…isn’t Ragnaros, and it isn’t C’thun, and it isn’t Algalon, and it isn’t Illidan, and it isn’t Hogger.

It isn’t Ganondorf.

It isn’t Psycho Mantis.

It isn’t Sephiroth or Kefka.

It isn’t the Elite Four.

It isn’t Bowser, or Dr. Robotnik, or Dr. Wily.

It isn’t the Z-shaped block in Tetris.

It isn’t Donkey Kong.

It isn’t the ghosts in Pac-Man.

…

…

…

It’s THAT STUPID MINE BOSS.

/blames Deathwing

I’m pretty sure we’re all clear on the fact that I enjoy rolling hunters. I can’t help it. It’s relaxing. It’s nostalgic.

Alongside this, it means I have tamed a lot of pets in my WoW career. The level 10 pet is very important to me, because I consider it to be the pet that particular hunter will have their entire life– oh sure, they’ll tame others, and may even use others in raids or PvP, but all of my hunters keep their first pet.

And one of my little quirks is that I enjoy taming the… more challinging to obtain pets.

I’ve ran level ten Hordies to Teldrassil. Twice. Once for the owl and once for a cat.

I’ve ran a low level Hordie to Azuremyst for the moth.

I’ve ran a level 10 Hordie to Dun Morogh for the snow leopard.

I’ve ran a level 10 Alliance character to Durotar for a raptor.

A good chunk of those were on PvP servers.

I’ve also done safer but still lengthy trips on other characters: dragging a Tauren to Eversong Woods or Trolls and Blood Elves to Mulgore. (It has occurred to me that an unusually high percentage of my lowbie hunters are Horde. Hmm.)

This was all in my mind yesterday when I did something crazy and made a character on one of my non-”Home Servers”. Thus it was that I made a female tauren hunter (yes I have a billion of those, shuddup, Azeroth needs more, dangit! /shifty eyes) on Wyrmrest Accord, so I could say hello to Faeldray and Tzia, two people who have been a part of the Aspect of the Hare commenting community for a very, very long time and who both have awesome blogs of their own.

We hung out for a while and did some really nifty RP (which I may talk about later, in its own post), but always in the back of my mind as I did the tauren starter quests for the umpteenth time was what pet I should get. It had to be special, something that I could tie in to my developing character story, and preferably something I hadn’t ever tamed before.

Then I had an idea.

Snoeken (Dutch for “Pike”, albeit the fish and not the weapon =P) went on a little adventure.

First, the ride from Thunder Bluff to Orgrimmar.

Taking the zeppelin to Undercity…

And getting on a different zeppelin and going to a very scary place for a level 10:

Howling Fjord.

Then came the ceremonial removing of all the clothes (except the shirt and pants– I’m a decent tauren!) and a deep breath…

And then the corpse hop began.

So, rez timer, we meet again.

The run to Utgarde Keep wasn’t that bad though, and I soon found myself where I needed to be…

Well well well, what’ve we got here?

Brand New Birdie:

The fishertauren and her sea hawk:

My new druid-birdie has a few bugs, it would appear. He flies extremely low to the ground (as opposed to, say, an owl, who flies much higher), and when he flies after you, he remains leaned back in his “hovering” position. The way a druid would look if it was just flying in place. I’ve actually had this happen to me in my druid flight form, if I time myself carefully and jump right when I enter flight form. But it seems to be a perpetual problem for the Daggercap Hawk, and it looks kind of silly. In addition, he doesn’t “highlight” when you click on him, the way other things do.

Regardless of these issues, he is a gorgeous pet– and certainly unique, as well!

Now we just have to cross our fingers and hope Blizzard eventually fixes these issues, rather than conveniently deciding that a level 10 hunter shouldn’t have a bird from Northrend =P

…that this happened to somehone who isn’t me:

Still a hunter though. Bwahaha! We shall take over the world, soon enough.

Note: Cause I know someone’s gonna bring up all the Marksman stuff on my bars: I am experimenting with raiding as Marksman when there’s a ret pally in the group already bringing the 3% damage buff, since it overwrites Ferocious Inspiration anyway. I want to get good with Marksmanship, and then someday, I swear to you, I’ll be good at Survival too… maybe… /bangs head into wall

“Woo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooooooooooooo…”

HOW TO BE MANLY LIKE ME IN THREE EASY STEPS:
1.) Go into Culling of Strat, if you are a race that will receive the human illusion.
2.) Use Iron Boot Flask
3.) Get rid of the buff.

