Monthly Archives: October 2008

thoughts, wrath of the lich king

Two Weeks Notice

9 Comments

It’s weird to think that in two weeks we’ll all be leveling up again.

For me, it raises a lot of questions, like the specifics of the spec I’m going to be using (still wavering on a lot of the talents), which characters I’m going to playing first, where I’m planning on heading to level first… I mean, Howling Fjord was so pretty in Beta, clearly prettier than Borean Tundra. But I worry that everybody agrees with that, and is gonna be headed there. =P We’ll see. In the long run I actually rather like some (though certainly not all) barren/desertish zones. I love Tanaris and Silithus. They remind me of Tatooine from Star Wars. >.>

As for who to give most of my initial attention to, it’s pretty obvious that Tawyn is my main and so I’ll be playing through the content Alliance-side first. Aside from Tawyn being my most-geared and favorite character, it also comes down to the social side of things. Lunapike has always been more of a solo/experimental character as opposed to Tawyn who did the heroics and the raiding. And now that she is in a guild of, well, Entelechy refugees for lack of a better term (Entelechy actually disbanded recently, from what I hear), there is some discussion about making a “comeback” guild in Wrath of the Lich King and at least tackling all the ten-mans. But, we’ll have to see.

Two more weeks!

screenshots

Ghostbusting!

5 Comments

Got together with some guildies and went on a Necrotic Rune farming spree last night. Spent a bunch of ’em on some new shoulders. Went through the horrifying experience of watching my shiny new fully-enchanted epic shoulders not live up to my old blues, for the second time in the past month or so. (Later found out that my RatingBuster settings were somewhat out of whack, which might explain my tendency to misjudge.)

Oh well, I did manage to get my mitts on that Pocket Paladin, and on top of that, the first new tabard Tawyn has worn in well over a year:

I said she’d never take the other one off for aesthetic/RP reasons, but I think the new one fulfills both functions just fine, so, I am happy. And I can always put the other one back on if I change my mind.

Then I thought “Hey wait a minute, Lunapike needs gear!”

Off I hopped over to her and ran to Azshara. I was worried about running into a team of Alliance (this being a PvP server and all) but I managed to find a big group of undead all to myself and blissfully grinded away for quite some time. Also got both some epic leather and mail pants as drops from those rare spawns, but they’re uuugly (paladin-style armor on a hunter, seriously? =P), and it’s honestly debatable whether they’re better than my current blue pants or not, so… yar. I wound up with some new shoulders and new gloves, as well as the tabard. In all honesty Lunapike is lookin’ pretty good right now from a cosmetic standpoint, most everything she’s wearing is some variant or other of the same armor skin so she’s all matchy.

The Bare Minimum Things Left To Do before WotLK: New Karazhan boss with Tawyn, and get the Karazhan key on Lunapike. I know someone else can open the door for you now and heck, I don’t even know if Lunapike will get a chance to do Kara before Northrend opens up, but… it’s an important thing for me. Working my way through Karazhan with my friends was the highlight of Burning Crusade for me and I adore the lore behind it, so… I will have the key on two characters.

Uncategorized

Plottyness

9 Comments

Manager: “So, Pike, you have some vacation time leftover and we want you to use it up before December 1. Christmas rush and all. So yeah, if you want some paid time off, November would be a good time to use it.”

Pike: “Paid time off eh? November eh? … so, anytime I want in November?”

Manager: “Yup!”

Pike: “So like, if I conveniently took November 13, 14, and 15 off, and got paid for those three days, that’d be cool?”

Manager: “Yep!”

/score

Still debating about attending the midnight release or not. I was thinking of wearing my pale yellow prom dress for this event. I don’t tend to be a “midnight release” sort of person because I’m a newb and midnight is right about the time I start losing all ability to function– I think Star Wars: Episode III was the last time I did a midnight release thing, and I went loopy. On top of that, pulling a BRK or Mania and holding some crazy event is pretty much out of the question cause I doubt any of ya cityfolk live within a hundred miles of Podunk Pikesville. Plus, I’m really not that interesting anyway. But, you never know. We do have Zephram Cochrane so we can always hold out for an alien landing, that’d spice things up.

Uncategorized

Just a Quickie

7 Comments

Okay, once again my deepest apologies for the site downtime that lasted all weekend. It was the same problem as last time, and thus, out of my control. Though I can tell ya now that if it happens again, I’m going to be finding a new host, because… it’s simply not fair to me as a writer and to you guys as readers that my site keeps going down, even if bored script kiddies are to blame.

