So I was feeling pretty happy about hitting 20k words (exactly!) in my NaNoWriMo today so I decided to dink around in WoW for an hour or two.

The first cool thing that happened was getting WSG for my random battleground, seeing that our ragtag group of team members was up against a pre-made, deciding to stick around anyway… aaaand then notching up a win. Against the pre-made. I giggled.

The second cool thing that happened was that I decided to clear out my quest log before Cataclysm so I was doing this random quest down in Howling Fjord and I happened to stumble upon this huge gigantic elite polar bear as part of the quest. So obviously I tamed him.

So there I was, doing pretty good for a random WoW break, so I hopped onto my Netherdrake and sort of aimlessly started to fly around in a general Northerly direction. I had the music on (which is rare) and it was nice and calm and atmospheric and I was kind of thinking about the good times I’d enjoyed with this expansion and how it was almost over.

And this is when the third cool thing happened. See, I somehow wound up in Zul’drak during this little jaunt, and a little voice popped into my brain. The little voice said, “Hey, isn’t there a spirit beast around here or something?”

And I said, “Hey, I think there is! Let’s turn on Track Beasts for the heck of it.”

So I turned on Track Beasts.

And the second I did, this little yellow dot appeared on my minimap.

I moused over it and it said “Gondria”.

>.>

…

This is, believe it or not, my very first Spirit Beast. I know Gondria is sort of seen as the Poor Man’s Loque, but I’m already in love with my Shiny Ghost Kitty who, because of his heal, has already proven himself to live through things that would have killed any of my other pets. (Read: the last boss in Gundrak who does that thing, I’m not sure what it is, that KILLS PETS DEAD.)

I had to release my newly-tamed polar bear to get Gondria. But don’t worry. I went back and got the same bear again afterwards. :3

So feeling nostalgic after my last post, I decided to give Arathi Basin a whirl on my level 46 hunter. AB is arguably my favorite battleground; WSG is a sentimental favorite but it’s in a masochistic sort of way and I’m sort of afraid to go in there now that it’s changed, AV used to have that epic feel but has turned into a zergfest, and EotS… well, we won’t go there.

Turns out the Intimidation + Bestial Wrath combo on a clothie is just as fun as it was years ago, and turns out pouncing on an unsuspecting hunter and Wing Clip + melee’ing him to death while he stands there stunned is still absolutely hilarious.

Gosh I love PvPing as a hunter. Nothing else compares, really. Healing is funnish and a nice change of pace but it’s nothing compared to huntering. I always wonder what people are on about when they say hunters need a buff in PvP– to be fair, I know they’re talking about arenas, and I’m talking about lowbie bracket battlegrounds, and there is a huge difference– but gosh I feel OP, and I luuuurve it. I basically never die, even when taking on groups of people alone. Really the only downfall is that you run out of mana far too quickly, and then regenning mana takes pretty much twice as long. >.>

So yeah, this AB. I went in and we were getting the whole “Not enough players… this BG will end in five minutes” dealy. I looked at the scorechart; Alliance had a full 15 players and us Hordies had five or six or something. I contemplated leaving, anticipating a five-cap stomp, but then said “ya know what, screw it,” and ran off to Lumber Mill.

We took Farm and took Lumber Mill, and for several minutes I was the lone person defending Lumber Mill as everyone else ran off to Blacksmith. This is where I single-handedly took on groups of two or three Alliance who kept trying to come attack me and who all failed miserably. Did I mention I love being a hunter in battlegrounds?

Anyways, we were getting more and more Hordies by the minute and finally fulled out to a full 15 vs. 15 AB. We were on a roll at this point, Alliance had no chance. Like there were a good six of them defending Mines, so we did a two-pronged attack on them, two or three of us attacking from each side, and just nabbed it out from under their nose. By the time we won we had about double the resources that they had. It was hilarious.

Almost as fun as an instance, a nice break from questing, and you get XP. Yay! I love you Arathi Basin.

At some point between the last time I seriously PvP’d (’bout a year ago) and now, Bloodlust Alliance figured out how to win Alterac Valley!

=D

…okay, so, while that is good news, it’s probably not the good news you came here to read. Fortunately, I have other good news. The latest rumblings on the PTR are the impending change to Animal Handler. This talent has changed much through the years. Initially it gave your pet some extra Hit, which was rendered obsolete with hit scaling. Then it gave your pet expertise, and that, too, is about to be made obsolete. So now what’s it gonna do? Increase your pet’s Attack Power by 5%/10%.