Way easier than all those spam e-mails, eh?

Is it possible to love something too much? Perhaps. I’ll tell you my story…

I have this tendency to crash and burn on things, and WoW is no exception. I pretty much hit rock bottom the other day. See, I love raiding with my guild. A loooot. But because I wanted to be able to contribute, I probably went way overboard. Suddenly, my days were concerned with stuffing them full of heroics on both my hunter and druid so I could get badges for gear. Suddenly I was doing tons of dailies every day on two characters, to be able to fund flasks, repairs, new gems and enchants and the like. Suddenly I was an unwilling slave to Recount, not because of outside pressures so much as because of my own impossibly high standards for myself.

And suddenly I snapped.

I logged on to grudgingly do dailies the other day and was invited to Onyxia 10. My DPS was absolutely atrocious. Later I found out it was because my pet’s special attacks all decided to turn themselves off, but it took me a while to realize that, and I felt useless.

I had this growing desire to just shut the game off and not worry about it anymore, but I was scared to accept this, because I’m a blogger right? And I love hunters right? It terrified me to think that I wasn’t having fun anymore.

In desperation I threw a bunch of gold at the hunter trainers in the Dwarven District for a respec. Contrary to popular belief, I actually like all the hunter specs (not just Beast Mastery), and I have this secret dream to become really good at all of them. So, hoping a change of pace would fix things, I spec’d Survival, went to the training dummies, and discovered that I still stink at it. It just feels relentlessly clunky and there’s no rhythm to it. Frustrated that there is some aspect of hunters that I am not good at, since I am a perfectionist, I switched over to Marksmanship, which is as fun as ever, but even that couldn’t salvage anything. I spec’d back to Beast Mastery and then logged off as fast as I could, terrified by that feeling growing inside of me…

“This isn’t fun.”

I went and read a book for a while. Then I played Nintendo DS. Then I played Megaman 2. Comfort food. I didn’t let myself think about WoW. I was scared of what it might mean.

Then I went out to buy some ice cream. See, I am basically to ice cream what a foodie is to cuisine. Unfortunately my freezer doesn’t work very well at the moment, which is torture and means that I cannot keep my own ice cream unless I want it to turn into a soggy melted mess. But I really needed some ice cream, so I went out and bought some. The plan was to watch a movie while I ate when I got back.

But something was calling me…

See, a couple weeks back, I randomly made this gnome warlock. I’m not sure why. I’d made warlocks in the past and always quit when I discovered that they weren’t anything like hunters. I’d find out my imp was a failure tank, and so I’d quit. But something had me making a warlock, and I lavished her with gifts like the heirloom shoulders my druid had used for so long, plus an heirloom trinket and an heirloom staff enchanted with +30 spellpower.

And once I’d realized and accepted from the start that Warlock does not equal Hunter, running her around Elwynn Forest and Westfall had been… the most refreshingly fun thing I’d done in WoW in a really long time.

So I thought about it a little.

Then logged into her.

Suddenly, I didn’t have to worry about Recount anymore. Suddenly I didn’t have to worry about dailies. Suddenly I didn’t have to worry about badges. I didn’t have to worry about being a perfectionist with talents and rotation, since I had no idea what I was doing, and that was okay. All I had to worry about was how long I could /dance before Curse of Agony, Immolate, Corruption, and my voidwalker destroyed all the Defias in Moonbrook. This was followed by /giggles, because the gnome giggle is adorable. It was really fun. It was me and my blueberry vs. the world, discovering things at our own pace, the same way it had been with Tawyn and Tux two and a half years ago.

You’re wondering why I’m posting this, perhaps. It’s probably more for my sake than for yours. For a while, I was denying that I could even have fun playing anything else other than my hunter(s) and then my tree druid(s). But mostly, I think I wouldn’t let myself. Well… screw that.

I’m Pike, and I’m a gnome warlock. So there.

To those of you wondering if this is the End of the Blog as We Know It… no, I don’t think it is. I still have huntery stuff in Drafts, and I still plan on raiding on my hunter (though I think a break is in store, shortly), and writing about that, although I no longer want it to consume my WoW life, simply because “I’m a hunter blogger”.

So we’ll see how things go…

Back in the day, when my druid was level 55 or so, and my boyfriend would drag me around with his warlock, he’d do this thing where he’d Life Tap dangerously low and then say “FASTER, HEALBOT, FASTER!” as I spammed heals and tried to keep up with him.

