Vacation Is Nearing the End

I hit level 35.25 last night and had a pretty good evening (read morning past midnight). I started out at 33 (I think) and wanted to get that spiffy new hat from T Bluff. On my way out to Growless Cave to summon and kill Frostmaw, I came across 5 !'s in Tarren Mills. Most of the quests were in the vicinity of the Growless Cave Yeti so I knocked them out:

• Kill the traitorous UD held at Lordemere Interment Camp
• Collect worn stones from newly dead Dalaran citizens
• Kill 6 Dalaran Summoners and 12 Elemental Slaves
• Get some low drop rate bracers from said Ele' Slaves
• Find the wand of an unsuccessful lich
• Re-energize said wand in 3 flame braziers
• Stick wand in graveyard of Southshore
• Skin, Skin, Skin (no it wasn't Wet T-shirt night at the T Mills Inn. That would be pretty nasty, might I add: decaying boobs of the UD, green and blue boobs of the orc and trolls, and cow boobs?!?!) needed more mats for Leather Working

I also headed to the Uplands to kill Baron Vardus for a WANTED quest. That earned me a pretty red dress which I promptly sold for 47 silver. Look quest givers, I know it may seem impersonal to give money as a reward, but wtf am I gonna do with a dress that grants +23 fire damage? Go on an Immolation Trap rampage? No. Though it retrospect, I shoulda tried it.
Anywho... I finally made it back to T Bluff to get my hat with a gain of 4 agi to the ass-lookin hat I had. By this time, I was almost 35 and drooling at the sight of the new crossbow in my pack and the first 20% chance for my pet to proc frenzy. Used HS to jet back to Grom'gol and kill a few Lashtail Raptors. Track Beasts reminded me of the croc skin series from booty bay. I saw Elder Saltwater Croc, the final croc, on my radar ran over to target him to guesstimate if I could beat him. Lo and behold, they knocked his gold dragon off. He was now a 38 instead of a 38 elite.I finished up step two in the chain and headed back to kill him. Instead of a harrowing fight that would use all my resources (were he still elite), I killed him while using a crossbow at level 15 skill and had Aspect of the Cheetah active the whole time :P It took 3 shots to apply the first Serpent Sting lol. Cake. So let's review: new pants (yesterday), new hat, new crossbow and new boots. Time for bed.

Peacock Feathers

or Why I Love Hunter
This post is inspired by the last post. It's kinda fun going through all the talents and abils that make me love the Hunter class. Where to start... well the beginning I guess. I'll go in order of where talents fall on the talent tree. Some differ from my current tree because there is one talent pre-70 that helps grind: Endurance Training, 10% increase in pet's HP and 5% increase in toon's HP.
End BM Spec

Improved Aspect of the Hawk (IAotH): my auto shots have a 10% chance of increasing my attack speed by 15%.
Unleashed Fury (UF): flat 20% increase in pet's damage done, both white and orange damage
Ferocity (Fer): 10% increased chance for pet to crit
Combo #1 Fer + UF: 10% increased chance to do crits, crits that are 20% more damage
Bestial Discipline (BD): 100% increase in pet's focus regen rate. More focus means more Claws. This is a focus dump move. That means the pet will continue to use this move once per second until focus is used up.
Combo #2 BD + Fer + UF: Bestial Discipline grants more focus to pet, which generates more Claw attacks which have a 10% increased chance to crit, crits that are 20% more damage
5/5 Frenzy: pet's crits increase pet attack speed by 30%
Combo #3 Frenzy + Fer + UF: this one is the first continual loop but starting with Frenzy looks like this: Frenzy makes pet attack 30% faster when proc'd, attacks that are 20% more damage and have a 10% increased chance to crit, crits that are 20% more damage and proc Frenzy (thus the loop)
Bestial Wrath (BW): pet does 50% more damage for 18 seconds
Combo #4 BW + Frenzy + BD + Fer + UF: when Bestial Wrath is activate, there is an 80% increase in damage from hits, crits and Claws, Claws which happen (roughly) twice as often and provide additional chance to crit, crits which occur 10% more frequently proc Frenzy which causes attack speed to increase by 30%, increased attack speed means less time until next crit and translates to 30% more white damage
5/5 Serpent's Swiftness (SS): 20% increase to my ranged attack speed and 20% increase in pets attack speed
Combo #5 SS + IAotH: 20% increase in attack speed means next IAotH proc comes 20% sooner, IAotH once proc'd increases in attack speed to a total of 38%
Combo #6 SS + BW + Frenzy + BD + Fer + UF: SS increases pet's attack speed by 20% which means crits come 20% sooner, crits which proc Frenzy, Frenzy that brings pet's total increase in attack speed to 56%, which means crits from hits come 56% sooner, crits which cause 80% more damage while BW is active, while BW is active, hits and Claws cause 80% more damage, Claws which come (roughly) twice as often, Claws provide extra chances to crit
The Beast Within (TBW): while BW is active, I cause 10% more damage
Combo #7 TBW + SS + IAotH: 20% increase in attack speed means next IAotH comes 20% sooner, IAotH once proc'd increases my attack speed to a total of 38%, attacks which cause 10% more damage while BW is active
Lethal Shots (LS): 5% more ranged attack crits
Combo #8 LS + TBW + SS + IAotH: 20% increase in attack speed means next IAotH comes 20% sooner, once proc'd IAotH increases my ranged attack speed to a total of 38%, attacks which cause 10% more damage while BW is active and have a 5% higher chance to crit
Go for the Throat (GftT):my ranged crits generate 50 focus for my pet
Penultimate Combo (includes all previous steps): 20% increase in attack speed means next IAotH comes 20% sooner, once proc'd IAotH increases my ranged attack speed to a total of 38%, attacks which cause 10% more damage while BW is active and have a 5% higher chance to crit, crits which generate 50 focus for my pet, focus which become more Claws, Claws that already come (roughly) twice as often, Claws that cause 80% more damage, while BW is active, BW which increases by 80% the damage from hits and crits, crits which cause Frenzy to proc, while Frenzy is proc'd attack speed is increased by 30% and next crit comes 30% sooner
4/5 Mortal Shots (MS): the damage increase from my crits is 24% more. Instead of double damage which is 1x + 1x damage, I cause 1x+1.24x damage.
Ultimate Combo (once again includes all previous)*: 20% increase in attack speed means next IAotH comes 20% sooner, once proc'd IAotH increases my ranged attack speed to a total of 38%, attacks which cause 10% more damage while BW is active and have a 5% higher chance to crit, crits that cause 23% more damage, crits which generate 50 focus for my pet, focus which means more Claws, Claws that already come (roughly) twice as often, Claws that cause 80% more damage, while BW is active, BW which increases by 80% the damage from hits and crits, crits which cause Frenzy to proc, while Frenzy is proc'd attack speed is increased by 30% and next crit comes 30% sooner
Holy Hell!! I even left out some stuff that have lesser effects like Ferocious Inspiration, which increases all of our damage by 3%. This stacking effect is the heart of Beast Mastery DPS and doesn't even include shots and stings. I left them out because they don't scale with what I have here.


