Monthly Archives: February 2009

fun, i love hunters, pets, screenshots

PetQuilt

33 Comments

petquilt

Left to right, top to bottom:

Tux, Level 80; Locke, Level 80; Eltanin, Level 79; Wash, Level 80
Alyosha, Level 70; Ivan, Level 70; Serenity, Level 70; Dmitri, Level 70
Kolya, Level 33; Regulus, Level 38; Alnair, Level 39; Chakapas, Level 37
Clifford, Level 18; Fiskars, Level 18; Scraps, Level 14; Niels, Level 16

And yes, there’s more. Though they are sadly attached to hunters who I don’t play as often. (The pets of six different hunters are represented in this quilt.)

…and yes, looking at this picture fills me with warm fuzzies. <3

alts, characters, ding, screenshots

Back On The Treadmill

18 Comments

After much hem’ing and haw’ing…

wow_lunapike71

…Lunapike starts to work her way up the leveling ladder!

Now, I’m one of those psychos that actually really enjoys leveling. I love the quests and the lore and the world and seeing it all through the eyes of a character with a different personality than last time. Why do you think I have so many alts that are hunters and druids? Because my strain of altism is unique in that I enjoy the questing more than the “learning to play a completely new class” thing. For the most part I stick to what I know I’m already comfortable with and enjoy, and do more leveling. (And tame more pets, my other favorite part of the game).

Lunapike’s spec is a little interesting, so I’ll preemptively explain before anyone asks (cause I have been asked about spec discrepancies between my characters before)… her spec is meant firstly for making her pet more of a tank for more efficient leveling, and secondly for the fact that she’s on an RP-PvP server and may have to scuffle every once and a while. Those two types of specs seem to coincide quite well if you are a Beast Master hunter, just nab all the talents like Endurance Training, Thick Hide, and Spirit Bond. I’ll probably respec her at 80 but for now, this is what she is, and it works well.

I have no idea how fast or slow Lunapike’s journey to 80 is gonna be or whether she’ll even be my second 80 (Tamaryn is closing in fast in a surprise run from the outside! And down the stretch they come! Now taking bets!) but I’m gonna enjoy it. I was always disappointed that I got her to 70 a little too late last time and never even got her into Karazhan because WotLK came out before I could finish getting her geared up for it. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen this time; my taureness is at least gonna see Naxx, and hopefully a lot more too. Because I maintain my stance that tauren females* are the best playable models in the game and deserve to be seen in all that epic armor. *nods*

—

* Female tauren hunter is probably my favorite gender/race/class combination in all of WoW. I just love it. And it makes me really happy that there are a pretty decent number of us in the blog world!

Uncategorized

The Fable of the Egotistical Death Knight

33 Comments

Prot paladin. Kitty druid. Holy priest. Your friendly neighborhood BM hunter.

And a Death Knight.

Our story begins in once upon a time in Howling Fjord, in Heroic Utgarde Keep. We get off to a pretty good start; we survived an accidentally too-large-pull (pet tank + Distracting Shot/kiting right before your pet dies = ftw!) and I even got to do a little chain trapping, which I miss dearly by the way. The Death Knight pulled aggro and died fairly early on, but he was rez’d and we continued on our merry way.

We get down to the that big fiery forge thing and we dispose of the groups there and our pallytank stops and says “Okay. I want to make this clear right now. I need aggro so I can get mana. So stop pulling aggro. Okay?”

Hmm. He did not specify who this instruction was directed to, but I woulda noticed if I’d had aggro other than purposefully (kiting/trapping/etc.) cause I would have feigned, and I hadn’t so far. And I really didn’t think it was the kitty because his DPS was, uh, less than stellar. So that left…

…our friend the Death Knight, who said nothing, although the fact that he’d been the only one who had died so far was some pretty incriminating evidence. Regardless, we continued on for a bit. Death Knight spoke up to voice his discontent about how slow we were going. To be honest, while we weren’t blazing along, I didn’t think we were going particularly slow either– I say this as someone who has run Heroic UK more times than I care to even try to count. Still, none of us said anything, and we made our way onward.

