So I healed an Underbog on my druid today, since I’ve been trying to do one instance or so a week with her, just for kicks. There was a level 64ish hunter in the group.

…I bet you all think you know where this is going, right? Some sort of disaster story about this hunter?

Well you would be quite wrong! For this hunter had a very solid spec and shot rotation. Pet on passive with growl off. Eager to trap if necessary (though it wasn’t). I told him it was really nice to see a PuG’d hunter who knew what he was doing. He informed me that he also had a level 70 horde hunter and that he loved the class.

A. Kindred. Spirit!

So we basically spent the entire instance talking about hunters. It didn’t help that two of the other people in the group also had level 70 hunter characters and seemed to have a decent grasp of them as well. I never woulda expected a hunter theorycrafting discussion in Normal Underbog, but there you go. It was really refreshing and honestly I think that the odds that it are gonna happen again are pretty low, so it was fun while it lasted.

We wound up running Slave Pens after Underbog and I got a level on the tree, but honestly the discussion reeeally had me itching to play my hunter. So that’s what I spent the rest of the day doing. Ended up with this fabulous prize:

Yes, that’s right, Tawyn is 77 and the flyer is back! I have to admit though, unlike 99% of the WoW population, I wasn’t really dying to get flying back. There was something really charming and fun to me about hoofing it old-school-style. But in the end the flyer was an obvious upgrade choice. Firstly, the last zones are much more geared towards you having it. Secondly, having your own flying mount saves you a bunch of money that would otherwise go to flight paths. And thirdly, when everybody else has a flyer and you don’t… things are tough. It really sucks to be heading towards that Wolvar Pup and have somebody drop out of the sky and grab it and fly off again*. So in the end I am glad have my wings back.

* The day I hit exalted with the Kalu’ak and can get my pengiun pet is the day I do that quest for the last time and never do it again. Ever. And yes, I need the penguin pet. Linux geek, remember?

Once upon a time there was a great hunter named Chakapas who, after having shown his hunting prowess by trapping every living creature on the earth, chose to go after the greatest prey he could think of: the moon. Chakapas ensnared the moon with a rope so tight that it had an unwelcome and unforseen side effect: the moon could not rise at night anymore, so nights remained dark– too dark for people to travel or do much of anything by night.

-Cree Legend, as retold by Pike

I’m pretty sure the Least Mouse is supposed to be the hero of the story but leave it to me to empathize with the hapless but determined hunter.

Gotta say though, you guys are GOOD at coming up with pet names. Some of your suggestions were unbelievably tempting and I spent a good few hours musing them over. In the end, though, my decision was made when I stumbled across this story.

<3′cha all and have a great weekend!

And tell you a little story to make a point.

With all my spec testing lately and my latest entry on how my “relationship” to my pet, playstyle-wise, varied according to spec, I fear I may have accidentally given off some false impressions. So, I’m gonna clarify.

There are hunters of all specs who love their pets.

There are also hunters of all specs who really don’t care very much either way. This includes some BM hunters who are BM only for the numbers, for example.

The point that I was trying to make in my last post, is that I missed the feeling of splitting my damage with my pet. I missed knowing he was doing 35% of my DPS. It felt awkward knowing that the damage responsibility was basically squarely on my shoulders. It felt lonely to me.

When I say that, I am not at all trying to discredit the relationship you lovely MM and SV hunters have with your pets, or say that they aren’t important.

Tawyn was my first ever character and she was Marksmanship until level 55-ish.

The reason is because I had no idea what I was doing or what a spec was. So I asked my friends what to do with these newfangled talent points. At this point I’d actually started putting points into BM already but two different people completely mocked the idea of me spec’ing BM and told me Marksman was the way to go, so I promptly changed course and followed their advice.

Up I went through that talent tree and my owl Tux was there the entire way. He was my feathery little pocket tank. He was my leveling buddy. He didn’t dish out a lot of damage but he held aggro like a champ. I loved him dearly. I loved him just as much then, as a Marksman hunter, as I do now as a Beast Master hunter.

Really though, I was hungrily eyeing the Beast Mastery tree the entire time I was leveling. Heck, I went off and made Lunapike so I could have a BM hunter that my friends didn’t have to know about. There is a reason why I gave her a red kitty pet, aside from the fact that I think they’re cute. It was a conscious, symbolic choice because Lunapike was going to be my BM hunter.