* I don't theory craft. If by some chance you are reading my blog and I didn't give you the link please feel free to leave all condescending comments and corrections at this site: I_could_give_a_shit.com
I wrote this for my own musings and to share with people who might care about my musings. TY, Paul

I Am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise

Leveling of Lÿnn the BElf Hunter is coming along nicely. I attained level 33 last night in Stranglethorn Vale. STV is a great place for questing. It is quest laden between Grom'gol Base Camp and Booty Bay. Our guild now has two level 70's which are Alenko and Kelviel's characters from other servers that they transferred. They are Gurch and Khanjin. Gurch was kind enough to run me through Gnomeregan last night to get my Gnomer pants which have +18 Agi. It took a little less than 20 minutes or rather it would have if I hadn't f'd something up. The equivalent Alliance side quest reads like this: Go kill end boss of Gnomer. So we ran through, passing as much as we could and went on to kill the end boss. I dropped from party to warp to my bind point since my Hearthstone was not cooled down. It was once back in Org that I realized the Horde quest reads: get safe combo from last boss, open safe and get rig plans.
There I sat with the combo in my inventory and no plans. Luckily enough Gurch logged off in Gnomer. So he logged back in saving the instance so I could warp back in and open the safe. Phew!!
[Triprunner Dungarees] Yay!! Thanks Gurch. He was also kind enough to make 3 Runecloth Bags for me which greatly upped my bag space. He donated a blue crossbow that was in his bank (I think reserved for his own hunter) which coupled with the 20G that Khanjin spotted me makes me set for a long time.
The preceding levels have brought me some wonderful abils:

• FEIGN DEATH!! I imagine I'm annoying Alenko with that by now. I said it a lot a few nights back when I was drinking and gaming. It truly is huge. Anything that can completely wipe all threat... you gotta love that
• Intimidation- One big threat move for pet to help them command a mobs attention... and stun them for 4 seconds
• 2 points in Bestial Discipline which doubles the focus regen rate of my pet which means more claws and usually having focus ready when growl coolsdown. All-in-all a flat increase in pet's abil to tank. Partnered with Intimidation and Feign Death and I die a lot less
• Dash Rank 1- pet focus move that ups his run speed by 40% for 15 sec. A nice way to sprint up to the mob and start tanking
• Re-spec to move one point out of Bestial Swiftness and drop it into Unleashed Fury- 4% increase in pet damage per point
• Did I mention Feign Death?

There may be more but going through levels quickly I kinda forget. I had a good laugh a couple nights back. Alenko told me that he and Kelviel believe I am rushing ahead in levels to avoid getting left behind. He was spot on. When last Alenko and I were leveling together as Xyln and Kerikov, I chose to switch chars and I ended up several levels behind him. Kerikov and Bayard (Kelviel's Anub'arak char) both made it to 70 and I ended up switching back to Xyln and caught up in time for them to take a break. I missed out on some fun 5-man's due to my switch and I don't want to miss out again. They have no intention of racing to 70 so I have no fear. If I get a chance tonight, I will be doing some more STV questing and hopefully attaining level 35. That is the level of the blue crossbow Gurch gave me. Level 1 crossbow skill will mean a lot of misses. All that will happen after I head north of Hillsbrad to kill a quest mob. The quest will net me a spiffy new +agi hat that doesn't look like my current hat, a witch hat.
Current spec next level will be the last retro point in Ferocity and the level after will be the first point in Frenzy, a crit triggered buff that ups pet attack speed by 30% for 8 sec. By the time I put the last point in, my pet will have this buff almost continually each fight. Ferocity feeds Frenzy which feeds Ferocity. The last part of the talent puzzle will be Go for the Throat, pet gains 50 focus for each of my ranged crits. 50 focus generates 2 Claws and 2 more chances to crit. The coup de grâce (Alenko and Kelviel will be proud) comes a level 60: Devilsaur Tooth guarantees the pet's next hit will crit. The item is from the hunter level 50 Sunken Temple class specific chain. Pop this before a fight and pet will start with 30% increase attack speed (translates to 30% increased white damage). By that time, I will also have Ferocious Inspiration, whole party receives a 3% buff to all damage, and Serpent's Swiftness (this talent would make me damp were I female), 20% increase in both of our attack speeds (that's right, 5 points and my white and pet's white damage increases by 20%. The stat is truly, as stated, attack speed increase and not a damage increase) so that means pet crits more often and I crit more often.
/pitch wood
Well once this cools down, I think I'll post a gratuitous feather preening post about what feeds what, like the Ferocity feeds Frenzy thing before.

