screenshots

Guys…

8 Comments

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

Uncategorized

In Which Pike Deviates From Her Usual Positive Outlook…

17 Comments

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.)

stories, thoughts

Give a hunter a fish…

6 Comments

…and he can feed his cat once. Teach him to fish, and he can feed his cat for a lifetime!

…okay, so that’s not really how the saying goes, but I’m sure you’ve all heard it and know what it means.

I am here to talk about why I blog about hunters, and why I make “hunter kindergarten” posts, and things like that.

I try my best to write readable and easily-understandable Hunter How-To Posts because I think that there is a very big category of hunters out there that fall between the category of “good hunter” and “huntard.” These are the people that are spec’d something cookie-cutter like 41/20/0, have gear that is at least mostly correct (no spell hit gems or shammy gear *shudder* … but maybe going too overboard with one stat or something), and yet do not know why they are doing these things.

I have been in heroics with hunters who show up with a solid spec and a solid set of gear and then they start tossing random Aimed Shots into their non-existent rotation and Serpent Sting stuff they should be trapping. I’ve seen hunters that use the Auto/Steady macro and have no idea WHY it does so much DPS, they just know that it DOES, so they spam it, maybe with a bow that is several speeds too slow.

Now do I have anything against these hunters? Of course not, I was there once too, and I’m sure I’m still there in some aspects. That is why I write what I write, and that is why I advocate hunters learning to weave their shots manually before switching to the macro (if they choose to do so)… because it’s all about the foundation.

I’ll never forget how surprised I was one day when this story happened: I popped into game and four of my guildies were in a Heroic. I asked who the fifth member was, and they said a PuG’d hunter. I asked how the hunter was doing (I tend to ask that… I’m curious), but instead of the typical answers, which are always either “He sucks” or more often “He’s okay, but…[something]”, they told me “She’s actually really good.”

I got into Ventrilo and popped into their channel just to listen in, and chat a little. I had just got my Choco-Bow and mentioned how fluid it made my shot rotations, and the PuG’d hunter said “Hey, what shot rotation do you use, if you don’t mind me asking?”

… /blinkblink

Another hunter was actually asking me about shot rotations. And we actually had an intelligent hunter conversation about them.

MADNESS, I tell you!

That’s never happened to me before outside of blogs. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me in game and ask me for shot rotation advice, which I have always very happily given those who ask… but actually having a little discussion about it was new.

Since then, that incident has stuck in my mind, and it reminds me about why I write. Because incidents like that should not be as rare as they are. I shouldn’t have to be surprised when my guildies say they PuG’d not just an okay hunter, but a very good one. I shouldn’t have to be taken aback when somebody wants to discuss shot rotations with me.

I’m part of the “WoW Noobs” community over at Livejournal, where I can give advice to newer players (Heck, if you look back far enough, you can find a level 20 me asking what the meeting stone outside Deadmines is for), and I’ve noticed that new players are attracted to the hunter class like a magnet. This means that we, as hunters, have a big responsibility. Learn why you are spec’d what you are spec’d. Why you’ve picked one talent over another. Learn why your shot rotation is your shot rotation. Then, pass it on.

“But Pike, if everyone is a good hunter, won’t that put you out of a job?” Maybe, but teaching-for-make-benefit-glorious-class-of-hunters is more important. Besides, I seem to have lucked out and I currently hold a monopoly on the hunter class in my guild. It’s true, almost all of the other 70 hunters in my guild either /gquit, permanently started playing non-hunter alts, or disappeared entirely. It’s really kind of odd and I’m not sure whether that’s says good or bad things about me, but… hey. >.>

talents, wrath of the lich king

The Future

6 Comments

Edit: Good news for my non-BM hunter friends, it appears WoWHead was wrong and it has now been fixed… all hunters can get the “final tier” talents now.

WoWHead has the WotLK pet talents up.

See all those lovely talents along the bottom there?

Can’t get ’em unless you’ve got 51 points in Beast Mastery.

I think spec’ing anything OTHER than BM in the expansion would drive my OCD-ness up the wall. “You mean I can’t get those bottom talents for Tux? *claws at desk*”

But on the other hand, I keep looking at the WotLK hunter talent tree and thinking about all the new hybrid possibilities now. I’m talkin’ about the potential to have Serpent’s Swiftness and the Super Trap talents from Survival. Or heck, Serpent’s Swiftness and Trueshot Aura in an unholy union. Or Expose Weakness, Trueshot Aura, Ranged Weapon Specialization, Improved Barrage, and some points in Master Marksman.

