naxx to the maxx

well, not quite. Last night saw me attempting to bribe my way in to the guild raid group for naxx buy offering to give 600g to a guild warrior for an epic shotgun. In the end he said he’d take a loan, but not a gift. I’m yet to see if i’ll actually get in to the guild raidgroup, hopefully.

However, i got in to a 25man naxxramas group later in the evening, and cleared out the spider wing without a hitch and then wiped big-style on patchwerk – exactly the same situation as last time i was there. Overall i wasn’t doing too great on the DPS despite re-speccing back to Survival, probably down to me being the least well geared person there. Still, 6th-8th on the DPS meters isn’t too shabby.

Hopefully i’ll get to naxx again tonight, either by way of a continued 25man run from last night, or with the guild.

In other news, there seems to be no way I will be able to complete the lunar festival achievements this year, what with there only being 3 days left, and me needing most of the dungeon eldars still. I did complete elders of the horde, though.

Happy Birthday Shao!

That’s right, it was one year ago today that I rolled mister Shao. The hunter dwarf that is my avatar in the game of the World of Warcraft. So lets take a look back at what’s he’s achieved in that time, as well as a progress update of what he’s been doing since we last checked in.

1-60

•       Most of the levelling to 70 progress was long and drawn out affair, taking two thirds of the year where. I had little time to play – at best an hour a day, and even less time to update this blog. For that reason I made slow progress of content. Levelling almost entirely solo, with very few group quests or dungeons run with other people. This was down to my play style, and the lack of other players at my level, but also because of recent patches at the time that had made a lot of the content a lot easier. Shao is also a bit of a loner, and has had trouble finding a good guild – more of that another time.

70-79

•       The amount  of play time I could fit in to a day has increased dramatically since my ex-girlfriend and I split, and also this coincided nicely with the launch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I launched myself head first in to this, reaching level 80 after about two weeks – not the fastest person ever, but also much quicker than a lot of other people. Again, most of the content aside from a some of the harder group quests was done solo mode. Primarily because of how great beast master talents and pets became in patch 3.0.2.

80

•        Shao has now spent over 5 days playtime at level 80, so what has he actually achieved? Gear-wise, not a lot. end-game content-wise, not a lot. He’s seen every instance apart from Obsidium Sanctum, but he’s not run them frequently or often enough to have gotten a lot of epic gear – but what he has got has come easy.

  

•   Onyxia’s Lair Entrance
•  
  More recently he’s been doing achievement content. Old world dungeons, the lunar festival achievments, and some rep grinding. Lets look specifically at what he’s done in the past week or so.

