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"It was a dark and stormy night…"

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“That’s not a promising beginning.”
“It may get better.”*

I can’t remember if it was an Easter gift or a birthday gift, but I do know that when I was eight years old my parents got me a journal. It was white with balloons on the front and it came with a little cheapy lock and key, and it was all for me to write my thoughts in.

I’m not sure where that journal went, it’s probably stashed away somewhere, but it was the first in a series of blank books which I filled with my thoughts. Off and on I have been journaling since then, sometimes going months without writing anything, other times faithfully writing several times a week for a year or more. In those books I have countless records of the time I spent with my friends, books I’d read, movies I’d seen, and what I’d done lately in school. I carefully recorded my fears, too, when I would have to move to a new school or give a speech in front of class.

But another thing has always been there too, in all those hundreds of journal entries. I wrote about video games.

I wrote about the new ones we got. I wrote about how far I got that day in a new game. I wrote about what levels were “impossible”. I wrote about characters I liked. I wrote about characters I hated. *cough*Navi*cough*. I would giggle at funny things that happened in game. And I triumphantly recorded the times I would do something like make a new track record in Uniracers (which I do believe I dedicated an entire entry to, once.)

…[I] found a new secret and return as the sure master of Uniracer track Hairpin Hill. The odds were against me as I chose to give Champion Uni Goldwyn a 3-second head start. But I ended up making records instead! First, a tie with both Uni (Goldwyn) and Someone (former record holder), then, three more races completely killed the time. So… the track record for Hairpin Hill is no longer 0:11:91 a lap, as it’s been for a year now… but 0:11:88, made today.

– March 28, 1997

Pokemon devoured my soul in the late 90s (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is a girl who skipped some of her high school classes… high school… to go watch “Pokemon: The First Movie” in the theater) and every day I would write in my journal and update my progress in the game. I gave each of my Pokemon a different personality and I became ever so attached to them, even writing from “their” point of view sometimes. I’ll never forget the day the Game Boy batteries died mid-saving, which wiped my file. I cried, and wrote a heartfelt memorial entry for my beloved lost pixels in my journal. (*brief moment of silence for Aspen the Venusaur and company*) But, undeterred, I started a new file. Many new files after that. And kept writing.

Alright, I need an opinion: should I, or should I not restart my Zelda file! I mean, I’m getting really bored here. But anyway: Exactly eight days ago I bought… Pokemon Trading Card Game! And five days later… I beat it! Isn’t that sad? I mean, Pokemon Red I beat in 17 days. Zelda… about 21. But really? Five days?

– June 28, 2000

At some point, about four or five years ago, I stumbled across Livejournal and started journaling my life online. The stresses and adventures of college and my jobs were the main focus by this point, but I still wrote about video games. This time, though, I was realizing I had more to say than I used to, and not all my friends who read my Livejournal even played many video games. Some did, though, of course, and appreciated my entries on them.

New Super Mario Bros. is amazing. It’s new and innovative but it also feels so familiar. I know I’m going to have a blast playing it. And the mini-games are all so very unique… they have this one where you have to blow into a microphone to control Yoshi’s flight (he’s attached to balloons), but you have to be careful not to blow too hard too fast or he might run into a Shy-Guy. It’s so different; I love it. I really think Nintendo is on to something with this kind of stuff, and if they can really channel this uniqueness into the Wii and “grow into it”, so to speak… then, well, I think they’ve got a winner.

– January 1, 2007

Early last year I installed World of Warcraft and made a hunter named Tawyn. I sucked. I like to tell people of my first infamous instance run, the Deadmines where Tux was on aggressive, Immolation Trap was my “CC”, and I rolled Need on everything. Very fitting for my 6/8/3 talent spec. Night Elf Huntard, thy name is Newbie-Pike. Fortunately, I acknowledged my horribleness, and resolved to fix it. That’s when I hit up WoWWiki, devoured the hunter articles there, and from the Fansites section discovered The Hunter’s Mark and BigRedKitty. I read both voraciously, “cover-to-cover” in fact, and read the comments as well. Heck, if you look hard enough you can find my very first step into this WoW blogging community, a comment I left on The Hunter’s Mark, where a young Pike said something along the lines of “I am a level 26 hunter and I suck, thank you so much for your helpful videos and guides.”

The months went by and I was beginning to have more thoughts on WoW and things I wanted to say about it, some of which I did share on LiveJournal, but I didn’t want to clutter up my journal which stuff I figured few people over there would want to read. So off I went to Blogger. Where I could ramble about WoW and nobody would ever have to read it. Oh look, it’s asking me for a name for my new blog… hmm… I like hunters… it should be huntery, but also personal… Aspect of the… Hare? Because the hare is my mascot animal?


…sounds good to me.

And so on August 7, 2007, one year ago today, I made my first blog post.