All sortsa stuff happened this weekend, I tamed a polar bear with Tawyn (he needs a name, now that I’ve given one to my moth!), I had a blast with the zombie/scourge invasion stuff (I really like it, yes, even on my lowbies… it’s exciting and new), and I hit a new personal record of about 1450 DPS on Headless Horseman, with only Mark of the Wild and the warrior’s sunders to help me out. All in all I’ve had more fun on WoW in these past couple of weeks than I’ve had in months. This will all need to be talked about this week. Yeeeess.

pets, screenshots, stories, Uncategorized

The Legend of Chakapas

4 Comments

Once upon a time there was a great hunter named Chakapas who, after having shown his hunting prowess by trapping every living creature on the earth, chose to go after the greatest prey he could think of: the moon. Chakapas ensnared the moon with a rope so tight that it had an unwelcome and unforseen side effect: the moon could not rise at night anymore, so nights remained dark– too dark for people to travel or do much of anything by night.

The people came to Chakapas and told him of their dilemma, and he immediately agreed to let the moon go, but the mighty hunter soon found that he could not undo his own trap, and the moon remained firmly stuck.

He asked the animals of the forest for help and they agreed to do what they could, one by one heading to the moon and one by one failing and coming back because the moon’s light was too brilliant and too hot. Finally, the smallest animal– the Least Mouse– asked for a try. Bravely he wandered up to the ensnared moon and chewed through the rope. It took a long time and he had to withstand great amounts of light and heat– so hot that it singed his belly, leaving it a lighter color than the rest of his fur. But he succeeded where the other animals could not, and the moon once again rose to take its place in the night sky.

As for Chakapas, no one is quite sure where he went in search of his next great hunt. But it is said that you can still see his shadow cast against the moon…

–Cree Legend, as retold by Pike

I’m pretty sure the Least Mouse is supposed to be the hero of the story but leave it to me to empathize with the hapless but determined hunter.

Gotta say though, you guys are GOOD at coming up with pet names. Some of your suggestions were unbelievably tempting and I spent a good few hours musing them over. In the end, though, my decision was made when I stumbled across this story.

<3'cha all and have a great weekend!

bugs, pets, screenshots

In Which a Game Bug Leads to a Pet Bug

29 Comments

You may have heard some hunters say they a have a “bug” with their cat pet, where they will very firmly turn Prowl off of Autocast and it will… automatically turn itself back onto Autocast. Everytime you mount or dismount or zone into someplace new, it comes back. There are “fixes” like resummoning your pet, or putting the offending Prowl on your pet’s action bar, and sometimes it will work, but sometimes it won’t.

Tawyn ran into this problem with Locke and Lunapike ran into this problem with Alyosha but they were both easily fixed. I dragged Prowl onto my pet’s action bar, turned it off, dismissed and resummoned my pet, and… problem solved. Neither of them are Prowling anymore and things are snazzy. Although even if they did have the prowling bug, it wouldn’t have been too big of a deal, because I have other pets I could use if it got too annoying.

So then I logged into Althalor. My hunter who only uses cats.

Guess what?

They won’t stop prowling.

Anytime I mount/dismount, Prowl. Anytime I log in and out, Prowl. Anytime I take a flight point and land somewhere, Prowl. It doesn’t matter how many times I turn it off. It doesn’t matter how many of those million tricks I found on the internet I try. It doesn’t matter that I did the little trick I did with both Tawyn and Lunapike to fix the problem. My poor cat hunter’s cats are simply not cooperating.

Why it’s only happening on one of my hunters and not the others, I have no idea, and why it had to happen specifically to my cat-only hunter I have no idea, but the result was that it wasn’t long before I got sick of the stealth noise and got tired of constantly having to tell my kitties to unprowl, and I decided to break protocol and go tame a non-kitty pet to use until this all gets sorted out.

At the suggestion of a commenter, I opted to go with a moth.

…let’s play the guess what game again. Guess what?

The only pre-Outlands-level moths in the game are in the Draenei starting zone. Althalor is a blood elf, on a PvP server.

Did I? You’d better believe I did!

It actually wasn’t that bad. I think a lot of people are distracted by the zombies running around so I didn’t run into anybody (except, well, a zombie) on the way there. Then I jumped into the water at Auberdine, drowned myself under the draenei boat, hopped onto the draenei boat as a ghost, rode over to Azuremyst Isle, and– still ghostified– ran myself to the Spirit Healer who is standing not too far away from where level 1 draenei first spawn. I rez’d there and, much to my luck, there was a moth right in front of my face.