For the record, that is awesome. And though I have no hard numbers, if Blizz delivers that plus expands on pet scaling like they said they wanted to in time for 3.2, combined with the impending weird Kill Command reduction on Catlike Reflexes and the Wild Hunt buff… I’m guessing that Beast Mastery is pretty much “fixed”.

Gotta say I am a bit worried, though. Remember why Blizz nerfed us last time? A lot of it was because pets were doing over 50% of our damage and they said that was too much. To which I actually agree– I love having a pet doing, oh… 35, 40% of my damage, but anything over 50% makes me too uncomfortable. Anyways, Blizz nerfed the pets, while forgetting to, well, really buff the hunter to counterbalance it.

Anyways, with all these new changes I don’t see any way that a Beast Master pet won’t be back up to 50% or more of a Beast Master hunter’s total DPS, and I worry that Blizz will have their nerfbat at the ready again. But who can say, really? It’s one of those things where we’ll just have to wait and see. At least the Blues know we could use some love, and that’s always a good sign.

A small sample of my thoughts from yesterday, after trying out the New AV on both Tawyn and Lunapike:

“So lemme get this straight… on my Alliance character’s battlegroup, Alliance has apparently collectively decided that “Zerg Drek” is the new key to victory, leading to games that are a mere ten minutes long which usually end in an Alliance victory…

…and on my Horde character’s battlegroup, Alliance still sucks at AV.

…this is the happiest day of my life *tears of joy*”

Momentary euphoria aside, the lag is horrendous on Bloodlust right now. I have never seen battleground lag that bad. In one game I was kicked off the server right as the “All in” call was given for Drek, I couldn’t connect for about ten or fifteen minutes, and when I finally managed to get in… I was in the same spot I’d been when I disconnected and Alliance won about ten seconds later. Took 15 minutes to kill Drek even with the Relief Hut. DoTs became the key to victory for most people, because they would at least keep ticking when you couldn’t move or cast spells or attack anything. People were joking that Horde had decided to revolt and use an “Alliance lag mod”, though I think things were just as bad for the poor Hordies.

The face of AV really has changed though, it seems, in Tawyn’s battlegroup anyway. Ever since the last time they changed AV, Horde has completely and thoroughly dominated AV in our battlegroup. But now… well, I played probably eight games or so yesterday, and six were wins (and I sort of think the other two would have been wins if it weren’t for the lag– in both cases, we had Drek down to about 30% health, or less). No more people spending the entire battleground arguing about what “surefire strategy” was the one that worked. No more 45-minute long painful battles of being killed over and over as you watched the Alliance reinforcements dwindle to zero while Horde still had 497 or something. Nope. Completely different.

Now the second I get into a AV, battleground chat has typically been taken over by one or two people saying “Rush to Relief Hut, take towers as you go, capture the Relief Hut, and kill Drek. Do not stop to fight Horde.” over and over. And there are no questions. No arguments (other than from the occasional person who is perhaps playing AV for the first time since the new patch). Everybody sticks to the plan. Nobody takes Iceblood Graveyard (which is still a surreal concept to me. No… Iceblood…?) Nobody even thinks about Galv. A couple people take towers along the way but for the most part you get some 35 people at Frostwolf Relief Hut and then four minutes later you’ve got 35 people in Drek’s fort. It seems as though the Horde has a similar strategy going on; there were many games where I never saw even a single Horde player and the BG announcements made it clear that they were busy doing the exact same thing we were: rushing to the end to see who could kill the boss first. And it most cases, it was Alliance who managed to pull it off.

In some ways, this is all really very ridiculous. I remember saying rather incredulously on Vent after a couple games: “I only have 3 honorable kills but over 1000 honor” and then the similarly incredulous replies from my guildies (which resulted in everybody going to try AV themselves, and getting the same result as I had). To me, it seems as though the new “Horse Race AV” (as I’ve heard a few people call it now) has sort of defeated the entire purpose of PvP. I can’t help but wonder how long this is going to last.

So it’s a bittersweet victory; yes, we win now, yes, I’m getting tons of marks and honor, but the victory is meaningless and hollow.

At least there are still epic battles on my hordie’s battlegroup. The Horse Race mentality has not spread there (yet, anyway) and Horde still wins by 400 reinforcements after super long matches. Victories take longer but it’s much more fun. (Oh, and no lag.)

How has everybody else’s AV changed? Or has it for you?

So what’s a hunter do the second she hits level 51?

Head to the 51-60 AV bracket, of course.

Not bad for being the lowest level they letcha in. I think so anyways.

