Uncategorized

The Official Be-In-A-Story-With-Pike Contest!

5 Comments

So the Sitemeter on my site is almost at 400,000 and as is tradition here, I want to give out a “kiriban” prize to anyone who can screenshot the number and e-mail it to me *points to e-mail on the left sidebar*

However, I’m going to try something a little different this time: instead of a custom avatar, you’ll get to pick one of your characters to star with one of mine in a short RP story! Cool, right? Maybe? …hopefully…?

Anyways, it doesn’t just have to be one of my hunters either. Wanna be in the very first story of my druid, warlock, or paladin? I haven’t done stories of any of them yet, and they’re all open game.

Here’s how it will work:
1.) If you screenshot the counter saying 400,000, send it my way!
2.) All winners (there will probably be several, due to the way Sitemeter works) will receive e-mail instructions including brief bios of all my characters so you can pick which one you’d like to be in your story, and directions to send me back information about whichever of your characters you choose. In addition if you have any particular plot ideas for the story, you can send me those as well (or I can spin one up, if you’d like!)
3.) Your story will soon appear on the site for the whole world to see, and your character will be immortalized in PikeLore~! (I’ll spread the stories out a little if there’s a lot of them, so as not to crit you with them all at once.)

If that sounds like something you might be interested in, keep an eye on the hit counter! It’s on the bottom portion of my right sidebar. Currently I get a little over 1000 hits a day so I’m estimating an ETA for this in about four or five days. Save the date!

The Fine Print:

-Yes, you can enter if you’ve already won a previous Aspect of the Hare prize
– Yes, I’ll be doing an avatar prize for 500,000 if you’ve got your heart set on one of those
– Special thanks to Rilgon for the contest idea <3 Also:

This might sound funny, but I noticed that a few of the winners from last time’s avatar contest never sent me screenshots of their character after I sent out the post-winner-instructions. It is possible that you forgot, or that my e-mail simply got lost in Junk, etc. Whatever the case, if I owe you an avatar from some point feel free to hook up with me again because the offer doesn’t expire!

Questions/comments/suggestions? Ask away! And good luck to all!

raiding, screenshots

It's About Time…

14 Comments

…that this happened to somehone who isn’t me:

WoW_LoseYourIllusion

Still a hunter though. Bwahaha! We shall take over the world, soon enough.

Note: Cause I know someone’s gonna bring up all the Marksman stuff on my bars: I am experimenting with raiding as Marksman when there’s a ret pally in the group already bringing the 3% damage buff, since it overwrites Ferocious Inspiration anyway. I want to get good with Marksmanship, and then someday, I swear to you, I’ll be good at Survival too… maybe… /bangs head into wall

Uncategorized

An Update

23 Comments

Firstly, I want to thank everyone for all the billions of comments I got on my “Brutal Honesty” post yesterday. It was one of those posts where I basically reached into my inner psyche, pulled something out, threw it at the computer screen and then ran to work as fast as I could since it made me late. I write those sometimes, and I’m never sure how they’re going to turn out, but I’m glad it seemed to strike a chord with so many people.

I do want to make a couple things clear, since I worry I may have caused some confusion.

** I did not “reroll”; I made a new alt. The point of having the alt be a central feature of that article was that said alt was what reminded me why WoW was fun. I have no idea how much this alt will be played. Maybe I’ll player her a lot, and maybe not. Who knows! I had some people concerned that this alt would eventually reach endgame and I’d have the same issue, to which I respond, she’s level 15 and when you take my leveling speed (or uh, major lack thereof) track record into account, I give two years as a rough estimate of when she’ll reach endgame (if it ever happens), so I’ll worry about it then =P

** I don’t really feel too pressured by the blog itself or by my readership or by the shadow of BRK, etc. Oh sure, my closer friends have no doubt heard me gripe about the pressures of sometimes feeling shoehorned into being the new BRK. And there have been times when I’ve wished for the blissful anonymity of my past WoW life. So, I’m not going to deny those pressures are there. They tend to just show up if you are a “bigger blogger”, as was eloquently stated by Rip. But these are only very minor gripes, in the long run. They aren’t what caused me to “snap”. What I was trying to express in that post was that the pressures I was feeling were internal more than external. I am a perfectionist when it comes to certain things (those things do not include the state of my apartment /glances around and coughs) and it happened to come to a head one day. So I wrote about it.

