so… Animal Crossing won out! Anyone else playing City Folk?

I started playing WoW a little over a year ago. When I joined DotA, “everyone else” was already 70 and well into raiding. By the time I was Kara ready, my guild was concentrating mainly on higher level raids and I constantly felt “behind.”

This time, I figured I’d race to 80 and be able to start raiding when they do, equal footing and all.

But as I’m leveling this time around, I’m finding that my “gaming personality” has changed. When I went through Outlands, my goal was to do an Instance every single day. I had a couple of friends who were about my level and we grouped together a lot. I also pugged and pugged and pugged. And I really enjoyed that.

This time though… I’ve been into Utgarde keep twice and haven’t set foot in any other instances. Sometimes I think about it… but then I’m like “eh, I don’t want to deal with marks and traps and all that.” The group dynamics that pulled me into the game don’t really seem appealing right now.

I know partly it’s because my Hunter Confidence has decreased. There was a time when I was reading hunter blogs every day, really keeping up with all the changes and I had a pretty good understanding of gear and shot rotations and what I should be doing. Now that things have changed again, I just haven’t put much time into research.

For solo (or duo with Niria), all that stuff? Honestly does not matter. I can run around in unenchanted gear with haphazard talent points and it doesn’t make one bit of difference. I was kind of stressing over gear for a bit (is this an upgrade? is crit more or less important than haste?) and then I realized, it doesn’t matter. I can wear either pair of pants, hell I could probably take OFF my pants and still complete the quests.

So I guess right now I’m feeling Lazy-Mode. I’m only playing WoW a couple days a week. I run around with Niria and do a few quests, we make each other laugh, and that’s it. I’m not concerned about shot rotation or having a maximum dps pet.

Now though, I wonder what will happen when I hit 80? Maybe I’ll get bit by the raiding bug and I’ll do my research and improve my gear and sign up. (And still never feel as l337 as our two top raiding hunters…) Or maybe I’ll go back to leveling the druid?

Or maybe I’ll just play Animal Crossing…

Ding 74!

My dingshots are never very exciting. I’d like to catch it when it glows all yellow around me. I tried downloading a screen capture addon thing, but it didn’t work. Any recommendations?

I’m still feeling pretty confused about gear. BRK and More Pewpew are my usual stops for hunter info, but not much luck there. I tried downloading the hunter spreadsheet from Elitest Jerks but I only have Open Office so it doesn’t work. At this point I’m pretty frustrated. And embarrassed. I feel like I *should* understand, but I don’t. And I’m worried there is a flashing HUNTARD sign above my head.

Let’s take a real example.

My armory link

I’m wearing Vengeance Wrap. I have an Assailant Shroud (gain 18 stamina, gain 14 hit rating, lose .93% crit). I also have Seared Scale Cape (gain 16 stamina, gain 16 attack power, lose 2 hit rating, lose .63% crit). So how important is crit compared to other stats?

I seem to be losing crit everywhere. Looking at my dingshots…
level 71, crit 24.62% and AP 1600
level 72, crit 23.76% and AP 1645
level 73, crit 20.85% and AP 1823 (new gloves, new trinket)
level 74, crit 19.64% and AP 1779

I don’t think I even changed any gear from 73 to 74 and the crit % still dropped. I’m guessing there is some kind of math curve where I need more and more agility to maintain the same amount of crit as I level. So maybe I should just not worry about crit? Once I hit 80 and start getting better heroic gear and enchants and such, it’ll go up again?

I guess I need some kind of chart that tells me importance ratios. I gather that Attack Power is more important than Haste. But how much more important? Is 20 haste better than 5 attack power?

It seemed like in the Outlands, most of my upgrades had the exact same stats as my old gear but just a couple points better in each category. And now everything I look at is showing gains and losses. And I’m not sure which gains are better than which losses. I’m not really instancing right now, so I think hit rating isn’t very useful. Haste? That’s faster autoshots which is good. But what is the haste cap? and how does haste compare to crit? see… I’m talking myself in circles.

And rings! Don’t even get me started on rings… I’m wearing Violet Signet of the Master Assaassin and Garona’s Signet Ring. In my bank, I’ve got Exectioner’s Band (more stamina, more crit, less AP, less hit), Averinn’s Ring of Slaying (less stamina, less hit, more crit), Scout’s Signet Ring (less stamina, less hit, more crit, more haste), Gleaming Tuskring (more attack power, less hit, less crit), and Ring of Indignant Rage (less attack power, more crit).

garrrr….
help?

I’m way behind on the blogging…

Ding 72!

Greta and Niria (gosh the artwork in this game is so beautiful!) Niria is my primary leveling partner. She’s got two ally toons and a hordie, so she always knows where everything is. It’s like having my own personal tour guide. Plus she’s really hilarious. And has a cute haircut.

When I’m kind of spacey/distracted or playing with my add-ons, I go to the area of Nagrand right outside the Aldor door and kill Clefthoofs and Stags. I’m a hunter with a pet to feed and I’m a skinner/leatherworker and there are mostly yellow mobs there so I can be tabbed out reading email and not have too many problems. I was doing that the other night and thought “gee, if I did this in Northrend, I’d be getting way more XP.” So off to Borean Tundra to skin Rhinos for awhile.

Ding 73!