It seems like it was just yesterday when Tawyn hit her early-50s and snagged herself Ice Barbed Spear. Well, today it looks like yet another of my hunters has achieved that rite of passage.

/cheer
/dance

It only took two games to do it, too. Just two! On Tawyn it took like eleven.

It was so weird playing this battleground from the Horde side for the very first time. It sort of felt like Bizarro-AV. To be honest I still can’t figure out Horde’s secret for winning. I was sort of hoping it would all be made clear, but honestly it seems like when I’m playing Horde we do the exact same thing as Alliance (only in reverse) and yet we win heartily rather than lose decidedly. Very odd. Clearly this requires further study.

Gosh I love leveling hunters.

…was a 2v2, me (BM hunter) and a warlock vs. a warrior and a priest.

I really didn’t know a lot about what I was doing because I’d never even been inside an arena before. Somebody told me I should “run up the ramp” so I did. The warrior started pounding on the warlock first which gave me ample time to pop Beast Within, Abacus of Violent Odds, and Rapid Fire, and start devouring the warrior.

I actually got his health down quite a ways, but, ya know… he had a priest. So it was all to no avail. (In retrospect we probably should’ve attacked the priest first, but I didn’t see him for a while.) I eventually died, which I expected– I am so geared for PvE right now that it’s not even funny how gimped my stamina and resilience are– but to be honest I did better than I thought I’d do. I guess having 7000+ lifetime honor kills gives me a wee bit of an advantage despite my lack of gear.

I also played ten Arathi Basin games yesterday; I figured “why not” because it was still the holiday weekend for it and also because I had this sudden idea to record the results of the ten games, just for some fun statistics to look at.

Of the ten games I played, all PuGs, seven were against premades and were thus losses. (Though funnily enough, only two of those premades wound up actually five-capping us, the other five were all long grueling battles that lasted just as long as if it hadn’t been a premade anyway. One comes to mind where we constantly had two nodes capped and the premade only managed to keep three… they kept trying to take our other nodes, and they kept failing.)

So only three of the games were good ol’ fashioned PuG vs. PuG matchups. Of those three games, Alliance won two and Horde won once. For the first Alliance win, the Horde seemed to be off the ball right from the start, Alliance was ahead the entire way and won about 2000-1200. The second Alliance win was actually a very very close race for about 75% of the game, at which point Alliance somehow pulled off some crazy epic 5-cap maneuever and clinched us the victory. The one Horde victory was a pretty resounding Horde victory, they were ahead basically the entire game and it culminated in a 5-cap for them.

All and all I was satisfied; it showed me that despite all the premades you still get the occasional really fun matchups. I’ve been taking a break from PvP for a while but yesterday may have given me “the bug” again. I need to get some gear, afterall, if I’m going to be doing arena!

And now for something completely different: more and more WoW blogs are being hosted on WordPress, and that’s fine and all except that for some reason, blogs hosted on WordPress seem to have a lot of issues loading for me. I think it has something to do with “Google Analytics” because that’s always what shows up at the bottom of my browser, by the loading bar: “Waiting for Google Analytics”. Seriously though, I had a WordPress blog open in a Firefox tab just now and it took no less than ten minutes to load. They’re all like that for me. And it takes me forever to leave a comment at those blogs, for the same reason. =/ Does anybody happen to know what’s going on? So many good blogs are hosted on WordPress and I’d like to make them easier to access.

I had a pretty productive day today in WoW.

For starters, my little hordie Lunapike hit level 38 and I decided to wander off to Westfall in the heart of Alliance territory and give solo’ing Deadmines a shot:

Ooooh, shiny stuff for my mount fund!

Aaaand, there ya have it, solo’d at level 38. A new record for me, because Tawyn solo’d it at level 41 (being primarily Marks-spec’d at the time.) Other then a few bad mistakes I made on Mr. Smite, and a VanCleef fight that was nearly too close for comfort (let’s just say my health was down to about 5%), the run went quite smootly and I got a lot of stuff out of it that I was able to put in the Auction House. (Hehe, and did you notice the mini-Tux in a few of the screenshots? I love it.)

I’ve been having a lot of fun with Lunapike lately; I’ve been playing her a little more often and I’ve been inspired with new character ideas for her, roleplaying-wise. I think I want to write a short story about her. There is a special meaning behind her name afterall, I bet you didn’t know that. Well two special meanings behind her name; one of them is in-character and one is out-of-character. I’ll have to talk about those in a future post!

