Category Archives: screenshots

Oh Blizz, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

Now this is a story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down…

So that bat minipet? Yeah. I’ve been wanting a bat minipet since before Blizz announced one.

So they announced it, and all excitedly I scheduled a special “Mirkblood Run” with my guildies so we could go get it. Of course, this run isn’t until towards the end of this “Ten Day Time Period” that Blue told us we’d have, but no worries, I figured…

And of course that is the day that an hour before the scheduled run, my entire character decided to glitch and become unplayable.

Flash forward to this morning. Tawyn is still glitched and Blizz has sent me another e-mail telling me to delete my WTF folder and basically do all the stuff I’d already tried. Frantically I sent in another GM ticket and went to work.

I came back from work. Had a nice letter from Blizz telling me that they’d moved my character and I was unglitched now.

Logged in and was greeted with the middle of Dustwallow Marsh (Blizz really does like to be random.) But… I was fixed!

Instantly hopped into LFG. I figure with Tuesday morning maintenance tomorrow, that boss will not be around for much longer. “LFG New Kara Boss. Please LFG New Kara Boss. Okay, I will pay gold to everyone in the raid for the New Kara Boss.”

An hour went by. Finally managed to get a group started. Got a whole group going except… healers.

Twenty minutes went by. No healers. People in the group mysteriously started to go offline or have other things to do.

Disbanded group. Combed through LFG again.

“LFM for Full Kara Clear including new Boss, then g2g!”

Gasp! Hallelujah!

Leapt into the group. There were only about four of us but the group leader/main tank seemed to know what he was doing and he had a full-blown group of ten within about five minutes. We all rushed to the stone, most of us excitedly talking about getting that new boss.

We go into Karazhan.

We wait a bit.

Tank comes in over Raid Chat.

“Um, guys… I forgot… I’m saved to Shade already. And now you’re all saved there too.”

Seriously, what did I do to get this kind of karma? Did I roll on a caster weapon? Did I melee something to death? Did I put points in Pathfinding by accident? Forgive thy hunter, she knows not what she did =(

Ghostbusting!

Got together with some guildies and went on a Necrotic Rune farming spree last night. Spent a bunch of ’em on some new shoulders. Went through the horrifying experience of watching my shiny new fully-enchanted epic shoulders not live up to my old blues, for the second time in the past month or so. (Later found out that my RatingBuster settings were somewhat out of whack, which might explain my tendency to misjudge.)

Oh well, I did manage to get my mitts on that Pocket Paladin, and on top of that, the first new tabard Tawyn has worn in well over a year:

I said she’d never take the other one off for aesthetic/RP reasons, but I think the new one fulfills both functions just fine, so, I am happy. And I can always put the other one back on if I change my mind.

Then I thought “Hey wait a minute, Lunapike needs gear!”

Off I hopped over to her and ran to Azshara. I was worried about running into a team of Alliance (this being a PvP server and all) but I managed to find a big group of undead all to myself and blissfully grinded away for quite some time. Also got both some epic leather and mail pants as drops from those rare spawns, but they’re uuugly (paladin-style armor on a hunter, seriously? =P), and it’s honestly debatable whether they’re better than my current blue pants or not, so… yar. I wound up with some new shoulders and new gloves, as well as the tabard. In all honesty Lunapike is lookin’ pretty good right now from a cosmetic standpoint, most everything she’s wearing is some variant or other of the same armor skin so she’s all matchy.

The Bare Minimum Things Left To Do before WotLK: New Karazhan boss with Tawyn, and get the Karazhan key on Lunapike. I know someone else can open the door for you now and heck, I don’t even know if Lunapike will get a chance to do Kara before Northrend opens up, but… it’s an important thing for me. Working my way through Karazhan with my friends was the highlight of Burning Crusade for me and I adore the lore behind it, so… I will have the key on two characters.

The Legend of Chakapas

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.

The people came to Chakapas and told him of their dilemma, and he immediately agreed to let the moon go, but the mighty hunter soon found that he could not undo his own trap, and the moon remained firmly stuck.

He asked the animals of the forest for help and they agreed to do what they could, one by one heading to the moon and one by one failing and coming back because the moon’s light was too brilliant and too hot. Finally, the smallest animal– the Least Mouse– asked for a try. Bravely he wandered up to the ensnared moon and chewed through the rope. It took a long time and he had to withstand great amounts of light and heat– so hot that it singed his belly, leaving it a lighter color than the rest of his fur. But he succeeded where the other animals could not, and the moon once again rose to take its place in the night sky.

