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.
Ganieda here, Argent Dawn server.
Just had to mention… my Ghost Saber is named Schrodinger. 🙂
Excellent taste, Ganieda <3
If the name was available on my realm, I’d have rolled a hunter named watson, and name my pet crick.
Ghostlands is a really fun area to be doing quests in, and it looks really fantastic in a creepy, scary kind of way.
Having already taken two unfinished Horde hunters through that region, I decided to give The Barrens a go for my third…
Yeah it doesn’t look as good but I still enjoyed the Newness. 🙂
You would need a live cat too won’t you? So at any given point, your stable has a live cat and (dead) ghost cat.
As an interesting point of fact: Lunapike was–in fact–a troll warrior, on the Wildhammer server. Pike decided she didn’t like warriors (as she would soon come to decide about ALL non hunter classes) and rerolled the character as a Tauren hunter. When the guild that her and I were on Wildhammer to hang out with fell apart, she transferred servers, while I decided that I really didn’t like rogues all that much and simply left my character alone.
Hope that was amusing for those of you stalking my girlfriend with fanboyish luster.
@ LS – true enough, although the troll warrior’s name was Lunakuti.
A name which I still sort of like…
I have a troll hunter who is stalled out at 37, though I did log in long enough to go buy her a raptor when they changed the levels for riding skill. She’s shelved at the moment, probably when I finish leveling my blood elf hunter to 70 I’ll go back and get my troll up there.
Trolls are my favorite race. If I had known I’d take her all the way to 70, I’d have made my main a troll hunter instead of a blood elf.
My other favorite are draenei, but I always lose interest once I get them off of Bloodmyst Isle. :-/
But how will you put the kitty in a box?
Male trolls have by far the best graphic for shooting a bow.
Ghostlands is one of the best leveling zones to 20.
@ boozsha
Agreed, and I was almost tempted to reroll my hunter as a male… but, the troll wimminz hips won out.
Trolls for the freaking win 😀
Many thanks to Stargate SG-1, whose resident cat was named Schrodinger and who provided an explanation of why. I would not have otherwise gotten the joke 😀
Hey Pike,
A couple things. In levelling terms, Surv doesn’t really take off until level 21 with the current tree, because that’s when you’re able to get Clever Traps. Before then, it’s basically 16 or so levels of kiting practice. 😉
On my alts I’ve always got Hawk Eye and Savage Strikes as my first five points. Hawk Eye because a) you’ve got more time to run if you need to, b) you’ve got more grace when kiting, and c) you can often kill mobs before they reach you without needing to send the pet at all.
Savage Strikes because, before you get Deterrence at least, and more properly Feign Death, as Surv, at times melee is going to happen. You don’t want it to happen more than the absolute minimum, but you want the boost that that talent will give you when it does.
Lastly, with the boar nerf as you know, I can’t recommend them any more as levelling pets. Since you’ll be doing it Horde side, I’d suggest getting one of the low level Swoops from Mulgore for Screech, which still gives us a reasonable amount of aoe threat, which we need.
Also, please don’t think that the pet isn’t important to Survival. It still is; we just use it in perhaps a somewhat different way. With Beast Mastery, you and the pet are both DPS. With Survival, you’re the DPS, and the pet is much more your tank.
When I’m soloing, what that ends up meaning is that even with Mend Pet up, sometimes I will actually have to draw aggro onto myself briefly and away from the pet, in order to prevent it from dying.
My relationship with my pets is just as symbiotic as with Beast Mastery; the main difference is that rather than thinking of the pet as extra damage, I primarily think of it as being a few thousand extra hit points. It’s more a shield, rather than another weapon.
oops…Deterrence in that last post meant Disengage. 😉
Thanks for the tips Mirsh. As I hope you know I have a lot of respect for Survival and did not mean to imply that you care less for your pet; I suppose what I meant to imply was I am really into the “making my pet stronger” thing, and find it difficult to do anything else! I certainly appreciate you guys.
Pike,
I know. /hug