That Little Red Kitty is level 70 now, by the way.

Anyways, back to Tawyn. I finally said “Ya know what, screw everybody else. I don’t care if they’re going to call me a noob now. I’m respec’ing.” So I did, and I’d like to say that I didn’t look back.

…except I did look back, once. Because it sort of scared me at first. Tux went from being my pocket tank to being this Big Red Owl of Doom. He was doing as much DPS as I was at the time, if not more. “I’ve created a monster!” I thought. I spent about a level as BM and then spec’d back to my Marksman safety zone. Tux went back to being my mild-mannered companion. All was well.

Then I started to miss the whole “fast and furious” playstyle of BM and the idea that Tux could be more than just my tanky friend. We could fight alongside each other, each doing equal damage. We could be unstoppable, together.

Together we went through the Dark Portal and stepped into Outlands and that is when I spec’d to Beast Mastery for good and since then I haven’t looked back. I wouldn’t have it any other way at this point. We fight together. He isn’t just there to keep the mobs away from me. He is there to buff me with his Ferocious Inspiration so I can in turn buff him with Kill Commands and tons of Focus, and we both act as an elegant killing machine, as One.

I have a special relationship with my pets as a Beast Master hunter. But that doesn’t mean I love them any more than I did when I was Marksman. That doesn’t mean I don’t value them any more than I did when I was Marksman (although in a gameplay sense, obviously you do have to value them somewhat more =P)

When I was experimenting with non-BM specs in Beta, I felt a certain detachment to my pets in terms of there not being nearly so much hunter/pet synthesis (one procs something for the other) and the reason I was forgetting Mend Pet is probably largely because I was busy trying to work out new rotations. Anyways, that is what I missed about being BM. I missed the hunter/pet synthesis. I didn’t love the pets any less just because I shuffled talent points around. That would be silly.

So! That is your Pike-story for the day. Hunters everywhere love their pets, and that is the way it should be. Just wanted to clarify that. Thank you, as always, for your comments and support and I will see you all next time.

The Tauren Hunter was merrily bounding into the Silverwing base in Warsong Gulch; she had been enjoying these player-verses-player excursions lately and was rather fond of her 25,000 honor that she had stockpiled for when she would hit 70 in a couple more levels and would need a nice set of war gear to go with her set of standard adventuring gear. She made it to the roof of the enemy building when suddenly she was jumped upon! By a very persistent gnome rogue.

Now, the tauren knew that many of her fellow hunters dislike the rogue because they are very good at taking away that which hunters prize most: space. However, she has an odd knack for managing to catch rogues before they catch her, and even when they do catch her first she has a knack for wriggling her way out of their grasp, so at first she wasn’t afraid. She directed her trusty red lynx to Intimidate the rogue, during which time she laid down an Immolation Trap and got a little bit of range and then hit him with a Serpent Sting.

He was soon on top of her again though, and sadly his first initial strikes had taken a critical toll so she was down on her luck right from the start. Still, they tussled for a bit, before the hunter’s health ran low and she collapsed to the ground.

She did not release her spirit though, for the rogue was himself weak, and he was still burning from the Immolation Trap and still feeling the ache of the Serpent Sting…

He saw her watching him, so he targeted her and /laughed.

Then, smugly, he started to bandage himself.

Serpent Sting removed the bandage effect.

The gnome’s eyes widened. They say in this world of pixels and polygons, facial expressions cannot change. I swear to the Earthmother, though, that his eyes widened as he came to a sudden realization.

The last tick of the Serpent Sting went off and he fell to the floor.

They lay there for a few seconds, simply targeting each other. Then, when the tauren hunter was sure her message had clearly been sent across, she calmly released to the graveyard.

The moral of the story, oh best beloved…

…is do not /laugh at a hunter, for they have a disturbing tendency to have the last /laugh. Or the last /giggle, anyways.

I’ve lately been playing my hordie hunter Lunapike quite a bit. She resides on an RP-PvP server, as opposed to Tawyn who is on a regular RP server, so seeing the game from the PvP-server side of things has been a bit of an adventure. I’ve been ganked by the obligatory level ??s who have nothing better to do, and I’ve reciprocated by raiding Southshore. I’ve learned to be wary upon seeing corpses of mobs laying around– might be the other faction, after all– and I’ve learned to rely oh so heavily on Track Humanoids. (Hunters have it easy here, I think.)

