This is something that happened to me a while back so the details are pretty foggy, but for some reason I never blogged this and it deserves to be blogged, so:

I was playing my delightful Tauren Tree, the second resto druid in my arsenal (because I luff them), and I was… 62, 63?… at the time so I was in Slave Pens. Pretty standard run, things were going just fine and we were at that point between the second and final boss… you know what I’m talking about, right? All those billions of packs of Naga adds right as you get to that tunnel-ramp-thing that gets you to the druid who gives you the buff and all of that.

So anyway we get there and this segment was always a little tough, especially back in the day on heroic. Who remembers that?

*cane-waving*

Anywho, our pally tank picks up one too many packs and I get feared or something or other and the tank dies. We still manage to survive, but apparently said pally tank was too impatient to wait the ten seconds to get a rez in what had otherwise been a flawless run and wordlessly leaves the group.

This is followed by one of the DPS leaving the group as well.

So there we are, Me the Tree, an arms warrior DPS, and some other DPS whose class I can’t remember. He was a blood elf and I wanna say some sort of caster, but it’s not really all that important.

We re-queue and we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

…it’s been thirty minutes. No joke, cause I moused over the little icon and it said we’d been waiting for thirty minutes.

I was expecting the group to dissolve in a pile of “Well thanks anyway”s any minute now when the arms warrior, a lovely female orc, strapped on a shield and a one-handed sword. “Let’s clear trash while we wait,” she said.

So we did. Cleared trash. It was slow going and pretty healing intensive but we survived.

We got up to that final room with the druid and the last boss. We successfully freed the druid from his cage, killed the mobs that spawn when you do that, and got his buff.

We waited around for a few more minutes. Still no bites from the queue. The last boss in Slave Pens, who throws poisons and crap around and has always been a toughie, was looming in front of us.

I’m not sure how we came to the decision that we would give it a shot anyway, but we did. Arms warrior in Defensive Stance rushes in…

…

The first minute or so of the fight, I spent Tree-Tanking. Seriously. The boss was on me. I was Barkskin’d and spamming heals every cooldown.

Finally the warrior snags aggro. I couldn’t let down my guard; the warrior was squishy and this boss hits HARD and he hits EVERYONE with his AoE. I was out of mana so I popped Innervate. At this point the boss was maybe down to, oh, about 66% of his health or so. Yeah, this was gonna be a long fight.

Still we continue. I’m still healing on every single cooldown. It’s not long before I’m out of mana again (Tree druid mana efficiency sucks at this level) so I use a potion. I know, though, that Innervate isn’t gonna be ready next time I run out of mana, and the fight is still just as tough…

The boss is down to about 33%. I’m almost out of mana again. In fact, I’m down to my last two or three spells before I go OOM. I quickly plotted out in my head who best to use my final heals on and executed them… one last Regrowth on our pseudo-tank…

…I wince cause I know we’re gonna wipe now…

…

…

And suddenly something weird happens with the party frames and I blink, not really comprehending what happened, and suddenly the boss is down.

A few seconds later I realize that the party frames had jumped from three to five. The queue had finally popped and thrown our new party members right into the fray of the boss fight.

*blink blink*

…easy Goodie Bag for those two, eh?

Arms warrior sends me a whisper. “Sorry about you having aggro, I didn’t realize that my one-handed sword skill was still 1.”

All’s well that ends well.

Crazy secret hideout thing in Hillsbrad that I didn’t know existed? Check.

Traps set for you on the way there? Check.

Hot blood elf guys?

Check.

Tearing up battlegrounds at 29? Check. Not as much as I was at 19, but still.

This rogue thing is wicked fun. Just sayin’.

So I was browsing MMO-Champion and stumbled upon this blue post:

The only specs we really failed on in LK raiding were Frost mage, Subtlety rogue, BM hunter and Arms warrior.

…and I thought, “BM hunter? Really?”

I mean, I know tons of people see it that way, but I don’t.

Here is a handy list of stuff I raided as a Beast Master hunter:

• Naxx
• Obsidian Sanctum
• Obsidian Sanctum hard modes back when they were still semi-hard
• Eye of Eternity
• Ulduar up through about half of Yogg
• Various Ulduar hard modes (back when they were still hard)
• VoA
• Onyxia
• ToC
• Various ToC hard modes
• ICC, the two times I went in there before I quit raiding

I dunno Blizz, I appreciate the concern, really, but I don’t feel like you failed me. I mean, maybe you did for that dark period between 3.0.8 and when you started giving us consolation buffs (although that didn’t stop me from raiding as Beast Master), but now that we’ve reached the end of WotLK, the spreadsheet has proven that a geared BM hunter does just as much DPS as a geared Survival hunter.  Tons of raiding hunters still play Survival, don’t they? Even though Marks has shown to outstrip it?

See, ultimately what bothered me the most about “spec issues” this entire expansion wasn’t the game mechanics so much as it was a good portion of the playerbase. If you had a problem with raiding BM hunters during the Ulduar era or even during the ToC era, then fine– my guild and I operated differently, but I can see where you were coming from.

But then ICC showed up, BM got more buffs, BM became essentially equal in DPS to SV, and yet blogs/forums were still only posting strats for MM and SV while ignoring BM, and various people in game were still picking on BM while gladly accepting SV raiders.

Yeah. I’m not seeing any logic here. (Please let me know if you see it, so I can correct it and put my foot in my mouth.)

Anyways, enough about that. I don’t raid anymore, and I don’t really seriously play my hunters anymore, so ultimately this doesn’t affect me, other than finally allowing me to get something off of my chest that has been bothering me the last few months. I guess I just wanted to say that I just found it odd that Ghostcrawler lumped BM hunters in with, say, sub rogues and frost mages, who, from what I understand, have it FAR worse off than we do. So yeah, don’t worry about it too much, Blizz. All’s good in hunterland. Go work on our frosty and stealthy friends.

Well, that’s all for now on one of my rare excursions into WoWblog-land recently. I have to admit, blogging here feels kind of odd lately. It truly does feel like what Aspect of the Hare used to be left back in February when I went on hiatus, and I don’t think it’s coming back, even if I do keep blogging here. Not to say that’s a bad thing. I just want to overhaul the blog and shift the focus a bit. I think more story posts are in order. You know, like “Once upon a time, there was this PuG…”

*grin*

When I’ve actually been playing WoW lately (and not Starcraft 2), I’ve been all about my gnomes. I’m serious with this, you guys. I’ve got Tawbree (my gnome warlock), Tourbillon (my gnome rogue), Widgets (my gnome mage, who I am leveling on a separate server with one of my good Twitter friends– and yes, I actually paid money to transfer BoA items over because I am spoiled), and my latest project, my gnome warrior Breguet (whom I have made a jewelcrafter, which seems appropriate. I 100% blame Khraden‘s comment in one of my earlier posts for this name inspiration.)

It’s so funny because these are classes that I have never been able to get into before– do you guys know how many times I’ve attempted warriors, and then scrapped them before level 10?– but this time is different. I am convinced that gnomes make everything more fun.

And yes, I have a spot all ready to go on my main server for my impending gnome priest.

And goblins, a BUNCH of those are happening.

Let’s make this an interactive blog post, shall we? Gnomes make everything more fun for me… what makes everything more fun for YOU?