Downed the first boss without issue. Death Knight “accidentally” greeded the blue the rest of us passed on, despite the fact that he couldn’t shard it. Still, meh, no big deal. I’ve heard some people say that on their home server everyone greeds and on mine everyone passes and it causes confusion to server newbies, so yeah, no biggie. ‘s just vendor trash. We were about halfway to the second boss fight when Mr. DK decided once again, and a little louder and more obnoxiously this time, to point out that the group was slow.

Pallytank paused. “You want to tank it?”

Death Knight responded “with pleasure” or something similar, proceeding to make some remark on how good his tanking was.

Pallytank calmly sits down to drink.

Death Knight pulls.

Ten seconds later the priest is dead. Cause, um, everything had been on top of him. Instead of Death Knight.

No one really said a word although it was pretty clear what had just taken place. Pallytank calmly gets up from his drink and rez’s the priest.

And this is when Death Knight starts demanding that Pallytank pass him lead. “Give me lead please.”

No response. Pallytank starts to pull again and the four of us start doing our jobs. Mr. DK is standing back, still protesting and crying for lead. “C’mon, just for two seconds.”

“Why, so you can kick me?” asked Pallytank.

And then DK snaps. He says something about how much our group sucks and how stupid we all are (Pallytank in particular.) Then he leaves the group and hearths away.

Easily four-manned the rest of the heroic.

The Moral of the Story Is: Complain not about things if you can’t do any better yourself. Cause it’s gonna be reeeeally embarrassing if you fail, and you’ll probably wind up leaving the group and missing out on free badges. *nods sagely*

The End.

/bow

screenshots, shot rotation, Uncategorized

Arcane Shot (And Pets) Never Faileth

10 Comments

I would like to present to you some DPS breakdowns that I took a screenshot of after a recent… memorable Heroic UK PuG (if enough people are interested, I’ll post the story about it. Hint: I think I’ll call it “The Fable of the Egotistical Death Knight.”)

Here’s the whole damage report… yes, after the entire run, which means rotations and the like aren’t gonna be super perfect:

shotbreakdown2

And now a breakdown of my shots. I would like to point out that this was a largely Multishot-free run due to lack of Replenishment and some other factors:

shotbreakdown1

“Why are you showing us this, Pike?”

Couple of reasons.

First Reason: Look how much damage your pet is doing. I have consistently found that ever since 3.0.9, my pet will come close to 50% but not quite surpass it. Still, that’s a lot.

Now, this is important for a couple of reasons. Firstly, keep him alive (dur) and secondly, if you have to, kindly (kindly!) remind your resident paladins to give him Might* if they forget. That alone is a huge DPS boost. You shouldn’t have to worry about most other buffs unless said buffers are passing out the K-Mart versions. That includes if your pet died and you had to rez him. In my experience, 95% of people will fail to re-buff your pet after said pet rez (or will do their groupwide buff before you’ve rez’d your pet). I always hate having to point it out to people because it makes me feel like a whiner of some sort, but really, it’s that important to your DPS and thus to the group, so don’t be afraid to ask for those buffs for your pet. While we are on the subject, I always go out of my way to thank people who specifically remember to buff my pet after a rez. ’cause said people are rare. (If you are a buffing class and fall under said rare category, you have my undying affection and love as of… now.)

And yes, I also find it amusing that my pet and I have a different “most attacked” target. =P

Second Reason: Arcane Shot. I fired 186 Steadies and 113 Arcanes throughout the course of the instance, and despite that fairly sizable discrepancy in the number of shots and the fact that I’m using the glyphed Steady (10% more damage), Arcane Shot still was really closing the gap there. What this means is that it’s very important to fire off your Arcane Shot when it’s up; it’s an instant cast and you can use it while moving so it’s basically free damage. In fact, really the only shot that I think should have priority over it is Kill Shot.

Why do I keep pounding this into everyone’s heads, you’re probably wondering by now. Well, it’s because I’ve been running into a few BM hunters in instances who are still doing nothing but Steady. And they could be doing a lot better!

