All posts by Pike

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Okay, okay

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Dear People Who, a Few Years Ago, Kept Telling Me “Oh You’ll Start Playing WoW Someday” and Who I Subsequently Laughed At…

…you were right.

-Pike

Note: We at Aspect of the Hare Incorporated would like to apologize for the lack of hunter-information posts lately. It is a little hard to write them these days when the game is still changing fairly substantially in every patch, and when all Pike has been doing these past few days is farming for minipets or running BRD/Stratholme with her druid or casually playing various other alts. We promise there will be a grand return of hunter-related information with the launch of Wrath of the Lich King this week. Cross my heart, hope to feign death.

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Minipet Mania

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I figured since my last few posts were so focused on minipets– the bat minipet in particular– I should at least discuss my thoughts on them a little.

So, minipets. I’ve really liked them ever since I started playing WoW. I say “really like” instead of “love” here because I never really considered myself to be a diehard collector. I just liked having some fun minipets. My first ever minipet was the Westfall Chicken, when I was about level 8 or so. My sister showed me how to get it and helped me set up a /chicken macro to spam. I still have that macro in Tawyn’s macro list. The Westfall Chicken followed me everywhere until one day I found an adorable Mechanical Squirrel on the Auction House for a whopping 40 silver. I spent all my cash on it. I was broke but happy. My boyfriend thought I was nuts for spending that kinda money on a pet.

Then came the Children’s Week Quests and you had the option of getting one of three minipets, or five gold. Five gold! I would be rich!

…yeah, forget that. I wanted Speedy. So off I went to all sorts of crazy far off locations at the tender level of 16 and got my turtle.

As I progressed through the game I found myself casually collecting the occasional minipet, mostly the ones that I really liked. I willfully passed up on several minipets because I wanted the ones I owned to be special. It’s sort of like that inspirational story you’ll hear sometimes, about the kid who only owned two Hot Wheels cars but didn’t want any more because he couldn’t spread the love around that much. That was sort of like me– I carefully picked the minipets I owned. Of course, there were many minipets out there that I considered to be special, so it wasn’t long before I had a whole bag dedicated to minipets anyway (now consider my quiver and my bag dedicated to random holiday junk and “toys”, and you will know where my constant bagspace issues came from.)

At level 70 I sort of gained a reputation among my instancing/raiding circle as being That-Hunter-With-The-Minipets. Other people would have one or two minipets that they could bring out to show, me, I had a Random Minipet button on my action bars that I would hit every five minutes so I would cycle through several different ones throughout the course of your average Heroic. More than one person asked me “How many of those do you have anyway?” or /boggled at the fact that everytime they looked at me, I had a different minipet out. I was different that way, and unique, because I was that willing to give up my bagspace for them. But I was never a collector so much as just a fan.

And then Patch 3.0 and Achievements came out. Minipets became summonable, and fashionable. Even though it sort of bugged me on a minor level that now everybody could and likely would become a minipet junkie, on the other hand the idea of actually having bag space again made me so ecstatic that any potential sadness caused by a loss-of-uniqueness was nullified. It was also about that time that I realized “Hey… I’d might as well go pick up all those minipets that I passed up on before.”

So off I went, gathering up all the faction-specific minipets that I didn’t have and any of the other easily-obtainable ones, and after getting the Batling I took a look at my collection and realized hey– I have 40 minipets. Without even really trying.

Then I realized that when you get 50 minipets, they not only send you an adorable skunk in the mail, but you also get an achievement that includes wording which is suspiciously similar to my current place of employment. The irony, I could taste it. That achievement? Tawyn needs it.

So she spent the last three days living in Wetlands. It was worth it for #41 here:

Three more dragon whelplings and days of endless farming to go! Hey, it’s the week before the expansion, what else do ya expect me to do? =P

Do you guys have any thoughts or stories on minipets? Or other comments or questions? Share the comment love!

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/strut

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My first group was a pretty terrible PuG ten-man that was literally wiping on the ghost horse trash (I blame the Boomkin’s tragic addiction to AoE), and I just barely managed to get out in time– I was disconnected, logged in and found myself outside the building while the rest of the group was working on Attumen. Hastily I left the group before I was saved, and then about a half hour later went back in with four of my trusty pals and a T6 priest and we demolished the place.

…even if I died on Mirkblood. Don’t tell anyone.

Passed up on the axe and gave it to our tank instead. He deserved it. /nods

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Oh Blizz, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

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Now this is a story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down…

So that bat minipet? Yeah. I’ve been wanting a bat minipet since before Blizz announced one.

So they announced it, and all excitedly I scheduled a special “Mirkblood Run” with my guildies so we could go get it. Of course, this run isn’t until towards the end of this “Ten Day Time Period” that Blue told us we’d have, but no worries, I figured…

And of course that is the day that an hour before the scheduled run, my entire character decided to glitch and become unplayable.