/tame!

/yell Byebye Draenei!

/hearthstone!

I only had enough time last night to play with the moth long enough to realize that the moth’s special ability, Serenity Dust, does not seem to be autocasting and I have to manually trigger it. So now I find myself wondering… is this a known issue or is poor Althalor just having horrific luck with pets?

Oh, also, I need a name for the moth. Something other than PikesWorstNightmare (have I mentioned I have this phobia of moths in real life but the ones in WoW don’t bug me? …pun not intended.) I was thinking of something dreamlike or trancelike cause I think it would fit. Toss me your suggestions.

art

Aspect of the Beast: An Unlikely Love Story

18 Comments

So I was playin’ around on one of my lowbie hunters today and it occurred to me how much work I really have ahead of me in terms of Hunter Kindergarten. Aspect of the Viper at level twenty? Level twenty? Now I’ve gotta write a whole post about it since many more hunters are going to “stick around” long enough to get it now than before. I do think I will put that post off until Blizz is done tweaking it, though.

For today’s topic, though, let’s discuss a little thing called Aspect of the Beast.

Prior to 3.0, this Aspect did one thing: It made you untrackable by other hunters (and by druids in cat form). It was a 100% PvP aspect that was banished away to my hidden Tradeskills action bar and which I would use maybe once every six months in some random Warsong Gulch game when I remembered that it existed.

Post 3.0, it has some extra stuff added to it. Namely, aside from making you untrackable, it also increases your melee attack power and your pet’s melee attack power by 10%.

My first thought was “Great, I still won’t be using it.” The pet bonus sounded yummy but… melee? I have a hard enough time remembering to switch to Monkey when something gets in my grill– heck, I usually don’t bother. I didn’t see any use for this newfangled Aspect of the Beast.

…until the other day when I was leveling Serenity and he was having some initial difficulty holding aggro, and a little light bulb popped into my head…

1. More pet damage = More pet threat.

2. No Aspect of the Hawk = less hunter damage = less hunter threat.

3. ???

4. Profit!

Aspect of the Beast, as it turns out, is a super epic grinding aspect! You dispose of things with ease without having to break much of a sweat keeping the aggro firmly planted on your pet, even if he is a bit low level. Now, I want to make sure everybody is clear, this is NOT an instance/raid Aspect. This is for grinding/leveling/soloing/that kind of stuff. Where your DPS doesn’t matter so much. And even then, you should probably only be using it over Hawk when you are having pet threat issues.

I have also decided that this is a decent–though probably not the best– PvP aspect, partially for the untrackableness but largely because if you are stunlocked, there is a good chance your pet will not be, so he can still be pounding away with his 10% extra damage. (I learned this in several scuffles with a level 67 ret pally. THOSE THINGS ARE DANGEROUS EVEN WHEN THEY ARE LOW LEVEL AND IN GREENS. HANDLE WITH CAUTION.)

To summarize, if you are leveling or grinding or working with a low level pet and are having trouble keeping threat firmly on your pet, brush off Aspect of the Beast and give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

In other news, happy NATIONAL MOLE DAY! Have a picture of Avogadro the Mole that I made a while ago:

…hey, I told you I was a geek. It says right on the sidebar.

screenshots, shot rotation, specs, Uncategorized

Can I Has DPS?

21 Comments

Okay, now that I have talked about my “emotional” investment into Beast Mastery in my last post, let us talk about another awesome component of the spec: Dee Pee Ess. Most people know that the Holy Church of Fortyone Twenty was the way to Hunter DPS Heaven in Burning Crusade; but by the looks of things the Reformation is happening in Wrath of the Lich King and we will see a lot more specs running around in raids. This strikes me as a Very Good Thing because I don’t like to see people spec something that they do not like. That was sort of one of the points I was trying to make (and I think I didn’t do a very good job at it, so sorry <3 ) in my last post. I want people to spec the way they enjoy the most. But I know there are at least a few of you crazy nutcases out there who love BM for its playstyle, like I do, who are maybe curious about new shot rotations in the like. Never fear, Pike is here!