A wiser person than I might say that the internal pressures are the result of external ones, and hey, who knows, they’re probably right. I don’t see a reason to think about it too deeply though. /shrug

** I do think some of the internal pressure is possibly a byproduct of blog growing pains. There are times when I’m not sure what I should write in this blog. See, I know people are going to tell me “Forget about the readers and write what you want to write about”, but I’m really strongly into themes and subject matter and whatnot and even if I didn’t have a single person reading this blog I’d still want it to have a strong theme. That’s just how my mind operates with my creations. I can never tell if this is a hunter blog or a having-fun-with-WoW blog or a personal-anecdotes blog or what. There are even sub-categories within those. I have been called a Beast Mastery specific hunter blog, (although I tend not to like that title), or a hunter blog that focuses on guides, or on the flip side, a hunter blog that focuses on stories. What am I, really?

In the past, I’ve called myself a blog for anyone who has ever rolled a hunter, tamed a pet, shot something with a ranged weapon… and got a little smile on their face for doing so. it’s a broad category, but in the end, I think that’s what I am.

Thus, the question of “what happens if I stop liking hunters?” lurks in the back of my mind because it means I’d have to redo my blog, and my blog is something I take a lot of pride in. Hence the “panic attack” when that question actually seemed to surface the other day. It’s not really the potential to lose readership that I’m worried about (though I do love all your comments), as much as the simple fact that I don’t like breaking my own rules. That’s why I also have a real-life blog and a recently-started Linux blog (which I should really update again) in addition to this one. Everything in its place.

** I still 100% love raiding with my guild and am planning on doing so a lot this weekend. =P I have just never been a raider before so the work involved caught me off-guard. I am determined not to let it burn me out.

** I do dailies because I suck at the Auction House. Not so much because it’s hard, but because I lack the dedication to do all the research and et al. The closest I ever got to “playing the AH” was a brief period where I cornered the minipet market on the neutral AH with Lunapike as a way to make epic flyer money. This provided a small but steady source of income and I’m pretty sure the other people that were also trying to do this hated me because I was always undercutting them. I stopped doing it primarily because it didn’t really interest me. Dailies at least have you flying around and you can level pets and stuff.

As it is now I toss Alchemy stuff onto the AH every so often and call it good.

I still think the depth of the WoW economy pales in comparison to the Neopets economy. Giggle at me all you want; I’m just sayin’ it like it is. =P I spent one whole year restocking and reselling and keeping an eye on market prices, just to reach a single goal. That’s hardcore.

SO! There you go. I just wanted to dissipate some of the concern I was hearing, and approach the story from a more logical standpoint as opposed to the pure emotional one that I poured out on you all the other day.

IN OTHER NEWS:

I am getting close to 400,000 page views. As long-time readers know, I usually hold a contest where people who screenshot the big numbers can get free personalized avatars. I’m hesitant to do it this time, because I’ve run into an issue with getting these avatar prizes done in a timely manner due to how busy I am all the time now, and it makes me feel bad (this applies to all the e-mails I get as well, I swear I do read them all!) So if you have any ideas for a different sort of prize, I’m all ears and open to suggestions!

As always, thank you all for being a reader. Why anyone reads my rambles, I have no idea, but it has enriched my life and I hope I’ve enriched yours a little <3 /ramble-off

alts, screenshots, thoughts

Brutal Honesty

56 Comments

Is it possible to love something too much? Perhaps. I’ll tell you my story…

I have this tendency to crash and burn on things, and WoW is no exception. I pretty much hit rock bottom the other day. See, I love raiding with my guild. A loooot. But because I wanted to be able to contribute, I probably went way overboard. Suddenly, my days were concerned with stuffing them full of heroics on both my hunter and druid so I could get badges for gear. Suddenly I was doing tons of dailies every day on two characters, to be able to fund flasks, repairs, new gems and enchants and the like. Suddenly I was an unwilling slave to Recount, not because of outside pressures so much as because of my own impossibly high standards for myself.

And suddenly I snapped.

I logged on to grudgingly do dailies the other day and was invited to Onyxia 10. My DPS was absolutely atrocious. Later I found out it was because my pet’s special attacks all decided to turn themselves off, but it took me a while to realize that, and I felt useless.

