Category Archives: screenshots

Memory… all alone in the moonlight…

July 12, 2009 Pike 24 Comments

…I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again

Alright, I’ve got a couple secrets to announce here today.

The first secret is that my memory is horrid. I’m not exaggerating this. I often can’t remember things I said five minutes earlier. Just ask Mr. Pike if you want to hear all the gritty details on my lack of anything resembling a decent memory, other than my odd penchant to remember random and often useless facts.

The second secret is that I have two level eighty characters and one level seventyfive character and I haven’t been playing them. No, I’ve been playing a level 44 hunter and a level 31 resto druid and a level 21 hunter (Yes, my two 80s are a hunter and a resto druid. THE FIRST STEP IS ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM. /admits it), running merrily around in the old world and in general having a grand ol’ time.

The first real reason for this is simply that it feels more productive somehow. I can log onto my level 80 hunter and sit around in LFG for a super long time and wind up not running anything… or I can log into my level 80 druid who is in this awkward position between heroics and raids and try to talk myself into trying a ten-man, and then inevitably chickening out… or I can log into my level 75 hunter and spend two hours doing quests and then look down at my experience bar and notice that it rather suspiciously looks like it’s hardly moved…

…or, I can log onto one of my lowbies and gain a level or two and make little fangirly squees everytime I unlock a new talent point that is going to make a tangible difference. See? Feels more productive.

The second reason, though, is simply that while I’ve done most of these quests before, I honestly can’t remember them, thanks to aforementioned crappy memory. Like, I can sorta remember the general idea of some of them… but they don’t feel old. They don’t feel like redo-ing territory I’ve already done a million times, even if I have. Every time I go through a zone, even one I’ve done fiftybazillion times before like Feralas, or Thousand Needles, or Tanaris… I feel like I’m discovering something entirely new.

And when you’re level 44, it doesn’t matter what spec you are or how much DPS you’re doing (though the number of people demanding Recount charts in Scarlet Monastery or ZF never fails to amuse me), or if you have the gold for raid consumables. What matters is… where in this crazy ol’ zone is this water well I’m supposed to find, and why did these random bugs I’ve never seen before spawn on top of me? What an unusual questline!

…and how far can I make the quest robot walk before he despawns? (I almost got him to the Dire Maul instance portal once, and my latest attempt got him to Razorfen Kraul.)

…and where should I put my next talent point, there’s so many good choices and I want them all!

…and maybe I can snag myself an Icy enchant because I want a super glowy weapon and I don’t have to worry about functional enchants yet!

…and ohmahgawsh! Rarespawns I’ve never seen before or even knew existed!

…and ooooh what rep should I grind on this character so I can continue with my tradition of mixing and matching mounts?

So yeah. Takes a special person to like the questing and the leveling best. Guess I’m one of those special people.

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

screenshots

Hunter Pet Specs: Now On the Armory!

July 1, 2009 Pike 15 Comments

Even better, you can choose which of your pets you are looking at. So you can see, for example, that Wash is spec’d for 20-point Beast Mastery goodness, whereas when I last left Perezvon, he was spec’d for Marksmanship pewpew.

Pretty nifty, I think! ^_^

Feel free to visit my own Armory to try it out (and take a peek at my oh-so-versatile Cunning pets, who I also believe are spec’d 20- and 16-points respectively at the moment).

patches, screenshots

Burnout? What's That?

June 30, 2009 Pike 9 Comments

It’s really funny to me when I think back to just about a month or so ago when I was feeling sort of meh-ish with WoW, and then I compare that to right now where I feel like I can’t play enough.

What was I thinking? I have to stuff to PuG and specs to play around with and old dungeons to solo on my hunter! I’ve got five-mans to heal and rep to grind on my druid*! I’ve got lowbie alts who have billions of levels just sitting in front of them, waiting to be claimed!

I have raids to stealth through in the name of photo ops!

On top of that, I am actually immensely excited for the next content patch. Back when they were first announcing stuff for it, I was kinda disappointed, solely because I was hoping this would be the patch where Beast Mastery would be brought up to par with the other specs but so far there has been little news on that front. Then I decided that that didn’t matter because I was having fun anyway, and now I’m just excited.

I mean seriously: leveling in battlegrounds! New n’ Improved, Lemon-Scented druid forms! (New look, same great product!) Being able to turn your XP gain on and off with a switch! (this has made the significant other very happy; he has a gnome warrior who he has been casually leveling and he is now revitalized in this goal to tank everything. in. the. game. At the right level.)