And for some reason, I kept writing. I was my only reader, but I wrote anyway. I didn’t even link to any other blogs because I didn’t want anyone to wonder who this silly little upstart newbie blog was and why I was linking to them. BRK and Lass, I figured, were so far out of my league that linking to them would be some form of desecration, so I simply refrained from doing it.

And yet somehow, Kestrel found me and left a comment, and linked to me.

And then somehow more people found me. And linked to me.

And I noticed that these people seemed to enjoy my writing for some strange reason… so I kept doing it.

…and to make a long story short, here we are today. As of the time of writing, my blog clocks in at 214 posts, 49,285 visits and 81,859 page views; with an average of 362 visits a day, and another 360+ subscribing to my feed. I have been Dugg and StumbledUpon and linked to on all manner of sites and forums. BRK and Lass, who I idolized with such bright young eyes when I was a baby hunter, have both added me to their blogroll (which still boggles the mind), as have many others. And in perhaps my favorite twist of things coming full circle… somebody added me to the very WoWWiki Fansites page that introduced me to the WoW blogging community i

n the first place.

Ya know what makes it all great though? The numbers and the inlinks are mind-blowing, but it’s you guys that make Aspect of the Hare what it is. It’s you guys that read and visit for whatever crazy reason you do. You guys that make it all worth it. Because for every time I get ribbed for liking hunters or for making a hunter blog, there are about a dozen comments or e-mails from you guys telling me that I’ve inspired you to install Linux, or re-ignited your long lost love for the hunter class, or taught you to play better, or that you’ve linked a new hunter to me. I have striven to make a site where us crazy-hunter-lovers can hang out and chat and commiserate without having to worry about the people who /point and /giggle and don’t quite “get it”. And I’d like to think I have succeeded at least on some small level. But I couldn’t have done it without you guys.

Thank you.

Thank you from the girl who, after all these years, still finds herself yapping away about video games.

On to another year?

*Guess the Trek! Doooo it!

characters, rp

Life, the Universe, and Everything

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The other night I was talking to the significant other, and an interesting topic of discussion came up. He has been casually leveling another warlock (I guess class obsession runs in the family?) and I asked him what would hypothetically happen, roleplaying-wise, if this new warlock and his level 70 warlock were to meet. What would they talk about? How would they get along?

His response was that he had a difficult time envisioning that happening, because they reside on different servers– and thus, different universes of the same continuum. Same stage, different players, so to speak.

I thought, “huh”.

And I realized that I am like that too.

When I first started Lunapike, my original story for her was that she had met Tawyn before, in passing (when Lunapike was still very young), and that it sort of subtly influenced her in her quest to become a hunter. But it wasn’t long before that story completely dissipated. Why? Easy. Tawyn and Lunapike are on different servers. They can’t meet.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I’d sort of unconsciously divided all my characters like that. Whether Alliance or Horde, even if the characters live in the same city, I had always assumed that different servers = different parallel universes and that characters on one server could not know characters on another.

Anyways, we started to talk about why, and my suggestion was that as you spend a lot of time on a certain server, you get to know it very intimately. There are things that set a server apart and make it what it is. Certain guilds. Certain players and personalities. Even server-wide RP storylines. When you go to another server, and you don’t run into those familiar things, it strikes you as being a place that is familiar, but different– a parallel universe, to use fantasy/sci-fi terminology. This is perhaps one reason why I have a hard time playing Alliance on anything but Silver Hand and a hard time playing Horde on anything but Venture Co., but it also means that I do in fact see servers as being different, but similar, planes of existence and the idea of characters on different servers interacting with each other does seem innately “wrong” somehow.

I would be curious to know if anybody else feels this way, too. Roleplayers, non-roleplayers, one and all, tell me your thoughts. Do you envision characters of yours on different servers as being able to theoretically “meet”, or do you experience the same mental halting at the idea that the boy and I do?

guides, hunter kindergarten, so you want to play a hunter

So You Want to Play a Hunter? Part 5

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Life With a Pet:

So now you’ve got a pet. Excellent! Now you get to learn about what I have long called Hunter 101: Send your pet in, let it establish aggro, and attack from a distance.

You guys have no idea how many hunters I’ve seen who will pull aggro from their pet early on and proceed to melee the mob down. Usually they’re Marksmanship spec’d too, which is possibly the most irrational thing I’ve ever heard. “I’m going to spec to buff my Ranged Attack Power and then melee stuff!” /facepalm

Here’s the thing: can you melee stuff? Yeah, if you want. But do you do more damage and kill things quicker if you’re at range and shooting? Yep!