The second thing I did today was net about 2500 honor in PvP on Tawyn, thanks to randomly winding up actually in the middle of a few Alliance EotS premades (and yes, a few good old-fashioned hard-earned games as well) and EotS being the PvP daily. I now have 100 AB marks and 100 WSG marks, which is the most you can carry, so I’m gonna stick to EotS and AV for now– sort of sad because AB and WSG are my favorites, but eh. Some of my guildies almost talked me into blowing nearly all my honor points and 30 WSG marks on some good pants… almost… in the end I opted not to because I didn’t want to spend that much honor, now that I’m finally on the downhill side of the grind for my crossbow. If I decide to be superhardcore I might even have it next weekend, but I’m certainly not going to be holding my breath!

The third thing was a guild clear of Mechanar. We did pretty well, I think, considering that only one of us had ever run it before. Sure we had some wipes, but we also seemed to manage to pull off some crazy miracles on what otherwise might have been even more wipes. Having us all on Ventrilo has been a big help also. There’s little I find more intense in this game, than something going wrong on a pull and somebody tossing out some crazy idea over voice chat, and then having it actually work. I even got to do some emergency trapwork a few of these times, and I think I did a pretty good job of it, too.

So now I’ve got the first half of the Arcatraz key, and if things go as planned I will be getting the second half tomorrow. I haven’t gotten any “phat dungeon lewts” in a while so hopefully those are in the cards, but on the other hand, I’m really just doing these instances for the fun of it and for the whole experience of doing one. The loot is just secondary.

I have to say, WoW has taught me more about teamwork than any school “group projects” or even any real-life, money-making job. The only other thing I have ever felt so much teamwork in, was Orchestra back when I used to play the cello in school. There were times when you were playing music when you just really “got it” and realized that you were all working together, playing parts that all sounded strange alone, to make a beautiful song. Instances in WoW (and battlegrounds too) are really the same way.

I sort of had a realization today in Mech. Basically I checked the damage meters about halfway through, because I wanted to make sure I was doing okay, and because I won’t lie, it’s always thrilled me to be on top. But today when I looked at the meters, the first thing I thought wasn’t “Oh yay I’m on top /flex”. Nope. It was “Wow… look at how well we’re all doing.” The meters looked exactly like they should. Nobody was doing a bad job. Three awesome DPS/CC doing their job and an awesome tank doing his job and an awesome healer doing his job, and together we were clearing this difficult instance. It was really a neat moment for me to feel that same synergy that I haven’t felt since my Orchestra days.

And yet again I realize that a video game has taught me a life lesson. Now if only we can get more people in the general public to realize that games can be good for you! =P

I’ve sort of been taken a break from leveling this whole past week. There were two main reasons for this. The first one is that The Boyfriend (hmm, should I call him Mr. Pike? Heehee) has been pretty busy, so he got about a level behind me. We try to stay equal in level, especially as we’re approaching 70, so I told him I would wait to level until he’d caught up.

The second reason is that I decided it would be fun to focus on PvP for a while. The reasons for this include wanting to stockpile honor and marks now so I have a jump on the level 70 PvP gear (I learned the hard way yesterday that going into the level 70 bracket AV with level 68 gear is… not a pleasant experience)… and the fact that I just plain like battlegrounds. I think my PvP skill is improving, too… I will still refrain from calling myself very good at PvP, but it felt good to see this:

I am usually near the top of the “Damage Done” charts, but I am very rarely actually first, so it was a nice surprise to see this. I’ve also noticed that my kiting skills have improved lately, and I’ve discovered a lot of little things about playing hunters in PvP that I should have known before, but didn’t. For example: Rogues love Serpent Sting. …actually, they really hate it. *cough* Because they can’t stealth if they’ve got it. I never knew this before! Fantastic. Oh, and The Beast Within handily works as, effectively, a second trinket. I didn’t know this either. Oh the fun I’ve had since I found this out. Can’t regain distance because of a warrior’s Hamstring or a rogue’s Crippling Poison? Pop The Beast Within and get back to business.

Speaking of which, I’ve noticed lately that there’s sort of been a complete turnaround for me in terms of classes that I do well against and classes that I don’t do well against. In my earlier levels, warriors and rogues were the bane of my existence. These days, I do quite well against them. Meanwhile, warlocks, who I was always pretty good at taking out before, have suddenly become near-invincible. I’m not sure if it has to do with the talents of our respective classes, or if it’s just a change in my playstyle, or maybe both. But it’s quite interesting.

Anyways, while I’ve had a lot of fun in the battlegrounds this week, I have been bitten by the dreaded Level 70 Bug, so I’ve started up my questing again. The newly-christened Mr. Pike is now at level 68 with me and we want to spend the weekend leveling. We’ll see how far we get!