And guys. HOGGER AS A LEVEL 80 BOSS. And VanCleef. And all those old bosses you loved to hate from back in the day. This is something I’ve been wistfully dreaming of for months and it’s happening. And the best part is: I will actually get to see this content because it’s a five-man. You know how many people are in my little group of closest WoW friends? About five or six, depending on who is taking a break/is crazybusy with IRL at the time (we all sort of naturally take turns being in that position). You know how difficult it was for us to juggle everyone’s schedules and bring in reliable people from “outside” simply to fill out a ten-man?

Now don’t get me wrong. I love raiding and I have tons of respect for serious raiders and if I had the schedule to do it, I totally would. Sometimes, when I need a break, I unwind by playing other games like สำรวจเกมคาสิโน UFABET.

…but I don’t, and as such some of my best memories in the game are doing things as, you know, a little group of the five or six or us, on those special nights when we all realized we had an hour or two to ourselves which resulted in “Hey, guys, we’re bored, LET’S GO DO SOMETHING CRAZY”. New five-man that pretty much dipped into the “I Can Only Dream” portion of my brain for inspiration? Very yes. Please don’t be wrong on this, MMO-Champion!

So yeah. Awesome exciting times in WoW lately. What is this “burnout” of which you speak, Month-Ago-Pike?

—

* As much as I hate most dailies as a rule, on the other hand, there is something deeply satisfying to me about grinding rep, in a weird sort of masochistic way.

screenshots, Uncategorized

Blood Elves and Dragons and Kael'thas, Oh My!

June 28, 2009 Pike 26 Comments

I never did Magisters’ Terrace at level 70. I’m not really sure why, other than I was holding out for a while to see if I could go with some of my guildies (we all thought doing a new instance for the first time together sounded awesome), but it never materialized, and then by the time I thought about going ahead and PuG’ing it I would’ve felt silly saying “So by the way, I know WotLK is coming out in a month or two but I haven’t done this instance yet…”

So I never did it.

There is one thing Kael’thas drops though that I really want: a minipet. So after sitting around thinking “Man, I should really find a group to go help me grind MgT with” for weeks, I decided “If you want something done, you have to do it yourself.”

Well, with your pet. But you know.

I had a couple things going against me. Lack of a Tenacity pet was a biggie (and my stable is full of pets that I… really don’t want to abandon), as was lack of a Super-Crazy-Pet-Tanking spec. But hey, you can always try, right?

I picked Eltanin, my Windserpent– a cunning pet– to be my companion on this experiment. I figured he would be a better choice than any of my Ferocities. Once out of the stable, I spec’d him into everything like Great Stamina and Cornered, and then headed off!

First boss was cake, even using my Beast Master glass cannon raid spec. He’s basically Warlord Kalithresh Redux if you don’t know how the fight goes (though it occurs to me that most of you who don’t know how the fight goes probably haven’t done Warlord Kalithresh either…)

Second boss was Curator Redux, aaaaand I soon realized I couldn’t do it with aforementioned Beast Master glass cannon raid spec. The solution? Hearthed out to Stormwind, spec’d into Super-Crazy-Pet-Tanking spec and bought a Glyph of Mending, and came back and tried again. He still put up a pretty big challenge and there was a point where I had to Distracting Shot pull + kite the guy for a while, to give Eltanin some extra Mend Pet time, but it all worked out in the end.

The next guy… isn’t a boss. But he’s hot, so I’m posting his picture anyway.

Third boss… oh gosh, how do I describe this. Close your eyes and imagine five guys plus a couple of pets and demons, all lined up in a row. And one of them heals, a lot. It’s like the twisted lovechild of Illidari Council and Moroes. Now imagine you’re by yourself. /gulp

The first attempt was a spectacular wipe, and then a little thought occured to me: hey, this is just like PvP. I should forget about doing the pet-tanking thing, and just burst-damage everyone to death. Plus, Aimed Shot would sure come in handy against that healer…

And so I did something nuts. I switched over to my Marksmanship dual-spec, and respec’d Eltanin to maximize my own survivability with things like Roar of Sacrifice. I basically pretended like I was spec’ing him for Alterac Valley or something.

Then I put a Frost Trap down, waited for the cooldown, and pulled…

…

OHYEAH! Combination of Frost Trap kiting, Feign Deaths and Readiness, that. /phew

By that point, I was feeling confident. I was on a roll, I’d just killed this boss fight that had looked near impossible on the surface, and there was only one boss left: Kael’thas himself.

But then there was something I wasn’t banking on.

These guys. They are all standing right in front of Kael’thas and if you don’t kill them all in one sitting, they all respawn.