1. Dire Maul  – My other characters had been to dire maul before, but it’s never been a massively popular set of instances, probably because it’s tucked away, or probably because it came to the game late (patch 1.2 if i remember correctly). There’s exactly two reasons why people still go there. 1) Warlock epic land mounts. 2) paladin epic land mounts. My other character never got his lock mount, which was a shame because it’s fricking awesom, but i had been there 3 years ago. It was nice running the content from start to finish, and oddly, and there were a couple of nice aspects about it that i’d not seen before.
1. Gordok Ogre Suit -  a quest that will give you a item to turn yourself in to an ogre – or at least wear an ogre suit. It’s a one-time effect, although you can create more suits using a reagent found in the instance. For those looking for a longer stint as an ogre you could always save up some UDE points to get the Carved Ogre Idol.
2. The above ogre suit is used in a unique mechanic i’ve not seen employed elsewhere. At the end of the instance, you have to kill the Gordok King – and in doing so you, or your group become king of the Gordoks, all the MOBs you didn’t kill become friendly, and you are given a reward based on how many you killed before killing the king.  The more you kill, the worse the reward.
   The interesting mechanic is that the king resides at the end of the instance, and you have to get past them all to be able to even fight him.
2. Zul’Aman – again, i missed this instance due to missing a year of burning crusade. It always looked cool because of the way the bosses wear animal outfits, and the drops reflect those outfits. Other than that the run was pretty dull, we were far too over powered, and did the instance incredibly quickly.
3. Gnomeregan Exiles Rep = exalted – my long drawn out quest to get all reputations to exalted isn’t going particularly well. Currently I’m working on the four main alliance races, with Dwarves, Humans, and now Gnomes there already and a couple thousand rep missing on the other two. Oddly, I’m only going after the status for achievements and mounts, I’m really after the cat mounts from darnassus.
4. Molten Core – another oldskool instance that i’ve never been able to run, and still couldn’t run on my own (the mere fact it requires a player to be in a raid doesn’t help). Pretty unremarkable instance.. lots of giants, elementals, naga. Pretty epic feel about it. The only thing i took away from this run was the achievement, and an Ancient Core Hound pet… a lot of hunters are using core hounds, but the orange ones can only be found in Molten Core, and are therefore pretty rare. More so because there are few beastmaster hunter’s in game at the moment.
5. Black Wing Lair – BWL is much like MC above, in that i never got to go there, and in fact i originally quit WoW shortly after BWL went live – a time when i was playing another hunter in the mid-40s. The two instances that i was familiar with in blackrock were some of my favourite from a design, and imagery point of view. I used to love running them back in the day with my warlock, because they were challenging, and not like any other instance I’d run up until that point, so I’d always wanted to progress enough to get to MC and BWL. The run was pretty straight forward, and of course a lot easier than with a group of 60s. I only rolled on three items. Ancient Petrified Leaf (which leads to an interesting quest), Dragonstalkers Spaulders, Head of Nefarian (which leads to this quest, which allowed me to take Master Dragonslayer’s Orb). Oddly, my rolls were good yesterday, taking two 94s, and a 97 to take all three items.

   Lord Victor Nefarius’ throne
    

6. Onyxia’s Lair – after all the hype of hearing about onyxia, and her lair, and going through the attunement (back when you needed to), i was a little disappointed. A server restart was scheduled in just as we all got there, none of us had done it before and decided to give it a whirl anyway. It took us a matter of minutes. Very easy, very disappointed. Interestingly i did this instance before BWL, and an item i need for the Ancient Petrified Leaf quest dropped, and i didn’t roll for it. Doh!

Guilds! What are they good for?

For the most part Shao has had a bad time with guilds. Indeed, one of the major problems with this MMO (and i guess every other MMO, and every other online community) is that is full of a lot people that

1. don’t know how to act in a community
2. are rude and/or opinionated
3. are immature.

There will always be problems when you put a group of people like this together, and WoW is no different.

see-saw – nerf ‘n’ buff

Blizzard, you are cheeky chappies! I haven’t been on WoW for the past couple of days, but it seems Tuesday’s restarts implemented a hotfix which nerfed explosive shot.

Ghostcrawler

We made a hotfix recently to lower the coefficient of Explosive Shot. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to announce the change ahead of time. We don’t typically do patch notes for hotfixes so we don’t have a system in place to always broadcast these before they happen. We are in the process of making some changes to get damage done more in parity (in PvP and PvE). If there are other classes far ahead of you on the damage meters, chances are good they will see some nerfs to their damage soon too. Overall, we are trying to make changes in a more timely manner so that players won’t feel like they are stuck with a bug or other issue forever. We won’t be able to get every issue fixed overnight, but it’s a start.

So, with me wanting to run some low level instances, to grind cloth for rep, achievements, and finishing off the elder quests for the lunar festival it seems like it’s a good time to re-spec back to beastmaster. Afterall, we’re expecting a beastmaster buff anytime soon (well, within the next patch).

gear counts?

despite the previous post, I’m sticking with my current survival spec. Primarily because a blue post on the official wow forums has admitted that beastmaster spec was over-nerfed. also because I’m actually doing quite well DPS-wise in dungeons and raids.

So what’s actually been happening in my WoW playing?

Today i’ve run two heroics, and a 25-man naxxramas run, along with a healthy dose of exploration, and solo questing. Here are my observations.

