OldSchool Pike: The Jumpshot Movie

I made this movie waaaay back at level 70, but I just watched it and it still appears to be relevant to us today. So after cleaning up the comment section a bit (the things that pop up on YouTube movies in a year and a half /sigh), I thought I’d share it (again) to those of you who perhaps haven’t seen it. The Jump Shot is a situational hunter move that helps us to kite things or during PvP, and is also a really fun trick to impress people with when you’re on a low-level, pre-pet hunter. It’s always a handy thing to know, I think ^_^

I still sound like a giant dork, but maybe someone will find it helpful nonetheless! =D

I Would Walk 500 Miles and I Would Walk 500 More…

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.

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Taking the zeppelin to Undercity…

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

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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…

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And then the corpse hop began.

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So, rez timer, we meet again.

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

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Well well well, what’ve we got here?

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Brand New Birdie:

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The fishertauren and her sea hawk:

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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

Our Raid: Kills Bugs Dead

…bad joke is bad? Sorry >.>

I’m Pike: I keyboard-turn, I click (unless I am healing), and I get about 3fps max on 25mans. Didn’t stop this from being awesome, after a good few weeks of attempts:

(the music is all MegaMan 2 remixes. Whaaat?)

I was Beast Mastery in this fight. Since our ret paladin had to leave, Wash’s Ferocious Inspiration contributed 3% bonus damage to all DPS in the raid ^_^

The Official Be-In-A-Story-With-Pike Contest!

So the Sitemeter on my site is almost at 400,000 and as is tradition here, I want to give out a “kiriban” prize to anyone who can screenshot the number and e-mail it to me *points to e-mail on the left sidebar*

However, I’m going to try something a little different this time: instead of a custom avatar, you’ll get to pick one of your characters to star with one of mine in a short RP story! Cool, right? Maybe? …hopefully…?

Anyways, it doesn’t just have to be one of my hunters either. Wanna be in the very first story of my druid, warlock, or paladin? I haven’t done stories of any of them yet, and they’re all open game.

Here’s how it will work:
1.) If you screenshot the counter saying 400,000, send it my way!
2.) All winners (there will probably be several, due to the way Sitemeter works) will receive e-mail instructions including brief bios of all my characters so you can pick which one you’d like to be in your story, and directions to send me back information about whichever of your characters you choose. In addition if you have any particular plot ideas for the story, you can send me those as well (or I can spin one up, if you’d like!)
3.) Your story will soon appear on the site for the whole world to see, and your character will be immortalized in PikeLore~! (I’ll spread the stories out a little if there’s a lot of them, so as not to crit you with them all at once.)

If that sounds like something you might be interested in, keep an eye on the hit counter! It’s on the bottom portion of my right sidebar. Currently I get a little over 1000 hits a day so I’m estimating an ETA for this in about four or five days. Save the date!

The Fine Print:

-Yes, you can enter if you’ve already won a previous Aspect of the Hare prize
– Yes, I’ll be doing an avatar prize for 500,000 if you’ve got your heart set on one of those
– Special thanks to Rilgon for the contest idea <3 Also:

This might sound funny, but I noticed that a few of the winners from last time’s avatar contest never sent me screenshots of their character after I sent out the post-winner-instructions. It is possible that you forgot, or that my e-mail simply got lost in Junk, etc. Whatever the case, if I owe you an avatar from some point feel free to hook up with me again because the offer doesn’t expire!

Questions/comments/suggestions? Ask away! And good luck to all!

It's About Time…

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

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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

An Update

Firstly, I want to thank everyone for all the billions of comments I got on my “Brutal Honesty” post yesterday. It was one of those posts where I basically reached into my inner psyche, pulled something out, threw it at the computer screen and then ran to work as fast as I could since it made me late. I write those sometimes, and I’m never sure how they’re going to turn out, but I’m glad it seemed to strike a chord with so many people.

I do want to make a couple things clear, since I worry I may have caused some confusion.

** I did not “reroll”; I made a new alt. The point of having the alt be a central feature of that article was that said alt was what reminded me why WoW was fun. I have no idea how much this alt will be played. Maybe I’ll player her a lot, and maybe not. Who knows! I had some people concerned that this alt would eventually reach endgame and I’d have the same issue, to which I respond, she’s level 15 and when you take my leveling speed (or uh, major lack thereof) track record into account, I give two years as a rough estimate of when she’ll reach endgame (if it ever happens), so I’ll worry about it then =P

** I don’t really feel too pressured by the blog itself or by my readership or by the shadow of BRK, etc. Oh sure, my closer friends have no doubt heard me gripe about the pressures of sometimes feeling shoehorned into being the new BRK. And there have been times when I’ve wished for the blissful anonymity of my past WoW life. So, I’m not going to deny those pressures are there. They tend to just show up if you are a “bigger blogger”, as was eloquently stated by Rip. But these are only very minor gripes, in the long run. They aren’t what caused me to “snap”. What I was trying to express in that post was that the pressures I was feeling were internal more than external. I am a perfectionist when it comes to certain things (those things do not include the state of my apartment /glances around and coughs) and it happened to come to a head one day. So I wrote about it.