Tarren Mills Questing

I logged last session in Tarren Mills after running a couple of quests in Durnholde Keep. Most of the quests I've gotten in TM have centered around slamming the nearby human community of Hillsbrad. They're getting a little repetitive which is a pain in this case because the mobs are very concentrated. Each new quest requires a bunch of clearing and patrol alertness. These don't mesh well with my low patience style of play. I believe I am all done now with ransacking Hillsbrad and the last thing left for me to do is assault the mine. I had to put it off because when I first tried the mobs were 5 levels higher than me. They should be only 3 higher now so off to the mines tomorrow.
I managed to forget training again. I'm glad I did though. Heading to Orgrimmar after my evening's quests netted me Hunter's Mark R2 and a new rank of Serpent Sting along with some crap skills. I do have the Beast Lore skill now to let me know where I can train the next level of Claw when it comes up.

No Fancy Title This Time

I managed to level from 17.5 to 21 last night. I finished Tranquilien out and even got a nice blue cloak from the rep vendor before I left. Levels 18 and 20 brought some great things:

• Freeze Trap- Although it lasts for only 10 sec
  
• Aspect of the Cheetah
• Multi-shot
• Bestial Swiftness Talent- I just found out that I can't train the first rank of Dash until 23. Ouch.
  
• Dual Wield- I seem to use this less than other hunters. Just give me a 2 hand axe with better stats and I'm fine. My melee weapons aren't for fighting or for looking cool. They're supposed to add stats
• Ghost Saber- which I have named Spectre
• Track Undead

I think I'm gonna take some time this morning and go back to earlier areas and skill skinning a bit. The Ghostlands didn't seem to provide me quite enough practise and now I find myself unable to skin my current quest mobs.

I AM A NIGHT ELF MOHAWK!!

It's Thanksgiving day and we got a bit of snow. How wonderful. It's crummy wet snow that has zero chance of sticking around past our next sunny day but it speaks of good things to come.
Last night took Lÿnn from 12.5 to 16.5 as far as levels. The quest laden Tranquilien was pretty nice to me and I even netted two rep items. I had never seen a rep based vendor before outlands before. I'm not sure if this is new since V2.3 or if it had always been there. They were very nice items and pretty cheap, about 22s combined. One item was already replaced by the end of my session. Yay! Green items rock.

You and Me and Kitty Makes Three

I leveled from8.5 to 12.5 mostly without incident last night. I am now the owner of a shiny new pet cat. Thank goodness. I was pretty sick of getting my ass handed to me by the level 5 critters I randomly attacked. Ok, so the critters didn't really kill me but I was dying more often than a naked priest. It was mostly due to my impatience but I no longer have to worry.
My new cat came equipped with Claw Rank 2 so I should be set for a while. I really miss Dash. I think the first rank of Dash can be trained around mid-20's and at that is a small increase in speed. Bestial Swiftness, 30% increase in pet movement speed while outdoors for one talent point, is looking mighty good in light of this. I believe I can take that point at level 20. Looks like I will have to respec in the end, anyways.
I say that the levels came mostly without incident. The one big problem I had last night is that BElf hunters need to get the pet quests in their starting area and I was in Durotar. I quickly realized why the Horde have the zeppelins for moving between major cities. It was Blizzard's way of apologizing for making Horde cities overly difficult to navigate. Undercity looks very cool with the sewer theme but it has twice aggravated the hell out of me while I was searching for something. I finally got warped back to BElf land and spent another boatload of time looking for the hunter quest giver. With other races, the hunter trainer is at the first or second town which is right in line with the path towards each race's starting city. Not BElf. There's a shack way out of the way. My pissfarting tour of BElf land wasn't a complete waste. I did collect a bunch of !'s along the way. It's easy to snag all the quests in new areas now; quest givers are nooberifically marked on the minimap since V2.3. Woot!
My damage by the end of the evening was listed at 17.x for autoshot and pet weighed in at 11.1. I guess it'll be a while before I see one of those 1500+ aimed shot crits.

Slow Day at Work... Can you tell?

Post number three for today and it's only 1PM. I'm pretty stoked about this new char on a PvE medium pop server thing. I'm about one step down from giddy as a schoolgirl even.

For fun I thought to list things I'll be looking forward to while leveling hunter a second time:

• Getting a Ghost Saber and keeping it this time- I had a Ghost Saber on my other hunter but dropped it around level 50 for the druid kitty look alikes in STV. I regretted this in the end but there was no way to undo what had been done
• All those subtle pet changes from talents, such as higher HP, higher armor, higher crit, higher damage slowly turning my pet into my DPS kitty
• Not having to re-spec since I know how I want to end up
• Not having to re-spec my pet since I know how I want my pet to end up
• Using a mark/attack macro with my pet from level 10 on. How did I make it to 70 without using macros?
• Searching out mobs with the new ranks of claw
• Skinning and LW
• Blazing through levels with the better understanding of hunter
• The first time I Feign Death <3<3
• Serpent's Swiftness. 20% white DPS increase in only 5 talent points. In a word: sick
• Ammo upgrade levels
• Mid-60's and finally acquiring Aimed Shot.
• Finally getting level 70 and misdirecting those very same Aimed Shots onto my pet
• Dire situations and popping a trinket, Rapid Fire and Bestial Wrath
• Nesinwary's in STV not being camped by level 70 asshat griefers
• Cobra Reflexes which causes Frenzy and Ferocious Inspiration to be applied for most of my fights

Ahh the little things. I took Druid to 70 before my hunter but in the end, hunter truly is more fun.