I have had to put up with not being able to go to Halaa to buy my arrows because the other faction has it, and I’ve rejoiced when we’ve put together a raid to take it back. (By contrast, on Silver Hand, Alliance controls Halaa about 99% of the time… so I never had to worry about it. Though in all honesty, VeCo Horde has it a bit better than VeCo Alliance in World PvP I think. Us hordies probably have it about 75% of the time when I’ve been there.)

I read once on the WoW website that, lore and RP-wise, Blizzard considers PvE and PvP servers to sort of be differing dimensions of the same point in history: PvE servers are where Horde and Alliance have established an uneasy truce, and PvP servers are where they are still actively at war. This, I have found, brings some depth to roleplay (nothing like getting demolished by a night elf druid after you have just killed a beast that is important to night elf druid lore) and offers a fun twist on a world that you have perhaps already explored PvE-wise… and makes for some interesting stories.

This particular story takes place in Blade’s Edge Mountains. I was doing a semi-long questline that involved putting on a gas mask, talking to a projection, killing some demons, gathering keys, and powering up some big obelisks. As I headed off to do the first step, an Alliance Shadow Priest, only one level lower than me, showed up at pretty much the same time.

She saw me and hesitated for a bit, trying to size up whether or not I would attack her, I imagine. I tend not to attack people first, though, unless they are being annoying in some way, so I went right past her and started attacking the mobs I needed. She did too. We stayed far clear of each other, each of us keeping a wary eye on the other as we turned in our first step in the quest chain.

Off we went to do the second step. About partway through, I noticed that one of my mobs had some DoTs on it… DoTs that weren’t mine. Shadow Priest had opted to make the first move and establish herself as “friendly”. So I reciprocated a few minutes later when she seemed to bite off more than she could chew and I helped whack the extra mobs off of her.

Still, we remained silent to each other. I have seen it happen in the past; people who do something to assert themselves as “friendly” and then conveniently change their mind shortly later. Despite that, I was getting good vibes from her, so we continued questing.

Then came the final part of the chain, where you used keys to activate five obelisks. Only one person can do this at a time and Shadow Priest got there first. One by one she activated them and I stood by and watched, waiting for my turn.

And what did activating those obelisks do? Summon a level 68 elite.

Shadow Priest was level 66. And alone. Well, alone except for…

She turned and saw that I was standing there watching. I like to think that we somehow communicated something there. Some sort of nonverbal and nonemote “nod”. She charged in.

After she got in the first hit I sent in my pet and away the two of us went at the thing. It was a long and hard fight and by the end of it, Shadow Priest was literally down to 3% health, but we did it.

She turned to me and /bowed, our first real communication, and I /bowed back. Then she sat to eat and drink while I went off to activate the obelisks myself. And on cue, the level 68 elite showed up.

I sent in my pet and started my attack. Shadow Priest was right there, tossing DoTs on it after I’d tagged it. This particular elite hits hard and my Mend Pet really wasn’t cutting it, but with aggro constantly bouncing back and forth between my pet and Shadow Priest, we somehow managed to do it. Like last time, it had been a close one, and my pet did die in the final few seconds. But, we’d done it.

Afterwards we /cheered at each other. Then she Mind Controlled me and gave me Power Word: Fortitude.

We went on our separate ways, having completed the quest.

Flash forward about an hour later and I was doing a different quest in a different part of the zone. Somehow I’d wound up with more mobs than I could take on top of me. I ran into a tunnel hoping to shake them off, only to unwittingly run into more. I was bracing myself for the final blows when suddenly the mobs were all feared. Feared?

I turned around. Shadow Priest to the rescue! It took a while but we managed to take down all the mobs. I /cheered at her again and she Mind Controlled me again and gave me Fort again before we parted ways.

Later I Armory’d her and found out that she has over twice as many honor kills as I do, and I have a lot– clearly she’s no “care bear”. Clearly she likes her PvP, as do I. But while a wise man once said “It’s easy to forget what a sin is in the middle of a battlefield”, you also never know what sorts of crazy alliances with kindred spirits you’ll make.

