also good for kiting guys around whether in PvP or PvE, though for the most part I found that I mostly just need Wing Clip/Concussive Shot.
And then you hit level 30! Grats on your mount, firstly. (back in my day I had to walk through Stranglethorn Vale, uphill both ways! /shakes cane)
Aspect of the Beast is the newest Aspect to welcome to your stable and I’m sad to say it’s not particularly useful. It is a pure PvP Aspect– it makes it so other classes with tracking abilities cannot track you– and I’ve used it once or twice in Warsong Gulch when going for the flag (or defending it), or on PvP servers in hotly contested areas… but for the most part I don’t find it to be worth it. Your mileage may vary.
Much more importantly, you learn Feign Death, which is your lifeline when it comes to dropping aggro. Use it when you have aggro, use it when you don’t have aggro yet but are getting there, and use it to get people (and pets) to stop targeting you in PvP. Use it and learn to love it. You can read much more about the mechanics of Feign Death at my post about it here.
If you are leveling pure Beast Master you will learn Intimidation here, which is handy for stunning people in PvP, and for helping your pet to establish aggro when out questing. Marksman hunters will likely be putting their point here into Scattershot which is great for getting back into range (especially in PvP). Survival gets Counterattack but in all honesty I have never used this move so I can’t tell you much about it. I hear it is useful in PvP.
Mmm, learning more and more hunter stuff all the time. Tastes yummy, doesn’t it? We’re cooking up some more, too, and it smells delicious. But that’ll wrap us up for this week.
In case you are new to the series, here’s where we’re at thus far:
So You Want to Play a Hunter?
Part One: Introduction & The Birth of a Hunter
Part Two: Just Starting Out & Levels 1-5
Part Three: Levels 6-10 and Jump Shot Kiting
Part Four: Talent Points & Pets
Part Five: Life With a Pet
Part Six: Levels 12-20
Part Seven: Intro to Freezing Trap
Part Eight: Levels 21-30 [Current]
Until next time, go pamper your pet.
Books
Have any of you read the Warcraft books? Some great stuff there. The Boy and I are currently reading “The Last Guardian” together (also reading “Star Wars: Heir to the Empire” together, but that’s another story).
The books are a great way to really immerse yourself in the lore and history of the Warcraft universe, as well as crack horrifically dorky jokes with your reading buddy that, on the one hand, are just bad, but on the other hand, somehow manage to be absolutely hysterical.
“Hey look, Moroes… vanished. *spends the next five minutes giggling*”
“Hey guys, it’s Khadgar, I’m super lost and I somehow walked into a big battle of evil green guys =( Can I get a summon to Maiden’s room?” “Khadgar, you’re in AV, we haven’t summoned you yet. Relax.” *once again, spend the next five minutes giggling like a lunatic*
In all seriousness, Warcraft lore is awesome, and I think it’s one of the big things that made WoW as popular as it is. I spend a lot of my freetime devouring WoWWiki, it only makes sense that I’d move on to the books.
Humble Pie
Today I got owned by a blood elf hunter. Twice.
Granted, she had a druid with her. But I had a T6 rogue with me. And later, a mage with me too.
The story? One of my good friends leveled a hunter to ten and asked what sort of pet she could get that wasn’t seen every day. I suggested the cute red Springpaw Stalkers in Eversong Woods; it’s certainly not every day you see a level 10 draenei hunter with one of those, afterall!
So we pulled together a group of buddies, nabbed a warlock, and us level 70s flew to Zul’Aman and headed into the heart of Blood Elf country.
T6 rogue (a heck of a good one, too) got there first, and I’m not exactly sure how it happened but somehow he got in a spar with a druid and a hunter. I dashed into the fray; determined to save him since his health was dropping quickly, and targeted the hunter.
I pulled out all my usual tricks that I do against fellow hunters; you know, the ones that ensure that I almost never lose against other hunters, as I like to say. And yet somehow they all failed miserably and I was laying rather embarrassingly on the ground before I could think.
Our magey friend showed up and quickly died as well, so the three of us– rogue, mage, and hunter, decided to rez all at the same time, dispatch of the healy druid, and then proceed to the hunter.
