Even better, you can choose which of your pets you are looking at. So you can see, for example, that Wash is spec’d for 20-point Beast Mastery goodness, whereas when I last left Perezvon, he was spec’d for Marksmanship pewpew.

Pretty nifty, I think! ^_^

Feel free to visit my own Armory to try it out (and take a peek at my oh-so-versatile Cunning pets, who I also believe are spec’d 20- and 16-points respectively at the moment).

Been feeling a bit lonely lately now that it’s been almost a month since I’ve been in a guild with my main character. I’m not entirely sure what I want to do about it though. All I ever see recruiting are either diehard raiding guilds, or “We are a new guild who will help you level and we have a tabard, PST!” I’m sorta looking for something inbetween, if that makes sense.

Ironically, the guild that I ran Naxx with for a few months is now recruiting ranged DPS for Naxx25 and Ulduar10, which is, guess what, exactly where most of my gear upgrades are! A few of the higher-ranking people in said guild are also aware that I am guildless, though I have yet to receive any sort of guild invite (although I think they are probably trying to be polite). They’re good people, too, and they seem to like me a lot.

So why haven’t I joined that guild yet? Because last I checked, their Naxx25/Ulduar10 runs happen when I am at work nine times out of ten. So, I’m kinda torn. Should I join that guild and just see what happens, or should I keep guild-shopping and hope for something with a better-fitting schedule?

And what is the best way to go guild-shopping anyway, aside from sitting around in GuildRecruitment and trying to make a good impression in PuGs?

/ponder…

(P.S. While I am still somewhat reluctant to do a server transfer, yes, I am still willing to take a serious look at all guild offers I get through this blog, cause ya never know! Must be Alliance, must be on an RP or RP-PvP server, and must be okay with the fact that I do not have any semblance of a set schedule and thus can not guarantee I can make raids on a regular basis. >.>)

It’s really funny to me when I think back to just about a month or so ago when I was feeling sort of meh-ish with WoW, and then I compare that to right now where I feel like I can’t play enough.

What was I thinking? I have to stuff to PuG and specs to play around with and old dungeons to solo on my hunter! I’ve got five-mans to heal and rep to grind on my druid*! I’ve got lowbie alts who have billions of levels just sitting in front of them, waiting to be claimed!

I have raids to stealth through in the name of photo ops!

On top of that, I am actually immensely excited for the next content patch. Back when they were first announcing stuff for it, I was kinda disappointed, solely because I was hoping this would be the patch where Beast Mastery would be brought up to par with the other specs but so far there has been little news on that front. Then I decided that that didn’t matter because I was having fun anyway, and now I’m just excited.

I mean seriously: leveling in battlegrounds! New n’ Improved, Lemon-Scented druid forms! (New look, same great product!) Being able to turn your XP gain on and off with a switch! (this has made the significant other very happy; he has a gnome warrior who he has been casually leveling and he is now revitalized in this goal to tank everything. in. the. game. At the right level.)

And guys. HOGGER AS A LEVEL 80 BOSS. And VanCleef. And all those old bosses you loved to hate from back in the day. This is something I’ve been wistfully dreaming of for months and it’s happening. And the best part is: I will actually get to see this content because it’s a five-man. You know how many people are in my little group of closest WoW friends? About five or six, depending on who is taking a break/is crazybusy with IRL at the time (we all sort of naturally take turns being in that position). You know how difficult it was for us to juggle everyone’s schedules and bring in reliable people from “outside” simply to fill out a ten-man?

Now don’t get me wrong. I love raiding and I have tons of respect for serious raiders and if I had the schedule to do it, I totally would.

…but I don’t, and as such some of my best memories in the game are doing things as, you know, a little group of the five or six or us, on those special nights when we all realized we had an hour or two to ourselves which resulted in “Hey, guys, we’re bored, LET’S GO DO SOMETHING CRAZY”. New five-man that pretty much dipped into the “I Can Only Dream” portion of my brain for inspiration? Very yes. Please don’t be wrong on this, MMO-Champion!