Third Reason: Mostly I just wanted to show what a good shot breakdown will probably look like for you as a Current-gen Beast Master. Gone are the days of having one shot doing as much (or more) damage as Auto Shot. Your Auto Shot is going to be sitting pretty at about 40%ish of your hunter-half’s total damage, because you have other shots to play with now that will be comprising the rest of that damage. And personally, I really, really like this change.

In closing: I am not a theorycrafter, and this is not a theorycrafting blog. I don’t know if I’ve said that before or not, but it bears saying again if I have. Sometimes I get comments or e-mails asking for more in-depth math and here’s the thing: I’m down with some math every now and again but I usually don’t dig into it. Most of my playstyle comes from observation, field testing, and common sense. My “numbers” posts are not meant to blow the Elitist Jerks folks out of the water, rather, they are here to spark inspiration in your head and possibly give you some new ideas to play around with or new things to think about. As always, feel free to take my post and add numbers to it on your own and do your own testing. I would be very flattered if you did that, in fact. But above all, remember that hunters are for fun! ^_^

—

* I’m pretty okay with Kings too if the warriors really want it, since your pet gets whatever the warriors get. Hey, it’s better than nothin’!

blogs, screenshots, thoughts

Ours is a finite hobby.

19 Comments

As I’m sure 99% of the blogosphere knows by now, Phaelia is closing the doors of Resto4Life. I don’t know if she is quitting the game entirely or just the blog, I couldn’t make it out from the entry, however, it’s definitely put a lot of thoughts into my head.

I remember a time when I figured I’d never quit Neopets. (shaddup, do you guys know how long it took me to get my Draik? =P) Of course here I am now having not touched it in months. I miss the friends I made there on the Neoboards sometimes, but other than that, there is very little that I do miss, and although I have tried a time or two, I haven’t been able to get back into it on the same scale that I was before. I have no regrets about the time I spent playing, and I made some accomplishments I’m quite proud of. But eventually I lost interest, and moved on.

World of Warcraft is like that. I think it’s something that we as a blogging community perhaps don’t like to think of sometimes. But it’s true. How many of us will still be playing this game ten or twenty years from now? Will it even be around? Even if it is in some incarnation, I imagine many of us will have moved on by that point. What that means for us as a community, is that these blogs we read and enjoy so very much will not be around forever, at least not in their current form. And it’s hard to deal with sometimes.

It’s perhaps ironic that it’s been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve reached a point where I sort of feel like I need to scale back the time I spend in game. I love this game dearly. Yeah, I try to deny it sometimes, but it’s true. I still have fun with the game. I am not quitting anytime soon, I don’t think (so please don’t think this post is about that!) But man cannot live on WoW alone. And there are days where I feel like I come home from work, I get onto my computer, aaand… I play WoW, I read about WoW, I write about WoW, I tweet about it on Twitter. And sometimes I wonder where that line is. You know what line I’m talking about. Where it becomes too much. Where it goes from being a hobby into being your only hobby. I often find myself wondering if I need a break or something.

And then my mind wanders to how I’ve lost interest in other obsessive hobbies I’ve had like this so fast. Sometimes seemingly overnight. It’s just a matter of time for this one, too.

In a way, it scares me, because when I think of all that, I inevitably end up thinking of this blog and this little community that has gathered here. What will happen when it comes to that point for me where I have to say goodbye? What would I do with this blog? How could I even bring myself to end something I enjoy so much? And more than that, I wonder if it all matters anyway. Will it matter decades from now when I look back on my life? Will it matter that I taught someone how to improve the way they played a class in some long-forgotten video game? Does it matter?

In the end though, I think it does. If for any reason, because of all the raw talent that is out there. Through this community I have met artists and writers and CSS masters and people whose blogs are packed with personality and humor and wit, and that’s only to name a few– I can only hope that Blizzard is at least marginally aware of this massive gathering of talent they have unwittingly drawn together, out of the passion for a video game, of all things. Positive influences from my guildies and in-game friends aside, I am extremely humbled to be a part of this community perhaps best known collectively as “Blog Azeroth“.