And I salute ya for that, Syphrilia of VeCo. /salute

Today I got owned by a blood elf hunter. Twice.

Granted, she had a druid with her. But I had a T6 rogue with me. And later, a mage with me too.

The story? One of my good friends leveled a hunter to ten and asked what sort of pet she could get that wasn’t seen every day. I suggested the cute red Springpaw Stalkers in Eversong Woods; it’s certainly not every day you see a level 10 draenei hunter with one of those, afterall!

So we pulled together a group of buddies, nabbed a warlock, and us level 70s flew to Zul’Aman and headed into the heart of Blood Elf country.

T6 rogue (a heck of a good one, too) got there first, and I’m not exactly sure how it happened but somehow he got in a spar with a druid and a hunter. I dashed into the fray; determined to save him since his health was dropping quickly, and targeted the hunter.

I pulled out all my usual tricks that I do against fellow hunters; you know, the ones that ensure that I almost never lose against other hunters, as I like to say. And yet somehow they all failed miserably and I was laying rather embarrassingly on the ground before I could think.

Our magey friend showed up and quickly died as well, so the three of us– rogue, mage, and hunter, decided to rez all at the same time, dispatch of the healy druid, and then proceed to the hunter.

That failed too, we did manage to kill the druid but he rez’d within two seconds and we were all dead again. Dang.

Well by this time more horde 70s were starting to show up, and it was painfully obvious that they were all PvP geared and we were sporting our PvE duds, so we all just sat around in ghost form and waited to deflag before rezzing. We did so, our Warlock pal showed up, we located a Springpaw Stalker and summoned our lowbie hunter friend who proceeded to tame herself a new kitty.

The curious horde showed up about now, all gathered around the unusual bunch that we were, so I /pointed at lowbie hunter and /pointed at her new cat, and /nodded. Blood Elf Hunter /cheered.

Afterwards I logged into a hordie and sent her an in-game mail telling her I’d enjoyed our spar (but she should catch me in my PvP gear next time, I added cheekily) and wished her hunt’s luck.

We hunters, we’ve gotta stick together.

I was at work today, stationed at my usual spot by all the fish (I work in a pet store), and this kid of, oh, about ten or twelve years old or so and his buddy were walking up and down the area, inspecting all the fish and pointing out all the cool ones. Then the first kid stopped in his tracks, and I saw him staring rather intently at our Red Zebra Cichlids…

After staring at them for a minute or two, the kid turned to his buddy and exclaimed “Look! Look! I found the Golden Darters !!”

You know, quite some time ago I had a dream that Tawyn had the chance to get the most rare and most awesome flying mount ever. She could get an owl mount, one that looked just like Tux.

And in the dream, I turned it down. My reasoning? It wouldn’t be in character.

I woke up and thought “Dream-Pike you dorkchop! Giving up a super awesome mount like that in the name of roleplaying! You don’t even roleplay all that often! Real-Pike is much more sensible than that.”

Or so I thought.

This is Althalor:

When he was a wee young lad, he and his high elven merchant parents were traveling down Southern Gold Road in the Barrens when they were attacked by some particularly nasty beasts. They fought gamely but they were tired and weary and couldn’t much fight back. With their dying breaths they managed to conjure up a spell that made it so the creatures did not see, hear, or smell little Althalor who was hiding in the caravan.

It was the Tauren of Camp Taurajo who found him and took him in. He was raised in Mulgore as an adopted Tauren, as a hunter, because of his uncanny skill with a rifle and his odd rapport with the lions of the Barrens. Today he fights for the Horde, passing himself off as a Blood Elf, although deep inside he feels that he really is a a Tauren in spirit.

So clearly he needs to ride a Kodo. This was the plan from day one. And for that, (unless you want the war mount)… you need to be exalted with Thunder Bluff.

At the tender level of two I ran him all the way from Sunstrider Isle to Mulgore. He cleared the place of quests and this led him to Crossroads, Camp Taurajo, and eventually Freewind Post in Thousand Needles. Considering the fact that I began with a distinct disadvantage (blood elves begin the game as Neutral with Thunder Bluff, not Friendly… and on top of that, a rather long questline in Mulgore is apparently Tauren-exclusive), I didn’t think I was doing too badly. Tawyn was exalted with Stormwind at level 37, why couldn’t Althalor be exalted with Thunder Bluff at level 40? Easy, I figured.

