I lost myself somewhere…

I forgot why I play World of Warcraft. I got so caught up in wanting to hit 80 as fast as possible, that I forgot this was about having fun. I got so upset watching my best friend’s smoke as he breezed through levels with a buddy of his and feeling left behind that I couldn’t cheer him on and be happy as he gets close to hitting 80.

I woke up this morning and had a epiphany. I’ve decided to try to start enjoying the ride. Yes, its cold and lonely leveling by myself, and yes, it will take a lot longer. The fact is that I’m bad at leveling. I’m bad at questing. Even using mods like Quest Helper don’t help me much when I spend literally an hour and a half searching for the entrance to a cave so I can go kill some named guy.

In fact, I may not be 80 by the time we are ready to start raiding. If that’s the case, they’ll just have to go on without me. But goddamnit, I’m going to start trying to enjoy the journey rather than concentrate on the destination. If it takes me 3 months to hit 80 (unlikely but who knows), so be it.

Its either that or find a high roof to jump from.

How not to design a quest

(aka How to design a truly aggravating quest)

Step 1: Require the death of 15 dragon whelp eggs and 15 dragon whelps.

Step 2: Write a really vague quest instruction with no indication on what the quest requires other than the deaths of the aforementioned mobs.

Step 3: Have the dragon whelps spawn only when less than a half a dozen dragons flying overhead spew flames at random intervals, in random places. And only have one dragon whelp spawn at a time from each flame spew.

Step 4: Make the players on the follow up quest kill the aforementioned flying dragons. This ensures that dozens of people waiting for each individual whelp spawn will be frustrated to an even greater extent.

Step 5: Place quest in starting area so that, at any given time, frustration levels will be high, although by an exponential degree on launch day.

Step 6: Do not increase spawn rates, despite knowing that a bazillion games have been pre-ordered, so that, at any given time, you can have the maximum number of players suffering as much frustration as possible.

Step 7: Sit back and laugh as the above elements draw out the worst in every player’s nature, causing normally mild-manered people to curse more than the worst sailor imaginable, and normaly shy and introverted people to behave like complete jackasses.

And so it begins…

Today marks the debut of my World of Warcraft column on MassiveGamer.com.  Being a dorf, I have entitled the column Mortar Combat.  I felt it was appropriate.   I will be updating it every Wednesday and will cover a variety of topics, not just hunter-related issues (although I’m sure those will come into play fairly often).  My huge thanks to Mark, Linda, Dana and especially Patrice and Rhoam for having total confidence and faith in my abilities. Thanks everyone!

Sooo… expansion hits at midnight tonight. What are your plans?

Meet my newest love!

Isn’t he adorable? So cuddly. lol  It seems these have been made tameable since 3.0.2 and I only found out about it today. So I said goodbye to Sunshine, my ghost cat, and went to snag me this fella.  Haven’t seen anyone else with one yet so I guess word hasn’t spread that they’re tameable. Shhh!  Don’t tell anyone!

Oh, and I have to say…

BEST totally unexpected, completely surprising and incredibly thoughtful gift has to be:

Best surprise gift evah!

I know, I’m sorry…

I’ve been remiss in posting updates. There’s been a lot going on. With the release of 3.0.2, I’ve been having too much fun with my exotic pets. And since they nerfed the instances, we’ve been breezing through Sunwell in about 3 hours and BT in about 2, leaving the rest of the week we normally would be raiding for things like working on Achievements, grinding rep, making money, and everything else we can do to prepare for the upcoming release of Wrath of the Lich King.

In addition, I’ve got a job now! Well, part-time anyway. I’m back to my first love – writing. I’ve been writing a few articles for the print magazine, Massive Gamer. My first article was a Kil’Jaeden strategy guide, and coming up in a future edition are my articles on the Achievement System and Death Knights.  Massive Gamer is a great magazine written and produced by some very good people. The website has just launched and I highly recommend everyone go check it out and register. Not only will there be some great content, but some benefits as well!

To celebrate our launch, we want to reward those who come early. We’re giving away 30 copies each of World of Warcraft: Warth of the Lich King, Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria and EverQuest II: The Shadow Odyssey. You can also vote on which of those three expansions will be featured on the coveted December cover of Massive Gamer Magazine. We’re even giving out 500 Massive Gamer Magazine prize packs, which include all issues of the magazine published so far and a Massive Gamer t-shirt.

And while you are at it, pick up a subscription to the print magazine. You won’t be sorry!

And now for something different.

A non-bitching post. Refreshing, no?  Things I like about the new patch:

Disengage – This rocks!!  I can’t believe how much fun it is on trash. Needs shorter cool down so I can use it more often (I know there’s a glyph but I won’t be able to get it). *giggle*

Heart of the Phoenix – O…M…G… Being able to rez my pet with full health and get it back into action immediately is awesome!

Bloodthirsty – I haven’t had to feed my pet in 2 days other than after rezzing it out of combat. Combined with Heart of the Phoenix, holy shit, no downtime at all for pet dps in a long fight!

New graphics – The new graphics for arrows shooting looks like lasers. There are new graphics for Dash, Ferocious Inspiration, Misdirection, all sorts of little things.  They really make the game feel fresh.