First thing’s first: make sure your pet knows Growl. All pets can learn Growl first thing, without any training points. Open your spellbook, and in the General tab (for some reason) is Beast Training. You can open that up to get to your pet’s training screen, where you can teach your pet Growl. Growl is sort of like a Taunt, but while it does not force something to attack your pet, it does cause a fair amount of threat. Now make sure Growl is “on” and has the little glowing box around it on your pet bar.

NOW you can practice Hunter 101! Hunter’s Mark something, send your pet in on it*, let it plant a growl or two, and then start shooting. Open with a Serpent Sting and then mostly Auto Shot. You can toss an Arcane Shot in if you want. Your mob should be down pretty quickly, though.

“Pike, that’s the easiest thing I’ve heard in the game. I could be AFK most of the time and still level a hunter.”

Theoretically, yes you can, and that’s why hunters get bashed all the time and why I still have to put up with people asking me why I’m making a help blog for hunters because clearly a help blog for hunters needs to consist of only one sentence. The thing you have to remember, and which you will hopefully see as true as I continue this series of posts, is that most of these people never played a hunter past the early levels and thus never got to the point where hunters begin to get deeper and more difficult. Heck, I personally have encountered many people who have a level 70 hunter (and are skilled at it) and a level 70 [other class], who have confided to me that they feel their hunter is deeper and takes more skill to play correctly, regardless of what their other class was.

This goes back to part one, you have to remember that you will get bashed and you will be underestimated and it will look like you are doing nothing in an instance (I’ve actually noticed that lately; hunters tend to simply look like they have it easy just by standing back and shooting; this probably adds to the reputation as well.) You have to be okay with that and find your own pride in your class.

…anyways, forgive my, erm, tangent *cough*

The point is that Hunter 101 is pretty straightforward, which is why it mystifies me that so many hunters do not know it yet! Here is the basic thing you want to remember: keep yourself at range.

Now, while we’re here, another thing you may or may not want to change is your pet’s “stance”. It’s on the pet bar, and your pet will be set to Defensive by default (it looks like a shield). Myself and many other hunters will immediately set their pet to Passive (it looks like a baby seal). Defensive means that your pet will automatically attack things that are attacking you, and Passive means that he does nothing without you telling him first.

Now, I have seen people make arguments that Defensive is better for leveling/solo’ing, and I can understand where they’re coming from, but my Always-Passive argument stems from the fact that I believe hunter and pet are One and they can only accomplish being One like this if you have complete control over your pet. On top of that, I strongly feel that an important aspect of being a hunter is being able to plan ahead and calculate things out precisely: “I’m going to chain trap this mob and Wing-Clip/Kite this other mob and my pet will focus on this other mob. I want to take out the mob I am kiting second.” But if your pet is on Defensive, he is quite likely to ignore your plans and lunge for your chain-trapped mob who is on his merry way to your next trap.

See? Out of your control. You are not One because he is not doing what you want. This is why my pets across all my hunters are Forever-Passive (I make an exception for running lowbies through instances, in which case I stick my pet on Defensive and run through shooting everything while he cleans up behind me).

Now am I going to knock you for having your pet on Defensive while leveling/soloing? Well no, I do feel strongly that the other way is better and more huntery, but there are certainly good arguments for it. I will knock you for having your pet on anything but Passive in an instance/raid, but that’s another story!

So you’ve got Growl trained, and you’ve thought about it and set your pet to the Stance that you want. Oh, and check the little icon next to your pet. Is it green? That means he’s happy and will do the most damage. Keep him fed to keep that icon green! (Petopia will tell you what pet likes what foods.)

Go ye forth, young hunter, and level!

You are level 10, you will now have both Track Humanoids and Track Beasts; use whichever you need for whatever you are doing. You have Aspect of the Hawk which is going to be your primary Aspect from here on out and you should be using it most of the time.

At level 12, you learn Mend Pet, which is very important! You may want to keybind it to something easy to hit, I know I have. This is where you will learn to keep an eye on your pet’s health. You know how when you’re driving you’ll glance at the rear-view mirror every so often just to take stock of your surroudings? Same with your hunter and your pet; you will learn to glance at your pet’s health every so often, gauge how much damage he is taking or is liable to take, and use Mend Pet accordingly.

You also learn Wing Clip and Distracting Shot at level 12. Distracting Shot you won’t use very much in the lower levels, but Wing Clip is your friend. It is really the only thing you should be using if something is in melee range. The point of Wing Clip isn’t to do damage; it’s to slow the enemy down so you can get back into range. You will learn to love it throughout the duration of your hunter career.

And it’s usually at this point that I figure one of my new hunters has all the tools they need to be a reasonably efficient hunter. You have Arcane Shot and Concussive Shot for kiting; you have a pet for tanking and Mend Pet to keep him alive, and you have Wing Clip if a mob gets too close. Now obviously you don’t have everything important yet, you don’t have Feign Death or Steady Shot, but I still see level 12 as being one of your first big milestones.

