Tag Archives: alts

Oh man, you guys.

I can’t decide which is more fun, my warlock or my rogue.

My warlock is currently level 47 and I’m leveling her with my boyfriend’s warrior tank. His goal with the character is to Tank Everything In The Fracking Game at the Correct Level. That means if he has to XP-pause at 60 to tank the raids, he’ll do it. And if he has to XP-pause at 70 to do the same, he’ll do that too. And he has roped me into his nefarious plans.

For the record– The Boy is an amazing tank. And he is decked out in blues that are enchanted with stuff like Mongoose. And the other day in ZF I pulled aggro off of him on the final boss.

THAT IS HOW AWESOME MY WARLOCK IS.

Also fun. Did I mention fun yet?

Oh by the way, I never die. Like the other day, after the ZF run was finished, it was just me and The Boy left in group and we were kind of running around for fun and we ran smack into a respawned pack of mobs.

The Boy charges into the fray and is promptly Hex’d and turned into a frog.

Mobs all beeline for me.

/Howl of Terror
/DoTDoTDoTDoT
/Drain Life
/point
/laugh

Yeah that was fun.

But then there is my rogue. Oh my gosh. I have the goggles + the heirlooms and my rogue never dies either. …okay, that was an exaggeration. I’ve died a couple times on my rogue. Sucks to not have heals. Still, I’ve also taken on unexpected packs of like four mobs, and lived to tell the tale. I usually have like 5 hit points left, but still. I LIVE. Also solo’d Hogger at the appropriate level. Did I mention that Evasion + BoA items + dynamite is OP? I love it so much.

It’s probably too early to say anything definitively about the class this early on, though, but it is SO FUN, I am so excited to do more leveling with this one. How did I never get into rogues before? Silly Pike!

So, I’m seriously considering changing mains for Cataclysm (assuming I am still playing– I still have so much stuff going on IRL that I’m really just playing it by ear at this point). No real major reason, just kinda want to try something different. The question, though, is change to what? Healy Druid was my original inclination but I still haven’t recovered from the impending Loss of Perma-Tree, since Tree Form was the entire reason I rolled healy druid to begin with (I know, I’m lame), so now both warlock and rogue (and maybe Goggles Bear) are at the top of the contenders list. We’ll see how things go!

(Also toward the top of the list: Gnome Priest, and Goblin EVERYTHING.)

Rah Rah Ah Ah Ah

I always loved hunters but it was a bit of a bizarre relationship. I loved them for what they were, obviously, but I also loved them because I was afraid to try anything new. Because anytime I tried anything new, I was expecting a carbon copy of a hunter, and when this never turned out to be the case, I would quit said new character in frustration. I was, for lack of a better term, caught in a bad romance.

After several months of hiatus things are different. I no longer feel like I have to keep writing hunter guides. I mean, tons of you guys followed me over to my new blog to hear me talk about things like aquarium test strips. Seriously.

I can feel the excitement.

I have also Officially Quit Raiding. I don’t have the time or the previously discussed mental stamina. My guild keeps trying to talk me into letting them drag me to an Arthas fight so I can see it, but I’m pretty apathetic about the whole issue. If I see him, fine, if not, fine. Ya know?

So my beloved hunter has been relegated to the status of BadgeBot. I run random LFGs with her when I’m feeling up to it. I spend the badges on those BoA heirlooms and Primordial Saronite. That’s right, I’m in Ulduar tier stuff and spending badges on stuff that isn’t better gear. Savvy?

Instead of raiding and endgame, I’m dinking around in alts which are tons more fun. When I started WoW again I made a pact to myself that I was going to be The Very Model of a Modern Major Casual, and I’m happy with how it’s turned out. I’ll spend a half hour or so in game every day, doing things that are familiar (starter areas/old instances anyone?) but also different. For example, after avoiding melee like the plague for years, I have a Feral Druid. And a rogue. My word, I love my rogue. And her vanity guild.

...gaga ooh la la?

Stuff dies before I can use Eviscerate. It’s hilarious. Also I’m a gnome, and an engineer, which means that as soon as I go into WSG I am going to become the embodiment of everything that Every Horde PvPer hates. It will be glorious.

