Category Archives: blogs

blogs, goals, screenshots, specs

Irony

10 Comments

The other day I was in the middle of a Steamvaults run (which we ended up scrapping halfway through because the tank was disconnected and then apparently the login server went down), when somebody said something to this effect in guild chat:

“Ugh, I’m grouped with another huntard. Tawyn, you need to start writing guides on how to be a good hunter and post them online so we can send all the huntards there.”

…I giggled.

And I told her that as a matter of fact… I sort of already try to do that. I said that there’s a rather expansive online “hunter community” of people that want to lend their advice and experience to newbies, and that I’m a part of it.

Now what you’ve gotta understand here, is that very few of my guildies know about my blog. It’s not because I’m hiding it from them or anything. It’s mostly that I don’t really like tooting my own horn. Somehow, for some crazy reason, this site is currently getting over 130 hits a day. Now I dunno about anybody else but I consider that to be a resounding success. But I can’t help but fear that it might put me in a sort of weird authoritative position in the guild that I don’t find myself to be deserving of, considering how awesome my guildies are. (Though to be fair, you could argue that I’m already in an “authoritative position”, since I am an officer and probably unofficially the “hunter class leader”, considering the “I need advice” whispers I often get from various lower-level hunters in the guild.)

Anyways while I’d love for more of my guildies to see this blog at some point, I’m holding off on it because I’m waiting for a time when it’s less awkward for me to bring it up. So when the aforementioned person asked for a website to refer the huntards to, I said BigRedKitty.net. Because there is no denying that not only is BRK probably one of the best hunter resources on the net right now, but he also holds the position of being sort of the “central hub” to this hunter community, and as such his site is a really good starting point– if you spend enough time at BRK, you will eventually find a lot of other good sites too.

And once again I find myself vouching for the help that the WoW-blogging community offers. I’ve been having more and more people recently asking me how I learned to play my hunter competently. And really my only answers are “lots of reading online” and “lots of practice.” Others in my guild, after hearing me mention this, have started doing their own research and reading on their class and I think it’s showing. We are developing a really strong group of players and it’s really exciting.

Anyways, blog-talk time over. I met one of my goals this weekend:


That is my new Gladiator’s Heavy Crossbow, which was promptly equipped with an Adamantite Scope. I was hoping to have it a day earlier, but it turns out the Estimated Honor was even more inaccurate than I’d assumed and I wound up about 180 honor short. But a few AVs and 24 hours later… yes. I am a happy hunter.

I went and tried it out on the level 70 elementals in Nagrand, and the improvement over my last bow is just insane. I’m so excited to try this out in an instance. I also need to get my crossbow skill up, so I can bring my crit back up.

Speaking of crit, my unbuffed agility is now over 500. At this point, I think I could probably decently pull off a 0/31/30 spec. It’s difficult for me to imagine life without the Big Red Pet and all the benefits that 41/20/0 comes with (like Serpent’s Swiftness, oh how I love this talent); but I feel like I have left hunter territory unexplored if I don’t try out a lot of different specs. Besides, I’ve noticed lately that my crowd control is pretty critical in instances; now I think I’m a decent trapper as it is, but I often feel like I could be bringing more to the table and improved traps would help with that. I know I can think of more than a few times lately where I’ve wished, mid-instance, that I had better traps. So I’ve informed my fellow-instance’ers to let me know if they ever feel like they need improved traps, and if so, I will respec post haste.

*glances up at wall of text*

…I really do talk too much, don’t I?

blogs

Quick Blog-Related Question

9 Comments

The new current fad seems to be switching from Blogger to WordPress; BRK just did it yesterday but a lot of other bloggers have done it recently as well.

What I’m wondering is… would it be worth it for me to make the switch as well? I know a lot of people have been praising WordPress for being more customizable and whatnot… I guess I’m just curious to know a comparison of some of the features they offer verses some of the ones Blogger does. Because up ’til now I’ve sort of been taking the view of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, which is why I’ve been sticking with Blogger.

Another reason I’m wary of switching is because I don’t want to annoy people with having to update bookmarks or RSS feeds or blogrolls. And I worry my readership might take a bit of a hit– not that I’m super popular or anything, but 60-70 hits a day really isn’t too shabby, and I kinda like those hits… makes me think I might actually be a decent writer or something! =P

So I will leave the opinions open to you guys; because you guys are the ones who read my blog so I’d like to know what you think. Do the benefits of moving to WordPress outweigh the possible cons? Are there any other good blogging software or sites out there that I should consider also? My personal journal is over at LiveJournal (and has been for over three years) but even though I love LJ it’s more for exactly that, personal journals, instead of blogging.