And so, that’s where I’m going to end today’s episode of SYWtPaH. Your homework: practice Hunter 101 and look into getting a Threat Meter so you can learn to watch your threat in relation to your pet’s– you want your pet’s threat to be higher than yours, so he can tank for you. KTM was the big one back in the day, though it seems to now be defunct– Omen is the current threat meter of choice but a lot of people I know swear by the up-and-coming Diamond which doesn’t require other peopl

e to have a threat meter installed for them to show up. Either of those latter two will work fine for you, though, as a new hunter who is solo’ing and learning about pet threat.

…wow, there really is a lot of stuff to cover about hunters. Case in point: We’re at Part 5 and level 12. Now I’m pretty sure things are going to speed up as we continue on and need to hit less of the basics, but still, this is a bigger project than I even anticipated. I hope that you are enjoying it and learning from it and as always let me know if you have questions or need something clarified.

Happy hunting!

* Awesome Macro of Epic Win:

/petattack
/cast Hunter’s Mark

It does both at once, and I don’t go anywhere without it.

karazhan

Hunters Just Wanna Have Fun

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On Friday I sort of got unexpectedly pulled into a semi-guild/semi-PuG Karazhan run. At first, I was admittedly kinda wary about it. Mostly because the last few semi-guild/semi-PuG runs I’ve been in have been complete disasters and I was tired of dealing with feeling like a failure in the raid I love. Still, I went, because I haven’t gone in a long time.

It was… a surprisingly good run. Shade of Aran was the farthest we got because we were sorta taking our sweet time and people had to go, but I did successfully see Nightbane downed for the first time ever, which means I have gone back and edited him into my Karazhan guide, video and all! (FileFront instead of YouTube this time, because the YouTube limit is ten minutes and I couldn’t cut our movie down past about 10:30.)

Overall though, it was nice to be able to go back to the place and do it justice; it’s been so long since I’ve been in there with a good group. Oh, raid-buffed, I topped both 2000 AP and 30% crit throughout /flex Not bad for someone who still has a few blues. (Though in all honesty, Badge Epics do crazy gear-score-skewing things like that.)

I did learn a couple lessons. Lesson the First: Using crazy tricks to unfairly defeat bosses sucks. See, we ran into Shade of Aran the first time and did quite well, getting him down to 15% and only wiping because of bad timing with the elementals. On our way back, one of our PuGs asks us if we’ve heard of “The Door Trick”. The Door Trick goes like this: you all stand right outside the door, and a hunter sends their pet in to aggro Aran and then they immediately pull their pet back. The door shuts (with everyone standing outside) and you trigger the encounter, and basically all you have to worry about is Flame Wreath because all his other stuff stays inside the room. Aran himself mostly stays inside the room, too, but every so often he comes outside for a little and you DPS him until he disappears again.

We tried it. About five minutes later Officer Chat was filled with all of us talking about how heinously boring this was (because at this point he was only down to like 95%) and how we were never going to it this way again.

The “Door Trick” actually wound up failing because a fellow player and I somehow managed to get knocked off the ledge outside his door where we fell to our deaths, and I think that reset the encounter. At this point we were all begging the PuG to just do it the normal, fair way, and she obliged (although she seemed somewhat mystified by how we’d rather have wipes and repair bills over a “safer” method; maybe we’re the only people she’s run into that are like that?) Seriously though, don’t do the Door Trick, it’s lame and takes forever.

Lesson the Second is that during the run, the fact finally sunk in that I am super burnt-out with Tawyn. There are a couple reasons why I never log onto her anymore, one of those reasons is admittedly my work schedule but another reason is because I honestly do not find her as fun to play as my alts right now. Don’t get me wrong; I love raiding and heroics and level 70 Alterac Valley* but after a few months of it, it has burned me out. The whole time we were in Karazhan I was thinking “Huh, this is pretty fun, I still love Kara, but… I’d really rather be playing one of my alts.”

Which leads me to believe that Tawyn is either going to get unofficially or officially stabled until WotLK. I still view her as my main and I have no doubt that she will be my first character to level 80, but I’m just not feelin’ the spark right now. Currently I’m trying to decide if I want to make an “official” post about it on the guild forums and attempt to pass of guild leadership, or keep going as I’ve been going and log on to her super-casually once or twice a week.

What does this realization about myself mean for you? Nothing, I still love the game and hunters and will continue to write about them just as I always have, I’ll probably just focus more on alts. As for what it means for me, I’m still trying to decide. My pre-WotLK goals have always been clear Karazhan (just Netherspite left) so I can finish my guide, see Gruuls/Mags, and finally get Epic’d out. But at this point, seeing how burnt out I am with that character, I think I may only get around to clearing Kara. But… that’s okay. I guess we’ll see what happens.