That failed too, we did manage to kill the druid but he rez’d within two seconds and we were all dead again. Dang.
Well by this time more horde 70s were starting to show up, and it was painfully obvious that they were all PvP geared and we were sporting our PvE duds, so we all just sat around in ghost form and waited to deflag before rezzing. We did so, our Warlock pal showed up, we located a Springpaw Stalker and summoned our lowbie hunter friend who proceeded to tame herself a new kitty.
The curious horde showed up about now, all gathered around the unusual bunch that we were, so I /pointed at lowbie hunter and /pointed at her new cat, and /nodded. Blood Elf Hunter /cheered.
Afterwards I logged into a hordie and sent her an in-game mail telling her I’d enjoyed our spar (but she should catch me in my PvP gear next time, I added cheekily) and wished her hunt’s luck.
We hunters, we’ve gotta stick together.
I've Got a Fever and the Only Prescription is More Hunters
Just some random thoughts…
— The hunter obsession shows no signs of slowing down. Lunapike is level 66 (Kill Command, come to me my precious), Althalor is level 31. I’ve sort of re-adopted another level 12 hunter I had lying around who I hadn’t played in so long that her pet had 126% experience because of the turnover from the pet leveling speed increase. Which happened a loooong time ago.
It’s sort of funny how much I genuinely try to get into other classes and how much I fail miserably; balance/resto druid is my best attempt and I’ve actually gotten her to level 42 but I can only stand playing her for short amounts of time before I have to run to the comfort of my hunters. I do still plan on getting her to 70 and going healy… someday. Because I have found that I enjoy healing, but I dislike DPSing as anything other than a hunter, and unfortunately there is a lot of DPS involved in the leveling process.
— Thinking I’m definitely gonna experiment around with the various updated hunter talent trees in WotLK (seriously, did you see the Explosive Shot in Scarlet Monastery YouTube movie?) although I have a hard time imagining permanently spec’ing something other than Beast Mastery– simply because I love the hunter/pet symbiosis so much. I have tried a few times now to level a survival hunter (call me crazy?); it always falls through because one of my favorite parts of leveling a hunter is watching my pet slowly get stronger and stronger. Definitely glad to see the other trees getting some expansion love though; it’s about time.
— I love all the e-mail questions/comments you guys send me, and please don’t stop sending ’em, but I feel I should stress that if I do not get to you within a couple days, it’s nothing personal, I’m just rather busy with lifestuff right now! I read everything though.
— I headed out to Blasted Lands the other day and did a bunch of DPS tests. Now I know testing my DPS against a level 57 mob is not as accurate as testing it against a raid boss, there are a ton of differences and factors involved, but I wanted to have a somewhat controlled environment with set conditions (“I will do science to it!”) and still get my pet in on the action which isn’t exactly possible with, say, Dr. Boom.
The results of my experiment? I do as much DPS hand-weaving a 1:1 rotation as I do spamming a 1:1 rotation macro. I know, crazy, right? I surprised myself and tested it multiple times with the same results– I was getting about 1050 DPS whether I manually weaved or macro-spammed. As you can guess, this makes me incredibly happy, because now my stubbornness when it comes to hand-weaving is justified! /dance =P
Of course, I also experimented with a 3:2 macro, which bumped my DPS up to about 1125, a huge increase, but left me with zero mana in a matter of seconds. So that macro was banished away to a hidden location for emergencies. I still like hand-weaving my own shots. I am just that psychotic. I have been getting some e-mails lately about macros and different Beast Master rotations. I want to come right out and say I am not the expert on shot rotation macros but I think it is a “Hunter Kindergarten”-style post which I will probably look into writing up because there seems to be a lot of interest on the subject.
Well, that’ll do it for today’s Random Post. Have a good day, people!
Oh, and for the record, these were the macros I was using in my test:
Macro’d 1:1 Auto/Steady:
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/castsequence reset=3 !Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();
Macro’d 3:2 Steady/Auto:
#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast !Auto Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();
No Introduction Needed
…and before you ask, no, the Ancient Petrified Leaf did not drop, and Eltanin the Windserpent can tank Ragnaros for nine seconds.