Did I mention that they do this thing where they stun you and put stupidly painful DoTs on you? And do this explosion thing? It’s like being ambushed by a rogue, warlock, and mage. At the same time. All in some little room where getting range is almost impossible. Yeeeeah. I apologize in advance for the nightmares you’ll have about it tonight.

Needless to say I pulled out all the stops on this battle. I tried everything. I tried Beast Mastery, I tried Marksmanship, I tried kiting them to a more open area, heck, I even tried Frost Trap -> Volley -> Feign Death -> Frost Trap -> Volley. No dice.

…then, after about nine or ten wipes and a repair break, I found out you can sneak past them and get to Kael’thas! For a brief moment I had a glimmer of hope restored to my eye!

Got Kael’thas down to about 50% and then the Fantastic Five (or Six, or however many there were in that group) decided it would be really funny to aggro and go Jackson Pollock on my butt. I Feigned to reset the fight and tried again, but same deal.

So, for the time being, I will have to concede that Magister’s Terrace is prrrroooobably not solo’able without a Tenacity pet to Thunderstomp that last pull and keep them off of you. If you can figure out a way to do it otherwise, please tell me, because for the time being it looks like I may have to ~~vote one of my pets off the island~~ return one of my pets to the wilderness and obtain a Tenacity pet in order to conclude what I started.

Next time, mister… next time.

alts, ding, druid, screenshots

Turning Over a New Leaf

June 26, 2009 Pike 21 Comments

I still have a rather distinct memory of when I decided to roll Tamaryn, though the “whys” have since largely been lost to the mists of time. I do remember saying in guild chat something akin to “I’m bored, I think I’m gonna roll a druid”, then making one and whispering an officer and being chucked a guild invite within ten seconds of my new character’s existence. I also remember a fellow guildie coming and making a druid alongside me. We did the starter quests together and were soon joined by this random naked hunter who kept challenging us to duels (I always won, because I never let him have range. Class experience for great justice.) When me and my buddy couldn’t shake the guy, we went into the deepest part of this spider cave and got as lost as we could, then hearthed simultaneously, leaving him behind. Good times.

My friend stopped playing his druid once we hit level five or so, and to the best of my knowledge he never played the character again. I kept playing, though, largely because of the sheer nostalgia of playing through the night elf starting area for the first time since Tawyn, my first character.

Upon hitting level ten I put my first tentative points into the Balance tree because I figured I probably would not like melee as much as casting. Leveling was slow going, though, and honestly I probably would have lost interest in the character (as I did all my non-hunters) once I got out of the nostalgia kick that was Darkshore… were it not for that fateful day when a bunch of guildies got on alts all about my level and asked me to heal Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep.

I was very nervous; I had never healed before, ever, well, outside of Mend Pet. Because I was so worried about it, I ran to Darnassus, found the druid trainer, cleared all my talent points, and put them into the Restoration tree. My plan was to respec again and put them back into Balance afterwards.

That didn’t happen.

Because that day, in Deadmines and SFK, I became fascinated with healing. It was like reverse-huntering! It was a completely new experience, so very different than what I’d been doing all this time on my hunters, and I was hooked.

And so, with the exception of a few flirtations with Moonkin-ing (once at level 40, and then again permanently when dual specs came out when I was level 74 or so), I leveled my druid full resto. I RestoKitty’d through the occasional quest, which was slow but effective, but the vast bulk of my leveling was through instances; I kept myself constantly in LFG and shoved myself into as many healing roles as possible. This culminated in a rather unique experience to put on my WoW résumé: I healed almost every five-man instance in the game. At the appropriate level.

It’s been ups and downs, really, but mostly ups.

There was the very slow process of learning about the delicate art of not-healing-too-fast so as not to pull aggro.

The little “squee” I emitted upon running into a group of roleplayers in Southshore when I was leveling there and letting Tamaryn put her fledgling skills to use to aid a “dying” character.

The joy of getting Tree of Life form mid-Maraudon run and using it right there and immediately bursting into /dance.

The rush of winning a single Alterac Valley game (by a hair… literally something like two reinforcements) at level 60 after dozens of losses, and looking at the “healing done” chart afterward and feeling like I had made a tangible difference in the outcome.

There was the perplexity I felt when first learning Lifebloom, because it kept changing all the time– first I was never supposed to let it bloom, then I was, et cetera… not to mention I couldn’t figure out how to use the dang spell, so I quickly resorted to my “healing fetal position” of Rejuvenation + Regrowth.