So, thank you, Phaelia. Thank you for being the person (well, alongside Bell) to really inspire me to make my own treedruid, who to this day is still the only thing in game that has really caught my interest anywhere close to what hunters do. And thanks for sharing your talent and enthusiasm with the internet.

And to everyone else, the specifics of what we blog about may not be important twenty or thirty years down the road. But positive influences only have to be very small, to be positive and meaningful. Thank you for being both, to me. I do not know how long our time together will ultimately pan out to be. But thank you for making the most of it every day.

art

I Draw Random Crap

11 Comments

scrapsashbringer

Toldja so. Yeah, it’s a cat. Best not to ask?

Oh and this is non-WoW, but I found it and I like it, so have an old (2004ish) picture of Pikestaff the Hare:

pikestafflandscape

Sorry they’re smudgy and drafty. I sketch. I don’t really finish or color or anything. I just sketch. =P (Hey, at least I erased the construction lines this time!)

P.S. For better arts, you should probably go check out Tora. I draw like once a year these days. >.>

fun

News Flash: Pike Is Creepy and a Weirdo!

28 Comments

I was sitting around in Stormwind and LFG trying to get into an easy heroic for badges since my new project is to kit all my alts out in Heirloom items. And just my luck, a random person proclaiming “LF1M DPS for Heroic UK!”

I whispered him. “I’ll go!”

No response for a good two minutes. I refreshed the Heroic UK LFG pane. He was still sitting there with three other group members.

I whispered him again. “No really! I provide massive quantities of shot rotation and even a trap or two, and I’ll also bring this [Lovely Cake]!”

No response. I refreshed LFG. An elemental shaman had popped up, and about ten seconds later, he and the original group of four were gone. I sighed and, admittedly a bit peeved for not even getting a single acknowledgment, sent one final whisper. “Well, good luck with your Heroic.”

And for the first time I got a reply. “Good luck with not being creepy to people you don’t know, you weirdo.”*

So-and-so is ignoring you.

*blinkblink*

Then I burst out laughing. I told my guild and we all had a good laugh. My goodness. This is what happens when you try to be silly and fun in LFG I guess. My bad for forgetting that this video game is serious business.

I got back in LFG. “DPS LF any heroic. Rumors of my creepiness have been greatly exaggerated. PST.”

Got a whisper from a level 65. “I wish I was a higher level so I could run with you, just for that. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

I said, “I’ve got a resto druid your level. Wanna do something?”

One Mana Tombs later and the druid got a level. All’s well that end’s well.

—

*Heavily translated from the original, very broken English

beast mastery, raiding, screenshots, shot rotation

Beast Mastery Meets Multishot

9 Comments

The Stage: Vault of Archavon, 25-man. I’m one of three hunters in there, the others are Survival.

The Plan: As I’m sure many of you know, this is a fairly straightforward and simplistic fight; yeah you move around a little and you’ve gotta stay away from the big scary falling rocks but other than that it’s a tank’n’spank. Like Patchwerk but a little more mobile. And in a 25-man there’s gonna be a lot of mana regen. Perfect testing grounds for my new shot rotation.

The Spec: 53/17/0

The Rotation: Serpent Sting (kept up); then in order of decreasing priority: Arcane Shot, Multishot, and finally Steady Shot. Pop Rapid Fire, Kill Command, and The Beast Within when available. Keep an eye on Wash to make sure he doesn’t get unsuspectingly caught in something that hurts.

The Verdict:

archdps1

Was barely edged out by one of the SV hunters. The other was no where to be seen in the top 12, as you can see, showing that spec alone doesn’t automatically make you good– it’s rotation and gear and that kind of thing too. Overall I was quite satisfied. Wash did a smashing job and contributed 48% of my total DPS and had Ferocious Inspiration ticking non-stop. Raptors are indeed lookin’ good, what with the fact that a BM raptor can keep their 10% damage boost up for a good portion of a fight.