Then came the change to the mount level. I worried about my rep grind but hoped for the best; turning in as much cloth as I could at my low level and scouring WoWHead for quests I hadn’t finished yet.

Today Althalor dinged 30.

…well dang.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like the chicken mount. I like it a lot. I was so excited when the Warstrider was announced and then so crestfallen when I found out my taurengirl Lunapike couldn’t get it. (She has some MgT farming in her future I think.)

But Althalor, I thought, no, he can’t ride one. It would be obscene. In his story he hasn’t been to the Eastern Kingdoms since he was a baby. Him on a hawkstrider? It would be So. Out. Of. Character.

So I said “Forget getting the mount at level 30. I’m not getting one until I’m exalted with TB.”

I went to work today and realized I’d turned into Crazy-RP-Mount-Dream-Pike.

And I thought about it and I thought about it and I thought about it and I thought about Aspect-of-the-Cheetah-ing all over Desolace and it was this horrible dilemma, you have no idea.

Then I had an epiphany. He’s trying to pass himself off as a Blood Elf right? So maybe his Tauren friends decided to help him out by obtaining a Hawkstrider mount for him… and he rode it around for a while because he was very grateful for the thought but it just made him so uncomfortable that he got a Kodo later?

…that sounds viable.

So I went and got the chicken mount.

It still feels awkward but at least my OOCometer isn’t buzzing off the hook and blinking red anymore.

There are two morals of this story. One is I think Blizzard has really succeeded if they managed to create a world so immersive that at least some of its players are willing to do crazy things like forego mounts in the name of their fictional character’s backstory. Two is that Pike is completely insane. But you all knew that I’m sure.

I was on Lunapike, my level 63 Hordie Hunter, and I was camping out in the inn in Tarren Mill because I’d been helping a friend out. At the moment though, my services weren’t required, so I’d alt+tab’d out to do some stuff.

Suddenly I heard a bunch of commotion on my screen and pulled up the game just in time to see a big red cat clawing my face out. I could barely move before I was completely demolished.

Eh, it’s Tarren Mill, it’s to be expected. So I went back to the Inn and rez’d and then alt+tab’d again.

Same story about a minute later, big red cat destroys me.

So at that point I was getting annoyed but there really wasn’t a whole lot I could do, this being my highest leveled character on that server. I started to play a little game with the guy. I’d stand in my spot in the inn, I’d see “Noodle gains Bestial Wrath” and “Noodle gains Dash” in my combat log, Noodle the kitty would run into the inn… and I would log out. I can only imagine the confusion on poor hunter’s face when his big red kittycat came running back to him emptyhanded.

I did that a couple times and thought it was immensely hilarious until one of these times I logged in and the hunter himself was standing in my spot waiting for me, and I got demolished.

Okay, this was all getting super annoying, and at this point I was having to wait around in Ghost Form to rez because I’d died so many times in such a short period of time. So I figured I’d head out of there. Which was in and of itself a major pain, because even my Frostwolf Howler is apparently no match for Concussive Shot + Intimidation + Full S2 Hunter, and I died another two or three times on my way out.

Now it was around this point that I think the other people at Tarren Mill were getting annoyed too because they started disappearing and higher levels started showing up. Mr. AnnoyingHunterGuy left somewhere around this time, headed south, and we all made a group to go track him down.

We didn’t see him anywhere, though.

But whaddaya do when you’re in a group full of ticked off Hordies whose lowbie alts just got camped into oblivion?

You raid Southshore, that’s what.

We leveled the place. I mean, completely leveled. There were no NPCs left. There were no quest givers left. The poor level 30-ish Alliance that got caught in the crossfire? Rest in peace. They can thank AnnoyingHunterGuy and Noodles.

Now the respawn rate on the guards was super fast and we were just killing them over and over. So I was figuring the Alliance World Defense must have been exploding with “Southshore is under attack!” which is why I was expecting the Alliance Response Team to show up and put an end to our shenanigans. See, I say that as somebody with experience about the other side. I always have WorldDefense on, and if Tawyn sees “Southshore is under attack” more than a couple times and she isn’t in Outlands, she pulls out her PvP gear and hops on her gryphon– you’d better believe she does. Usually she shows up right around the same time as five or six other similarly-minded people and we successfully defend our town.