Of course, the big question is whether these potential hybrid builds will ever outclass the new talents. But I find it so very, very interesting to think about…

Anyways! I’m sure many of you are sick of hearing about WotLK, and I do find all the news kind of overwhelming myself. So! I will go back to concentrating on playing my current characters and writing about them (as best as I can anyway; I’ve been thinking about the ramifications of having a bunch of out-dated guides on my blog… the good news, though, is that there will always be new hunters who always need Hunter Kindergarten posts. At least, I hope so, between all the Death Knights.)

druid, movies

Foshizzywhatsy?

13 Comments

I have three things of interest to say in this post.

Firstly, this is my 200th blog post. I would wax nostalgic here and give a nice long speech about it, but I’m saving that for my one-year-blogoversary next month! Thank you, though, to all you crazy people that visit here every day.

Secondly, somebody got to my blog via the search term: “warcraft hunters why do you think you’re special?” Well, Googler, the long answer is here. The short answer is “Because we are. Durr.”

Thirdly, something is afoot among the druid community. I did my very best to defend my huntery honor in the Great Foshizzle Debate of 2008, and I maintain that Massive Quantities of Sustained Ranged Foshizzle is how it is best dished. But my level 40 druidling was very impressed by the unification of her fuzzy, feathery, and leafy comrades, so much so that she decided to show her own personal Foshizzleness against the baddest of the baddies: Edwin VanCleef himself. With only a level 11 priest (the alt of another druid, of course) by her side, Tamaryn ventured into that big scary boat and defended her honor.

Bear, Bell, Awlbiste, and all you other druid bloggers out there, this is for you… from the huntard with love.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmlM90fPezE&hl=en&fs=1]

(Disclaimer: if you didn’t understand the last paragraph, it’s okay. /pat)

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

So You Want to Play a Hunter? Part 3

11 Comments

So you’ve hit level 6 and you’ve got Arcane Shot. Great! This will make it easier for you to kill stuff before it gets to you. Now there seems to be some confusion, I think, involving when to use Arcane Shot. In all honesty, I don’t think there is a set “best rotation” for Arcane Shot in the low-levels. But the basics that you want to know is that you don’t want to use it too much, because it will eat up your mana and pull aggro away from your pet pretty easily. It does, however, round out most of the skills you will be using pre-level-62.

Hunter’s Mark is the other thing you learn at level 6. There is some debate over whether Hunter’s Mark is worth the mana. In my mind, it is: it provides a sizable DPS boost (particularly over time), and if you are spec’d for Improved Hunter’s Mark, it boosts your pet’s attack power by a significant amount, too. Think of it this way: if you are a Beast Master or Survival hunter, Improved Hunter’s Mark is basically like your own mini-Trueshot-Aura. And if you are Marksman, it’s more of the goodness! Rank 4 Hunter’s Mark is going to give you an extra 110 AP and the more you shoot it, the higher that bonus rises (for ranged only). Pike’s verdict: learn to use and love Hunter’s Mark.

Typical Lowbie Hunter Rotation:
-Hunter’s Mark
-Serpent Sting Opener
-Auto Shot until the mob is dead, throw in an Arcane Shot every so often to speed things up.

That’s really all there is to it. Before you have a pet, you are most advised to use your Arcane Shot whenever you can, though.

If you are looking into doing more PvP than PvE, Arcane Shot is going to become basically the cornerstone of your life and everything you hold dear, but us more-PvE types typically love our Steady Shot more.

And now you’ve hit level 8. And you’ve got Concussive Shot. Your mission, if you choose to accept it: put your kiting skills to the test and learn how to jump-shot-kite.

Jump Shot Kiting is accomplished by jumping, turning, shooting, and then turning back and landing, while moving. Sound complicated? It is, and it’s difficult at first, but if you practice a little, you will soon have the hang of it. It’s a little hard to describe through writing, so I’ve made a movie:

I don’t know if it is the clearest or most helpful movie, so let me know if you need clarification! Also, I have decided that Hellfire Peninsula is perhaps not the best place to hold many of these videos in the future, because over the overwhelming… red…ness… yeah. Note to self: Nagrand next time.