Other Notes: Despite all the Replenishment going on, I did run out of mana faster with the usage of Multishot. I had to switch to Aspect of the Viper twice during the fight. However, thanks to all of that said Replenishment, I only had to stay in Viper for 10 seconds or so each time and it would give me enough to keep going for a while. If I’d wanted to I could’ve chugged a mana pot, seeing as I run with an Alchemist’s Stone and it would’ve given me quite a boost, but I opted not to because my mana issues were so close to the end of the fight.

I also think my rotations would have been a lot tighter and the results would have been better had I not been lagging so much. >.>

Lastly I think it is important to mention that I think the SV hunter who edged me out could have been rather higher on the chart. However, she was using a Tenacity pet (not exactly known for their DPS) and her spec was slightly more SV-heavy than the current cookie-cutter one. So I am not trying to suggest that running with this BM spec and rotation that I mentioned here, is necessarily going to have you neck-and-neck with really good SV hunters all the time. But I am trying to say that for most of us everyday WoW folks, if you are doing it right, it will keep you quite competitive. And remember, don’t just compare your performance to the other hunters, compare it to the DPS and group as a whole and see yourself as part of the big picture. (The More You Know! *flashy star*)

Conclusions: Use Multishot when possible and you don’t think you’ll have a big mana issue. It’s worth it for me and I think it might be worth it for you too, so give it a spin and see what you think! Next on the agenda: go all out and try Aimed Shot, perhaps? Or will it be too small of a damage boost for too much mana? Stay tuned!

addons, screenshots, ui, Uncategorized

UI de Pike

18 Comments

Inspired by Anea over at Holy Discipline, I am here to post about my UI. I haven’t really done a post like this since I was like level 55 because I figure this blog is largely a screenshot dump anyway so I’m sure you’ve all seen it by now. But hey, this gives me an excuse to talk about addons, right? And I get a lot of comments asking about mine sometimes, so why not!

wow_pikesui1

Startin’ from the top:

Ah, X-Perl. Sometimes I go and try to replace it with something different and then I cry and run back to X-Perl. X-Perl is the unit frames mod that you see there, making you and everyone in your party all 3-D and purdy and in general just looking a lot better than the default thing. It also comes with approximately fifty million options to play around with. It’s kinda buggy and bulky at times but I still secretly love it, meaning this is one o’ those “I wish I could quit you!” addons that I’m sure a lot of us have.

Now let’s hop over and take a look at the lovely Drake-Mounted Crossbow in my bags which I recently traded in for the sexiest gun since Wolfslayer *drools*:

See how it’s giving me a “Stat Summary”, that’s RatingBuster and I couldn’t live without it. I mean really. Makes gear choices a lot easier to calculate out on the fly. Remember though that you have to tweak the options to take things like gems and enchants into account (I’ve certainly wound up with a few false “upgrades” because those options were unchecked) , and obviously this addon isn’t gonna be the answer to all your gear upgrade problems. You’re still going to have to mentally think about stuff like sidegrades and the like. Still, lovely addon.

(Also, looking at that screenshot now, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take scopes into account. Just a heads-up.)

And below that, you see Auctioneer. Would you guys believe I actually went Auctioneer-less for a while? No really, there was a month or two right after WotLK launched where I decided I didn’t like the new Auctioneer and auctioned all my stuff manually. I am a Neopets restocking veteran, I figured, I didn’t need no silly pricing addon.

Then one day I reinstalled it, figured out how to work the new Auctioneer, realized that I really really like it now, and it’s been good times since. <3 And finally we go down to the bottom of my screenshot and we see StellarBars. I love StellarBars. No having to worry about moving your action bars around, no having to worry about logging in and seeing like twenty extra random action bars filling up your screen, no having to worry about re-doing your keybindings… no, this is the pure and simple Blizz action bars but prettier and with some nice stylization options. I combined mine with ButtonFacade for maximum prettiness. Sure, I can play without StellarBars, but it sucks. I had to play without it for a couple days after this latest patch cause it was broken for me; I actually went and told the SB guy about my problem and he had it fixed in a new version literally the next day. So much love <3 Moving on to combat! wow_pikesui3

The scrolling combat text? Is SCT and SCT-D. I like this a lot better than the built-in game version because it tells you which shot is doing what and I find that immeasurably useful. For example, I can see how my Steady Shot crit in that screenshot for 1865, but I can also /chuckle inwardly because I know that I’ve seen Arcane Shot crits that go well over 4000. Very handy, and the numbers don’t bounce all over the place like they do with the Blizz version. You can customize it a lot too, to display the numbers where you want to and change the colors around. The written [Cobra Strikes] proc you see there is also a part of SCT/SCT-D. I do know there are better scrolling combat text addons out there by this point that are more frequently updated, but I’m happy with the old standby for now.