I had this growing desire to just shut the game off and not worry about it anymore, but I was scared to accept this, because I’m a blogger right? And I love hunters right? It terrified me to think that I wasn’t having fun anymore.

In desperation I threw a bunch of gold at the hunter trainers in the Dwarven District for a respec. Contrary to popular belief, I actually like all the hunter specs (not just Beast Mastery), and I have this secret dream to become really good at all of them. So, hoping a change of pace would fix things, I spec’d Survival, went to the training dummies, and discovered that I still stink at it. It just feels relentlessly clunky and there’s no rhythm to it. Frustrated that there is some aspect of hunters that I am not good at, since I am a perfectionist, I switched over to Marksmanship, which is as fun as ever, but even that couldn’t salvage anything. I spec’d back to Beast Mastery and then logged off as fast as I could, terrified by that feeling growing inside of me…

“This isn’t fun.”

I went and read a book for a while. Then I played Nintendo DS. Then I played Megaman 2. Comfort food. I didn’t let myself think about WoW. I was scared of what it might mean.

Then I went out to buy some ice cream. See, I am basically to ice cream what a foodie is to cuisine. Unfortunately my freezer doesn’t work very well at the moment, which is torture and means that I cannot keep my own ice cream unless I want it to turn into a soggy melted mess. But I really needed some ice cream, so I went out and bought some. The plan was to watch a movie while I ate when I got back.

But something was calling me…

See, a couple weeks back, I randomly made this gnome warlock. I’m not sure why. I’d made warlocks in the past and always quit when I discovered that they weren’t anything like hunters. I’d find out my imp was a failure tank, and so I’d quit. But something had me making a warlock, and I lavished her with gifts like the heirloom shoulders my druid had used for so long, plus an heirloom trinket and an heirloom staff enchanted with +30 spellpower.

And once I’d realized and accepted from the start that Warlock does not equal Hunter, running her around Elwynn Forest and Westfall had been… the most refreshingly fun thing I’d done in WoW in a really long time.

So I thought about it a little.

Then logged into her.

TawbreeAndFriends

Suddenly, I didn’t have to worry about Recount anymore. Suddenly I didn’t have to worry about dailies. Suddenly I didn’t have to worry about badges. I didn’t have to worry about being a perfectionist with talents and rotation, since I had no idea what I was doing, and that was okay. All I had to worry about was how long I could /dance before Curse of Agony, Immolate, Corruption, and my voidwalker destroyed all the Defias in Moonbrook. This was followed by /giggles, because the gnome giggle is adorable. It was really fun. It was me and my blueberry vs. the world, discovering things at our own pace, the same way it had been with Tawyn and Tux two and a half years ago.

You’re wondering why I’m posting this, perhaps. It’s probably more for my sake than for yours. For a while, I was denying that I could even have fun playing anything else other than my hunter(s) and then my tree druid(s). But mostly, I think I wouldn’t let myself. Well… screw that.

I’m Pike, and I’m a gnome warlock. So there.

To those of you wondering if this is the End of the Blog as We Know It… no, I don’t think it is. I still have huntery stuff in Drafts, and I still plan on raiding on my hunter (though I think a break is in store, shortly), and writing about that, although I no longer want it to consume my WoW life, simply because “I’m a hunter blogger”.

So we’ll see how things go…

fun

And Now For a Random, Awesome Aside

17 Comments

Like many blogs, I have the mouseover WoWHead links enabled. This allows you to see the details of what items/talents/abilities/glyphs/etc. I am referring to by simply mousing over linked text.

Examples:

Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle is the sexiest ranged weapon in the game.

Medivh is roughly as hot as Mega Man. (hint: I’m not being sarcastic.)

My Hunter’s Mark is bound to my pet attack via a macro, which makes the hunters in my guild with Improved Hunter’s Mark and Glyph of Hunter’s Mark want to hurl things at me.

And so on.

“Pike… duh” you are probably telling me.

But did you know that you can link to CHARACTERS as well?

Check this out:

My “main” is Tawyn. I also have a resto druid named Tamaryn and a Tauren Hunter named Lunapike.

And all sorts of other alts.

My boyfriend hasn’t played in a long time, though.

But yeah, the point is…

IS THIS NOT THE COOLEST THING OF ALL TIME?

It’s really easy to do it, too. Just go to WoWHead Profiles and look yourself up, then link to yourself.