In closing, does anyone know of a good way to measure personal DPS? I’m curious about it and my damage meter (SWStats) is silly.

* It’s AV weekend and I actually am feeling this urge to spec something more PvP-worthy and spend the day in there. Hey, last time I was in there, Alliance had finally learned how to cap towers, all we need now is to learn how to tank Drek! Right? Right? Bueller?

stories

Gone Fishin'

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I was at work today, stationed at my usual spot by all the fish (I work in a pet store), and this kid of, oh, about ten or twelve years old or so and his buddy were walking up and down the area, inspecting all the fish and pointing out all the cool ones. Then the first kid stopped in his tracks, and I saw him staring rather intently at our Red Zebra Cichlids…

After staring at them for a minute or two, the kid turned to his buddy and exclaimed “Look! Look! I found the Golden Darters !!”

rp, screenshots, stories

I wanna cast… Magic Missile

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You know, quite some time ago I had a dream that Tawyn had the chance to get the most rare and most awesome flying mount ever. She could get an owl mount, one that looked just like Tux.

And in the dream, I turned it down. My reasoning? It wouldn’t be in character.

I woke up and thought “Dream-Pike you dorkchop! Giving up a super awesome mount like that in the name of roleplaying! You don’t even roleplay all that often! Real-Pike is much more sensible than that.”

Or so I thought.

This is Althalor:

When he was a wee young lad, he and his high elven merchant parents were traveling down Southern Gold Road in the Barrens when they were attacked by some particularly nasty beasts. They fought gamely but they were tired and weary and couldn’t much fight back. With their dying breaths they managed to conjure up a spell that made it so the creatures did not see, hear, or smell little Althalor who was hiding in the caravan.

It was the Tauren of Camp Taurajo who found him and took him in. He was raised in Mulgore as an adopted Tauren, as a hunter, because of his uncanny skill with a rifle and his odd rapport with the lions of the Barrens. Today he fights for the Horde, passing himself off as a Blood Elf, although deep inside he feels that he really is a a Tauren in spirit.

So clearly he needs to ride a Kodo. This was the plan from day one. And for that, (unless you want the war mount)… you need to be exalted with Thunder Bluff.

At the tender level of two I ran him all the way from Sunstrider Isle to Mulgore. He cleared the place of quests and this led him to Crossroads, Camp Taurajo, and eventually Freewind Post in Thousand Needles. Considering the fact that I began with a distinct disadvantage (blood elves begin the game as Neutral with Thunder Bluff, not Friendly… and on top of that, a rather long questline in Mulgore is apparently Tauren-exclusive), I didn’t think I was doing too badly. Tawyn was exalted with Stormwind at level 37, why couldn’t Althalor be exalted with Thunder Bluff at level 40? Easy, I figured.

Then came the change to the mount level. I worried about my rep grind but hoped for the best; turning in as much cloth as I could at my low level and scouring WoWHead for quests I hadn’t finished yet.

Today Althalor dinged 30.

…well dang.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like the chicken mount. I like it a lot. I was so excited when the Warstrider was announced and then so crestfallen when I found out my taurengirl Lunapike couldn’t get it. (She has some MgT farming in her future I think.)

But Althalor, I thought, no, he can’t ride one. It would be obscene. In his story he hasn’t been to the Eastern Kingdoms since he was a baby. Him on a hawkstrider? It would be So. Out. Of. Character.

So I said “Forget getting the mount at level 30. I’m not getting one until I’m exalted with TB.”

I went to work today and realized I’d turned into Crazy-RP-Mount-Dream-Pike.

And I thought about it and I thought about it and I thought about it and I thought about Aspect-of-the-Cheetah-ing all over Desolace and it was this horrible dilemma, you have no idea.

Then I had an epiphany. He’s trying to pass himself off as a Blood Elf right? So maybe his Tauren friends decided to help him out by obtaining a Hawkstrider mount for him… and he rode it around for a while because he was very grateful for the thought but it just made him so uncomfortable that he got a Kodo later?

…that sounds viable.

So I went and got the chicken mount.

It still feels awkward but at least my OOCometer isn’t buzzing off the hook and blinking red anymore.

There are two morals of this story. One is I think Blizzard has really succeeded if they managed to create a world so immersive that at least some of its players are willing to do crazy things like forego mounts in the name of their fictional character’s backstory. Two is that Pike is completely insane. But you all knew that I’m sure.

pvp, stories

Return of the Grumpy Care Bear

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I was on Lunapike, my level 63 Hordie Hunter, and I was camping out in the inn in Tarren Mill because I’d been helping a friend out. At the moment though, my services weren’t required, so I’d alt+tab’d out to do some stuff.

Suddenly I heard a bunch of commotion on my screen and pulled up the game just in time to see a big red cat clawing my face out. I could barely move before I was completely demolished.