Life as a Teenage Blood Elf

Just wanted to post a bit of an introspective and opinion piece on my first night on a blood elf.
Things started off a little rough. The plan was to level in Deathknell, the starting area for undead. This suited me as I have done the first two areas of UD territory twice and have an idea of where quests items are and such. Being a blood elf, my char started in a far off land, so someone /begged a lock to summon me to Undercity. I spent twenty minutes trying to find my way out of Undercity. I had never been there before, so cut me some slack. Once on the road (yes Max the road) I made my way to Deathknell for some zombie-skeleton-and-spider-killing-armband-and-box-collecting fun. We blew through Deathknell and moved on to Brill. Knocked out a couple of Brill quests and then the others logged. During our quests I had time to make a few observations about BElf, hunters and other miscelania including the following:

• BElf chicks are too skinny. NElf chicks look better. They have hips
• BElf chicks hold bows kinda cock-eyed and it looks pretty lame. No worries. Not like I'll be using ranged weapons much :(
• BElf racial abil seems pretty nice. It has three facets: deplete a mob's mana, stores the depleted mana for my use, area of effect silence
• I will miss Shadowmeld a bit but it will be less apparent as I used it more for PvP purposes
• Hunter-pet = Not as fun. I died 5 or 6 times trying to kill the human captain in the little castle area south of Org. A pet would have made it much easier. Only one and a half levels to go before pet quests so no biggie
• There is not a hunter trainer in the UD starting areas despite what Max told me
• Moving a Horde char from major city to major city is a synch with the zeppelins
• I miss my V-Bow but 8.1 DPS is funny as hell

Now all alone, I headed out of the UD area to go get trained in Org. I had done a few Horde chars in Durotar during 10 day trial periods so I headed to Razor Hill after getting Serpent Sting, Hunter's Mark and Arcane Shot to do a bit of questing. I logged off shortly after hitting level 8 and becoming the highest level char in the guild. I doubt I will still hold that title by the time I get home tonight. Meh.

Switch to Stormrage

Max signed on last night for the first time in about two months. He and a real life friend of his also named Max were the two people I have played with most in my time on WoW. He had some good news and some bad news. Good news: he and Max were going to be playing again. Bad news: they and a couple other people were re-rolling Horde on Stormrage (medium pop, PvE). Was this really bad news or the final impetus I needed to change servers and sides?

I'm happy to announce that there is now a Blood Elf hunter named Lÿnn. She's soon to appear at an Armory near you; I only made it to level 8 last night before logging. Wow, is it a pain in the ass to level hunter without a pet. I can't wait to get a raptor at level 10. Hunter is such an easy char to level solo.
Being on Vent, talking to people I know and playing a lowbie char is heaps more fun than playing a high level char and running instances with random people. Ahhh we collected doom weed, killed zombies, started a guild and looted mass quantities of copper. Max, the lucky bastard, got a small red pouch too. I'm green with envy. But seriously, bag space and money are the two reasons I never made any real chars on different servers. It will come in time. /sigh
This will be a nice change. I never cared much for the Horde races and having to party with them is gonna be weird. I laughed last night when killing zombies that I kept targeting Max's undead lock, Alenko I believe, cuz he looked just like the other zombies. The PvE server will be nice. No more griefing. Hot damn that sounds nice. I still remember running from Astranaar to Darkshore zone at level 15 or so and a much higher level troll hunter having some 'fun' with me. Ashenvale, where Astranaar is, is a contested area and that son of a bitch killed me 15-20 times while I ran to Darkshore which is Alliance territory. What in the hell is wrong with you that you go and do that? I must ask though, what in the hell was wrong with me? I should have swapped chars and played somewhere else for a change, but I kept rez'ing on sheer stubborness. I thought for sure the asshat would leave me be at some point, but it wasn't until my 5 minutes in Darkshore did he finally go away. Dishonorable kills need to be re-instated. O wait!! Nevermind. I'm on a PvE server now.
/joy

Murmur Down!!

I should not be proud of the title of this post but sadly I am. Last night rocked. I was fortunate enough to score a completely competent party looking to run Shadow Labyrinth. Sweet! I need the first Kara key frag from there and Sonic Spear. I am lucky enough to have a nice spear that gives me a little higher RAP but Sonic Spear has better AGI and has a nice +hit. I think Sonic Spear is a very commonly sought hunter weapon and I am no exception. We had two people that were well versed in the instance, two that knew some (including myself. I had never been past the second-to-last boss, the orc lock) and one brand new. There was a well geared BM hunter in the group who seemed to employ a similar dart board selection method for some of his talents as the hunter the other night. This hunter had better selections than the first but didn't finish anything out. There were a couple 2/5's and a 1/3 I think. /shrug
Most of the pulls through the whole intstance went well. The other hunter was great that he let me practice chain trapping instead of just doing it himself. I'd give myself a 4 out of 5 score for my night's trapping, losing points because I did break one of my own traps and once forgot to drop my next trap. Easily fixed by freezing the mob right there at my feet, but by the time the trap takes effect, I'm at 30-40% health. I need one of those bubbles that all the clothies seem to have. Our first wipe came at the hands of the orc lock. The tank hadn't done this fight before and went down the southern hall after we got sucked in to the altar. This essentially took the boss right towards his AOE bomb/heal voidwalkers. We were tearing him up on DPS and took him to about 40% health before he teleported us the first time. Two rounds of misdirection really let us tear into the boss. We wiped right after the second teleport. The second attempt went a little bumpy but well enough that we downed him. The pulls leading up to Murmur are overly easy with 2 or 3 mob pulls and even a one mob pull. Murmur wiped us on the first attempt but we killed him on the second. I'm stoked any time I finish an instance with a PUG. I just wish the Sonic Spear had dropped. No one got anything useful except for key frags and rep from this run. Well that and experience in running the instance.