A wiser person than I might say that the internal pressures are the result of external ones, and hey, who knows, they’re probably right. I don’t see a reason to think about it too deeply though. /shrug

** I do think some of the internal pressure is possibly a byproduct of blog growing pains. There are times when I’m not sure what I should write in this blog. See, I know people are going to tell me “Forget about the readers and write what you want to write about”, but I’m really strongly into themes and subject matter and whatnot and even if I didn’t have a single person reading this blog I’d still want it to have a strong theme. That’s just how my mind operates with my creations. I can never tell if this is a hunter blog or a having-fun-with-WoW blog or a personal-anecdotes blog or what. There are even sub-categories within those. I have been called a Beast Mastery specific hunter blog, (although I tend not to like that title), or a hunter blog that focuses on guides, or on the flip side, a hunter blog that focuses on stories. What am I, really?

In the past, I’ve called myself a blog for anyone who has ever rolled a hunter, tamed a pet, shot something with a ranged weapon… and got a little smile on their face for doing so. it’s a broad category, but in the end, I think that’s what I am.

Thus, the question of “what happens if I stop liking hunters?” lurks in the back of my mind because it means I’d have to redo my blog, and my blog is something I take a lot of pride in. Hence the “panic attack” when that question actually seemed to surface the other day. It’s not really the potential to lose readership that I’m worried about (though I do love all your comments), as much as the simple fact that I don’t like breaking my own rules. That’s why I also have a real-life blog and a recently-started Linux blog (which I should really update again) in addition to this one. Everything in its place.

** I still 100% love raiding with my guild and am planning on doing so a lot this weekend. =P I have just never been a raider before so the work involved caught me off-guard. I am determined not to let it burn me out.

** I do dailies because I suck at the Auction House. Not so much because it’s hard, but because I lack the dedication to do all the research and et al. The closest I ever got to “playing the AH” was a brief period where I cornered the minipet market on the neutral AH with Lunapike as a way to make epic flyer money. This provided a small but steady source of income and I’m pretty sure the other people that were also trying to do this hated me because I was always undercutting them. I stopped doing it primarily because it didn’t really interest me. Dailies at least have you flying around and you can level pets and stuff.

As it is now I toss Alchemy stuff onto the AH every so often and call it good.

I still think the depth of the WoW economy pales in comparison to the Neopets economy. Giggle at me all you want; I’m just sayin’ it like it is. =P I spent one whole year restocking and reselling and keeping an eye on market prices, just to reach a single goal. That’s hardcore.

SO! There you go. I just wanted to dissipate some of the concern I was hearing, and approach the story from a more logical standpoint as opposed to the pure emotional one that I poured out on you all the other day.

IN OTHER NEWS:

I am getting close to 400,000 page views. As long-time readers know, I usually hold a contest where people who screenshot the big numbers can get free personalized avatars. I’m hesitant to do it this time, because I’ve run into an issue with getting these avatar prizes done in a timely manner due to how busy I am all the time now, and it makes me feel bad (this applies to all the e-mails I get as well, I swear I do read them all!) So if you have any ideas for a different sort of prize, I’m all ears and open to suggestions!

As always, thank you all for being a reader. Why anyone reads my rambles, I have no idea, but it has enriched my life and I hope I’ve enriched yours a little <3 /ramble-off

Brutal Honesty

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.

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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…

And Now For a Random, Awesome Aside

Like many blogs, I have the mouseover WoWHead links enabled. This allows you to see the details of what items/talents/abilities/glyphs/etc. I am referring to by simply mousing over linked text.

Examples:

Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle is the sexiest ranged weapon in the game.

Medivh is roughly as hot as Mega Man. (hint: I’m not being sarcastic.)

My Hunter’s Mark is bound to my pet attack via a macro, which makes the hunters in my guild with Improved Hunter’s Mark and Glyph of Hunter’s Mark want to hurl things at me.

And so on.

“Pike… duh” you are probably telling me.

But did you know that you can link to CHARACTERS as well?

Check this out:

My “main” is Tawyn. I also have a resto druid named Tamaryn and a Tauren Hunter named Lunapike.

And all sorts of other alts.

My boyfriend hasn’t played in a long time, though.

But yeah, the point is…

IS THIS NOT THE COOLEST THING OF ALL TIME?

It’s really easy to do it, too. Just go to WoWHead Profiles and look yourself up, then link to yourself.

I am doing this for the rest of my blog’s existence. Just a heads-up. >_>

Faster, Healbot, Faster!

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…

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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:

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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.)