Eh, it’s Tarren Mill, it’s to be expected. So I went back to the Inn and rez’d and then alt+tab’d again.

Same story about a minute later, big red cat destroys me.

So at that point I was getting annoyed but there really wasn’t a whole lot I could do, this being my highest leveled character on that server. I started to play a little game with the guy. I’d stand in my spot in the inn, I’d see “Noodle gains Bestial Wrath” and “Noodle gains Dash” in my combat log, Noodle the kitty would run into the inn… and I would log out. I can only imagine the confusion on poor hunter’s face when his big red kittycat came running back to him emptyhanded.

I did that a couple times and thought it was immensely hilarious until one of these times I logged in and the hunter himself was standing in my spot waiting for me, and I got demolished.

Okay, this was all getting super annoying, and at this point I was having to wait around in Ghost Form to rez because I’d died so many times in such a short period of time. So I figured I’d head out of there. Which was in and of itself a major pain, because even my Frostwolf Howler is apparently no match for Concussive Shot + Intimidation + Full S2 Hunter, and I died another two or three times on my way out.

Now it was around this point that I think the other people at Tarren Mill were getting annoyed too because they started disappearing and higher levels started showing up. Mr. AnnoyingHunterGuy left somewhere around this time, headed south, and we all made a group to go track him down.

We didn’t see him anywhere, though.

But whaddaya do when you’re in a group full of ticked off Hordies whose lowbie alts just got camped into oblivion?

You raid Southshore, that’s what.

We leveled the place. I mean, completely leveled. There were no NPCs left. There were no quest givers left. The poor level 30-ish Alliance that got caught in the crossfire? Rest in peace. They can thank AnnoyingHunterGuy and Noodles.

Now the respawn rate on the guards was super fast and we were just killing them over and over. So I was figuring the Alliance World Defense must have been exploding with “Southshore is under attack!” which is why I was expecting the Alliance Response Team to show up and put an end to our shenanigans. See, I say that as somebody with experience about the other side. I always have WorldDefense on, and if Tawyn sees “Southshore is under attack” more than a couple times and she isn’t in Outlands, she pulls out her PvP gear and hops on her gryphon– you’d better believe she does. Usually she shows up right around the same time as five or six other similarly-minded people and we successfully defend our town.

But you know what, on this server, it never happened. The Alliance Counterattack I was waiting for never came. Every so often a single level 70 would pop up and they would quickly get killed. That was about it. AnnoyingHunterGuy never even came back (although he did /yell something at us in the middle of it, so you know he was somewhere and knew what was going on– he just never came out to fight us.)

So after about twenty minutes of having Southshore firmly under Horde control we left not because the Alliance came to take care of us, but because we just got bored.

Victory for us!

So there you have it. Has Pike crossed over to the dark side? Gonna go around ganking and camping lowbies on a regular basis? Nah. I still like /hugs for the most part.

But revenge is sweet.

The best part of the entire night though?

Now I’ve had people make alts on servers specifically to say hello to me, but I can only think of a few cases where people who already live on that server recognize me. Makes me feel special. <3 And to Mr. Moonkin who asked me that, if you are reading, ’twas fun! =D

guides, hunter kindergarten, pets, screenshots, so you want to play a hunter

So You Want to Play a Hunter? Part 4

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Thanks for the comments on my last video. There were some concerns that the technique used in the video was hard to understand, which I was afraid of, but I went ahead and tried it anyway. I also had some concerns that the movie did not go “in-depth” enough with techniques for kiting, but in all honesty, the movie was supposed to be intended for a new hunter who isn’t level ten yet (or who has never kited before) so hopefully it was okay for me to have skipped some of the more “advanced” tactics.

So you’ve hit level ten. Yay! Two different important things can happen now: you can use your talent points, and you can tame your pet.

Talent Points:

Before you, you see three possible talent trees to put your points in. I’ma summarize them really quickly: Beast Mastery focuses on making your pet stronger (and eventually making you shoot much faster), Marksmanship focuses on increasing your own Ranged Attack Power, and Survival focuses on critting a lot and using various tricks to survive or help out your party. You could say that Beast Mastery shoots faster but for less per hit, Marksmanship shoots slower but for more per hit, and Survival is slower and does less per hit, but crits all the time. Pick your playstyle!

If you are just starting a hunter and want to get it to endgame, then you should be aware of the fact that the Marksman tree is currently considered to be a rather weak tree compared to the other two; although hopefully this will be remedied (or at least improved a little) in WotLK. It’s not such a big deal for leveling though.