What do you guys think?

blogs, rp

Roleplay & Character Choices – Combining my Comments into a Post

7 Comments

I’ve seen a lot of blog posts around lately that seem to be hitting on sort of the same note; that is to say, the idea of playing a gender different than your own (the subject may or may not involve roleplaying).

I’ve been responding to a lot of these posts and I noticed that a lot of my responses were coming out pretty much the same so I figured I would turn it into a full-fledged blog post.

On Roleplaying: Roleplaying and things related to roleplaying (coming up with new characters, giving them stories and backgrounds, imaging their life in Azeroth, etc.) is pretty much 90% of what draws me to WoW. The other 10% or so is the mechanics of playing my hunter. And I’m sure you all know how much I love playing my hunter, so you can definitely see just how important roleplaying is to me. That’s just my personality and how I am– I like imagining things. I definitely understand why roleplaying isn’t everyone’s thing, in fact, I don’t think it’s most people’s thing. But, it is my thing. It is a huge, huge part of what makes WoW interesting to me. (Yes, I’m a geek, I know. =D) If you were to take away Tawyn, Night Elf Hunter who I’ve invented this huge story for… and replace her with an equally-leveled but different character that I did not invent, it would be very, very hard for me to keep playing the game.

And where is this leading to?

This:

On Playing as a Character That is the Opposite Gender:

For a long time, I’ve been just a little confused on why so many people play as the opposite gender. It wasn’t that I had a problem with it, it was just hard for me to understand why someone would play as a character that they couldn’t identify with on that base level. Yes, you could make the argument that the opposite gender looks more attractive to you, but for me that wasn’t nearly as important as being able to play as a character that you could really identify with. (And I say this as a very, very tomboyish female. My characters are tomboys, but they are still female. Like me.)

And then, thanks largely to an excellent article at Big Bear Butt Blogger, it hit me. I’m looking at the game a lot differently than most people are.

That is to say, I am a roleplayer and a daydreamer and I imagine my characters as extensions of myself, and… avatars of myself in a parallel universe, so to speak.

The majority of you guys, I imagine, are a bit more normal than me, heehee =P And you play the game as just a game, or as a movie. Big Bear Butt said that he liked playing female characters because he likes watching female characters kick butt, like in a movie or TV show, for example. It has nothing to do with creating a character that is an expression of yourself. And that’s a very normal thing, and it makes a lot of sense. I had just sort of forgotten that, and assumed that everybody was like me and into the whole roleplaying thing.

So, thanks Big Bear Butt for hitting me back into reality for a few minutes and helping me understand a lot of my fellow WoW players better. I’ll try not to dig myself so deep into the RP-hole next time. (Even if it is a lot of fun down here!)

P.S. A lot of roleplayers actually play the opposite gender too… because good character ideas are not limited by gender. So it’s not a roleplayer thing, I think, so much as it’s a “Pike” thing. =P

blogs, screenshots

Desktops & Blogs

4 Comments

This is a screenshot I took today of my current computer desktop:


The wallpaper was made by the extraordinarily talented artists over at The Bronze Kettle, which is a very good WoW blog that I would recommend looking into if you haven’t already.

Speaking of blogs, I’ve finally updated my sidebar’s blogroll; in fact, thanks to Google Reader and some code, it should actually self-update now every time I find a new blog to read. (Thanks to Mania for originally pointing out that you could do this!)

My blogroll has gotten very big in such a short amount of time, if it gets much bigger I might have to make a dedicated “page” for it. But I like having all the links on the blog itself.

Ding 63 and I got my [Survivalist’s Pike]! It even has my nickname in it, so you know it’s gotta be a good weapon. =P

blogs, outlands, pets, pvp, screenshots

Random Ramblings!

3 Comments

So my Sitemeter tells me that I’ve had like 100 new visitors just in the past few hours thanks to a link on Big Red Kitty. To coin a term, I have been BRK’d. Wow! Thanks BRK! And welcome to any new visitors. Please feel free to browse around my little blog, and pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable if you so desire. *passes out cookies and tea for the readers, and a variety of pet foods for their pets*.

(Edit: And a link on Mania’s Arcania too? Wow, thank you!! I might just have to make another “shout-out” post sometime soon.)