Never Roll on a Low Pop Server

I'm feeling some major frustration for rolling on a low population server. At first it seemed quaint. I'll pick a low pop server and have less run-ins with idiots and gankers and everything will be bliss. That sounds like a great notion but in truth my server is horrible. Anub'arak seems overrun by Horde and they're geared to the teeth. There is obviously enough horde on this server to get stuff done. It's killing me though to drop into the LFG queue, spend three hours in queue and then result in no instance run. Yeah I know "go make your own party", right? Sounds easy enough but come roll on Anub'arak and give it a try. With no one else LFG you continually end up with a party consisting of any three of the following: hunter, lock, rogue, ret pally that can't really heal or tank, Shadow Priest that refuses to re'spec Holy, or even cast a heal for that matter, despite the fact they've reached 70, Feral Druid that can't heal and doesn't want to tank cuz they won't get to drool over their kitty burst damage, and people of negligible intelligence. And there you sit in your party of three DPS'ers typing "/4 LF2M tank and healer for any frickin thing". Last night's endeavour, however yielded an ok party. We had a Holy Pally, Prot or Arms Warrior, Ret Pally (can we sign petitions to force them to re'spec Holy or Prot? are 'DPS' Pallies even any good?), another BM hunter and myself. Now the invention of The Armory was a wonderous thing. First off it lets you know what spec people are without asking them, not a truly important thing except for BM hunters. I always hope to be paired with a Marksman Hunter to see how I compare on the boards. Especially one of those "I'm MM b/c MM>>>>>BM for DPS." type of MM hunters. So I see a hunter in the party and I immediately pop over to the Armory to check their spec. The hunter that we got last night was listed as Beast Master but to my horror, on closer examination I could easily make out that this was one of those all-to-common Huntards. /gasp His talent tree looked as though it were chosen by dart throws. He had points in all sorts of random spots. Touting a crossbow with 44 DPS, and a Ranged attack power of just under 700, I knew this guy was going to be low man on the damage charts. Even below the tank. There's no helping people like this either. I reached out with "Hey there a nice gun you can get from the Nesingwary chains in Nagrand. How close are you to completing those?"
"I think I have them done. Since it's a gun I'm pretty sure I sold it", comes his reply.
/cast Aimed Shot Huntard
/cast Aimed Shot Huntard
/cast Aimed Shot Huntard
O come on Blizz, just let me shoot him once, PLEASE!!!! That gun is 11 DPS higher than his crossbow and has better stats. How can someone be so nonchalant about a DPS increase? I'm stoked with an increase of .4 DPS or more.
No worries, let's just get to Shattered Halls and run the instance. Second hurdle of the night (first being just get a party): Horde are camping the summoning stone. This mystifies me. If you have all the gear you need, all the rep you need and are so bored that you're griefing people that want to do an instance, then go reroll. Try out priest. That will keep you busy for a long time. Granted it's a PvP server but do you have to be dicks about it? Well, after one wipe on the way in, because SH has that damn door, we get inside and start. This was my first time running Shattered Halls and it's a bitch. Give me three good crowd controllers (a nice mix would be rogue, mage and hunter), a qualified tank, and an adept healer and this will be a synch. After the first few pulls I realize what we in fact have is a well geared, well qualified Warrior paired with a truly competent healer, a ret Pally that is putting out DPS just below me (I was at 33% total party damage and he was at 30%. I guess he proved the "are Ret Pallies decent DPS'ers" question. This one is clearly the exception and not the rule) the huntard who is at least beating the healer for DPS and myself. The hunter was not a capable chain trapper so we are in essence crowd controlling one mob. On 5 and 6 mob pulls down the long hallway, our pulls are chaotic and result in at least one death a pull. We make it down the hall, which I'm told is the most difficult part of the instance, and there it is. The glaring red lightning bolt next to the healer's name. D/C'd. A minute or so later she's back and explains laptop had come unplugged and wore battery down but all is well now... except for sudden lag issues. She tells us she's running at 5-6 frames per second, but says she can work through it. Next pull is at the end of the hall and has three or four elites and three normal mobs. She D/C's again during that fight which became a wipe although mine was a fake death. She comes back. Mana and HP up and it's back in the fray. I can only guess one of these mobs has a new lightning bolt of doom debuff because there goes the healer again. /cry We gave up.
I hearthstoned outta there and stewed since it's so impossible to get any 5-mans together. I really need to join a guild with a focus on such things. My dead guild is yielding me no benefits.
It's Eye of the Storm this week so I thought to go give it a shot. It's always a decent amount of honor if I hang out in the middle and kill people. At the start we get our two caps quickly and we're about tied up to 200-200. At about that time we lost BOTH of our caps. The horde controlled all four towers and they were running flags on us!!! New changes to EotS make flags worth more if they have more towers. Final score approx. 250-2000.
/disgusted
/deletechars
/rerollhorde
BElf Chicks FTW, anyone?

ROFLMAO!!

You've seen it before, but man is it funny. This is easily one of those things you think is hilarious or farked. I happen to find it hilarious.

Level 20 priest

Getting a priest to level 20 now tops my accomplishments in WoW. This is a seriously grueling class to level. Level 20 brought some great new toys including but not limited to:

• Flash Heal- a heal that seems to have bad HP/mana efficiency but heals... are you ready in a flash. its 1.5 sec cast can really save my butt, I often die from letting my HP get too low and then 2.5 sec for lesser heal may as well be a half hour
• Shackle Undead- undead cc- situationally useful
• Fear Ward- I think this was previously a Drenai/Dwarf priest racial only but Horde complained until Blizz gave it to all of priests.
• Mind Soothe- Bah! I bubble run anyways but also situationally useful
• Mind Flay- My first shadow priest talent tree abil. It's channeled and does 75 damage in 3 sec and slows movement by 50%. I think this will be big later. More opinion to come after testing.
  

Talent point at level 20 is one point in Mind Flay as mentioned before.
Last order of business before logging, buy a darn dress. I'm a clothy; I want to look like a clothy. Accomplished. If I can find the screenies folder, I'll post a pic.

Well, I finally did it. I took the plunge :(

I knew it would happen. I predicted it long before my hunter made it to outlands.
Back story: My first char to 70 was a druid. Druid flight form is instant cast so I run up to a cliff, I jump off, I hit crow and voila: I'm flying.
So Lÿnn was in Stormspire, I ran to the elevator, jumped off and frantically searched for crow. Oddly enough hunter does not have an instant cast flying form. It's a long fall. I swore the whole way down.
It's funny now.