Tawyn has spent probably close to a hundred gold on respecs since the patch hit; she started with a very deep BM build and slowly has been drifting to a lighter one, moving to 51/10/0 and now sitting at 48/13/0. The reason for the talent shakeup was threefold: firstly, I wanted to pick up Animal Handler now that it’s going to be useful again in the next patch (I am so down for extra pet expertise). Secondly, Deep BM at 70 was feeling very… top-heavy, for lack of a better term. Too much in BM, too fast. And Invigoration and Cobra Strikes are both kinda “iffy” to me right now in terms of the proc rate and “worth it” value– which saddens me, cause I love their synthesis concept, but sometimes the truth hurts. Thirdly, I have come to the conclusion that Go for the Throat is a Super Vital Talent™ and it is worth it to sacrifice the Exotic Pet and four extra pet talent points to pick it up. You can always go back and pick up the Exotic Pet talent later on once you get closer to 80.

Lunapike is still 46/15/0, which is very similar, but a little different. Points in Focused Aim, for example, because she is not hit-capped, and she is testing Invigoration at the moment whereas Tawyn is testing Cobra Strikes, so those talents are switched.

ANYWAYS, I was getting really curious about the performance of these specs so I downloaded Recount, spent approximately four seconds deciding that I liked it better than SW Stats, and headed off to visit our friends the Training Dummies.

With some 1900 AP and 25.29% crit and unbuffed (Except for stuff like Aspect of the Hawk/Ferocious Inspiration), and having popped all her cooldowns and trinkets over the duration of the test, which lasted until I was out of mana, Tawyn hit about 1180 DPS at her peak and consistently maintained 1050+ DPS using Steady Shot and keeping Serpent Sting refreshed (because Serpent Sting is supposed to be viable now =P). Not too shabby. I’m satisfied. I’d like to make a comparison to pre-patch DPS but I honestly never paid attention to anything beyond where I sat on the chart (does that make me a good or bad hunter?)

This is not an entirely 100% accurate breakdown because I took this screenshot after a Viper cycle to replenish my mana. Still, it can give you a general idea of what the DPS will look like after one full round of DPS and the full round of Viper, and it also gives you an idea of what Locke is doing in terms of damage. And looking back, I’m thinking I was a little slow on the uptake with Serpent Sting once or twice. Derp.

My testing was not finished though, oh no!

Now Lunapike is obviously at a disadvantage here and I wasn’t out to make a real comparison exactly for this reason. She only has roughly 1450 AP (with Aspect of the Hawk) and 22.35% crit. However, I mostly wanted to see the wasp stats, and also see if Invigoration was going to be making a big difference. The verdict? …it procs often enough, but… I dunno, it lets me do what, get maybe three more Steadys in before I switch to Viper? Dunno if it’s worth it for the two points or not. More testing will have to be done.

This screenshot was actually taken right before switching to Aspect of the Viper so I wound up with 884 DPS as an unbuffed hunter in semi-enchanted blues. Again, I am satisfied. Now, let’s discuss the pets; Serenity the wasp and Locke the Kitty are almost identical in terms of the stat breakdown (Roughly 60% regular melee, 30% focus dump, and 10% DoT/special ability.) The big difference I see is that Serenity brings a big whoppin’ armor debuff with him whereas Locke doesn’t. I think that this is gonna be one of the things that makes a difference when it comes to which pets you will see more often in raids. And of course, things will get all the more interesting when we throw Exotic Pets into the picture, with their intended upcoming buff and their extra talent points.

And the moral of the story is: Beast Masters, Steady Shot and Serpent Sting is looking like your rotation for the time being, unless I totally botched up somewhere (in which case, please tell me ^_^). Although I would still call Serpent Sting situational; depending on if Scorpid Sting might be preferred or if there might be emergency trapping in the forseeable future.

The second moral of the story is… next time, remind me to do my testing on Beta where respecs only cost 1 copper. Cause next up I think I wanna do the Go for the Throat vs. Exotic Pet/extra points Showdown. But I’m not willing to throw more gold into it. I’m just a poor Pike from a poor family.

beast mastery, specs

Remember Who You Are

15 Comments

With all the hype about the exotic pets, I sort of feel the need to post something about choosing the spec that is right for you. There are a lot of Big Red Devilsaurs running around right now and while it is 100% understandable that people want to have fun and try them out in this lull before the expansion, I also worry that some people may wind up Beast Master for the wrong reasons.

Beast Master Hunters are a special breed. We don’t get our kicks from putting up super big numbers or ridiculously high agility scores, or doing really in-depth shot rotations. We are the hunters who love having a strong pet to fight beside us as a partner, not just as an extra DoT. We are the hunters who love when we do something that procs an ability for our pet, or when our pet does something that procs an ability for us. We are the hunters who relish the fact that we’re shooting so fast that sometimes we feel like we’re about to spin out of control. We love watching those Scrolling Combat Text numbers fly by– they may not be big, they may not always be crits– but they are fast and furious. Oh, don’t get me wrong, we love big crits and big agility numbers and shot rotations too– but when it comes down to it, we are all about the frenzied machine-gun mentality. Other hunters may be calculating and precise as they weave their shots with immense care or design a perfect plan of attack and survival. But we Beast Masters throw such precision to the wind and toss ourselves whole-heartedly into the fight, the same way our pet would. We go nuts. We really, truly do unleash the beast within.