But then there was the thrill of first hitting 1000 spell power, and soon after, the deep satisfaction of doing Azjol’Nerub and Violet Hold and pulling up the healing meters and realizing that Regrowth had pretty much been completely replaced by what else but that oh-so-stubborn spell Lifebloom– I was, at long last, a bona fide HoT healer.

Yeah, it’s been a pretty crazy ride.

Not a single death in that HoL. Not one. And the DPS had never been there before and kept standing in crap. (Though to be fair, the tank was really good >.>)

…and yes Virginia, after all these years, Pike finally has an endgame character that isn’t a hunter.

NOW ONWARD TO EPICS!

marksmanship, screenshots

Raid Buffed

June 24, 2009 Pike 27 Comments

43% crit. Almost 6000 Attack Power. Can you imagine that when Call of the Wild and Mirror of Truth proc’d? I was laughing like a maniac.

Marksmanship really is a very fun spec, for me anyways. I know there was a time when disliking Marksmanship purely-on-principle was in vogue for some reason (interestingly, Survival was more likely to be seen as “cool and edgy” and all that, at least among the places I frequented), and I think you can still see remnants of that dislike today, but I find it to be an ill-deserved reputation. It easily out-does Survival on Pike’s Personal Fun-o-meter so far.

screenshots, specs, survival, Uncategorized

NOW We're Gettin' Somewhere

June 17, 2009 Pike 17 Comments

So that’s basically about, oh, 50-100 DPS more than I do as BM on 10man Patchwerk. I probably should’ve just snapshotted the Current Fight (I think it was on Overall) but hey, it was a nice number. And much more than I’ve normally been doing as Survival so far this week. (Even if the whole Twilight Torment thing from my pet kinda skewed the numbers. I had decent numbers on the other fights too, so it’s justified. /cough)

Mostly I’m surprised because I don’t feel like I changed my playstyle at all. I did wind up sucking it up and installing Quartz this morning, but I don’t think it had much of an effect, since overall my latency is pretty low and my FPS is pretty high. Very helpful for my moonkin, though. >.> 1900 DPS at level 75? Yes please. Aaaanyways, perhaps I just got the right mix of buffs, finally.

I feel like I am finally starting to get into the Survival groove. Maybe. At least, this was the first time I saw a bunch of mobs and thought “Oh! I should use Frost Trap for Lock and Load!” only to find out it was on cooldown because of Black Arrow. I’ll uh… remember next time. >.>

…Frost Trap is the one, right? <.<

screenshots, specs, survival

Outwit. Outplay. Outspec.

June 14, 2009 Pike 40 Comments

I’m playing a game with myself. It’s called, “Pike is actually going to learn to play the other two hunter specs”.

Yes that’s right. Don’t panic. See, I’m sure we all know by now that I’ve been primarily a Beast Master hunter up until this point. This is so largely for two reasons; firstly, it really is my favorite hunter spec (don’t get me wrong), and secondly, well… this seems to have unofficially become a BM hunter site and I figured you guys would appreciate it. /blush

However, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the other specs or secretly long to learn to play them well. I mean, seriously, anytime I’ve ever spec’d SV or MM recently has resulted in a DPS loss, which simply isn’t logical and means I am playing them incorrectly. So I figured… now’s as good a time as any to figure them out!

The Rules:
1.) Must play one spec for one week. No temporary respecs or spec-swapping allowed.
2.) With said spec, must do at some dailies, a few heroics, and at least one raid (preferably a Naxx clear, but something like OS or VoA will work if necessary) and report back to the blog.
3.) Must not talk about Fight Club
4.) No matter how much he begs, never, ever feed your pet after midnight.

Okay, so the last two rules are a joke, but ya know.

Anyways, with said rules in place, I swapped over to Survival (figured I’d start with it since it’s my dual spec so I’m already glyphed for it) and headed off to the Argent Tournament.

The first thing I noticed was that I pulled aggro on Chillmaw within about half a second and Feign Death failed to work so I wound up Deterrence tanking him. 1200 dps on that fight. Oh yeah, off to a dandy start. /cough (Oh, and how the two Death Knights in the group failed to grab aggro from me throughout the entire fight… I will never know.)

The second thing I noticed was that when fighting the Scourge mobs for that one “kill 15 Scourge” daily, it was impossible for my pet to hold aggro beyond more than a second.

The third thing I noticed was that Misdirection extended one second of pet aggro to about two seconds of pet aggro.

The fourth thing I noticed was that Growl was off and Cower was on. Derp. Swapped those around.

The fifth thing I noticed was that with Growl safely on, my pet still couldn’t hold aggro more than a second or two without Misdirection.

The sixth thing I noticed was that mana issues while solo’ing were pretty much gone.