Not your father's AV... reactions on 2.3

Or: All your caps are belong to Horde

Well version 2.3 is officially out. and my thoughts are...
Let's wait on that and give some quick updates with a smattering of V2.3 comments about each char:

• Xyln (Feral Druid) is still 70. My general reaction on druid changes in 2.3 are positive the biggest being Heart of the Wild. Previously HotW gave a 20% increase to STR in cat form. Now it gives 10% Attack Power. This is nice because it let's up on my STR focus in cat gear a bit. +STR gave me a big boost in AP and left me a little short sighted in crits and +hit. Now I can feel ok about taking gear that has AGI to get the higher crit % or take some of the +AP +hit gear and still get a boost from HotW


• Lÿnn (BeastMaster Hunter) is now 70 and Xyln(pet) is very close to 69. I can't wait for Xyln to hit 70 and get her last rank of growl. She's starting to lack on the tanking against my DPS. Changes to hunter? IDK were there any significant ones? Yes!! We're now debuffers albeit mana costly debuffers. Aimed shot now has a -50% healing debuff attached to it with no loss in damage and Arcane Shot can now dispel one positive effect. Neato... but Volley looks way lame now :( In a move I cannot fathom, Blizz has removed "the dead zone". Well I can fathom to be honest, this is all for PvP. The dead zone made a lot of dead hunters. No dead zone ups their survivability. It makes PvE a little weird. I still find myself running out past 8 yds to pewpew when all I need to do is take a step back.


• Mordra (Assassination Rogue) is still 36 and remains mostly unplayed for the time being. I think she is in good contention for my next lvl 70 'break'. In V2.3, Blizz reduced xp needed to level by 20% for lvl's 20-60 and some group oriented quests between 30 and 60 now have nerfed mobs so they can be completed solo.


• Vendress (Shadow Priest) has gone up one level in recent history to level 19 last night. She is frustratingly difficult to level. Another blog gave me hope when I read that in the 40's she can take 2 mobs at once with little difficulty. Hunter, Druid and Rogue have me spoiled b/c they are very easy to level and not hard to get out of bad situations by escape or by squeaking out a victory (i.e. I recently killed a chain of 5 level 70 mobs with Lÿnn and during most of the fight I had aggro from two mobs.) As for other V2.3, she experienced a nice-ish change since the version update. Starshards is now a no-brainer to add to my tactics. It is now instant cast and costs no mana. That instantly changed my tactic to PW: Shield, Smite, Mind Blast, SW:Pain, Starshards then wand until done. Nothing beats a free DOT that's not channeled. There were a bunch of changes that sounded like "this will set off this effect and this won't anymore"... I didn't know WTF any of them were, so the Priest patch was awesome IMO.


• I have a new char Denae (Dranei Retribution Paladin, if one point in the Retribution tree makes her spec'd) She's not NElf but she is a chick so she makes her way here. She came about for two reasons: I have wanted a dranei for a long time but never had one stick, and I wanted the possibility of a plate wearing healer. My intent for Vendress is that she be a healbot if and when she gets up there. My impression so far... I'm not super keen on Judgement which I'm guessing is going to be an imortant part of my damage dealing, so she sits at lvl 10 for now.

In other V2.3 news, Blizz has killed Alterac Valley. I've heard it said many times and I've thought it a lot. Alliance sucks at Battlegrounds. I'm not talking vacuum cleaner sucking, I'm talking about the-king-of-all-blackholes sucking. I mean blown out of the water everytime I ran Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm or Warsong Gulch with scores typically resembling 500-to-2000. I read in a blog that someone claimed she had heard "all her horde friends" saying Alliance always wins. I don't know on what planet that could happen on but ok...

So I don't run pre-mades ever because I'm on a shitty little server with low population according to blizz and I think a desperately low alliance pop. If I waited to run pre-mades I'd never go. I drop myself in queue and wait for a Pick-up BG. The people that will be in the BG when I get in are always random. So how is it, that a random selection of Horde pitted against a random selection of Alliance always mop the floor with my team? Law of averages should favor us at some point right? Wrong! In all my runs, which don't amount to a lot of runs but probably close to 50 total BG's, I've been part of winning EotS once, WSG once and AB never. The only one Alliance did fairly well at was Alterac Valley where I experienced a winning percentage of about 40-60 with the larger percentage going to Horde. It was the place for Ally to farm honor. Well... no more. I ran one AV and was disgusted. The random collection of Ally I was thrown in to was handily beaten by the Horde. The days of zerging what's-his-name are officially gone. Cap'ing is required to drop the Horde reinforcements and once something is cap'd, it absolutely must be protected. It now takes 5 min instead of 4 to cap anything there and the Horde were aggresively re-cap'ing. Holy cow, I had never seen that. It turned into an all out PvP war where the Ally's turlted on the bridge but once they got passed us on the bridge, it was all downhill. End result was low 300 honor. Not horrible like EotS, WSG or AB but still low for what I was accustomed to. I haven't quite figured out why I want to BG so much though. All the rewards I've come across, discounting gems and the regain-control-of-your-toon trinkets are crap. There is a new PvP set available but it is ridiculous expensive. I would have to play for a couple of years to get that much honor and badges. I'm better off running the dailies for badges of justice or w/e they're called.

AV-athon

Up tonight, I'd like to grind a bit of rep in AV. It will be Xyln at first and I'll put on my bear gear or die a lot.
Nov 12- Finishing this one. I did decidedly well for tanking. My HP, and def are in a decent range to make me an ok tank and in most of the AV's I ran, I tanked the first 'general' or whatever he is. Tanking AV's are not super fun b/c you never know if people are really going to heal you. I've never run as a healer, (I have considered strapping on my healing gear and going as a feral healer :P), so I don't know what it's like to be there healing. Do they keep good track of the tank? What if my healer's croak from Horde; they must be prime targets.
Regardless, I farmed some honor but not as much as I was hoping.