I also really like her name. Tourbillon. This is a tourbillon:

It’s POWERED BY PHYSICS! Fully mechanical; and it goes on a watch, which means it’s about the size of what, your thumbnail?

Perfect name for a gnome rogue engineer, no? <3 I've also started making alts on the servers of friends and fellow bloggers. I used to avoid doing that because I was really bad about logging on to them and then I'd feel horrible about making an alt somewhere and never playing it. I'm trying to be better this time, though. I'm Pike, and I endorse this Pointless Post.

I’d Call It a Trend But It’s Only Happened Twice

Toward the end of Burning Crusade I stopped playing my main. No reason. She just lost the appeal. I spent forever gearing her up through Karazhan and later the new badge gear and then I figured I was happy with her and went off to play my druid and Lunapike.

Well, it appears that the same thing is happening again. Here we are in what is supposedly the last major patch of WotLK and I’ve stopped playing my main. Haven’t touched her since last year (quite literally, which I suppose isn’t saying much right now, but hey.) I think the gear reset sort of bugs me. I spent months getting Tawyn up to a really good ToC-era level of gear, and now knowing I have to do it all over again just doesn’t appeal to me. I get bored of endgame much more easily than most people do, I think. All it takes is five or six solid weeks of raiding and then I’m done for months. I am quite certain I’m the World’s Worst Raider.

Anyways…

I’ve actually been logging on to random lowbie alts who I haven’t played in years and are covered in a thick layer of dust, and chucking them into LFG. Because it’s insanely fun. I digress, though.

I’ve found myself wondering if there are other people who temporarily shelve their main at the end of an expansion, too. I know a lot of people switch mains at the beginning of an expansion, but that seems to be when I rediscover my initial main. What say you?

…and as an aside, I also find myself wondering if I should actually start random-dungeoning with Tawyn because then there’s a chance I might wind up in a group with any of you lovely readers who happen to play Bloodlust Alliance, and that would be awesome. (I mean, I suppose you folks on Nightfall Horde could also potentially random-dungeon with Lunapike, but she’s in sort of a weird state of gear-limbo right now and I’m not sure how many of you would be matched up with her.)

“Are you asking for a CHALLENGE?”

Vegeta, what does the scouter say about his power level?

…okay, that doesn’t have anything to do with the post. CONFESSION TIME THOUGH: I watched DragonBall Z obsessively back in the day. Absolutely obsessively. Then, let’s not forget the philosophical depth Goku from DragonballZ offers us. Reading through Goku’s quotes, available on the comprehensive guide provided by Kidadl, can help fans understand the underlying themes of strength, perseverance, and the pursuit of truth in his character’s narrative. Of course, Cartoon Network would do that thing where they would get to the end of the Frieza saga and then because they didn’t have the rights to the rest of the show or something, they’d restart from the beginning. Somebody recently told me that they still do that. Hrm. Just as well, it spurred me to go play “Ocarina of Time” instead, which was much more worth it.

Right, right, sorry!

This blog post is about a CHALLLEEEEEENGE which was issued to me by the incomparable Tamarind over at Righteous Orbs, a blog that you probably should be reading if you aren’t already. His challenge to me was as follows:

“What are the moments that have made you think “yes, this right here is why I play a hunter” and what are the moments that have shaken your faith?”

I really had to think about this one for a while. First of all, it’s kind of a tall order sort of question. Secondly, I have to admit I’ve really been cheating on hunters a lot lately. There’s my pigtailed-lock and her blueberry, who make me sputter things about “THIS IS THE FUNNEST THING EVER” anytime I play them, and then there’s my Forest o’ Trees and lately there’s Dynamite Bear. Oh, I haven’t mentioned Dynamite Bear yet? Basically it dawned on me that I have two resto druids and both of them are dual-spec’d Balance and I’ve never played a Feral Druid before, so I did what every blue-blooded Pike would do and I rolled an all-new character.