The seventh thing I noticed was that my traps were always on cooldown when I wanted to use them (Black Arrow’s fault).

The eighth thing I noticed was that it was near-impossible to do a proper Survival rotation on random level 79 non-elite mobs, because they were all dead after an Explosive and a Steady or two. Eventually I just abandoned using Serpent Sting and Black Arrow entirely because I didn’t need ’em. And lastly,

The ninth thing I noticed was how empty I felt when I realized that suddenly, I was just another Survival hunter with a wolf in a sea of Survival hunters with wolves. Now you’re probably thinking “Pike, you dork, you were totally a BM hunter with a cat and then a BM hunter with a windserpent in Burning Crusade.” And it’s true… I was. But somehow it feels different now and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I differentiated myself back then by refusing to use the Steady Shot macro so I still felt fundamentally unique. Back then, I got my kicks from out-DPSing macro-using hunters with my manual rotation in the same way that today I get my kicks from out-DPSing cookie-cutter specs. Or, perhaps it’s because I was naive back then and automatically assumed that everyone was having as much fun with Beast Mastery as I was. I dunno exactly, but whatever the reason, being like everyone else bugs me now in a way it didn’t before.

Anyways, I am now bound into using Survival until next Sunday evening, though, so we’ll see how things go. I am actually very excited for this project and looking forward to getting a nice glimpse into other worlds of hunteryness! ^_^

alts, druid, screenshots

To Tree or Not to Tree?

June 12, 2009 Pike 14 Comments

I’ve gotten a couple comments asking who “won” the contest. I tallied up the votes and yes, the druid won. (To be fair, the reasons given for “hunter” tended to be much more passionate and convincing! But I decided to go purely on numbers.)

So I’ve been playing the druid and having a surprising amount of fun. I’m making good headway on the Wrathgate storyline (thanks to dual specs, I am able to quest more often than I could before), and I even got to experience being a Moonkin and not a Tree in a Violet Hold.

…by the way, they’re OP. *cough* >.>

Boomkinning is interesting; playstyle-wise it feels like a somewhat less hectic version of Survival Huntering, in that you are waiting for a proc (in this case, Eclipse) which then changes up your rotation. (Said proc likes to happen on the last spell you cast before the mob dies, by the way.) I gotta say though, you’ll never be able to take the hunter out of the girl, as was evident to me anytime my treants died and I went into a panic and reached for my Revive Pet button. Overall it was a very interesting experience to do something I’ve done so many times on my hunter– DPS a familiar instance– as… well… a non-hunter.

Okay, clearing-things-up time. I think a lot of people are worried that either a.) I am not interested in my hunter anymore, or b.) I will be writing less huntery things here now. Neither of those could be farther from the truth. You should all know by now that I’d never be able to leave huntering, and on top of that, I’ve had several great huntery post ideas hatch in the incubator that is my head recently and I’m really looking forward to doing some of these posts. I’m mostly just waiting for next week because I’m OCD and like to start things on Monday.

I also think that there is a misconception going around that I am making a conscious effort to fill the shoes of BRK and as such I am actively trying to change the direction of the blog. The truth is, I’m not. As in, I’m not either actively trying to be or not-be the new BM hunter hotspot. Aspect of the Hare has always been an amalgamation of information, education, personal stories, and an attempt to document the WoW experience from the standpoint of someone who is okay at the game but not great and would rather set 80s dance music over thrash metal to her WoW movies. Because there are a lot more of us out there than people realize. That’s what I’ve always been, and that is, well, what I still am. If that makes me the new BRK, then hey, that’s great! And if not, then well, I wasn’t trying to be the new BRK anyway! =P

The only effect that other bloggers quitting blogs has had on my own blogging is that I am determined more than ever to not become a victim of the disease where blogging usurps playing. Blogging about WoW, especially once you have an audience, is hard work. You play for yourself but you have that “Would my audience find this interesting? Would this make a good post idea?” in the back of your head. I don’t think it’s bad to have that in the back of your head, especially if you enjoy blogging (which I do); it becomes bad when that jumps over to the front of your head, if that makes sense. I’m not gonna let that happen. I was never really one of those people that tried to become THE-BESTEST-BLOGGER-EVER anyway, beyond the basics.

All that said, believe me, it does flatter me greatly when I receive positive comparisons to BRK or other blogging “greats”. The comments I get from people saying I helped make them a better player, or I brighten up their day, or they love my writing style– all of these combined with my general enjoyment of blogging are what keep me going. So, thanks, and I hope to provide lots of fun and hunteryness for many months to come. ^_^

/off soapbox

alts, druid, fun, screenshots