So yeah. Awesome exciting times in WoW lately. What is this “burnout” of which you speak, Month-Ago-Pike?

—

* As much as I hate most dailies as a rule, on the other hand, there is something deeply satisfying to me about grinding rep, in a weird sort of masochistic way.

I never did Magisters’ Terrace at level 70. I’m not really sure why, other than I was holding out for a while to see if I could go with some of my guildies (we all thought doing a new instance for the first time together sounded awesome), but it never materialized, and then by the time I thought about going ahead and PuG’ing it I would’ve felt silly saying “So by the way, I know WotLK is coming out in a month or two but I haven’t done this instance yet…”

So I never did it.

There is one thing Kael’thas drops though that I really want: a minipet. So after sitting around thinking “Man, I should really find a group to go help me grind MgT with” for weeks, I decided “If you want something done, you have to do it yourself.”

Well, with your pet. But you know.

I had a couple things going against me. Lack of a Tenacity pet was a biggie (and my stable is full of pets that I… really don’t want to abandon), as was lack of a Super-Crazy-Pet-Tanking spec. But hey, you can always try, right?

I picked Eltanin, my Windserpent– a cunning pet– to be my companion on this experiment. I figured he would be a better choice than any of my Ferocities. Once out of the stable, I spec’d him into everything like Great Stamina and Cornered, and then headed off!

First boss was cake, even using my Beast Master glass cannon raid spec. He’s basically Warlord Kalithresh Redux if you don’t know how the fight goes (though it occurs to me that most of you who don’t know how the fight goes probably haven’t done Warlord Kalithresh either…)

Second boss was Curator Redux, aaaaand I soon realized I couldn’t do it with aforementioned Beast Master glass cannon raid spec. The solution? Hearthed out to Stormwind, spec’d into Super-Crazy-Pet-Tanking spec and bought a Glyph of Mending, and came back and tried again. He still put up a pretty big challenge and there was a point where I had to Distracting Shot pull + kite the guy for a while, to give Eltanin some extra Mend Pet time, but it all worked out in the end.

The next guy… isn’t a boss. But he’s hot, so I’m posting his picture anyway.

Third boss… oh gosh, how do I describe this. Close your eyes and imagine five guys plus a couple of pets and demons, all lined up in a row. And one of them heals, a lot. It’s like the twisted lovechild of Illidari Council and Moroes. Now imagine you’re by yourself. /gulp

The first attempt was a spectacular wipe, and then a little thought occured to me: hey, this is just like PvP. I should forget about doing the pet-tanking thing, and just burst-damage everyone to death. Plus, Aimed Shot would sure come in handy against that healer…

And so I did something nuts. I switched over to my Marksmanship dual-spec, and respec’d Eltanin to maximize my own survivability with things like Roar of Sacrifice. I basically pretended like I was spec’ing him for Alterac Valley or something.

Then I put a Frost Trap down, waited for the cooldown, and pulled…

…

OHYEAH! Combination of Frost Trap kiting, Feign Deaths and Readiness, that. /phew

By that point, I was feeling confident. I was on a roll, I’d just killed this boss fight that had looked near impossible on the surface, and there was only one boss left: Kael’thas himself.

But then there was something I wasn’t banking on.

These guys. They are all standing right in front of Kael’thas and if you don’t kill them all in one sitting, they all respawn.

Did I mention that they do this thing where they stun you and put stupidly painful DoTs on you? And do this explosion thing? It’s like being ambushed by a rogue, warlock, and mage. At the same time. All in some little room where getting range is almost impossible. Yeeeeah. I apologize in advance for the nightmares you’ll have about it tonight.

Needless to say I pulled out all the stops on this battle. I tried everything. I tried Beast Mastery, I tried Marksmanship, I tried kiting them to a more open area, heck, I even tried Frost Trap -> Volley -> Feign Death -> Frost Trap -> Volley. No dice.

…then, after about nine or ten wipes and a repair break, I found out you can sneak past them and get to Kael’thas! For a brief moment I had a glimmer of hope restored to my eye!