I am doing this for the rest of my blog’s existence. Just a heads-up. >_>

alts, druid, screenshots

Faster, Healbot, Faster!

8 Comments

Back in the day, when my druid was level 55 or so, and my boyfriend would drag me around with his warlock, he’d do this thing where he’d Life Tap dangerously low and then say “FASTER, HEALBOT, FASTER!” as I spammed heals and tried to keep up with him.

Ya know, several months later, and I still hear it in the back of my mind sometimes…

WoW_TamarynChampionFrozenWastes

Lemme tell ya, it’s weird to have “Champion of the Frozen Wastes” floating above a certain character’s head when you still feel like a noob to that particular class.

Not to mention:

WoW_TamarynUlduarAntechamber

My alt is in Ulduar. That may not be a big deal to some of you, but it’s fantastically surreal to me.

(Nothing dropped, of course, but hey.)

guides, raiding

Pike's SuperQuick Guide to Huntering Onxyia

11 Comments

OnyxiaMG

Phase One: Don’t stand behind her! Stand off to her side or something. Misdirect onto the tank. Pewpew!

Phase Two: Onyxia will be in the air, so you can keep shooting her, although your pet won’t be able to reach her. What I’ll typically do here is stick my pet on the “large adds” that show up every once and a while.

Whelps will show up every so often. Once the offtank has a firm grasp on them, Volley to your heart’s content. If your computer is slowish, do not look at the resulting AoE. (You’ll thank me later).

Every so often, Onyxia will do a Deep Breath. You’ll know cause it’ll say “Onxyia takes a deep breath…” This, roughly translated, means “Don’t stand in front of her or you will die.” I’ve found that your best bet here is usually to just get out of the middle and run to the side, as it is surprisingly difficult to keep track of where she is when she’s flying around.

Phase Three: Your pet can attack Onyxia again– yay! Back to a tank and spank, except that Onyxia has this annoying tendency to toss fears around like no tomorrow. Bestial Wrath (and presumably things like the PvP trinket, etc.) will get you out of it, but it won’t be off cooldown nearly enough to save you from all of them. Just grit your teeth and bear it, and don’t stand too close to the whelp caves on the side, lest you are feared into it.

Phase Four: Loots! Whee!

—

I got a gun out of Onyxia-10 a few days back, which means for the first time since Naxx10, I have a non-sucky ranged weapon. Still holding out for the 25-man version, but this will work nicely in the meantime. I think my favorite part about the new gun is how plain-looking it looks from a distance, although it has some nice little details on it if you zoom in. In the plainness is the beauty, I think. I rolled on some epic crossbow in ToC25 but I’m kind of glad I didn’t win it, my plain lil’ gun is better aesthetically. /huggles it

pets, Uncategorized

Use Your Pet

40 Comments

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently both in game and as anecdotes on other blogs: hunters that aren’t using their pets. At all. Like, they don’t even summon them.

Okay guys, here’s the deal. I know that 99.999% of you are Marskman or Survival right now, but even so, you can’t afford to not have your pet out.

“But Pike, his DPS sucks!”

I asked some people on Twitter how much DPS their pet contributes in a raid setting. Here were some of the responses I got:

TheAllianceGuy (Marksman): “Above 1000 at least”
T_Jazz (Marksman/Survival): “the hundreds”
tchann (Beast Master): “40+ percent of 5k dps”
shizukera (Beast Master): “I can’t give you a number, but it hurts like hell when my pet dies”
jayesh (MM/SV, depending on fight): “16-23 percent. varies from fight to fight”
ILikeBubbles (Beast Master): “I think mine is…800/900ish DPS?”
dhollinger (Survival): “Rough estimate? My ulduar geared SV hunter’s wolf does ~450-500 from what I remember”
shieldbreakr (Survival): “536dps in my raid last night in my 25man naxx pug. I did 4132dps, he did 536. I use cats”
Eidtalheg (Survival): “my average pet (wolf) dps is ~730.”