Well, congratulations, you have (hopefully) mastered the art of playing sans-pet. /diploma

And that’ll do it for this week’s installment of SYWtPaH. (pronounced Suit-paw…? Perhaps!) Be sure to join us next week when we go on a crazy pet-taming adventure!

pets, screenshots

Finally

7 Comments

No really, I was literally having dreams about taming this guy, I was camping for him so much.

Althalor has The Rake, he has Humar, what’s next? Sian-Rotam, of course. I’d love to go for the much lower-level Echeyakee but keeping three pets leveled up with me is simply not gonna happen… two is hard enough as it is, and typically requires forgetting about rested XP for the duration of my hunter career. I… am just that devoted.

I love pets.

I have been watching the new WotLK stuff popping up on Mania’s Arcania with a lot of interest. It looks like I’m going to have two “cunning” pets (Tux and Eltanin) and one “ferocity” pet (Locke). Of course, that fails to account for Exotic Pets which are still a mystery.

Stable slots… it’s all I’m asking for. C’mon Blizz! /beg /cry

alts, wrath of the lich king

Lunch Break

13 Comments

There is nothing more amusing than being in the breakroom at work, eating lunch and minding your own business, and suddenly hearing the girl next to you screech over the phone “I WAS IN THE MOST EPIC ALTERAC VALLEY EVER!”

Ahem.

So the new WotLK hunter talents are supposedly up on WoWHead, if you haven’t heard already. Yeah, I looked at ’em and messed with ’em a little, but you know what? Not only am I still taking the talents with a grain of salt for various reasons, but I have way too much stuff I want to do before the expansion hits to spend too much time worrying about new talents.

I want Tawyn to at least see some Tier 5 content, other than that failed attempt at Hydross, before the expansion hits. Heck, I want Tawyn to see something other than Karazhan. I always feel kind of like a newbie when I’m trying to write about raiding and I’ve never even been to Gruuls/Mags (in all fairness, I’ve tried about a million times, but I seriously jinx Gruuls/Mags and they always fill up or are canceled.)

I want Lunapike to get to level 70 and start tearing up the battlegrounds.

I want Tamaryn to get to level 70 and start Tree’ing it up (I hit 40, by the way, and respec’d Boomkin. WTB Mana Battery, PST.)

Now we get to the secondary projects, which are that I’d like Althalor to tame Humar–been camping out for days now, with no luck thusfar– and start working his way further up the leveling tree, I’d like Songlark to either start leveling seriously or at least hit 19 and become a semi-twink (my definition of a semi-twink: buy decent enough greens at the AH and put cheap enchants on them), and I’d like my dwarfyhuntergirl to start leveling as well.

But as my House-loving boyfriend likes to say, “You can’t always get what you want”, and with my time limited, it’s time to prioritize. Sooo tough to pick from my characters though… I love them all. I do think that Tawyn, Tamaryn, and Lunapike are going to become my primary projects, though.

What do you guys want to accomplish before Wrath of the Lich King?

guides, hunter kindergarten, pets

Pet-Specs

10 Comments

Dear Pike,

I am a level 65 hunter named Syaoken on the server of Shandris. Questing and leveling has been going quite well for me, but, I’ve ran into a small problem… my pet. I tamed a Frostsaber Pridewatcher from Winterspring, her name is Sakura. But, the problem I am having is I don’t know the best way to train her with skills. I don’t know to give her the best stam or best armor. Of course I gave her the highest growl I could and also claw (rank 9). I don’t know if the highest stam, highest armor, or even the resistances, are the most important. I just tried cobra reflexes for the first time and she kills so much faster. But, could you give me your two cents on the matter?

Thank you,

– Syaoken

Heya Syaoken,

The great thing about spec’ing your pet is that a respec is only 10 silver and it resets really quickly. For this reason, many hunters find themselves spec’ing their pet from situation to situation.

This is what I would do in your given situation:

First of all, the active skills. For a cat, I’d say max level Growl, max level Claw, and max level Dash. That is really all you need in terms of the active skills. Growl holds aggro for solo-play, Claw is going to be your focus-dump move, and Dash means you and your pet can kill stuff quicker!