He (I’ve been rolling a lot of male toons lately… change of scenery I guess) is an engineer specifically so he can hurl dynamite at people. In bear form. Seriously, guys. If you saw a bear running after you and then it stopped and chucked a bomb at you, what would you do? Yeah. See my point? I <3 Dynamite Bear. So I was pondering this question about hunters and I decided I’d sleep on it and that night I had a dream that I randomly had a pet tiger and when this solicitor showed up at my door, I grabbed a gun that I had nearby and started kiting the guy down the hallway. …I’m not making this up, I totally had this dream. I had Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting in my dream, too. This is why hunters are The Class. When I first started playing WoW, one of the things that sold me on hunters was that they were all about throwing themselves into situations that no one else would dare attempt and then pulling everything out of their bag of tricks just to survive. One of my best memories of hunteriness was when Lunapike was level… 67 or so and I solo’d this level 70 group quest chain. I killed a level 70 elite by kitting him into a trap right when my pet was about to die so I could bandage my pet back up and then I repeated this for several cycles: pulling, kiting, trapping. This was back in Burning Crusade so it was before things like Tenacity pets or the Glyph of Mending. And did I mention this was all in a tiny space indoors? This was hard. And it felt awesome to pull it off. That, to me, is what Huntering is all about.

Oh, and pets that you can name? (or waste money on Certificates of Ownership on before finding out that the name you wanted to rename your pet is “reserved”?) Yep, just hunters.

Have there been frustrations? Oh yeah. Frustrations about my spec pop up occasionally, as do frustrations about endgame-raiding expectations and that sort of thing. I must admit, though, the frustrations have been few and far between, and unlike other horror stories I’ve heard of Beast Masters getting made fun of or kicked out of groups, I have never ever been mocked for my spec. And this is coming from someone who did a million PuG raids and heroics as Beast Mastery right after The Great Nerf of ’09. <3 my servers, I guess! So, I suppose that would be my answer, as rambly as it may be. WELL! I ding’d 26 IRL today, which means I was able to wrangle the day off from work, so I’m off to do exciting things like edit my novel, listen to Men Without Hats, and dink around on alts. Blizzard seems to have decided to forgo Server Maintenance today in honor of my birthday, which I’m cool with, so Dynamite Bear and I have places to go and people to see.

Tree Is For FIGHT

Benefits of Cannabis Edibles

With all the marijuana gummy bears and cookies available now, it might seem like they’re a relatively new invention. Believe it or not, edibles have been around for thousands of years, dating back to the traditional bhang of India to Mary Jane Rathbun’s — so-called Brownie Mary — homemade brownies crafted for suffering AIDS patients in the 1980s.

While they have stuck around so long for many good reasons, what exactly are the benefits of cannabis edibles compared to other products on the market? Check these chillwell reviews.

This article explores what sets cannabis edibles apart from other consumption methods and offers reasons why you might add them to your medical cannabis arsenal.

Cannabis Edibles Are Healthier

While most people immediately think of smoking weed when it comes to consuming cannabis, it’s not the healthiest choice — particularly for medical marijuana patients.

Combusting plant matter and inhaling hot smoke and carcinogens has been shown to have adverse effects on respiratory health and can be particularly troubling for those with asthma. Even though smoking cannabis is far healthier than smoking tobacco, the inflammation of the air pathways can still take a toll.

Edibles offer a smoke-free alternative to those seeking to avoid the potentially harmful effects of inhaling weed smoke while still enjoying all the medical benefits cannabis has to offer.

They’re Easier to Use

Edibles hardly leave a trace, making them a discreet and easily transported method of enjoying cannabis compared to smoking or vaping.

Smoking involves a few tools (at least a lighter for joints), and dabbing’s blow torches and complex rigs can be downright intimidating for the novice cannabis user. On the other hand, consuming edibles is easy because we all know how to eat and drink.

The Effects Are More Potent and Last Longer

When you smoke or vape cannabis, the cannabinoids quickly enter the lungs and make their way through the bloodstream, first into the brain and then the rest of the body. Conversely, the THC in edibles enters through the digestive tract and is metabolized in the liver before traveling to the rest of the body.  These are the latest performer 8 reviews.