The awesometacular Anna of Too Many Annas sent me some raid info from Totally Raids, Inc, on Feathermoon. Here is what she sent me:

First 3/4 of Ulduar + VoA Clear
Surv Hunter Pet – Cat – 950 DPS, 3.3 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Moth – 900 DPS, 3 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Wolf – 920 DPS, 2.5 mil damage

Yogg, Ony, VoA, ToC Normal –
Surv Hunter Pet – Cat – 850 DPS, 2.2 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Moth – 800 DPS, 1.9 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Wolf – 650 DPS, 1.5 mil damage
Marks Hunter Pet – Cat – 750 DPS, 1.5 mil damage

It’s worth noting that the marks hunter, whose pet is at the bottom of the chart, had never seen Yogg-Saron before (he’s our “sometimes” hunter, and we’ve not been doing Yoggy a lot), so he’s got a bit of a gear disparity from the other three!

Last half of ToC plus 11 wipes on Heroic Northrend Beasts
Surv Hunter Pet – Cat – 950 DPS, 2 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Wolf – 700 DPS, 1.3 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Wolf – 1000 DPS, 1.1 mil damage

Extremely variable numbers as you can see, and I know this is dependent on things like gear, level of content, group makeup, etc. But look at even some of the low-end numbers from Twitter and tell me that’s not helpful. Would you say no to a free 400 DPS? And check out some of the stuff Anna is doing– those pets are doing twice that! If you’re min/maxing your gear and your spec, why would you say no to using a pet?

“But Pike, I can’t keep him alive, I’m not BM like you!”

There seems to be this weird misconception floating around the blogosphere and the WoWosphere in general that raid-spec’d BM pets are magically much easier to keep alive and/or are better tanks than non-BM pets. Here’s the deal, I could spec for pet survivability, but I don’t, because I spec for DPS. The only things my pet has that yours probably doesn’t, from a standpoint of pet survivability, is one extra point in Wild Hunt, one extra point in Bloodthirsty, and one point in Improved Mend Pet. Possibly one point in Endurance Training, if you are Survival and don’t have it. That’s it. (I don’t count Improved Revive Pet because that is assuming your pet is already dead, and we’re talking about keeping him alive.)

This means my pet has a little more stamina than yours, and a slightly greater chance to regenerate a minute amount of life in combat. Improved Mend Pet is extremely situational– it’s helpful on Heigan and that’s about it.

If I can keep my pet alive, you can too. It just involves some situational awareness and a Mend Pet keybind.

“But Pike, this is [Insert Some Ridiculously Pet-Unfriendly Boss Here]”

Now, believe me, I know that some fights are a royal pain in the butt in terms of pet survivability. I understand that not all fights are created equal.

So keep your pet by your side.

Most Marksmanship builds include 2/2 Focused Fire, which is free DPS just for having your pet there.

And on top of that, a good number of you are using a wolf right now. I don’t, myself, partially because I like other pets better, partially because my stable is full, and partially because I’m a stubborn idiot making a stand against what I see as an unfair pet status quo. But guys, the wolf is free DPS just from standing there because of Furious Howl.

“But Pike, he dies on Mimiron anyway, even if he’s standing by my side!”

Yeah, I know >.> We won’t talk about Mimiron. /cough

“But Pike, it’s just a couple hundred DPS.”

And yet that new piece of gear you are drooling over will get you what, like, 15 DPS?

And what about those 1% boss fight wipes? Betcha wish you’d had a couple hundred extra DPS there.

In Conclusion:

You have no reason to not have your pet at least out and summoned. It’s free DPS. And besides which, look at your favorite pet’s face. Go on, do it.

Who could say no to a face like that? >.>

Pet control is vital, in my opinion, to all hunter specs. It’s part of what makes you a hunter. It’s part of what makes our class difficult to play, regardless of what other classes may occasionally think or rib us about. Because when the raid leader says that “ranged has to do this and melee has to do that”, we have to listen to both those things because part of us– our pet– is in fact melee.

We are the ones who have to make sure our pet is not DPS’ing the same lasher as we are on Freya.

We are the ones who have to make sure our pet is DPSing the big add on Onyxia while we focus on whelps or Onyxia herself.

No other class has to worry about this kind of thing, except maybe demonology warlocks (and Unholy Death Knights..?). It’s a big responsibility.

And spec’ing MM or SV doesn’t automatically clear you from that pet responsibility. That arrived when you chose to roll a hunter. If you want to be the best hunter you can be, that includes your pet. You’re both in this together.

To mangle a quote by a toy cowboy, “Pets. If you don’t have one, get one!”

Everyday I'm Huntering