As for Chakapas, no one is quite sure where he went in search of his next great hunt. But it is said that you can still see his shadow cast against the moon…

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!

In Which a Game Bug Leads to a Pet Bug

You may have heard some hunters say they a have a “bug” with their cat pet, where they will very firmly turn Prowl off of Autocast and it will… automatically turn itself back onto Autocast. Everytime you mount or dismount or zone into someplace new, it comes back. There are “fixes” like resummoning your pet, or putting the offending Prowl on your pet’s action bar, and sometimes it will work, but sometimes it won’t.

Tawyn ran into this problem with Locke and Lunapike ran into this problem with Alyosha but they were both easily fixed. I dragged Prowl onto my pet’s action bar, turned it off, dismissed and resummoned my pet, and… problem solved. Neither of them are Prowling anymore and things are snazzy. Although even if they did have the prowling bug, it wouldn’t have been too big of a deal, because I have other pets I could use if it got too annoying.

So then I logged into Althalor. My hunter who only uses cats.

Guess what?

They won’t stop prowling.

Anytime I mount/dismount, Prowl. Anytime I log in and out, Prowl. Anytime I take a flight point and land somewhere, Prowl. It doesn’t matter how many times I turn it off. It doesn’t matter how many of those million tricks I found on the internet I try. It doesn’t matter that I did the little trick I did with both Tawyn and Lunapike to fix the problem. My poor cat hunter’s cats are simply not cooperating.

Why it’s only happening on one of my hunters and not the others, I have no idea, and why it had to happen specifically to my cat-only hunter I have no idea, but the result was that it wasn’t long before I got sick of the stealth noise and got tired of constantly having to tell my kitties to unprowl, and I decided to break protocol and go tame a non-kitty pet to use until this all gets sorted out.

At the suggestion of a commenter, I opted to go with a moth.

…let’s play the guess what game again. Guess what?

The only pre-Outlands-level moths in the game are in the Draenei starting zone. Althalor is a blood elf, on a PvP server.

Did I? You’d better believe I did!

It actually wasn’t that bad. I think a lot of people are distracted by the zombies running around so I didn’t run into anybody (except, well, a zombie) on the way there. Then I jumped into the water at Auberdine, drowned myself under the draenei boat, hopped onto the draenei boat as a ghost, rode over to Azuremyst Isle, and– still ghostified– ran myself to the Spirit Healer who is standing not too far away from where level 1 draenei first spawn. I rez’d there and, much to my luck, there was a moth right in front of my face.

/tame!

/yell Byebye Draenei!

/hearthstone!

I only had enough time last night to play with the moth long enough to realize that the moth’s special ability, Serenity Dust, does not seem to be autocasting and I have to manually trigger it. So now I find myself wondering… is this a known issue or is poor Althalor just having horrific luck with pets?

Oh, also, I need a name for the moth. Something other than PikesWorstNightmare (have I mentioned I have this phobia of moths in real life but the ones in WoW don’t bug me? …pun not intended.) I was thinking of something dreamlike or trancelike cause I think it would fit. Toss me your suggestions.

Can I Has DPS?

Okay, now that I have talked about my “emotional” investment into Beast Mastery in my last post, let us talk about another awesome component of the spec: Dee Pee Ess. Most people know that the Holy Church of Fortyone Twenty was the way to Hunter DPS Heaven in Burning Crusade; but by the looks of things the Reformation is happening in Wrath of the Lich King and we will see a lot more specs running around in raids. This strikes me as a Very Good Thing because I don’t like to see people spec something that they do not like. That was sort of one of the points I was trying to make (and I think I didn’t do a very good job at it, so sorry <3 ) in my last post. I want people to spec the way they enjoy the most. But I know there are at least a few of you crazy nutcases out there who love BM for its playstyle, like I do, who are maybe curious about new shot rotations in the like. Never fear, Pike is here!

Tawyn has spent probably close to a hundred gold on respecs since the patch hit; she started with a very deep BM build and slowly has been drifting to a lighter one, moving to 51/10/0 and now sitting at 48/13/0. The reason for the talent shakeup was threefold: firstly, I wanted to pick up Animal Handler now that it’s going to be useful again in the next patch (I am so down for extra pet expertise). Secondly, Deep BM at 70 was feeling very… top-heavy, for lack of a better term. Too much in BM, too fast. And Invigoration and Cobra Strikes are both kinda “iffy” to me right now in terms of the proc rate and “worth it” value– which saddens me, cause I love their synthesis concept, but sometimes the truth hurts. Thirdly, I have come to the conclusion that Go for the Throat is a Super Vital Talent™ and it is worth it to sacrifice the Exotic Pet and four extra pet talent points to pick it up. You can always go back and pick up the Exotic Pet talent later on once you get closer to 80.