Aspect of the Viper – Yes, I know they are nerfing it soon but I love how it is now.  I’m usually chugging Fel Mana Pots like there’s no tomorrow on raid nights, going through at least 20 pots a night.  Last night in Sunwell, I think I used 2 to help keep me out of Viper a little longer.  On the rare occasions when I went oom, I hit Viper and in 15 seconds or less, I was back to full bar and back in Hawk.

More bag space – Being able to learn mounts and vanity pets in a spellbook is awesome and frees up tons of space for people like me who like to collect both.  And being able to carry them all around with me and use them anytime I want is very nice.

My new haircut. I went with the long braided ponytail with the braided crown. It used to be the two braided loops (not the cinnamon buns though).  Same color, black.  Same piercings.  The new haircut still looks like me, only different. Know what I mean?

What the fu…?

Blizzard did it to me again. Several months ago, I made the trek to Winterspring for a cat pet. I specifically wanted the white-on-white skin of the Frostsaber Huntress. I spent many hours leveling her up and getting her ready to play. I would take my ravager on progression raids, of course, but she went with me everywhere else – Black Temple, 5mans, farming, etc. I loved her, she was beautiful. She looked like this:

And when I pulled it out of the stable after this patch, this is what I got:

GIMME MY SUNSHINE BACK GODDAMNIT!

*sigh*

On another note, we raided last night for the first time since the patch. Here are some things I/we learned:

The “stop attacking when I switch targets” thing doesn’t work. It didn’t work before but its not working now even worse. I rarely break sheeps. Last night I was breaking sheeps everywhere because as soon as a mob died, if I had a shot in the air, it automatically switched to the next nearest target and started firing. WTF?

I can no longer function without tank target windows. Ugh. And unfortunately ORA2, which I used just for that purpose, hasn’t been updated. So I was trying to set up Pitbull on the fly during combat and failing miserably. Gotta remember to fix them today.

Don’t Misdirect the tank with Distracting Shot anymore. (Took two hits to the face aka deaths to figure that one out.) DS is now a threat generator but doesn’t transfer threat with MD, it pulls it onto you. Not sure if that is how its intended, but that’s how its currently working.

Just because the health of mobs/bosses has been nerfed doesn’t mean you don’t still have to pay attention to fights. You still need to do a lot of dancing and be environmentally aware.

Take it easy on Kalecgos. Sathrovarr needs to die faster. Kalec is dying so fast its not even funny. He was almost dead before the first set of portals was over. Yeesh. Had to stop attacking him for quite some time in order to catch up on Sathrovarr.

Most tanks have had their threat generation techniques increased. Warlock tanks did not. Don’t hit scorch or any other attacks before the warlock tank has generated enough aggro on Grand Warlock Alythess.

M’uru is too fucking easy now. It felt dirty killing him in 3 minutes. We actually had to wait quite a long time for the human adds to spawn and get to us, during which time we had to stand around with our thumbs up our asses because M’uru was dying too fast.

Kil’Jaeden dies tonight. Would have died last night but ran out of time with people having to leave. Tonight, there will definitely be one more dead Eredar demon in the world (or banished or whatever the hell happens to him).

Oh, and one last thing. As gimped as we are and as “boring” as our shot rotation is, I LOVE BEING BM. Bite me in the ass, Rilgon. :p

One last, last thing. I got my Clutch of Demise last night!  WOOT!  Thori’dal awaits…

*sigh*

News that is sure to make Rilgon very happy (that was sarcasm, btw).  From GC:

Two changes coming up:

We aren’t happy with how Aspect of the Viper is working in PvP, but it seems fine in PvE. We’re going to try changing it so that 50% of its current regen is passive, leaving the remaining 50% active. That should give hunters some more mana in Arenas in particular when dealing with opponents who manage to get out of LOS a lot. Yet, in PvE where hunter dps is very high, the difference in regen shouldn’t be very noticable. We are also going to let Viper return mana from melee attacks for those cases where a melee opponent is too close for comfort.

The second change is to some of the numbers on the special attacks of exotic pets to make sure the pets are around a 10% increase from normal pets. This should make exotic pets a reasonable benefit for the talent point (especially when you also count the bonus pet talents) without making every BM hunter feel like they are limited to just those pets.

Then later:

Here is the actual Viper change we’re going to implement: The per attack mana regeneration has been reduced by 50% but it now generates 4% of maximum mana every 3 sec. In addition, the per attack regeneration now also works on melee attacks.

So basically we are getting nerfed because the PvPers aren’t happy. Again. Its now going to take twice as long for us to refill our mana in a raid fight, our damage gimped by 40-50% the whole time, but hey, PvPers will be happier (although they’re still bitching that its not enough) and that’s all that matters in this game.

Assholes.  At least they gave us a minimal increase on exotic pet damage. Hey, a bone is a bone right?

It will be mine…

Oh yes, it will be mine!  After trying to figure out for awhile what I want for my upcoming birthday, I finally found what I want.  Preordered it and it will come late but just around the time WotLK ships.  MMmmm… I am such a gadget queen, I tell ya.  New gadgets make me do the happy, happy, joy, joy dance!

SteelSeries WoW Gaming Mouse