Got Kael’thas down to about 50% and then the Fantastic Five (or Six, or however many there were in that group) decided it would be really funny to aggro and go Jackson Pollock on my butt. I Feigned to reset the fight and tried again, but same deal.

So, for the time being, I will have to concede that Magister’s Terrace is prrrroooobably not solo’able without a Tenacity pet to Thunderstomp that last pull and keep them off of you. If you can figure out a way to do it otherwise, please tell me, because for the time being it looks like I may have to vote one of my pets off the island return one of my pets to the wilderness and obtain a Tenacity pet in order to conclude what I started.

Next time, mister… next time.

I still have a rather distinct memory of when I decided to roll Tamaryn, though the “whys” have since largely been lost to the mists of time. I do remember saying in guild chat something akin to “I’m bored, I think I’m gonna roll a druid”, then making one and whispering an officer and being chucked a guild invite within ten seconds of my new character’s existence. I also remember a fellow guildie coming and making a druid alongside me. We did the starter quests together and were soon joined by this random naked hunter who kept challenging us to duels (I always won, because I never let him have range. Class experience for great justice.) When me and my buddy couldn’t shake the guy, we went into the deepest part of this spider cave and got as lost as we could, then hearthed simultaneously, leaving him behind. Good times.

My friend stopped playing his druid once we hit level five or so, and to the best of my knowledge he never played the character again. I kept playing, though, largely because of the sheer nostalgia of playing through the night elf starting area for the first time since Tawyn, my first character.

Upon hitting level ten I put my first tentative points into the Balance tree because I figured I probably would not like melee as much as casting. Leveling was slow going, though, and honestly I probably would have lost interest in the character (as I did all my non-hunters) once I got out of the nostalgia kick that was Darkshore… were it not for that fateful day when a bunch of guildies got on alts all about my level and asked me to heal Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep.

I was very nervous; I had never healed before, ever, well, outside of Mend Pet. Because I was so worried about it, I ran to Darnassus, found the druid trainer, cleared all my talent points, and put them into the Restoration tree. My plan was to respec again and put them back into Balance afterwards.

That didn’t happen.

Because that day, in Deadmines and SFK, I became fascinated with healing. It was like reverse-huntering! It was a completely new experience, so very different than what I’d been doing all this time on my hunters, and I was hooked.

And so, with the exception of a few flirtations with Moonkin-ing (once at level 40, and then again permanently when dual specs came out when I was level 74 or so), I leveled my druid full resto. I RestoKitty’d through the occasional quest, which was slow but effective, but the vast bulk of my leveling was through instances; I kept myself constantly in LFG and shoved myself into as many healing roles as possible. This culminated in a rather unique experience to put on my WoW résumé: I healed almost every five-man instance in the game. At the appropriate level.

It’s been ups and downs, really, but mostly ups.

There was the very slow process of learning about the delicate art of not-healing-too-fast so as not to pull aggro.

The little “squee” I emitted upon running into a group of roleplayers in Southshore when I was leveling there and letting Tamaryn put her fledgling skills to use to aid a “dying” character.

The joy of getting Tree of Life form mid-Maraudon run and using it right there and immediately bursting into /dance.

The rush of winning a single Alterac Valley game (by a hair… literally something like two reinforcements) at level 60 after dozens of losses, and looking at the “healing done” chart afterward and feeling like I had made a tangible difference in the outcome.

There was the perplexity I felt when first learning Lifebloom, because it kept changing all the time– first I was never supposed to let it bloom, then I was, et cetera… not to mention I couldn’t figure out how to use the dang spell, so I quickly resorted to my “healing fetal position” of Rejuvenation + Regrowth.

But then there was the thrill of first hitting 1000 spell power, and soon after, the deep satisfaction of doing Azjol’Nerub and Violet Hold and pulling up the healing meters and realizing that Regrowth had pretty much been completely replaced by what else but that oh-so-stubborn spell Lifebloom– I was, at long last, a bona fide HoT healer.