Ya know, several months later, and I still hear it in the back of my mind sometimes…

Lemme tell ya, it’s weird to have “Champion of the Frozen Wastes” floating above a certain character’s head when you still feel like a noob to that particular class.

Not to mention:

My alt is in Ulduar. That may not be a big deal to some of you, but it’s fantastically surreal to me.

(Nothing dropped, of course, but hey.)

One-shotted. 4968 DPS from yours truly, of which Wash– who lived the whole time– did 38%. Of course, I got destroyed by a mage, DK, and Marksman hunter, but that’s one of the great things about my raid group: people are good!

But yeah. Even if everyone is way over-geared for this now and much of the title’s value has been cheapened, it’s still cool, no?

I <3 my guild!

Color-coordinating Bears. It was cute. =D

This is the achievement I got after winning The Greatest Piece of Loot I Have Ever Won In Any Event Ever. To be fair, I used the trick where you just stick it in one trinket slot and then move it to the other, so really, I am still rolling with one non-qualifying trinket (Curse you, Mirror of Truth!)

In any event, I had a big night, and now I’m off to go lovingly cuddle my new trinket as I fall asleep~

*is not in any way obsessed with her new trinket*

*may not be telling the entire truth*

Just a few hunterrific things you may or may not have noticed with this latest patch…

1.) Bestial Wrath Graphics Change:
This was pointed out to me by a guildie who wanted to know if my Bestial Wrath went “RAWR” anymore, because his didn’t. I tried it and immediately assumed it did, however, this was because my pet was by my side. See, now your pet will still go RAWR, but the hunter will do a Swirly Ball– a la Old Rogue Detect Traps– and make a cleansing noise. This falls in line with Blizzard’s intention of turning The Beast Within into a “defensive ability” in PvP. However, I still firmly consider it to be 100% offensive in PvE, and I sorta miss my personal RAWR! in all its ragey glory.

At least Swirly Ball is sparkly.

Pike’s Final Grade: B-

2.) Feed Pet Graphics Change

You now visibly toss your pet a snack, and your pet makes a cute noise and jumps up and catches it! It’s the cutest thing ever and I love it to bits. Too bad thanks to Bloodthirsty and the Mend Pet glyph, I hardly ever feed my pet anymore…

Pike’s Grade: A+

3.) Pink Elekks are Not Tamable

Self-explanatory.

Pike’s Final Grade: F. But at least we get the minipet, right?

Have at ye! *wields cold medicine*

This is what I did today, in spite of having said persistent cough:

I got a ring out of it, which means for the first time in my entire WoW career, I am wearing all purples. Took long enough, dontcha think? =P I mean, I’ve only been playing the game for, I dunno, two and a half years at this point…

The fights were, for the most part, fun and interesting. I look forward to writing up a guide once I’ve ran through this joint a few more times.

Ah Onyxia, the classic. I’m kind of disappointed I never got around to solo’ing her before the change, but at least I do have the Sinew in my bank so I can theoretically still do the Rhok quest (if I can ever get into a Molten Core group without five or six other hunters who also want the Leaf). I am also glad to say that four of my best friends and myself took her on at 70. It was glorious. I made it a movie that can’t go on YouTube because it’s like thirty seconds too long.

Anyways, here’s a hint for the current Onyxia: if your computer can’t handle lots of things onscreen at one time, do not look at the whelps when they are being AoE’d. Trust me.

So a pretty darn nice polearm dropped. I won the roll, but then traded it to our bear tank afterward, because I know she really wanted it. Or at least the weapon that it turns into.

But then we found out something interesting.

See, when you turn it from the ranged-oriented weapon into the melee-oriented weapon, you keep the original weapon. So you basically have two polearms.

And that first one can be traded within that 2-hour period.

So, she kept the copy, and I got the original back.

I have no idea if this is intended or not and I’m half expecting Blizz to take it away during the next wave of rolling restarts, but until then, we are Polearm Buddies:

So yeah. This week shall be known from here on out as “Let’s see how many raids Pike can stuff herself into and still maintain her sanity.”

In other news, I’m come up with some super interesting Beast Mastery and pet related math on the online spreadsheet as of this latest patch. I’ll go into more detail on a later post, though, because the NyQuil is gonna knock me out in T minus ten… nine… eight… …