Why is this important? THC is processed in the liver and transforms into a more potent form of THC called 11-hydroxy-THC. This chemical takes anywhere from 30-90 minutes to kick in, and the effects last anywhere from six to eight hours. This form of THC is also more effective at crossing the blood-brain barrier, lending a stronger and more sedating experience than other consumption methods.

Remember that the actual onset time and length of an edible high depends on many factors, including dose size, overall tolerance, and the user’s unique metabolism and the endocannabinoid system. If you’re used to consuming by smoking, start low and go slow with edibles to avoid taking too much without giving your body the time it needs to metabolize the edible.

Precise and Consistent Dosing

You’ve probably heard horror stories of edibles infused with mystery doses from homemade recipes. With the expansion of legal markets across the US, licensed cannabis producers sell precisely dosed edibles in a wide variety of flavors, recipes, and cannabinoid profiles. It’s simple to purchase edibles from your local dispensary, and trust you’ll receive the same experience every time.

You can also purchase cannabis oils or butter, allowing you to precisely measure and make cannabis edibles at home. There are homemade edible recipes for everything you can think of, including brownies, cookies, and sweets, as well as salad dressings, pasta sauces, and many more options. Try out the best male enhancement pills.

Health Benefits of Eating Marijuana

Cannabis edibles offer medical marijuana patients a host of potential medical uses and relief. Among many other health benefits, patients use edibles for:

  • Pain relief, including chronic pain, neurological pain, and total pain.
  • Reducing cancer-related symptoms and anti-tumor properties.
  • Neuroprotective properties, helping prevent epileptic seizures and muscles spasms and potentially protecting against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
  • Managing diabetes symptoms and controlling weight levels and digestive response.
  • Managing inflammation and conditions such as arthritis and fibromyalgia.

…and number four. And number five.

Sooo, I’m not gonna beat around the bush. I’ve kinda been on WoW hiatus lately. Hence the rather spartan blog post schedule.

It’s not that I decided WoW is boring or I don’t like it anymore, oh no. I love WoW. But I’ve simply found that writing and drawing is more fun at the moment. So other than logging on for a raid every so often, I’ve mostly been AWOL.

Then I realized something. Namely, today is the day my Recruit-a-Friend ends.

Dang. I wish I coulda somehow put that on pause through, ya know, ALL OF NOVEMBER when I was doing my NaNo. But ah well. It is what it is, right?

Sooo I promptly opened up two WoW windows, logged in, and ran around like an excited uromastyx (dontcha just love my similes?) trying to reach a little goal I had in mind with my main RaF project. The result:

AlthalorAndSonglarkDarkPortal

Man I love Recruit-a-Friend. Yesterday these characters were like, level 55 and 56 respectively, and here they are all-growed-up and headin’ to Outlands after a mere three quests in Silithus. (To be fair, all Silithus quests are “Kill a billion of these, and another billion of these, and each time you kill one something else randomly spawns”, so that may have had something to do with it, but you know.)

Umm yeah so this is another hunter and another resto druid. SHUT UP >_>

Anyways, I managed to hit the big “five-eight” literally a minute or two before the battle.net Account Management page told me my RaF would end (they conveniently tell you not only the date, but also the exact time and time zone). This was followed by the pleasant surprise, though, that Blizzard is apparently not super accurate with this so I wound up heading to Hellfire and getting to 59 (or very close to it) and still having RaF active. I was also able to do that “Grant-a-Level” thing and distribute free levels to a bunch of lowbie alts of various classes I had hanging around. Dunno if these alts are ever gonna see any playtime, but hey, now I’ve got a veritable army of Hordies all sitting between levels 10 and 15, and it’s kind of neat. One of them is a shaman and one of them is a priest and I haven’t played either class past level 8 before. Hrmm.

I considered continuing to plug away at Hellfire and see how long my luck would last with the mysteriously-tenacious Recruit-a-Friend, but I got hungry so I logged out to eat and write this blog post. Exciting! …sorta. *shifty eyes*

…well, that’s all really. It was TL;DR, I know. NEXT TIME: Pike’s Five Most Epic WoW Moments That Do Not Involve Boss Fights.