People respond to kindness:

I’m sure most of you have been there. The battlegrounds game where within five minutes, somebody has, say… taken the flag but then something goes wrong and they lose it. And then somebody pipes up with “Wow you guys suck.”

I’m here to say… don’t let your team have that attitude.

“Nah, we don’t suck, we just got off to a bad start”, I said. “Come on, we can do it.”

“Yeah,” a couple other people sort of tentatively agreed.

And so we were off again. After some hard battling we managed to capture a flag.

“See? We can do it. Now we just have to keep it up.”

That was basically really all I had to say. It took off from there, people encouraging each other, thanking each other, and helping each other out. Mr. “Wow-you-guys-suck” decided to be obnoxious again at some point, proudly proclaiming his top position on the damage meters to everyone and making a big deal out of “why can’t you guys keep up”, but a quick “Yes, you’re doing a good job, keep it up everyone” reminded him that it was a group effort and hushed him up pretty quick.

Somehow, someway, after nearly an hour-long game, our scrappy little team won that Warsong Gulch game 3-0. Even with one of our members AFK nearly the entire time. Furthermore, while Mr. Originally-Obnoxious-But-Really-Not-So-Bad kept his top spot in the damage charts at the end, there were four more of us up there with him.

Was it my encouragement and our team’s overall helpful attitude that gave us this victory? Maybe we’ll never know. But I’d like to think that it at least helped a little. I’ve had similar things happen to me before; our team coming from behind and winning not because of our skill so much as because of our attitude. Don’t underestimate the power of a little encouragement; it can go a long way.

I love worthy opponents:

I ran across a female orc hunter in a completely different WSG match. She was Beast Mastery spec’d, like myself, and she and her bright green Windserpent were good. At some point early on in the game, I think we both subconsciously decided that it was a matter of hunter pride to make each other our sparring partner, so throughout the entire game we were hunting each other down and taking each other on 1 on 1. Sometimes I won, but most of the time she did. I’ve long thought that most hunter-on-hunter matches come down to gear and stamina, but this orc had skill. You could tell. I wish I’d had time to /salute her before the game ended, she was a fun opponent.

Level 19 Mage PvP:

My mage got to level 19 and I took her to WSG a few times. It was my first time PvP’ing as something other than a hunter, and I’d like to think I did decently, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. Not to mention that it’s tough being a squishy in there.

Somehow I managed to do less overall relative damage than I do as a hunter, but got a lot more killing blows. It was kind of strange.

Not being able to track people was driving me insane, though, and I missed all the other hunter abilities too. After a few games I missed my hunter so much that I had to log out of the mage and onto the hunter, and that’s where the previous WSG stories came from.

Just a few more levels until the level 70 battlegrounds! If any of you guys happen to play on the US battlegroup “Bloodlust” then I look forward to working with you… or sparring with you!… soon. Give me a /wave!

I got my tauren hunter to level 29 today, and as is the typical case with me when I get to the end of a “bracket”, I’m taking some time out to go play in the battlegrounds.

So there I was, guarding Blacksmith by myself in Arathi Basin, feeling a bit awkward about not having Flare or other helpful higher-level skills and dreaming of the trinket I’m saving up honor for. We’re winning this particular game and it’s nearing the end, but I’ve still got a freezing trap sitting at the flag waiting for anybody who wanted to try something at the last minute.

Suddenly I heard a familiar noise. I turned around and, what do you know, a rogue is caught in my trap.

Now I try to be a friendly person and honorable fighter in PvP, and throughout the whole game, really. I thank players for their heals or buffs and in general I think I’m a pretty nice person.

But at this point all I could do was be amused at the hapless rogue as my mind cycled back through all the dozens of times I’ve fallen prey to the stealthed hand of this particular class…

/target rogue
/laugh

And then I sic’d my kitty on her and she went down like a fly, and it felt pretty darn good.

Dear rogue, wherever you are… I’m sorry for laughing at you when you were stuck in my trap. But you have to realize how funny it looked and how nice it felt to be the one catching you by surprise for once. I was laughing with you, not at you. I promise. ^^

My tauren also tamed a new pet today; the windserpent Arikara. He apparently makes quite an entrance when you summon him. And I’ve never had a windserpent before, so it’ll be fun to try him out. I named him Ivan to go with the kitty Alyosha, and yes the third pet is going to be Dmitri. Cookie for anybody who gets the reference to my favorite book. *cough* =D