Okay guys, here’s the deal. My “Ask Pike” post got a lot of really great questions! So as not to crit you with a wall of text, I’m going to post the answers in chunks. Here are the first seven. (Yes, seven. It’s a good number. Do not dispute this fact.)

1. (paraphrased) “What is your opinion on the new Aspect of the Viper and the new Survival 41-point talent (Trap Mastery)”: I haven’t been messing around in Beta as much as other people; there is still a lot for me to do in the Live game so I’ve been playing Live. I did some quests with the new AotV and I also did some solo instances to test my rhino with the new AotV and for the most part I like it. I think a passive regen component would be nice for between pulls (and Blizz has said that is coming), but PvE-wise I like it. It adds some new depth to the hunter class and I always welcome that. You have to plan for when you know you have a big fight coming ahead, and adjust your Viper usage accordingly.

Now moving on to PvP, I can understand your concerns. I do not do Arena, but in its current implementation, Viper is my aspect of choice in certain battlegrounds (I’m lookin’ at you AV). And even then I occasionally have to sit and drink. The big question, in my mind, comes down to “is the shooting-based regen from the new AotV going to work in a battlegrounds-PvP situation”, and that I cannot tell you without actually going and trying it.

And all THAT said, I know they have changed it lately and I haven’t exactly been in Beta lately, so, if I have said anything misleading or outdated, I do apologize!

As for your Trap Mastery comment: I haven’t paid much attention to the changes to the Survival Tree other than I find them to be interesting (not really in a negative or positive sense, just a “…huh!” sense.) Like I said, I have spent too much time playing Live lately. =P

2. “How excited are you about Naxx on a scale of 1-10?”: New Naxx is gonna be pretty awesome. Bringing back Cryptstalker Armor is gonna be pretty awesome (am I the only person in the world who liked how that set looked?). My biggest regret is that I never got to do Naxx in its current implementation. So I’m givin’ it a final score of 9.

3. (paraphrased) “More Alamo-styled posts?”: Possibly! But no guarantees. In all honesty I was not expecting it to be that popular so it was going to be a one-time thing. However because people seemed to like it so much, I am game for a possible sequel sometime.

4. “What kind of gaming did you do, and characters did you enjoy, before WoW that you think led up to you playing five million hunters at once?”: My game-playing has always been rather all over the place, genre-wise. I devoured games of all types on the Commodore 64, Atari, and Colecovision, and then I devoured games of all types on the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64. (My Playstation I acquired for the sole purpose of playing Final Fantasy. I was a major Nintendo fangirl, okay? =P)

At around that time my game playing sort of started to plateau into a comfortable existence of playing Starcraft 12 hours a day* and playing various games on my Game Boy/Game Boy Advance the rest of the time. I later got a PlayStation 2 and a GameCube but I actually didn’t do a lot of gaming on them other than cavorting around Super Smash Bros. Melee and various Metal Gear Solid games. And I did play a lot of Halo for somebody who never had an XBox (my parents did, and when I could tear my mom away from Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, I was all over that. Sniper rifles were lame by the way. Come out with the pistol and fight me like a man!)

Then World of Warcraft showed up and the rest is history.

It’s hard for me to pick a favorite genre or style of game though I’d say Real-Time Strategy if pressed. I also have a major soft-spot for Final Fantasy Tactics-style games but they don’t seem to come around very often. Really though, I have fallen madly in love with RPGs, First-Person Shooters (Goldeneye 007 anyone?), action-platformers, and everything in between.

But my three favorite games, will, I think, always be Super Mario RPG, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Starcraft.

As to how that all possibly correlates with my hunter obsession, I can’t tell ya. I guess I was pretty good at that “shooting the targets from horseback” minigame in Ocarina of Time though. I think the closest I have come to pre-WoW hunterness is the ranger character I played in D&D who I really liked, and in all honesty, that influenced my class decision in WoW more than anything else (with the possible exception of a friend who told me they were “easy to solo with” and I figured I would be solo’ing a lot.)

Really, the more I think about it, the more I think a lot of my “hunterness” has its roots in real life. I was an unusual kid when I was younger. I eschewed normal friends in favor of a trusty stuffed animal sidekick; people confused me anyway, animals were my passion. During recess I’d leave the playground and run into this big group of trees, a mini-forest of sorts, that we called, well… “The Trees”. The Trees were offlimits but I went there sometimes anyway, because it was a million times better of a playground than the jungle gym was. I got in trouble once. I didn’t deny what I’d done; I rather defiantly told the teacher that yes, I was playing in The Trees, thank you very much.

Feeling disconnected from humanity like that, finding yourself instead in nature– this is the type of thing that society beats out of you as you grow up, and then you find it again years later in a video game, of all things.

Possible?

I dunno.

Just some food for thought.

5. “How about your thoughts on the Auction House and the economy of the servers you play on and what could happen with LK after it’s release?”: Hmm, kind of a toughie. Though I use Auctioneer, I don’t really “play the auction house” very much and the only prices I’m familiar with tend to be the prices of herbs because I’m a herbalism junkie. The prices in WoW already fluctuate a lot anyway, based on time of day, etc., to the point that a lot of times I can overprice something and it will still usually be sold by the end of the 48-hour period. I predict that the current primals and motes are gonna lose their value as they are replaced with… whatever the new primals and motes are. Things like that.

6. “We know that you are completely sick with obsession over the huntar class, as am I. But what other char class is your second passion, what do you play when you are unhuntarded?”: Healing is a guilty pleasure of mine. Its feel and the timing involved is basically the exact opposite of huntering and in that way, I find it very interesting. Druid is my highest-level non-hunter class– I’ve got one at level 48– and I’ve also got a second druid who is level 20. I fully intend on getting the first druid to endgame at some point, with the goal of healing.

Interestingly enough, I cannot get into druid DPS. Not a fan of Feral (though Bear tanking looks like something I might try). Currently spec’d Boomkin and it’s moderately fun, but it’s… definitely lacking something. The majority of my leveling thus far was actually spec’d Resto because healing was the only aspect of the class that I could really get into.

It is slow going as far as leveling my druid goes but I really do enjoy healing.

I have also lately been finding myself enjoying mages. I tried the mage class once upon a time and eventually decided I wasn’t a fan– it was too much “root and nuke” which I think is sort of what turns me off to boomkin, too. But I’m c

urrently leveling a new mage with my boyfriend and it’s a lot more fun this time around, to the point that I actually wouldn’t mind seeing endgame with her, either. If that is the case, that will be the first time I have liked doing DPS that is not hunter DPS. We’ll have to see! =P

Other classes do not seem to do it for me. But, I’ll never say never.

7. “Why are you already taken??!?”: Because four years ago I joined an online Zelda fan community and hit it off pretty well with some crazy guy with a million posts.

Yes, we met online.

/dorkgrin

Next post: Next seven questions! (I believe I had 21 total, so this “sevens” thing should work out pretty well.)

* Anybody who has ever played Starcraft needs to go watch this, now. I dare you not to giggle. Especially at the last 15 seconds.