But you know what, on this server, it never happened. The Alliance Counterattack I was waiting for never came. Every so often a single level 70 would pop up and they would quickly get killed. That was about it. AnnoyingHunterGuy never even came back (although he did /yell something at us in the middle of it, so you know he was somewhere and knew what was going on– he just never came out to fight us.)

So after about twenty minutes of having Southshore firmly under Horde control we left not because the Alliance came to take care of us, but because we just got bored.

Victory for us!

So there you have it. Has Pike crossed over to the dark side? Gonna go around ganking and camping lowbies on a regular basis? Nah. I still like /hugs for the most part.

But revenge is sweet.

The best part of the entire night though?

Now I’ve had people make alts on servers specifically to say hello to me, but I can only think of a few cases where people who already live on that server recognize me. Makes me feel special. <3 And to Mr. Moonkin who asked me that, if you are reading, ’twas fun! =D

…and he can feed his cat once. Teach him to fish, and he can feed his cat for a lifetime!

…okay, so that’s not really how the saying goes, but I’m sure you’ve all heard it and know what it means.

I am here to talk about why I blog about hunters, and why I make “hunter kindergarten” posts, and things like that.

I try my best to write readable and easily-understandable Hunter How-To Posts because I think that there is a very big category of hunters out there that fall between the category of “good hunter” and “huntard.” These are the people that are spec’d something cookie-cutter like 41/20/0, have gear that is at least mostly correct (no spell hit gems or shammy gear *shudder* … but maybe going too overboard with one stat or something), and yet do not know why they are doing these things.

I have been in heroics with hunters who show up with a solid spec and a solid set of gear and then they start tossing random Aimed Shots into their non-existent rotation and Serpent Sting stuff they should be trapping. I’ve seen hunters that use the Auto/Steady macro and have no idea WHY it does so much DPS, they just know that it DOES, so they spam it, maybe with a bow that is several speeds too slow.

Now do I have anything against these hunters? Of course not, I was there once too, and I’m sure I’m still there in some aspects. That is why I write what I write, and that is why I advocate hunters learning to weave their shots manually before switching to the macro (if they choose to do so)… because it’s all about the foundation.

I’ll never forget how surprised I was one day when this story happened: I popped into game and four of my guildies were in a Heroic. I asked who the fifth member was, and they said a PuG’d hunter. I asked how the hunter was doing (I tend to ask that… I’m curious), but instead of the typical answers, which are always either “He sucks” or more often “He’s okay, but…[something]“, they told me “She’s actually really good.”

I got into Ventrilo and popped into their channel just to listen in, and chat a little. I had just got my Choco-Bow and mentioned how fluid it made my shot rotations, and the PuG’d hunter said “Hey, what shot rotation do you use, if you don’t mind me asking?”

… /blinkblink

Another hunter was actually asking me about shot rotations. And we actually had an intelligent hunter conversation about them.

MADNESS, I tell you!

That’s never happened to me before outside of blogs. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me in game and ask me for shot rotation advice, which I have always very happily given those who ask… but actually having a little discussion about it was new.

Since then, that incident has stuck in my mind, and it reminds me about why I write. Because incidents like that should not be as rare as they are. I shouldn’t have to be surprised when my guildies say they PuG’d not just an okay hunter, but a very good one. I shouldn’t have to be taken aback when somebody wants to discuss shot rotations with me.

I’m part of the “WoW Noobs” community over at Livejournal, where I can give advice to newer players (Heck, if you look back far enough, you can find a level 20 me asking what the meeting stone outside Deadmines is for), and I’ve noticed that new players are attracted to the hunter class like a magnet. This means that we, as hunters, have a big responsibility. Learn why you are spec’d what you are spec’d. Why you’ve picked one talent over another. Learn why your shot rotation is your shot rotation. Then, pass it on.

“But Pike, if everyone is a good hunter, won’t that put you out of a job?” Maybe, but teaching-for-make-benefit-glorious-class-of-hunters is more important. Besides, I seem to have lucked out and I currently hold a monopoly on the hunter class in my guild. It’s true, almost all of the other 70 hunters in my guild either /gquit, permanently started playing non-hunter alts, or disappeared entirely. It’s really kind of odd and I’m not sure whether that’s says good or bad things about me, but… hey. >.>