Now then, Outlands:


This screenshot was taken shortly before heading through the Dark Portal to get to Outlands. Yes, I’ve had my hearth set to Shatt since level 50 or so, but there was no way I was going to miss out on going through the portal.

The irony is that the screenshot is already “outdated”, so to speak, since in the short time between then and now I have already managed to replace two pieces of gear as well as my ranged weapon, all with stuff that is better than my old-world gear to a ridiculous degree. I already love Outlands though– it’s fun, it’s challenging (the “yellow” mobs are more like “orange” mobs, and I love that challenge), and of course, there’s all the new gear!

So here I am, on the fast-track to level 60 (ooh, remind me to do more farming… need epic mount cash) and enjoying every bit of it.

Other bits of interest: My teal kitty has been christened Locke. This name has a double meaning for me; firstly, John Locke was a 17th-century English philosopher, just like Thomas Hobbes… so there is an in-joke there, a nod to both the Calvin & Hobbes comic and to BRK. Secondly, Locke Cole is a character from the Super Nintendo game Final Fantasy VI, which is one of my favorite video games. Locke the kitty and Tux the owl have been taking turns playing in Outlands with me, all the while being lavished with roasted quail.

Also, I have decided that I’d like to improve upon my PvP skills. I’ve been doing a lot of battlegrounds recently (since once I hit a level ending in 8 or 9 I hightail it over to the battlemasters… you might say I have a bit of an addiction) and while I would call my self an “okay” PvPer and I tend to be towards the top of the damage charts at the end, I still am not a “good” PvPer. A lot of times in PvP I’ll get caught of guard or people will sneak up on me, and then I seem to spend the duration of that duel trying to get back to range and doing very little non-pet damage. It’s definitely time to practice my technique here.

I do have an interesting PvP story to share. I was in Alterac Valley the other day, and was somewhere out in the middle of nowhere when I ran across a lone orc warrior. He was level 51, and I was level 59. Now I know it’s battlegrounds, I know player-vs-player combat is the whole point here… but I couldn’t bring myself to attack him. Not with eight levels separating us. Besides, since we were both out in the middle of nowhere I figured he must have been doing a quest or something. So I hopped on my mount and rode right past him. Not long after this I paused to catch my bearings and decide where I wanted to go. And who should come jumping on me but that level 51 warrior! We fought, and obviously Tux and I triumphed. But I have to say that little incident left me admiring the orc player’s courage and mindset. He knew what PvP was all about. He was willing to try taking on a player that was eight levels higher than him. Whereas I, well, I love a good battlegrounds game but I’m really just a carebear at heart. It was an interesting juxtaposition of two different playstyles and I /salute that orc warrior, wherever he is.

Alrighty, enough pseudo-philosophical rambling. Back to Outlands!

bad hunters, blogs

Blogs, and bad hunters (not together, fortunately)

12 Comments

It never ceases to amaze me how expansive the blogging community is, even in a single subject (in this case, WoW.) I’ve been finding myself linked to in blogs and even mentioned in blog posts (thanks again Matticus! It was a very interesting article too) so I keep finding more and more blogs to read. I’m afraid I may run out of room in my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder before long. I need to find a nice, easy way to keep track of all the blogs I read– is Google Reader good? I need some recommendations.

While we’re on the topic of blogs, I also want to mention that I do in fact read every single comment that is posted here, thanks to Gmail notifications. I even read the ones made on really old posts. I just wanted to mention that because I’ve been getting some comments on older posts recently, and I wanted to make sure everybody knew that they are all read and quite appreciated.

Anyways, I’ve been coming up with a lot of things I’ve wanted to write about lately; but I think this post is just going to focus on… bad hunters. Yes, hunters seem to have a bad rap for having the highest quantity of bad players. To be quite honest I’m not surprised. The amount of people I’ve run into who don’t have “Hunter 101” down is astonishing. (I think Hunter 101 probably consists of one sentence: “Send your pet in to hold aggro for you and shoot things from afar.” Seriously I think some hunters have not yet made that connection.)

I once grouped with a level 40-something hunter whose strategy in an instance went like this: use multi-shot or volley to get as many mobs as possible to aggro onto you, and then melee everything. Yes, I’m serious. Now, it’s one thing to be a self-professed delusional hunter and do stuff like that for fun 😉 , but it’s another thing to seriously use that as your main method of attack in an instance. (For the record, that guy wound up aggro’ing everything in a particularly bad room and everybody died except me, and I even managed to dispose of all the offending mobs. I was pretty proud of being able to survive such a bad wipe. It’s moments like that– moments where the odds are stacked against you, and you experience the thrill of coming up with a way to survive– that really make me love being a hunter.)