1. i found what was for me a new, and cool zone in the game, Naz’anak: The Forgotten Depths, which seemed far cooler than it actually is at first.
2. i ran heroic Utgarde Keep with another hunter on DPS, who also had survival build, but with almost entirely level 80 epics, i have 2. I ran with blingkong – my gorilla pet, the other hunter ran with a cat. As you may notice, and tenacious pet vs a ferocious. The DPS charts should have been against me, but in actual fact i was doing 7-9% more DPS than the other guy. Two conclusions, either blingkong kicks substantially more ass than a cat with trash mobs, or gear doesn’t count so much in 5 man.
3. i ran heroic gundrak with a two hunter, two DK, one pally group. The other hunter is a long-time WoW friend that has found a great raiding guild since our guild died. He’s geared to the hilt in epics, but also new to a survival build. We both ran with cats. This time the damage meters were much more even, with him dropping behind me on DPS for the first half, and then pulling ahead for a 2-3% lead overall.
   Conclusions, it’s looking like blingkong is rocking my world even with survival build. But this is looking like he counts for more in a trash-heavy environment.
4. i ran 25-man naxxramas with a pug. Most people there had been there a number of times, and also nicely geared. I ran with my cat and was coming much lower in the DPS charts, as you’d expect. flickering around 6-8th position, with 6.8% of total DPS. I was a little disappointed by this, but this was my first raid run on with shao so i wasn’t expecting much.  My DPS was nearly twice that of a normal 5-man group, so obviously conclusions here are that raid buffs, and gear count a lot for raiding, especially in big groups.
   I also managed to pick up Torn Web Wrapping from maexanna, although i still need to apply a Eternal Belt Buckle to it.

i completed the eldars of northrend, and a few other nice achiements that i wasn’t trying for today. Overall, a good day for me, and i really enjoyed running new content. Both gundrak and naxx are new to me, so it’s all good.

what’s all the fuss about?

Okay, so it’s been an absolute age since i posted anything of worth. needless to say i have reached level 80, and I’ve enjoyed Northrend, and the hunter buffs that came with patch 3.0.2, and were reigned back somewhat in 3.0.8.

over the years I’ve seen the trends of hunter pets go from the obscure yet unique pets that could hunt down epic land mounts, to the great pet rationalisation that followed – whereby each pet in a family was bought in to line, and everyone stuck with cats and boars.

changes have come in over the years with talents too, but for the most part hunters stuck with beast master, or marksman. for the most part survivalist sucked pre-BC, and wasn’t massively better post-BC. The wrath beta showed some glimmers of hope for the SV spec, but as with any major patch the hand that giveth also taketh away, and taketh away it certainly did in 3.0.8.

So, lets clear a couple of things up first.

I’m not a theory-crafter. I don’t spend 100s of gold re-speccing every couple of hours, and spend most of my play time in front of the target dummies honing my spec, gear, and pets.. I don’t raid that much. I play solo for the most part, and when i run in to dungeons i expect to be top or second on the damage meters.
There are people like that who tell people for the most part what spec, macros, pets, gear, play style they should use. I respect these people on the one hand because they are pushing the envelope and vocalising these discoveries with the hunter community, but on the other hand there are hunters out there that will follow these guides and not find things out for themselves.

For me I’ve been stuck in a beastmaster tree for the most part since rolling Shao. When 3.0.2 hit i picked myself up a gorilla. Not just any gorilla – Uhk’loc (the taming of which is another story for another day), and this thing hits like a ten ton truck, and keeps going like no Duracell i’ve ever seen. My talent spec and my pets i built myself with some basic advising from others, but basically is full of things that i think help me to achieve the things i look for most – Speed, and Power.

Where possible increase armour, health and healing to the pet. He’s my white furry tank, and if he goes down in a fight i go down. If he goes down and i can get out of range for a few seconds i can use improved revive pet to bring him back to life ASAP, and prevent me from dying.

So, what is all the fuss about?

I dumped this spec for a survival spec that a lot of hunters are suggesting at the moment, and to be totally honest, it kind of sucks for me, because it goes against everything i like about playing my hunter.

I’m slow. I attack slow. My pet is slow. He takes heals like a retard, hits like a baby gorilla, and the solo experience generally sucks. I found this out the hard way because lately I’ve been trying to grab some argent dawn rep – don’t ask why – and I’ve run scholomance, and stratholme a couple of times under both builds and its just SO much hard with survival build – and it really shouldn’t be.