Lunapike is still 46/15/0, which is very similar, but a little different. Points in Focused Aim, for example, because she is not hit-capped, and she is testing Invigoration at the moment whereas Tawyn is testing Cobra Strikes, so those talents are switched.

ANYWAYS, I was getting really curious about the performance of these specs so I downloaded Recount, spent approximately four seconds deciding that I liked it better than SW Stats, and headed off to visit our friends the Training Dummies.

With some 1900 AP and 25.29% crit and unbuffed (Except for stuff like Aspect of the Hawk/Ferocious Inspiration), and having popped all her cooldowns and trinkets over the duration of the test, which lasted until I was out of mana, Tawyn hit about 1180 DPS at her peak and consistently maintained 1050+ DPS using Steady Shot and keeping Serpent Sting refreshed (because Serpent Sting is supposed to be viable now =P). Not too shabby. I’m satisfied. I’d like to make a comparison to pre-patch DPS but I honestly never paid attention to anything beyond where I sat on the chart (does that make me a good or bad hunter?)

This is not an entirely 100% accurate breakdown because I took this screenshot after a Viper cycle to replenish my mana. Still, it can give you a general idea of what the DPS will look like after one full round of DPS and the full round of Viper, and it also gives you an idea of what Locke is doing in terms of damage. And looking back, I’m thinking I was a little slow on the uptake with Serpent Sting once or twice. Derp.

My testing was not finished though, oh no!

Now Lunapike is obviously at a disadvantage here and I wasn’t out to make a real comparison exactly for this reason. She only has roughly 1450 AP (with Aspect of the Hawk) and 22.35% crit. However, I mostly wanted to see the wasp stats, and also see if Invigoration was going to be making a big difference. The verdict? …it procs often enough, but… I dunno, it lets me do what, get maybe three more Steadys in before I switch to Viper? Dunno if it’s worth it for the two points or not. More testing will have to be done.

This screenshot was actually taken right before switching to Aspect of the Viper so I wound up with 884 DPS as an unbuffed hunter in semi-enchanted blues. Again, I am satisfied. Now, let’s discuss the pets; Serenity the wasp and Locke the Kitty are almost identical in terms of the stat breakdown (Roughly 60% regular melee, 30% focus dump, and 10% DoT/special ability.) The big difference I see is that Serenity brings a big whoppin’ armor debuff with him whereas Locke doesn’t. I think that this is gonna be one of the things that makes a difference when it comes to which pets you will see more often in raids. And of course, things will get all the more interesting when we throw Exotic Pets into the picture, with their intended upcoming buff and their extra talent points.

And the moral of the story is: Beast Masters, Steady Shot and Serpent Sting is looking like your rotation for the time being, unless I totally botched up somewhere (in which case, please tell me ^_^). Although I would still call Serpent Sting situational; depending on if Scorpid Sting might be preferred or if there might be emergency trapping in the forseeable future.

The second moral of the story is… next time, remind me to do my testing on Beta where respecs only cost 1 copper. Cause next up I think I wanna do the Go for the Throat vs. Exotic Pet/extra points Showdown. But I’m not willing to throw more gold into it. I’m just a poor Pike from a poor family.

Betcha Didn't Think I'd Get This Far

So this past weekend I hit a milestone as I successfully managed to get a third character to level 50.

Wanna see a picture?

Oh snap! Hide your children! Shelter your weak, your young and your old! Houston, we have a problem! Pike has a level 50 character and it’s not a hunter!

What this unholy union of hunter and druid will bring in the future, I can’t say. But you’ve at least got to tip your hat to a class that can almost manage to keep my attention to the extent that hunters do. (Keyword: almost).

As for the inevitable “Why are you leveling resto you wacko” questions that I can already forsee in my crystal ball, I have four answers for you:
1.) I am doing a lot of instance/group stuff
2.) I never die
3.) Come on… you get to be a tree. Clearly the most fun of all druid forms. I run around Stormwind in Tree Form instead of Travel Form.
4.) Honestly, when I am solo’ing… tossing on some feral gear, piling on the massive resto HoTs, and going into cat/bear as needed is surprisingly effective. Not quite as fast as moonkin, maybe. And certainly not as fast as a hunter. But who cares about “fast” so long as things are working well and you’re having fun?