It’s even worse when other people are grouped with bad hunters and then they feel less inclined to group with hunters again, later. My boyfriend occasionally runs instances while I’m gone or busy; many times I have returned home to be met with “Pleeeease get on WoW and group with us, we just had to kick this horrible hunter who can’t use traps/feigns death at the worst times/can’t control his pet/keeps wiping us/*insert something else here* and we need you.” It’s flattering that he and his friends turn to me when they need a reliable hunter, but it’s sad that it’s so hard for them to find reliable hunters in the first place.

Now maybe it’s just easier for me to pick out bad hunters because hunter is really the only class I know much about. Maybe I’ve grouped with lots of bad players of other classes and just haven’t noticed because I’m not very experienced yet. But I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I have met poor players of other classes (the rogue who was out-DPS’d by my pet, when I was Marksman-spec’d, comes to mind… granted I don’t know much about rogues, but that struck me as rather, erm, less-than-stellar), but bad hunters are just everywhere. It sort of makes you wonder why that is so. Maybe this is just one of those classes where you really need to have a “Eureka!” moment before you finally get it. Or maybe it’s a more gradual process… or maybe it just depends.

There are definitely good hunters out there, though. And it always makes me happy to see those. As I have said before, that’s what I’m aiming for… being a good hunter. I don’t think I’m there yet but at least I know I’m not bad. It warms my little huntery heart to see really good hunters in battlegrounds, even if they’re of the opposing faction and beating me into oblivion =) So keep up the good work, guys!

blogs, hunter, pictures

Pics or it didn't happen! *grin*

5 Comments

There are really three parts to this blog post:

The first part is, I want to say thank you to all of you who commented on my last post about taking my time through Outlands. Thank you for the tips and support, and I think I’m going to be telling any over-eager friends that I will let them know when/if I need their help, and that I don’t exactly need it right away.

Secondly, Kestrel posted over at his blog that when it comes to girls on the internet… “Pics or it didn’t happen!” 😉 So off I went in search of a picture…


It’s nothing exactly stellar… and yes I know I look a lot younger than I really am (I am in my mid-twenties! Really! Honest!) but it’s the best I could dig up for now… and my boyfriend really likes this picture (he actually took it) so I guess it can’t be all that bad! =P And yes, that is a Firefox shirt I’m wearing. Geek pride all the way, baby!

Lastly, I wanted to expand a bit on a comment I made in another blog. Grumpy had an interesting post on his blog, called “Do you regret your choice?” It asks if you ever regret rolling a hunter because of all the flak that hunters seem to get with being “easy-mode” and “overplayed”. This was my response:

“I have to say that sometimes I feel a tad bit embarrassed to be yet another “female night elf hunter”, but on the other hand it reminds me that if I want to stand out, I have to become a really good hunter. That was one of the first things to really inspire me to start looking up hunter information online and start practicing my skills– I decided early on that I wasn’t going to be “another night elf hunter”, I was going to be “a good hunter”.

I don’t regret being a hunter because I love the class so much. But sometimes I do wonder if it’s just because it’s the first class I ever played so maybe it’s like a “first love”, so to speak. I wonder if, had I picked another class, I would have fallen in love with that one instead. I guess we’ll never know…”

And yeah, I think my comment pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter. Is it annoying to often be lumped with “all the other millions of bad night elf hunters who need to learn to play”? Yes, it most certainly is sometimes. But to me, that’s all the more incentive to truly become a good hunter. I want to become good at my class and stand out. I know I still have a long way to go, but I think that I’m at least on the right path.

It’s true that I also have been wondering if I would love hunters so much if it wasn’t the first class I picked. I want to say I would have anyway, but we’ll probably never know. I’m glad I picked the class I did though, and yes, I’m proud to be a hunter. Most overplayed class? According to Warcraft Realms, yes. The easy-mode class? Debatable, but I’ll accept it. But nonetheless, I’m proud.

blogs, pets

Beware My Rudimentary Art Skills

4 Comments

I have made a topbanner for my blog! As I do not have access to a working scanner at the moment, the characters were mouse-drawn in GIMP. Then they were pasted onto a picture of Elwynn Forest. I think it turned out okay. The hardest part was figuring out how to center the image because, by default, it aligned to the left. It’s still sort of stuck to the top of the banner but it looks okay for now.