I’ve yet to try any raiding or heroics with this build, but i will report back when i have. However I did run normal HoL earlier (with a lvl 79 pet cat) and came out dealing just under 40% of total damage for the group.. which seems good, but i was doing that with my beastmaster build too (with my gorilla) so as yet I’m not seeing the benefit, or point of changing.

Why no hunter camo? (2)

it seems the gods were listening. Rumours and rumblings of a camouflage ability for hunters may come to us in the next expansion pack: Wrath of the Litch King. The question is, what is this ability, and how would it work?

The theory suggests that at the moment it may be implemented as a feign death type combat reset. Removing debuffs from the hunter, and sending him invisible until he causes further damage. This could be devastating in the right hands. two scenarios

Crowd Control

• hit camouflage
• drop a freezing trap on opponent #1
• focus on opponent #2

Re-Range Attack

• hit camouflage
• drop traps
• retreat to safe distance
• unleash ranged attack hell

The wowinsider article linked above has more rumblings, but doesn’t really touch on what will happen to our beloved pets. it’s safe to assume that they wouldn’t attain camouflage too, so would they stay visible – somewhat obvious as to where the hunter was hiding, or do they get tucked away as if the hunter was on a mount. To me the ability smells of something that would be talentised, and tucked away towards the bottom of the survivability tree, although some suspect marksmanship would be better suited.

We shall just have to wait and see, but for now all I can say is I told you so!

Why no hunter camo?

After reading a recent post on Lienna’s log, about the untimely death of Gary Gygax; the founder of Dungeons and Dragons, and how he set the template for most, if not all subsequent role playing games, whether paper-based, or otherwise, I couldn’t help but wonder if his depiction of hunter and rogue type figures are the reason hunter’s are more real world based. Most hunters in the real world wouldn’t wander around the flora and forna in brightly coloured capes, and shoulder pads. Most hunters would use some form of camoflage. So why not World of Warcraft hunters? Or is that just my rogue envy vocalising itself?

How I roll..

Having a few hunter blogs, and wow news sites on my Netvibes homepage i see that there’s mix of players out there at the minute, with a fair few that are currently playing an alt, since the 2.3 levelling speed increase. It’s interesting, as I’ve recently come back to wow, but not because of the patch, but because i have some time to play it again.

Whilst I’ve definitely noticed the levelling speed increase, my method to levelling has always been different to everyone else’s. All other players will keep themselves in the highest zones, doing the highest quests they can. Whilst there’s definitely an XP bonus to doing this, it’s negligible, and causes more downtime between killing mobs. Additionally it also makes taking on adds and patrols harder, and more challenging.

Personally i start out at level 1 grinding for a few levels, and then always staying a couple of levels ahead of the curve. Currently Shao is at level 28, having just finished the Stormwind Stockades, with the worst group ever, and finishing the subsequent quests in solo. Including taking both level 31 mobs (whilst at level 27) at the end of one of the quests lines. I’m now starting dusk wood without any issues. I find i can take on practically everything, in multiples, have little or no down time, and earn around 90-95% of the XP from each kill.

Which do you think is the better way to level?

WoW Predictions #1 – expansion packs

My first prediction for the future of WoW is this. Blizzard will release 2 more expansions after Wrath of the Lich King, raising the level cap 10 for each expansion, making the final level cap 100.

Additionally There will be an average of 18months between each add-on, giving the game an estimated expected lifespan until 2013. This will allow blizzard to have overlap between World of Warcraft, and it’s upcoming MMO(s) of 2-3 years.

1. Burning Crusade – Outland – 2 new races – lvl70
2. Wrath of the Lich King – Northrend – 1 new class – lvl80
3. ?? – Undermine / Kazan – ?? – lvl90
4. ?? – Maelstrom – ?? – lvl100

expect races such as the goblin (horde), Murloc (alliance), and recently announced Tuskarr (horde) races to become playable at some point over the latter two add-ons, with a potential for a race to swap sides from horde to alliance.

Note, this post is all speculation.