If that is how you feel, too, and you accept the fact that that means you will not have a particularly complex shot rotation or put up very big numbers yourself (because your pet will be doing a lot of the work himself)– then welcome to the family.

If that doesn’t sound as appealing to you as you like– if you really like using your other shots besides Steady Shot, if you really like big crits, if you like traps that last forever– then please, spec something else. It’s okay. Sure, you may not get the exotic pet, but there are so many great non-exotic pets out there just waiting to be your companion. Similarly, you don’t have to spec Beast Master just to show that you love your pet– Marksman and Survival hunters love their pets too. And I’m certainly not going to stop appreciating you and your comments here. I am an unabashed Beast Master fangirl, it’s true, but hunters of all specs and stripes are welcome here and there are many, many Marksman and Survival hunter blogs out there that I read and that are written by very talented hunters that I have a lot of respect for.

With the advent of 3.0 and the way that Marksman and Survival have really been brought up to par, now is a great time to take a deep look at your little definition of “hunter” and spec the way you really feel and experiment with different things. Then, read about your class– and spec– learn about it, test it out, and put it into action. As a wise man once said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The road to hunter enlightenment isn’t always easy and it has already cost Tawyn several gold in respecs and several minutes of relearning, but Auntie Pike promises it will be worth it.

Well, that’ll do it for now. Be sure to tune in to our next episode of Aspect of the Hare: Tawyn’s Talent Tree Tweaking! May or may not include abundant amounts of alliteration. You’ve been warned.

Edit: Reading some of the comments I am getting, I fear my point may have come out the wrong way =/ I’m very sorry if it did. I am not discrediting any reason to spec Beast Master. If you just want to have a devilsaur, that is a perfectly valid reason as well. Toque, I agree 100% with your comment. “Remember Who You Are: A person who is playing a game. Spec how you want for your greatest enjoyment of the game, for whatever reason”, as you commented, is exactly what I was trying to get at. I was also trying to encourage trying out all the specs, so you can decide exactly where that greatest enjoyment of the game will come from, because the answer may surprise you. My deepest apologies if it did not come out correctly. This post was sort of a cut-n-paste from some stuff I had laying around in drafts so it probably wasn’t very smooth. I also want to clarify that when I am talking about “Beast Master Hunters” in this post, I am generally talking about BM Hunters as in those who love the spec, and not as in those who spec it simply for DPS. Once again, apologies for any confusion.

druid, screenshots

Betcha Didn't Think I'd Get This Far

12 Comments

So this past weekend I hit a milestone as I successfully managed to get a third character to level 50.

Wanna see a picture?

…

…

…

Oh snap! Hide your children! Shelter your weak, your young and your old! Houston, we have a problem! Pike has a level 50 character and it’s not a hunter!

What this unholy union of hunter and druid will bring in the future, I can’t say. But you’ve at least got to tip your hat to a class that can almost manage to keep my attention to the extent that hunters do. (Keyword: almost).

As for the inevitable “Why are you leveling resto you wacko” questions that I can already forsee in my crystal ball, I have four answers for you:
1.) I am doing a lot of instance/group stuff
2.) I never die
3.) Come on… you get to be a tree. Clearly the most fun of all druid forms. I run around Stormwind in Tree Form instead of Travel Form.
4.) Honestly, when I am solo’ing… tossing on some feral gear, piling on the massive resto HoTs, and going into cat/bear as needed is surprisingly effective. Not quite as fast as moonkin, maybe. And certainly not as fast as a hunter. But who cares about “fast” so long as things are working well and you’re having fun?

Well, that is my obligatory non-hunter post of the year. Hope you non-hunters that visit my site (are you out there?) were entertained! In closing, I would like to dedicate this post to BRK and BBB, both of whom are bloggers that I <3 muchly, and who have this frightening tendency to conspire together to bring Massive Quantities of Sustained Ranged Fo'Shizzle to the Druidic and Hunterrific masses. We will return you to your regularly scheduled hunter broadcast program tomorrow. Until then, happy hunting and tree-hugging.