Up by my map is Omen, I don’t leave home without it, and neither should you. /cough

And straight down from there is Recount, the obligate damage meter. I usually don’t have my damage meter open and visible even when running things; I display it briefly after bossfights to see how I did, or when I’m pounding away at the training dummies. It’s a good tool for testing and troubleshooting.

And now moving on to the addons that I have but weren’t visible in those screenshots…

Deadly Boss Mods: when I was raiding in Burning Crusade I somehow wound up with the unofficial title of “Deadly Boss Mods Person, Give Me Assist Please” and even though I think I’m not the only one in our group who has it these days, I still have it just in case it’s needed. Basically it tosses up warnings and the like during raids and it can be handy for a lot of people. Now we just need to get it to draw a frickin’ line on the ground on Heigan and I’ll be all set.

CensusPlus: Take a census of your server and upload it to WarcraftRealms. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing.

And finally, the Addon Graveyard, of addons I used at one point and no longer do. RIP…

FuBar. I really like FuBar, I do. But 75% of the FuBar plugins that I used quit working with 3.0.2 and never updated themselves, and in my latest reinstall it was borking my minimap somehow, so I canned it entirely. Maybe someday in the future I’ll look into it again.

MyRoleplay: I like what RP addons do, not just cause you can see details about other peoples’ characters, but cause it’s an easy way to see who else roleplays. It got to a point, though, where 1.) it was hogging up all my chat channels, 2.) I don’t actively roleplay enough (I’m more of a mental roleplayer), and 3.) not enough people on my server even use the thing. So it got booted. Again, I’m more than willing to look into an RP addon someday in the future, if I ever feel the need or urge for one.

Gatherer: Displays on your map where you’ve found various herbs/mining nodes/etc. in the past. Semi-handy but in the end I’m enough of an herbalist junkie at this point that I know where everything is anyway. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, if you want Briarthorn, go live in Silverpine Forest. Trust me.

Lightheaded: It takes about three seconds to alt+tab and use the WoWHead search bar on my Firefox. In the end, it wasn’t worth it for me to take up extra memory to be able to do that in game. Your mileage may vary!

Well, that’ll do it. If you’ve got questions/comments/discussion, lemme hear ’em!

memes, screenshots

It's Not Showing Off If You Were Tagged

11 Comments

My good buddy Rip over at Critical QQ tagged me with a meme where I was supposed to open up my screenshots folder and post my sixth screenshot, regardless of what it was.

My first thought was “Oh, heck no”. I’m that person who takes screenshots of random funny crap people said in Trade Channel. I’m that person who is OCD and takes screenshots when buffs make my HP end in “000”. I’m that person who takes screenshots and then when I go back and look at said screenshots I have no idea why I took them.

But then my curiosity got the better of me. What IS my sixth screenshot right now? I’ve reformatted and reinstalled and moved around and copied and deleted and hacked up my screenshots folder so many times by now it’s a mess. So what could it possibly be? Something from when I was leveling no doubt, or one of my alts, or Tawyn when she was running around as a fresh 70 or something, right?

…

wowscrnshot_010209_215810_edit

…so, remember when BM hunters were overpowered and cats were broken?

Yeah. Me too. /cough. I like things better now by the way, though I won’t get close to 3600 again until I’m actually in purples. But that’s probably how it should be, ne?

I tag whoever wants to do it =P

(P.S. original screenshot was unedited. I decided to do a rough edit job on it to take out the Vent password (no idea whose Vent that is) and out of courtesy on the Recount. Just in case ^_^)