Flash forward to this morning. Tawyn is still glitched and Blizz has sent me another e-mail telling me to delete my WTF folder and basically do all the stuff I’d already tried. Frantically I sent in another GM ticket and went to work.

I came back from work. Had a nice letter from Blizz telling me that they’d moved my character and I was unglitched now.

Logged in and was greeted with the middle of Dustwallow Marsh (Blizz really does like to be random.) But… I was fixed!

Instantly hopped into LFG. I figure with Tuesday morning maintenance tomorrow, that boss will not be around for much longer. “LFG New Kara Boss. Please LFG New Kara Boss. Okay, I will pay gold to everyone in the raid for the New Kara Boss.”

An hour went by. Finally managed to get a group started. Got a whole group going except… healers.

Twenty minutes went by. No healers. People in the group mysteriously started to go offline or have other things to do.

Disbanded group. Combed through LFG again.

“LFM for Full Kara Clear including new Boss, then g2g!”

Gasp! Hallelujah!

Leapt into the group. There were only about four of us but the group leader/main tank seemed to know what he was doing and he had a full-blown group of ten within about five minutes. We all rushed to the stone, most of us excitedly talking about getting that new boss.

We go into Karazhan.

We wait a bit.

…

Tank comes in over Raid Chat.

…

…

“Um, guys… I forgot… I’m saved to Shade already. And now you’re all saved there too.”

Seriously, what did I do to get this kind of karma? Did I roll on a caster weapon? Did I melee something to death? Did I put points in Pathfinding by accident? Forgive thy hunter, she knows not what she did =(

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The Sad Tale of the Worst Glitch Ever

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It all started when I was waiting around for my scheduled “Mirkblood Run” with my guildies in a couple hours. I figured I’d might as well work on some of those dungeon achievements that hadn’t been given to me, in the meantime, so off I headed to Blackfathom Deeps.

At least, that’s what the intended plan was.

Instead the boat disappeared out from under my feet and I wound up in the water in the middle of nowhere. Desperately I tried to swim back to shore but the Fatigue Bar was too much for me.

I spawned as a wisp ghost not at a Spirit Healer, but out in the ocean.

I made the long trek back to a graveyard outside of Stormwind, only to find… no Spirit Healer.

/restart game

/spawn as a ghost in the middle of the ocean again

/long trek back to Elwynn Forest again

This time, a Spirit Healer was there, so I rez’d and promptly got disconnected. Logged back in. And… I was alive! And things were back to normal.

Maybe.

I tried to mount. “You cannot use that while swimming.”

…

I got a whisper from somebody. “LOL, you’re running at 100% speed.”

…

Not long after that I was in Stormwind running around in the canals. Because I could walk on water now. People were stopping to stare at me and buff me. I pranced around on the water and had a blast despite the fact that my mana was stuck at 50% and using any aspect would immediately boot me from the game.

Then things started to get annoying. I tried to log into a battleground, no dice. I tried to go into Stockades, it wouldn’t let me in. I managed to ride a gryphon to Duskwood, but when I landed the flight master was gone. As were all other NPCs.

By this time I had sent a ticket into Blizzard and they’d already responded with an e-mail along the lines of “Thanks for your report and we’re glad you fixed it yourself!” Except, of course, I hadn’t fixed it myself (dunno where they got that idea), and things were getting worse by the minute. I sent in another ticket and went on a little personal fix-it spree; I moved my WTF, Cache, and Interface folders, I ran the Repair tool, I tried to run the game on both my Linux and Windows partitions, I ran the game on computers that weren’t mine and with routers that were not mine.

All that happened was it eventually got to the point where I couldn’t do anything, on any computer, with addons disabled or not. I couldn’t do anything because I got an “Another action is in progress” message. The worst part was realizing that this also meant I couldn’t feed Tux, who was getting more and more upset with me.

Or should I say, is STILL getting more and more upset with me. Because yes, this glitch has not been fixed yet.

I’m not in game right now, but my character still is. She can’t log out. She’s stuck. I have to force-quit the program and it doesn’t log her out. Tux is sitting there at maxed unhappiness; fortunately for me as of the latest patch pets don’t run away anymore (I… don’t know how I would have reacted to that happening. /shudder)

My guild went and did the Mirkblood quest without me. They have all been very supportive and understanding and wished I could go but… I couldn’t, and there was nothing anyone could do. That quest is gonna be gone in a few days. I hope this bug gets fixed before then you guys… I want that bat minipet and I want to see all the World Event content…

…but six hours later and no reply from Blizz, so here I sit…

thoughts, wrath of the lich king

Two Weeks Notice

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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!

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Ghostbusting!

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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.

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Plottyness

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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.

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Just a Quickie

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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.