Shao is now called sheppo, a troll, but he’s still a kick-ass hunter, as depicted by this picture. Yes, that’s me, turned in to a skeleton, riding a fricken-turtle, man!

boosh!

So, a rough countdown of some of the highlights sheppo has enjoyed of late.

10man kingslayer achievement – probably the hardest we’ve worked as a guild to take the lich king down, and that made the payoff so much more worthwhile. Sheppo went out and bought himself a chopper to celebrate.

11/12 ICC 10man – for a casual guild we were delighted to be able to get as far as getting all but the lich king down in heroic mode. to be fair, patch 4.0.1 has made even the hard heroic fights insanely easy.

Glory of the ice crown raider 10man – again, 4.0.1 has made this patch insanely easy, and i just hope not too many people take the effort to go back and get the mount.

talking of insanity

A tribute to insanity 10man – with the removal of the mount from the tribute chest associated this achievement in patch 4.0.3 I can see a lot of people aiming for this, we did it on our second week of trying. To be fair, we only failed the first week because the healers didn’t realise we’d gone in to phase three on anub’arak so quickly.

Loremaster of Kalimdor – without a doubt this is the hardest achievement or single target i’ve worked toward in WoW. I actually got 80% or more of the way there on alliance before faction changing, not realising that it would wipe out most of my progress. The slog back has taken many months of casually chipping away with it. With outland being completed over a year ago it falls just for outland to be completed.

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.

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!

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.

Now that’s not to say there aren’t any nice people to interact with in WoW, because they are, just it’s hard to filter out the kids from the adults.

Currently Shao find himself in Ad Adstra – a relatively large guild, but filled with people at polar opposites personality-wise. The mature, thoughtful people (like me! , and the immature angst-ridden people. It gets to the point where there really is no point these two groups of people playing, or socialising together because two two groups want different things from the game. A couple of examples.

1. talking to one particular hunter in the guild chat about recent or upcoming hunter changes, talent builds, stats to stack, gear, play styles etc. This is a normal thing to do within a guild – to learn where you’re going wrong, where you can improve. However to take the case of one guy’s, he gets very defensive, and idiotic whenever you try to chat with him about the class he plays. I hear he’s 17.. I’m twice his age, and as easy as it would be to blame him age, i have two brothers that age, neither of which are as stupid as he is.
2. Ad Astra don’t do anything together. This is partly because of the leader taking a break from the game at the moment for very good personal reasons. However, suggestions at doing things together – have not only fallen on deaf ears, but have resulted in me being openly abused in guild chat for suggesting such things. Hopefully the guild leader comes back soon, because every other guild I have been in play together to play together. Not to do things disparately.

I think part of the problem with the guild is that at the moment the game is not geared towards communal playing, or even much in the way of social interaction, and group effort. Back in the day raiding top level content required much more of a coordinated effort for a guild to progress. Mats collection, and farming running content over and over again to learn the nuances of an encounter, as well as a healthy amount of guild pride in the achievements that its members had accomplished.

Now this has all changed. Currently in WoW we see that almost all content can be Pick Up Grouped (PUG’d), and doing so will earn a number of people in that group or raid some end-game quality content. For example i ran 25-man naxxramas, and heroic HoL and took away two epic items.

When did the game become so easy? Why did the game become so easy? It’s sad because not only does the sense of accomplishment fall by the wayside but also because its so easy people do not need to work together, and bond as much as they used to.

As for Ad Astra, who knows. I find myself doing more and more nostalgic content at the moment (albeit for the achievement points), and I’m loving it. Why do i need a guild if 90% of them are idiots?

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).

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.

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.

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!

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?