In all honesty I do not see there as being a “one true spec” for leveling. They are all going to be reasonably effective. Beast Mastery is often seen as “the leveling” spec because it makes your pet more of a tank and thus you have little downtime, but Tawyn actually leveled Marksmanship until level 55 or so, and had absolutely no problems (though that was before the Growl-changes, so it may be different now). I regret to say I haven’t leveled a Survival Hunter past level 17 because I’ve been so busy with other goals I want to accomplish, but I imagine that leveling Survival, while maybe not as fast as BM or Marks, is still going to be handy because you will rarely die. That is just my conjuncture, however!

A while back Znodis did a lot of testing and found that an interesting BM/MM hybrid (enough MM for Trueshot, then everything else in BM) was actually probably the best spec in terms of grinding and pet threat generation, but it might have changed since then with the growl changes. Regardless, his thoughts are worth a look if you are okay with crazy hybrid specs.

In all honesty I think you should level up in the talent tree that you find most interesting.

If you do want my advice, I am going to say Beast Mastery, and I am going to say spec something like this. Yes, it’s a different talent spec than the “leveling spec” I posted a few months back. But I sort of waver on my own personal opinions of a leveling spec, so I change it up a lot. Anyways, the one I posted is basic cookie-cutter 41/20/0 but with some twists that hone it more for leveling and soloing: namely, you swap out Improved Aspect of the Hawk and Improved Revived Pet for Endurance Training and Thick Hide, which are considerably more useful for leveling. I am still thinking about the possibility of Catlike Reflexes instead of Ferocious Inspiration– I know it sounds like blasphemy, but for leveling it’s not a bad choice at all and I wouldn’t knock you for it (so long as you respec later if you are going to be instancing/raiding).

If you are still unsure of what you want to do with your talent points and want some time to think about it, but also want to start putting your points somewhere, I’m gonna tell you to put five points in Lethal Shots in Marksmanship and then come back at level 15 (you’ll hopefully have decided by then). Heck, all my hunters level Beast Mastery and almost without fail I put the five points in Lethal Shots first. But that’s maybe cause I’m a crit fiend.

Anyways, I don’t want to go massively in-depth on the subject of leveling talent points, but I might do that in a later post if enough people are interested or think it’s a good idea.

Pets:

Pets! Yay! My favorite part of playing a hunter!

First of all, be aware of the fact that you will have to do your pet quest in your race’s homelands; at the first major town you encounter after you leave the level 1-5 starting zone. So yes, that means that if you pulled a Tawyn and ran your Night Elf to Elwynn Forest at level six, you will have to go aaaaall the way back to Teldrassil.

The pet quest itself is pretty simple and involves you going and “taming” a few different test pets that the quest giver will tell you to tame. You will do this for three different pets until you are given the skill to tame pets permanently. Then you are sent to your home city (Ironforge, Thunder Bluff, etc. depending on your race) to pick up a couple extra (and necessary! Do not skip this step) skills and then you will be good to go!

“Pike, what pet do I pick?” Well back in the day, boars were seen as the supreme leveling pet and for good reason: their threat generation was massive. But the Boar-Shaped Piñata since been whacked into oblivion with the Nerf Stick so there is really no ultimate-leveling pet anymore. You may opt to go with something that has high armor, such as a bear– keep in mind that bears cannot use Dash, though.

But see, my thoughts on pets has always been that you don’t choose the pet, the pet chooses you.

Pike would tell her young Padawan to study Petopia closely, browse the available pets that are level ten or lower, and pick the one that jumps out to them. There are no restrictions, although remember that only some pets will be able to learn Dash/Dive at higher levels (which makes leveling quicker), and some pets are considered to be better for endgame (windserpents, ravagers, cats, and raptors fall into this category), but if you like a non-standard pet, then go for it.

What’s that you say? You found a pet you like but it’s on the other end of the world? …what are you waiting for? You’re a hunter! Go get it!

And I would walk five hundred miles
And I would walk five hundred more
Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles
To fall down at your door…

That’s my level eleven dwarf hunter. In Durotar. Getting there was an adventure, it involved running through Duskwood (and dying a million times) and I would have died a million times in Stranglethorn Vale, too, but lemme tell you, having a level 70 priest put a bubble on you and then tell you “Run!” and follow you all the way through the zone makes things a LOT easier.

When I first got there, the dinosaur I wanted to tame was level eleven, and I was level ten. And, as you may or may not know, you can only tame pets that are your level or lower. So I grinded myself up a level on the random critters running around Durotar, managed to tame a rare

Scorpion while I was at it and nab myself Claw 2, and finally abandoned him so I could tame my new dinosaur:

So cute!

Well, I’d like to go in more detail on pets and how your huntering strategy has changed now that you have a pet, but this blog post is already obscenely long, so we’ll discuss that later. In the meantime, the afore mentioned Petopia is an amazing resource to peruse if you have pet-related questions.

As always… leave me your comments and questions!

screenshots

Guys…

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Thanks.