Yeah, it’s been a pretty crazy ride.

…and yes Virginia, after all these years, Pike finally has an endgame character that isn’t a hunter.

NOW ONWARD TO EPICS!

Marksmanship Week wraps up with a VoA10 yesterday where I did a pretty dang good job– I was in the lead on Recount by a large margin on both Archavon and Emalon, and some of my long-time friends who were in the group commented on my sudden noticeably big jump in DPS. Yes, where Survival failed to bring the increased numbers, Marksmanship delivered– a lot.

And so we reach the end of this great Spec Experiment. Things I’ve learned?

- Marksmanship is definitely replacing Survival as my dual spec. I don’t need to be the raid group’s emergency replenishment bot when I don’t have a raid group anymore. >.>

- I was using my wolf this whole time as part of my experiment to really try to min/max this as much as possible, but I miss my raptor so much that I will probably go back to using him full time. Furious Howl has a cooldown, but Raptor cuteness is forever <3

- I was sort of expecting to spec back to BM and suddenly flail around feeling like I had nothing to do and everything was "easy" after playing specs with a lot more buttons to push. But in all honesty, the reverse was true. For me, Beast Master feels very difficult to play well, and I think a lot of it has to do with perception. With Marksmanship, topping the DPS chart feels smooth and near-effortless, whereas with Beast Master, it feels like I'm prancing on a rather precarious position and one misstep will cost me. So I really really have to try to coax what I can out of it, merely to reach the lower level of what I got as MM. The result is that, oddly enough, BM has suddenly become sort of a more stressful spec to play o.O It’s kind of weird and I’m not sure what that will mean for me in terms of playstyle. Though lemme tell ya, I can’t wait until BM gets this supposed buff that we’re supposed to get… and hopefully still will… /crosses fingers

(Note: I don’t mean to offend anybody here; I know the idea of “which spec is the most challenging to play” seems to be a really touchy subject, with most everybody clamoring to claim theirs as the most difficult to play. I think first of all a.) it’s subjective, and b.) I haven’t found a single hunter spec thus far to be boring to play– awkward, yes, *glances at Survival* but certainly not boring– and to me, that’s what counts. They are all challenging in their own way. /nods)

In the end though, I don’t really aim for giant DPS numbers so much as I aim to be competitive; so long as I am somewhere in the top 3 or 5 (depending on whether it’s 10man or 25man) then I am content. This experiment has been an awesome and eye-opening experience to me, but I’m glad now I’ll be able to close Recount for a while and not worry about it.

/leans back and streeeeeeeeeeetches

An interesting thing I’ve noticed is that Marksmanship has given be a definite DPS boost in heroics but not so much in raids. Why? I have no idea. Maybe it’s all the buffs my pet gets. Or maybe I still just stink at anything that isn’t BM. =P

Either way, I definitely tied my current Beast Master DPS high score in OS25 yesterday. 4900 again, on that one drake that makes everyone’s numbers go crazy.

My Sarth+1 Drake numbers were well below most of the other hunters’ despite the fact that I was the only one with my pet still alive at the end of it all (all the other hunter pets died very early on in the fight. It’s my BM instincts, I guess?) Although I think a lot of that can be attributed to how the other hunters spent the bulk of their time Volleying adds, the simple truth of the matter remains that I have fallen rather viciously behind in terms of gear and I keep winding up in PuG raids with Ulduar-geared hunters who are going EoV-farming to sell the bracers or whatever. This can make it difficult to use other hunters as a yardstick so I have to use myself as a benchmark, and it’s not always easy to remember how I’ve performed in the past. But it was 3600 or so on Sarth as MM which is pretty similar to what I get as BM. (Sarth isn’t exactly a good benchmark fight because of all the stuff you’re doing, but hey.)