After that, you want the passive skills. Max level Avoidance and Cobra Reflexes are both a must. Avoidance is going to be huge in determining your pet’s survivability and Cobra Reflexes does provide higher DPS overall.

Next is stamina. Max that out because in the long run, Stamina is going to do a lot more in boosting your cat’s survivability than armor will, because armor only protects against physical attacks whereas stamina protects against magical as well.

Now we have a choice, you can dump your remaining points in armor or spread it out over some resistances. Resistances are very good if you know you’re going to be doing a lot of stuff in places with certain types of damage. You can also put some points in resistances and some in armor and it will work out nicely.

This is how I have spec’d my cat Locke for Karazhan/many Outlands heroics:

Growl Rank 8
Dash Rank 3
Claw Rank 9
Avoidance Rank 2
Cobra Reflexes
Great Stamina Rank 11
Natural Armor Rank 3
Arcane Resistance Rank 2
Fire Resistance Rank 2

This uses 349 of his 350 total training points and has worked just fine for me in early raids/heroics.

This is how I often spec Tux, my PvP/solo pet:

Growl Rank 8
Dive Rank 3
Claw Rank 9
Screech Rank 5
Avoidance Rank 2
Cobra Reflexes
Great Stamina Rank 10
Natural Armor Rank 3
Fire Resistance Rank 2
Shadow Resistance Rank 2

Now you will notice that he is a little more complicated because he is an owl, and I’ve taken advantage of that by training him both Claw and Screech. This is because Screech is very handy in soloing and in PvP but on occasion I will take him into an instance and turn on Claw. (While soloing: Growl/Screech/Dive, while PvPing: Screech/Claw/Dive). The Shadow and Fire Resistance is because you run into a lot of warlocks in PvP who like to DoT everything. =P

You will notice I had to sacrifice a point in Great Stamina to make up for Screech; to me, that is okay because owls by default have slightly more health than cats. Plus, I am usually wearing my PvP gear in a PvP situation, so Tux benefits from my additional stamina. But, it’s all a matter of personal preference. Keep in mind that the higher ranked skills cost many more points than the lower ranked ones, so sacrificing the highest rank of something will often get you enough points for something else that you want.

For your Sakura specifically… I would say, first get her Avoidance and Cobra Reflexes, then max out Growl, Dash, and Claw, then max out Great Stamina as much as you can, and then see what you have left and decide whether you want to try and spread the remaining points out through resistances or dump it into Armor.

Again, the great thing about pet-spec’ing is that it’s very flexible and cheap to mess around with it, so experiment and see what works best for you.

Good luck!

-Pike

Reproducing this here because I thought it would make a great guide! I have admittedly edited my reply up a little because I realized that I regrettably sent it on its way with some errors. Good luck to you, Syaoken, and I would check out Petopia and WoWHead’s Pet Training Calculator for more on this topic.

Uncategorized

In Which Pike Goes Hollywood

3 Comments

A couple months back I got an e-mail from somebody telling me he was making a WoW website and would I write up a hunter guide for him, according to his template? I agreed, wrote one up and sent it to him.

I got an e-mail today saying that the site is up.

Lookie lookie: http://projectlore.com/wow-game-guides/classes-and-talent/hunter-guide/

Now I have to admit, I don’t know a whole lot about this site or its project, but it does look like a big deal; a bigger one than I initially thought! I do have a few worries; one is that my guide isn’t as great as it could have been. Reading over it now, there are some things I should have clarified or re-worded. Although, it was admittedly somewhat difficult to write because I was following a strict template. Also, reading over it, I can tell that it was rather condensed from my original guide. Anyways, I hope that I did an okay job (at least enough of an okay job that I don’t sound like a complete huntard), and that people who want some more information on hunters click the little link to me and find their way here, where I can go much more in-depth.

Speaking of which, if you have managed to find your way here from that site… I’m Pike, and I like hunters. And Linux. Nice to meetcha!

I have a Beast Master specific guide that I’m working on for the site, and then I think I’m done with that project. Which I’m actually kind of relieved about, because as fun as it is to see my name attached to a big ol’ shiny website like that, it simply does not compare to writing freely in the more intimate environment that is my blog. Where you guys can read it. /nod <3cha all by the way!

Everyday I'm Huntering