So You Want to Play a Hunter? Part 7
Intro to Freezing Trap
Greetings, young level 20 hunter! You’ve just got Freezing Trap which is going to make your life easier!
You may have heard of a mythical thing we like to call “Chain-trapping”, i.e., chaining your traps together such that you can keep a mob trapped indefinitely. Now, that is indeed what you are aiming for eventually, but keep in mind that it’s not exactly something you’ll be doing very much before you get Freezing Trap Rank 3 at level 60. Your traps simply will not last as long. At this point, if somebody asks you to chain-trap in Deadmines or WC, there is no shame in telling them that it’s not a good idea.
So what are you going to be using lowbie traps for, then? When solo’ing and leveling, it’s very handy for keeping extra mobs out of your hair.
An example situation would go something like this:
You see two mobs standing next to each other. You send your pet in on one. They both aggro on your pet. Now the problem is, that if you just continue this scenario as is (you and your pet both attacking one target), it’s very possible that the second guy will pick up on your Mend Pet threat and come running for you.
So what do you do in advance of this situation? You lay a Freezing Trap down at your feet right about the time you send your pet in. If Second Guy comes running for you, he will run into your trap. Usually you can keep him trapped long enough to finish up your first guy.
If your pet is taking a lot of damage you can also purposefully pull one guy into your trap by way of Multi-Shot: that will alert Second Guy to your presence and get him to come running into your trap, so he is off of your pet.
A trap can also be quite handy to give your or your pet some recovery time before you finish up the fight. If you are already both quite wounded after a large pull and you have one guy left, you can trap that guy, pop up a Mend Pet and throw a bandage on yourself, and then finish up the guy in your trap.
Overall, Freezing Traps are one of the most useful tools you have at your disposal as a hunter. Always keep them in mind. They are your main form of crowd control and as you level and get better ranks of Freezing Trap and practice with them… you will learn that a hunter who knows how to trap is a hunter that everybody loves.
Things to Keep in Mind:
-Your trap needs two seconds of “arming time”, that is, if you lay down your trap right as a guy is on top of you, you will have to take a hit or two for a couple seconds.
-Once you lay down a trap, it will be active for one minute (before it disappears).
-Damage done to the trapped target will break the trap. That includes DoTs such as Serpent Sting. If you suspect you may possibly be trapping, it is a good idea not to use Serpent Sting. You can, however, use things like Distracting Shot because it doesn’t cause damage and will not break your trap.
-Traps have a chance to break early. It’s not your fault when that happens, it’s just something that you will have to deal with sometimes. Traps can also be resisted entirely, and there are some mobs that are immune to traps.
-Remember to put some space between the trap and you, or the mob will still hit you before getting frozen. Not a big deal when out in the open field, but rather more important in a raid or heroic.
-It is very possible to accidentally break your own trap via Auto Shot. If you have this problem a lot, you may want to look into a Pull Shot macro.
Freezing Traps can be improved (along with all other traps) via Survival talents, which will make chain-trapping easier, but you certainly do not need those talents to be a successful trapper. All it takes a little practice and a little timing. Eventually, as you gain higher ranks of your Freezing Trap, you will be able to start practicing your chain-trapping; but until then, just get a feel for when and how to use your trap.
In closing, I leave you with “Tawyn’s Trapathon”, a movie I made several months ago (and which you may have already seen, but hey!):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awj26eYxN5o&hl=en&fs=1]
Yes, it has its nub moments, but I wasn’t going for anything particularly fancy at the time, I was just FRAPSing one of my routine farming sessions. =P
And I will see you on our next installment of SYWtPaH, when we get to level 30!
Hunting is Cheaper than Therapy (-random T-shirt saying)
The other day a good friend of mine told me about a dream he’d had with me in it. He said he and I were just hanging out, and I was messing around on my computer and showing him Linux, but I was talking about it completely via hunter terminology– “Let’s just Auto Shot through this menu,” I said in his dream.
From now on, when I put my computer into Standby mode, I’m going to say it’s Feigning Death.
Hey, it’s only logical!