I’m still trying to get into Naxx to go play with Patchwerk. I tried to get into a Naxx PuG that was going on yesterday morning but they wanted a shadow priest. So I went and did a bunch of heroics which is when I realized that my heroics results as Marksmanship were quite better than they were as both BM and SV. Verrrrry interesting /strokes chin

Also found out that the second I spec’d MM, suddenly every other hunter I heroics’d with was also MM. It kept making me sad that my Trueshot Aura was going to waste because there were two of us with it. I miss Ferocious Inspiration…

43% crit. Almost 6000 Attack Power. Can you imagine that when Call of the Wild and Mirror of Truth proc’d? I was laughing like a maniac.

Marksmanship really is a very fun spec, for me anyways. I know there was a time when disliking Marksmanship purely-on-principle was in vogue for some reason (interestingly, Survival was more likely to be seen as “cool and edgy” and all that, at least among the places I frequented), and I think you can still see remnants of that dislike today, but I find it to be an ill-deserved reputation. It easily out-does Survival on Pike’s Personal Fun-o-meter so far.

• Extremely variable DPS. Anywhere from “Gosh, this I do this on the training dummies as Beast Master” to “HOLY MOTHER OF MEDIVH I ALMOST BROKE 5K”, all in the same raid.
• Very possible to beat better-geared Survival hunters at the DPS race.  Cause I did it today in VoA25.
• Is overall giving me slightly better numbers than Survival did. I don’t know why. I still don’t know what I did wrong when I was SV. o.O
• Is fun.  Mwahaha.  Billions of cooldowns, plus toys like Rapid Fire + Readiness, and did I mention I hate re-applying Serpent Sting?  I hate it.  I dunno why.  If you are a Marksman you don’t have to.   Ever.  It’s bliss. Oh and I can strafe around again and I don’t have to worry about standing still anymore! /glee

Depending on how long you have been reading this blog and/or how attentive you’ve been, you may already know by now that Tawyn leveled Marksman until level, oh, 58 or so. Granted, I did it because I had no idea what talent points were and everybody told me “Go Marksman, go Marksman”, so I did. Pretty sure I had points in Improved Concussive Shot and everything. Anyways, I enjoyed it and I was used to it and I sort of always had a soft spot for it, and I imagine it’s partly because of that, that making the switch to Marksman isn’t nearly as hard as making the switch to Survival was. It feels rather natural and full-circle, in a way.

Honestly I have a confession to make; I have long wished for a viable Marks/Beast Master hybrid build. It just seems like the pinnacle of hunter-ness to me; taking a bunch of talents that augment both the hunter and pet equally. The idea of something like this really excited me back in WotLK Beta but I saw it tested a few times and it never lived up to a “pure” spec. And so, I don’t know if I will ever get my wish, so I am destined to bounce around between BM and MM, it seems.

In other news, I’m trying to decide which of mine/my friends’ “Alt Guilds” to stick my main in while I wait around for a new “Real Guild”. I’m torn between < The Ice Stone Has Melted > and < Slack Jawed Daffodils >, though the former has the larger vote on Twitter at the moment. Hrmmm.

I am now officially specced 7/57/7. All I’ve really had time to do so far is some dailies and a little bit of time on the training dummies to de-rustify my rotation.

Things I have noticed so far:

1.) The Marksman rotation feels like you are pressing more buttons despite the fact that in theory, Survival is the one pressing the most buttons. Probably because the Survival buttons tend to be on longer cooldowns.

2.) Questing is hilarious; my pet is better at holding aggro as an MM pet than an SV pet for some reason I can’t ascertain (or maybe it’s just my mind…), a Chimera + Aimed will kill almost all mobs (sometimes I don’t have time to even use Aimed), and Rapid Recuperation is like a dip into AotV without having to use AotV. I’ve had less downtime doing dailies as MM than as any other spec thus far. (Interestingly, Beast Master is the spec where kill-em-all quests take the longest amount of time to do– I’m not killing things nearly as fast and thus I am in Viper much more often.)

I’m actually sort of worried about this week not being a good week for this test; I work evenings Wednesday through Saturday this week which means I have… uh, just tonight and tomorrow to try to get into all the raids I want to test. And tonight is limited because there are already a few I am locked out of. >.> We’ll see how things go.