Democracy rules

Joshua is buggin me to pick a char. He gets to decide tonight between Vendress and Lÿnn
Joshua chooses...
Vendress.
I think it's that very same goofy Halloween mask that helped him decide.
21.5% into level 17. Vendress still looks decidedly rogue-like. I hope to get a nice robe soon. This is my only clothy. I want her to look like one.
Quests

• Tharnariun's Hope 1350XP
• The Absent Minded Prospecter 1150XP
• A Lost Master 1550XP
  

Notes

• Deaths: aggravatingly many tonight
  

Push to 70

After getting re-hunter-energized, I'm logging on Lÿnn today. I currently have crud gear that consists of about 90% greens and a couple of blues. My damage output is typically one of the top in groups, but my pet and I probably average 300-350 DPS. Tons of room for improvement. I'm fully Beast Mastery spec'd with filler points in Marks.
I log in to find myself in the Scryer's inn in Shattrath
I think I'll head to Blade's Edge Mountains and finish out what I can. There's an Ally area there that I don't think I ever visited with Xyln so I'll look there for some more quests. 70... here I come. Currently I'm 17.4% into 68 so not long now.

Quests

• Test Flight: The Zephyrium Capacitorium 2650XP
  
• Crystal Clear 11650XP
• What came First, the Drake or the Egg? 11650XP
• Test Flight: the Singing Ridge 5400XP
• Picking Up Some Power Converters 11650XP
• Cutting Your Teeth 11650XP
• Ride the Lightning 11650XP
• Ridespire Manace 11650XP
• Gauging the Resonant Frequency 11650XP
• Test Flight: Razaan's Landing 5400XP
• Trapping the Light Fantastic 11650XP
• More than a Pound of Flesh 11650XP
• Show Them Gnome Mercy 14950XP
• Test Flight: Ruann Weald 5400XP
  

Notes

• Found Toshley's Station. This is my first time here.
• I took part in an unintentional AV turtle. Over 120 people later and I finally broke through to get on offense. We had some massive D which was their fault. They were letting no one through so the only alternative was turtle them. Ammassed 650-ish honor between one AV and killling a Shadow Priest two times. He ganked me so he had it coming
  

The Blog Formerly Known As Prince

I made the executive decision that I will blog all of my NElf chars here instead of just Vendress. This comes on the heels of reading a lot of BigRedKitty today. It has me really jazzed to take hunter to 70 and beyond. Beyond of course not meaning higher levels but...
You get the picture.

A Bit on Names

I'm at work and thought to make a short post about the naming conventions that I use since they have a long history.
In the beginning there was Palomar. To be honest there was more than just him, but he's the only one I remember. He was a clothy of the mage sort accompanied by 5 other fearless adventurer's in the Bard's Tale II. I don't know where the name came from, but I always thought it was attached to a dragon from the He-man: Master of the Universe cartoon. From what I can find, there is no such name in He-man. The name has resurfaced but never has it topped my list of popular names. The most common use was for a Red Mage in NES Final Fantasy... Due to only have 4 letters to name characters, though, it looked more like: Plmr.
Muze. He was my first 8-bit character back in the days of the NES and Dragon Warrior. His name, along with all my character names, has no particular reference where I drew it from. I just liked it as a kid and it sticks with me to this day. Most of my male char's throughout the years have held this name and it probably is the most used of all my names due to it's longevity.
Final Fantasy brought out the first diversification in names. Parties were composed of 4 characters of which each member could be a Warrior, Thief, Black Belt, Red Mage, Black Mage or White Mage. I had a standard name for each:

• Warrior - Muze
• Thief - Shdw (Shadow)
• Black Belt - Xyln
• Red Mage - Plmr
• Black Mage - Deth
• White Mage - Lynn

And there are the top three: Muze, Lynn and Xyln. Muze and Lynn persisted as the main male and female chars for the RPG dujour. Xyln typically saw use as a direct damage caster type or naturey characters (e.g. the mutants in Final Fantasy Legend on Gameboy).

From there it's a blur of video game characters, most with the same names the only notable names to come out of this jumble are Vladrek and Vendress. Vladrek was a knight-type name typically, for instance the bumbling knight of Final Fantasy 9. Vendress wasn't reserved for any certain character archetype, but conjurs up in my mind a healer or priest.

The next time a notable name popped up was Lynn of Final Fantasy XI fame, on the server Lakshmi. I was the recipient of a HDD and a full copy of Final Fantasy XI for free after participating in the three month long closed beta. Lynn of the beta and release copies was a mithra. Lynn stepped into Vana'diel as a thief. Mithra were cat chick chars with high agility and I thought a thief sounded fun. Somewhere around level 3 of thief, I found a white magic scroll from a mob and quickly ran to switch my job. I became a white mage which remained my most prevalent job for quite a long while. My best screenies of Lynn were her in her White Mage AF which recalled the garments of the original Final Fantasy White Mages. It is that very same AF that compels me to help others in need of class specific items and quests. I had to collect in the vicinity of 40 players, mostly strangers and some Japanese (the main tank in fact spoke no English) to make a run for my Healer's Briault. What an undertaking. I can be heard saying, "I still owe karma for my Healer's Briault." Muze and Vladrek saw use in FFXI, as well, acting as banks for Lynn.

World of Warcraft came next. I can make characters with reckless abandon here since I don't pay anything extra for each additional, unlike FFXI. The usuals popped up right away. My first char that wasn't a trial week char was Lÿnn on Anub'Arak. A NElf Hunter. The ÿ replacing the y not for cosmetic reasons or pronunciation (God only knows what they letter would sound like) but because Lynn was already taken. It's probably a level 1 Gnome Warrior Bank too :( Lÿnn made it to around level 40 before any other notable characters came about. Xyln was next on the scene and this time around as a NElf (the naturey aspect) Druid. Xyln went almost straight to 70 without interruption. I loved prowl and my huge burst damage output. Lÿnn has seen action recently taking her from mid-40's to 68 as of this posting. Vendress the priest is a break from my hunter for now. I imagine in a week or less, I will be back to Lÿnn to get her to 70 and maybe some raiding or at least a lot of BG's. hunter is way more fun in BG's. Muze is a Tauren on Coilfang, either a hunter or shaman... or maybe he's the undead rogue. They don't see much daylight since I like NElf chick chars the best and I'm not much for any of the horde races.

Well that's it. My lunch break is consumed.