Well, that is my obligatory non-hunter post of the year. Hope you non-hunters that visit my site (are you out there?) were entertained! In closing, I would like to dedicate this post to BRK and BBB, both of whom are bloggers that I <3 muchly, and who have this frightening tendency to conspire together to bring Massive Quantities of Sustained Ranged Fo'Shizzle to the Druidic and Hunterrific masses. We will return you to your regularly scheduled hunter broadcast program tomorrow. Until then, happy hunting and tree-hugging.

New Pet Review: Wasp

First of all, I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for the site downtime on Friday night/Saturday morning. The server this site was hosted on was the victim of a Denial of Service attack so they took everything down and it took a little while for it to go back up. Hopefully I didn’t scare too many of you with the site’s sudden disappearance. =P

I’m back though, and here to talk pets. As much as I love my current pets– I went into this patch with five level 70 pets across my two “main” hunters– I was, a few nights back, sort of randomly feeling this urge to tame something new and different. I thought back to the pets I’d played on Beta… Rhino, Devilsaur, Gorilla… I wasn’t feelin’ it this time for any of them and the Rhino isn’t even around yet.

So off I went to Petopia to comb through the new pets. Finally I settled on trying out the Wasp family.

Tawyn was who I was playing at the time so off I went to tame Blacksting. I played around with him for a while and did some dailies with him before coming to two conclusions: Firstly, even though I haven’t seen many Wasp Hunters around at all, the ones that I did see had invariably tamed Blacksting as well, so I decided I wanted something a little more different, and secondly Tawyn is my hunter with the Exotic Pet talent so really, I should save her for trying out the Exotic Pets.

So the next day I hopped onto Lunapike and tamed a Marshlight Bleeder. I broke Lunapike’s personal protocol here and named it something other than a character from my favorite book:

Honestly though, if you thought I was going to tame a firefly and NOT name it Serenity, you were sadly mistaken.

Over the course of the next couple of days I succeeded in getting Serenity from level 65 to level 70. This was accomplished almost entirely by grinding the ogres in Nagrand and the result was that I got a fabulous bonus prize right after the pet ding happened:

/flex

Anyways, now the pet. I gotta admit, from an aesthetics standpoint, I am hooked. It’s kind of ironic because in real life, insectoids with large flappy wings have this tendency to… not sit right with me. Okay, let me rephrase that. A typical real life scenario would involve a moth flapping lazily past my face and me leaping on The Boy and screeching out something along the lines of “KILLITWITHFIRE”. (Yes, that was a dramatization of an actual occurance.)

But I really like the wasps in game, the glowy firefly variety especially. There is something comforting about having something next to you that is emitting a warm glow and making a soft chattery noise and grooming itself cutely with its little legs. It’s kind of relaxing, really. It’s like questing with a nightlight. A deadly nightlight. (Maybe he really is the only bee in your bonnet?)

Gameplay wise, the wasp is a Ferocity pet (who thus dishes out plenty of damage) and puts a handy debuff on whatever you are attacking, decreasing its armor for 20 seconds. That meant that when I was fighting the ogres, I was constantly fighting them with a big fat 400 armor debuff on them, and it meant smooth sailing. And grinding.

Overall, I gotta say I am a fan. Serenity isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and while he may not have some super-awesome exotic-pet move or anything, being able to toss around mini Faerie Fires like no tomorrow is far from a bad ability. Look into one if you want a solid Ferocity pet that is somewhat rare (as I said, I haven’t seen too many Wasp Hunters around) and you appreciate the serene, glowy aesthetic of Zangarmarsh. If you are anything like me, you will quickly become attached to your little lightning bug.

Got a pet that you want me to review? I still have several open stable slots left so give me a shout out and I will see what I can do for ya.

Slash Cower

You know, Tawyn had to deal with a lot of scary stuff today.

A room full of dragon hatchlings in the name of a title…

And the big mother dragon, herself, just for the heck of it…

But nothing, apparently, is quite as scary as a talking tree.

/cower indeed.

(For the record, the guild name is a BIG inside joke; and Onyxia was done with a prot warrior, a resto druid, a warlock, our healadin-turned-retadin, and me. I FRAPS’d the thing and I’d be willing to try to get a video together with annotations about my usage of the new hunter talents and skills, if anybody is remotely interested!)

'Til We Meet Again

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