Last night, I was kind of a mess– it was midnight, a million thoughts were going through my head, I’d just logged off in frustration, and I had to let those feelings loose somehow. So I wrote ’em all down in Blogger. It was super cathartic. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t shed some tears in the process. Before I hit the “Publish Post” button, I glanced at what I’d written and thought “Man… I should maybe just delete this all… nobody wants to hear my QQing.” But I was hoping maybe I’d get some advice, so I published the post and then went straight to bed.

I woke up after a bit of a fitful sleep and went over to my computer and I had dozens of comments expressing support and help. People telling me they’d been through it before themselves, who were offering their own advice and experience. Ratshag even IM’d me to make sure I was okay. I also had some responses to a (rather embarrassingly) panicked post I made over on my guild forums, from guildies reassuring me that it wasn’t my fault.

Are things magically fixed now? Well no, but I feel more calm and confident about it now. Whatever happens, will happen, and it will be okay. The point is, your collective concern helped more than I can express… so, thank you.

ANYWAYS, I don’t want to dwell too long on mushy stuff like that. Aspect of the Hare will return to our regularly scheduled hunter programming on Monday (or maybe even Sunday if I’m feeling inspired.) You wants hunters, we gots hunters. And you wants the prettiest screenshot I’ve ever taken…

I was gonna say “You’ve got three guesses” but it’s super easy, so you’ve only got one guess. =P

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In Which Pike Deviates From Her Usual Positive Outlook…

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Okay guys, I know this is super out-of-character for me, but it’s gnawing at my mind and chewing a pit in my stomach and I’m hoping that by sharing it with you guys, maybe I’ll feel a little better.

My guild is dying. And I don’t know what to do.

Some of you may remember all the past victories of our guild, because I wrote about them so proudly. How we gained so many members, so fast. How we did so many heroics and eventually these turned into weekly Karazhan runs. We were progressing. We were dangit. We were many. We were legion.

Then the boyfriend got busy with life-stuff and gave the guild to me. And at that exact same time my job decided to schedule me mostly afternoons/evenings from here on out. And at that exact same time, a bunch of the guild regulars… the people who had been there forever… started to slowly drift away. They left for bigger guilds. Or they left to play alts on other servers. Or they simply went on WoW hiatus.

And here we are today; this once mighty guild is hemorrhaging members. Karazhan runs? Unheard of. That was something we used to do. These days we’re lucky if we can scrape together five or six people once a month or so to get in there with PuGs to fill us out, and we get stuck at Opera. Opera. This is not the I once knew. This is not the scrappy group of friends that fought our way tenaciously through Medivh’s tower, on our own, without the help of bigger guilds. This is not “THUNDERCATS HO” before Shade of Aran. This is not people affectionately calling me “Tawtaw” and cheeking with me, “I don’t care if it’s immune to traps, trap it anyway.” This is not “FIVE SECONDS TO EVOCATE!!”

Not anymore. What went wrong? I don’t know.

On the rare days that I can bring myself to log in to Silver Hand, I deal with more people who are leaving or contemplating leaving, because it is very clear that the guild is dying, or at least changing drastically. It hurts. I don’t blame them for leaving, not at all. But you think about how before you become GM, there would be 15 people all online, all doing stuff and chatting up a storm in Ventrilo, and now you’re GM and you’re lucky if there’s five people on… and nothing is going on, and the atmosphere is gloomy… and it makes you think. What am I doing wrong? Did I do anything wrong, or was it simply bad timing?

I’d give the guild away because I clearly do not have the time or energy to be GM, and maybe somebody else can salvage it… but there’s hardly anybody left to give the guild to.

/gdisband? I’ve thought about it. Yep, I’m confessing it: I’ve thought about it. Perhaps it is necessary, like putting down a dying creature. But I don’t know if I could ever bring myself to do that. Not this group of friends. Not this family. That was what we called ourselves, back in the day. We weren’t just a guild. We were family. Combine that with the vague hope in the back of my mind that maybe it’s just a rough patch we’re going through, maybe we’ll come back with a vengeance in Wrath of the Lich King… I don’t know if I could bring myself to type out the command.

But in the meantime I have to put up with a heavy heart everytime I log in and see more people leaving or confiding with me that they are thinking about leaving, and see more half-hearted Karazhan runs getting canceled for lack of interest. It’s painful, this hole in my heart is. And no Heavy Netherweave Bandage is gonna fix it anytime soon.

Though admittedly, writing it all down has made me feel better. The wounds are still there, yeah… but I don’t feel quite so alone.

(Note to any guildies/ex-guildies that may possibly be reading: I <3 you all and I am not in anyway upset with anybody, or laying the blame on anybody. Too much happened at the wrong time, I think. I hope. If it was somehow my fault… I apologize.)