Day 2

On the slate for the evening will most likely be the end to Darkshore and the start of Ashenvale. I will have a few go between quests but most of my turn-ins will be in Astranaar. Tonight... I may well get ganked. I'm super not looking forward to that, but it comes with the territory.
Currently I'm updating Napster. Tonight's soundtrack, I'm thinking, will be panic at the disco. It's been a little while since I listened to it.
Well I'll get my preliminaries out of the way:
Logged in to find myself still wearing the goofy Halloween mask. I can't figure out why I don't just sell it but it has a certain appeal for the moment. I'm at the Darnassus Enchanter Trainer, 11.8% into level 15.
I took Tailoring to 73 and Enchanting to 36 last night before I logged. Enchanting was exciting. "Would you like to replace '+5 Health' with '+5 Health'?" I enchanted my bracers a lot. haha

Quests completed:

• Buzzbox 525 1150XP
• For Love Eternal 875XP
• Cave Mushrooms 1250XP
• Beached Sea Creatre 460XP
• Beached Sea Turtle 550XP
• Beached Sea Turtle 550XP
• Deep Ocea, Vast Sea 1250XP
• Onu 625XP
• The Master's Glaive 625XP
• The Twilight Camp 1250XP
• Return to Onu 950XP
• Beached Sea Creature 575XP
• Beached Sea Turtle 725XP
• Beached Sea Turtle 725XP
• Beached Sea Creature 725XP
• Beached Sea Creature 490XP
• The Blackwood Corrupted 1700XP
  

Notes:

• I became a Journeyman Tailor tonight
• I wanted to make Barbaric cloth chest with my mad tailoring skillz... I needed 1 light leather and the only light leather on AH is a stack for 10 Gold. This server is farked. /logout and get one of my skinners. 10 G... just wow!
• Cured my first disease today
• New Wand thanks to alt Mordra
  
• Killed Flagglemurk the Cruel, Silver Mob
• I received the first of what will be many instance requests today. It sounded like this, "DM?" The deadmines. I look forward to healbotting instances (oddly enough) but it was far too late to make a run.
• Green items broken: 9
  
• Deaths: 2

I was a little worried when I first started out tonight. It took me too much mana and time to kill the bears for buzzbox and the cat sires. I took a time out and had Mordra craft a new wand for Ven. I went from 11.0 DPS to 17.5 DPS. Big difference. I still employ the same tactic: PW: Shield, Smite, Mind Blast, SW: Pain, then wand til dead. Rarely, after the wand change did I have to heal and start dps'ing again. Usually I could make it right through. By the time I got to Cleansing the furbolg, I had leveled to 17 and the even levels mobs were a synch. I found I could go straight from one to the next, but links really messed me up. I cannot take more than one thing at a time. Not unusual, I guess.
Shadow Spec continues: added points 2 and 3 to Shadow Focus. Brings me to 6% less chance for mob to resist shadow spells. Looking ahead, level 20 will bring Mind Flay which I think is a pretty useful shadow spell. We'll see.
New abil tonight of heal and new rank of Mind Blast, overall a pretty disappointing level (16).
Next login will still find me xp'ing in Darkshore, but I already have transition quests, including the tower quests, which go back and forth for a little, and the turn-in for saving the centaur from Master's Glaive. Woohoo!

Darkshore

On the menu for tonight: Darkshore quests.
28% into level 13
Tailoring 61
Enchanting 17
Quests completed:

• The Fall of Ameth'Aran 900XP
• Tools of the Highborne 900XP
• Bashal'Aran 675XP
• The Tower of Althalaxx 675XP
• The Tower of Althalaxx 1350XP
• Washed Ashore 675XP
• Washed Ashore 975XP
• Grove of the Ancients 875XP
• Cleansing of the Infected 1150XP
• How Big a Threat? 975XP
• Beached Sea Turtle 460XP
• The Red Crystal 490XP
• As Water Cascades 490XP
• The Fragments Within 975XP
  

Notes:

• Inventory takes a dramatic leap from 40 to 80 thanks to some new Netherweave Bags provided by Thrillho.
• Killed Lady Moongazer (silver mob) in Ameth'Aran, thank goodness she was a ranger cuz she was level 17.
• Deaths: 0
• Green Items Broken: 6
  
• Gained Psychic Scream at 14

This time around priest is going a little better. I'm not sure if it's the familiar ground of NElf quests instead of the other factions I'm not used to, or if it's the fact that I bought some decent gear. Probably a combination of the two. I hit level 15 tonight, woot! Current 'tactic' is Power Word: Shield, Smite from afar, Mind Blast (is that the name?), Shadow Word: Pain (that one seems wrong also), then wand until done. Some variation if the mob is a bit tougher. Usually includes bubble, heal, re-apply Pain and then wand again. Seems to work well enough. I finished out the Spirit Tap talent so I now get the buff 100% of the time and my first talent after that was reduction of shadow resists for mobs by 2%. Not great but better than it's competition it seems.
G'night

In the Beginning

This is starting a bit late, but I wanted to track the leveling and development of Vendress. She's my fifteenth or so priest (third or fourth is a bit more accurate) and I thought it would be fun to look back once she hits 70... or I shitcan her, whichever comes first.
As of this post, she's 28% into level 13, and 14 was my highest priest so far. I'm officially shadow spec'd, haha. 4 points in spirit tap. The increased mana regen once a fight is done will be nice for leveling but once I get to grouping, it will go in favor of the 10% (when full) stun chance talent. It seems I have to be the one to kill the mob to get the spirit increase from Spirit Tap.
My racial (NElf's only) priest abil kinda blows: Star Shards or some shite. A channeled DOT with fair mana efficiency.
I logged on to find myself in Auberdine wearing a Halloween mask (accompanying pic) and I have some mail waiting. 4 Netherweave bags courtesy of Lÿnn's Netherweave and Thrillho's tailoring skills.
BTW... current opinion of priest is low. They blow at killing stuff so far and slow killing means slow leveling... hooray! Well off to XP.