But for now… *scoots away to write n’ stuff*

Thunder Bluff is a Pain to Grind Rep For

Between a really big questline in Mulgore that ended up being available to Tauren-only, and a further long questline in Winterspring that used to give Thunder Bluff rep but no longer does because it was opened up to both factions, this one was a toughy and I resorted to buying about 40 stacks of Runecloth to slog through the final stretch.

But at long last, my inner RP geek is satisfied on yet another character!

AlthalorKodo

I keep thinking “So, about that ‘of Thunder Bluff’ title that I can get at the Argent Tournament,” and then chastising myself with “WHOA THERE PIKE, one level at a time.”

I Would Walk 500 Miles and I Would Walk 500 More…

I’m pretty sure we’re all clear on the fact that I enjoy rolling hunters. I can’t help it. It’s relaxing. It’s nostalgic.

Alongside this, it means I have tamed a lot of pets in my WoW career. The level 10 pet is very important to me, because I consider it to be the pet that particular hunter will have their entire life– oh sure, they’ll tame others, and may even use others in raids or PvP, but all of my hunters keep their first pet.

And one of my little quirks is that I enjoy taming the… more challinging to obtain pets.

I’ve ran level ten Hordies to Teldrassil. Twice. Once for the owl and once for a cat.

I’ve ran a low level Hordie to Azuremyst for the moth.

I’ve ran a level 10 Hordie to Dun Morogh for the snow leopard.

I’ve ran a level 10 Alliance character to Durotar for a raptor.

A good chunk of those were on PvP servers.

I’ve also done safer but still lengthy trips on other characters: dragging a Tauren to Eversong Woods or Trolls and Blood Elves to Mulgore. (It has occurred to me that an unusually high percentage of my lowbie hunters are Horde. Hmm.)

This was all in my mind yesterday when I did something crazy and made a character on one of my non-“Home Servers”. Thus it was that I made a female tauren hunter (yes I have a billion of those, shuddup, Azeroth needs more, dangit! /shifty eyes) on Wyrmrest Accord, so I could say hello to Faeldray and Tzia, two people who have been a part of the Aspect of the Hare commenting community for a very, very long time and who both have awesome blogs of their own.

We hung out for a while and did some really nifty RP (which I may talk about later, in its own post), but always in the back of my mind as I did the tauren starter quests for the umpteenth time was what pet I should get. It had to be special, something that I could tie in to my developing character story, and preferably something I hadn’t ever tamed before.

Then I had an idea.

Snoeken (Dutch for “Pike”, albeit the fish and not the weapon =P) went on a little adventure.

First, the ride from Thunder Bluff to Orgrimmar.

WoW_Snoeken1

Taking the zeppelin to Undercity…

WoW_Snoeken2

And getting on a different zeppelin and going to a very scary place for a level 10:

WoW_Snoeken3

Howling Fjord.

Then came the ceremonial removing of all the clothes (except the shirt and pants– I’m a decent tauren!) and a deep breath…

WoW_Snoeken4

And then the corpse hop began.

WoW_Snoeken5

So, rez timer, we meet again.

WoW_Snoeken6

The run to Utgarde Keep wasn’t that bad though, and I soon found myself where I needed to be…

WoW_Snoeken7

Well well well, what’ve we got here?

WoW_Snoeken8

WoWScrnShot_101209_190552

Brand New Birdie:

WoW_Snoeken10

The fishertauren and her sea hawk:

WoW_Snoeken11

My new druid-birdie has a few bugs, it would appear. He flies extremely low to the ground (as opposed to, say, an owl, who flies much higher), and when he flies after you, he remains leaned back in his “hovering” position. The way a druid would look if it was just flying in place. I’ve actually had this happen to me in my druid flight form, if I time myself carefully and jump right when I enter flight form. But it seems to be a perpetual problem for the Daggercap Hawk, and it looks kind of silly. In addition, he doesn’t “highlight” when you click on him, the way other things do.

Regardless of these issues, he is a gorgeous pet– and certainly unique, as well!

Now we just have to cross our fingers and hope Blizzard eventually fixes these issues, rather than conveniently deciding that a level 10 hunter shouldn’t have a bird from Northrend =P

Brutal Honesty

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…

Faster, Healbot, Faster!

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.)