I am the stereotypical DPSer that every healer hates. I am the person that gets made fun of in trade channel. Who am I? I am Pike, and…

I HAVE NEVER LIVED THROUGH HEIGAN OR SARTH.

There. I said it.

Maybe it’s a graphics thing. I haven’t been able to see any bridges in the game, for example, or several building skins, since patch 2.2 or thereabouts. I’ve plummeted to my death in Thunder Bluff more times than I can count.

Maybe it’s a me-being-an-idiot thing. Hey, it’s more likely than you may (or may not?) think.

But whatever the reason, I cannot see these supposed waves of fire and lava that everyone else and their pet monkey can see.

My name is Pike, and I die on Heigan and Sarth.

/bow

I somehow managed to squeeze myself into a couple of 25mans today, which is perhaps ironic because I haven’t done any WotLK 10mans yet. But hey, I’m not complaining.

The first was Vault of Archavon, the Wintergrasp Raid, which was basically just as easy as everyone said it would be. The main issue was that for some strange reason, my pet refused to attack the boss. Flat out refused. I told him to attack, he sat there. I moved closer to the boss and told him to attack again, he still sat there. He does that on the last boss of Drak’theron Keep, too, but though it’s annoying, I can live with it. A raid boss though? Ugh. Needless to say, with 50% of my damage essentially out of commission, my DPS on that fight was absolutely abysmal and embarassing. Just ugh.

The second raid was Obsidian Sanctum. I only managed to be there for the first half, but with Locke fortunately opting to cooperate this time, my performance was much more respectable. I managed to snag fourth place on the meters overall in my dungeon blues, even coming out a small hair ahead of a much better geared BW/Readiness hunter. (Far and away the overall DPS winner was a Volley-spec’d hunter who basically did nothing but spam Volley. Not even kidding.)

Really though, while it was nice to see those numbers and it was nice to see I had done so well, I still came away feeling like it was a bit of a hollow victory. Pre-WotLK, when I topped the DPS, I knew I had done so through hard work and relying on the clock in my head to time my shots. Now all I do is spam Steady and pop all my cooldowns, really only worrying about Serpent Sting if needed. I don’t get the same sense of satisfaction. And it doesn’t help when the top six or seven DPSers are all either hunters or Death Knights. I guess it is nice for getting into groups because people know you can easily deliver, but for me… it was always the feeling that I did a lot of hard work that I enjoyed the most. And I’m not getting that feeling this time.

And so I scratch my head and weigh the pros and cons and decide to stand out there on a limb and say that I’m… sort of looking forward to the nerfs. I strongly feel that with the incoming Steady Shot nerf and reduced mana cost of Arcane Shot, there will be some actual shot weaving going on again. I will be able to work hard for my spot on the DPS charts again.

And honestly, I’m looking forward to the challenge. There, I said it. If I wind up with my foot in my mouth later, I fully accept the responsibility =P

And with that said, Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

You know, Tawyn had to deal with a lot of scary stuff today.

A room full of dragon hatchlings in the name of a title…

And the big mother dragon, herself, just for the heck of it…

But nothing, apparently, is quite as scary as a talking tree.

/cower indeed.

(For the record, the guild name is a BIG inside joke; and Onyxia was done with a prot warrior, a resto druid, a warlock, our healadin-turned-retadin, and me. I FRAPS’d the thing and I’d be willing to try to get a video together with annotations about my usage of the new hunter talents and skills, if anybody is remotely interested!)

…and before you ask, no, the Ancient Petrified Leaf did not drop, and Eltanin the Windserpent can tank Ragnaros for nine seconds.

So what happens when a rather motley crew of roleplayers shows up in Moonglade to have an in-character Guild Lunar Festival Party… and then somebody randomly announces that a certain boss has been summoned?

Yep. We downed him.

To fully appreciate this you have to realize that about half of our little raid group consisted of people from levels 40-60. The other half were people in their 60s and a smattering of 70s. None of our healers was a higher level than 60, and that level 60 healer was spec’d Boomkin at the time.

We were completely and thoroughly unorganized, because we had no idea we were going to be doing this; people had been thrown into random groups without regard to party buffs, in fact nobody had any buffs of any kind really. There was conveniently a graveyard very close by, so the typical strategy was to do as much damage as you could before the AoE inevitably caught you off guard and killed you, at which point you would wait two minutes to rez and then rinse and repeat. It wasn’t long before everyone’s armor started getting shot so we started taking shifts running to the nearest repair guy and running back.

And yet somehow, after what I swear took no less than a half hour, our scraggly little group of roleplayers pulled it off. It helped that we had our ever-so-amazing pre-Kara-geared tank, who did not even die a single time, thanks to our ridiculously talented sub-level-60 healers.

We failed to get the quest beforehand, but honestly, I couldn’t care less about that. Being on Ventrilo with the whole group, cheering and squealing at the end and congratulating and complimenting everybody and simply being so giddy and high on our guild’s first little “raid victory”, was worth far more than any possible quest reward.

I cannot wait to start raiding.

(Oh, did I mention Tux didn’t die a single time? I musta died 5 or 6 times; Tux never once hit the bucket before I did though, Omen’s Starfall be darned. I’m proud of my boy. *ruffles his headfeathers*)