Let me know if you’re having trouble reading the banner, I realize the bright blue text is kind of an iffy idea but I tried to make the text large enough to still be easily readable.

Other blog-related news: I’ve added my e-mail address to the sidebar. I don’t know if anybody would have reason to e-mail me but I thought it would be a good idea to have it there, just in case!

WoW-related news: My boyfriend admitted to me the other day that Tux’s wings annoy him sometimes. This is understandable and the curse of pets with big flapping wings. I love Tux and would never part with him but as I get closer to “the higher levels” of the game (aka the Outland Levels), I figure it’s time to start thinking about an alternative pet to use when the people I’m grouping with would rather I not have a bird. I have my raptor in the stable, but I’ve also been thinking about the ever-so-classy cat. Decisions, decisions, on what my third pet should be…

blogs, links

Here's To The WoW Bloggers

5 Comments

As a few of you may know, I am fairly new not just to the hunter class, but to World of WarCraft as a whole. When I was first starting out, I was a pretty terrible player. I really had no idea what I was doing, or what I was supposed to be doing. Today I look back on some of the epically bad newbie mistakes I made (“Hey, putting my pet on aggressive in Deadmines is a great idea, right?”) and cringe.

Fortunately for me, I was bright enough to realize that I was… lacking in the hunter skills department. So one day I went on a Google rampage to see if I could find some information to help me become a better player.

The two blogs that came up were The Hunter’s Mark and Big Red Kitty. These blogs really need no introduction; they both provide a wealth of information on the hunter class and WoW in general and both helped me immensely in my newbie-hood. Lassirra and BRK are hunters that I have huge amounts of respect for and I /salute them. However, after a while, I also noticed that they weren’t my only mentors– the commenters and readers of these blogs had a lot to offer too! Slowly I started visiting their profiles and sites and following various blog links that I stumbled across and building up a little collection of blogs to read. Some of these blogs are bigger and some are smaller but they have all helped and continue to help make me a better hunter and WoW player.

Kestrel’s Aerie is chock-full of information and help regarding pretty much anything and everything that is WoW-related, and also includes highly interesting features such as UI/addon reviews and a frequent “blog roundup” listing some of the most interesting blog posts of the week.

Little White Lion chronicles the both the ups and downs of the adventures of a hunter as she gets closer to level 70, and has shown me a lot about what I have to look forward to as I get there myself.

Balls of Z is a highly informative and entertaining blog about mages and a couple hunter alts. (I certainly don’t blame anyone for having more than one hunter alt, I can’t even count how many hunters I play by now.) Mages are possibly my second favorite class in the game and this blog, while still fairly new, has been a solid reference for my own baby mage so far.

Mirshalak’s Lair is to Survival what BRK is to Beast Mastery. This blog also has a lot to offer about various aspects of WoW, and these informational posts are accentuated with an inherent thoughtfulness and introspectiveness which makes a very good read overall.

Little Black Kitty is a newer blog that documents the adventures of leveling a draenei hunter. It’s been a remarkably fun read so far and the posts are often accompanied with absolutely adorable pictures of the blogger’s real life kitties!

Thrill of the Hunt features Top Ten Lists and a lot of information on everything from raiding to “budgeting your WoW checkbook”.

Bubble-Hearth is a pally blog (as you’ve probably guessed from the title =P) which I started reading not too long ago but from which I have already gleaned some advice on video capture and reducing lag, and which I look forward to reading more of.

Grumpy Old Dwarf is, well… about a grumpy old dwarf! This is another blog that I just started reading recently, but it has a lot of personality and is always fun to read.

Saber Squadron I actually just started reading today =P Because I found out that they were linking to me and I regret to say that I didn’t know about the blog earlier! It’s about somebody who has gone all out and is multiboxing five hunters. It sounds like a fun adventure and I’m excited to read more about it.

And that is my listing of all the WoW blogs that I currently read. I am always looking for more because I am an avid reader/learner, so give me a shout out if you know of any others that deserve looking into! But this post is largely to say thank you to the WoW blogging community, particularly the hunter subset of that community, for unknowingly helping to raise this little hunterling. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a good hunter yet– I’m still low-level, and I’m still learning– but I think that I am getting there, slowly but surely, and a large part of it is thanks to you guys. I hope that someday I’ll be able to help newbies with my blog the same way your blogs helped me.

So I raise my Brewfest cup to you WoW bloggers today! =D