Greta’s quests are all over the place. I started off in both Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. I intended to do one solo and one with Niria. But we found that when playing together, things were so easy that it was very very boring. So now she and I are doing Dragonblight. But we’re a couple hours into that and things still feel incredibly easy. My gorilladin rounds up a large group and then I volly and she does that shammy thing (chain lightening maybe?). Repeat. I’m definitely enjoying having AOE since I didn’t even have my volly spell on my bar before (yes, I’m serious). For the named mobs? We go to the spawn spot, stand in line and wait for three other groups to kill him. I step up and lay a trap and put the Taco (the gorilla) there. Niria throws down totems. The mob appears. Taco attacks. I start to queue up a Steady Shot. And before I even fire…. he’s dead. I’d like a fight that lasts long enough for me to his my Bestial Wrath, trinket, Rapid Fire and Kill Command. Maybe even a Kill Shot. Is that too much to ask?

Maybe it’s time to find another zone. But I hate the idea of leaving three zones less than half done.

Is everyone else finding the content to be BEAUTIFUL, interesting, more fun than usual (baby murlocs!) but lacking any sort of challenge whatsoever? I’m certainly not a fan of dying (I play a hunter!) but it would be neat if some of the fights made me think I *might* die.

Maybe it’s just that it’s written for Solo and only grouping for specific quests and instances. I hear that Everquest was written for groups more. I never played that one. I bet I would have liked it.

So far… In Northrend…

I’ve been questing in both Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord. I am continually astounded by how BEAUTIFUL everything is. The penguins on the iceberg? SO CUTE.

I had a gorilla in my stables for running lowbies through deadmines. Well, with all the pet changes, Gorillas are now the awesome. So I played him up to level 67 today. (He still needs a name.) (also need to find some fun gorilla macros. He has a bunch of “get that monster off me” abilities that would be nice to have on one MASH MASH button.)

71 at last! (One of my guildies is already 78. I enjoy leveling slowly, but I do worry that everyone else will speed ahead of me and I’ll be playing raid-catch up AGAIN.)

Ding Shot!

My UI is still kinda funny. I’ve been trying out various add-ons, moving things around and around. Haven’t settled on anything yet. Oh, speaking of which Ampere is awesome! It allows you to turn add-ons on and off while logged in! No matter backing out to the character selection screen over and over and over again.

I did my first Northrend Instance: Utgarde Keep. It was easy. Maybe too easy? But we’re all wearing 70 raid gear, so perhaps for the new 70s in greens it would be just right?

I did have some embarrassing moments though. Apparently /stopcasting no longer reliably stops autoshot. Which means I spent most of the instance in total confusion about why I couldn’t properly pull/trap anything. I was looking at my macros all boggled. I found a thread about it on BRK’s forums. I’m in a 600 person queue right now, but as soon as I get in, I’ll test out the new pullshot:

#showtooltip
/Cast Distracting Shot
/target player

it works!

Oh, and I wanted to Thank you for your replies on my last post. You’all give great advice! I’ve got a new spec and realized my “cower” button was stuck ON explaining the pet aggro failure. I still hate pet defensive stance though.

yay… it’s letting me login!
/salute

Right. So I took a month off. And major hunter things changed. For the longest time, even though I wasn’t able to actually DO IT, I at least understood, intellectually, how to be a rocking hunter. But now I’m lost. I haven’t been reading blogs and there is so much information to sift through. I don’t want to get into an instance group and totally embarrass myself with ridiculously low dps. So, maybe you’all can help me? I’ll post some questions here and I’d love advice/links. (And I’m also going to start weeding through blogs and wowwiki to try to find the info myself.)

1) Talents. I want to stay BM. But, at least at this point, I don’t care too much about having an “exotic pet.” I need a build that will be primarily for leveling but will give me enough dps so I can hit 5-man instances with confidence.

2) Pet Talents. For now I’m still using Juniper (my cat). What’s the preferred build?

3) Gear. I ran around Northrend today and got a lot of quest reward gear. I assume that most of it isn’t really an upgrade, since I’m wearing Kara gear. BUT, I realized that I don’t even know how to identify hunter gear anymore. Most of the mail had “spellpower” which I figured must be a shammy thing but then I saw another hunter say that spellpower helps with crit? And I have never understood how “haste” fits into the equation. And if I’m not raiding, does “hit rating” even matter? Should I just forget about hit and maximize my agility/AP/int until I hit 80?

4) Autoshot. I’ve read that they fixed autoshot so that it no longer clips. Does that mean I can now fire my other shots whenever and as often as I want and autoshot will continue to fire every couple of seconds regardless?
edit: oooh, my answer is here

5) Like most other BM hunters, I used to have a steady shot macro with Kill Command in it. But it looks like steady shot and Kill Command are both different now. So what are people using? What’s the new shot rotation?

6) Pet Aggro is FAIL. I really haven’t done any solo with Juniper in months. Other than the SSO island dailies. Which I had memorized so it didn’t matter too much. But now that I’m in new zones with unexpected adds and crazy respawn rates, I’d really like it if my kitty could hold aggro a bit better. I can certainly just not use any special shots, but it’s a bit boring to just send pet, sting and autoshot till it’s dead. Suggestions?

7) Pet Defensive stance. So far I HATE it. Previously, my pets only attacked stuff when I directed them to OR when something started swinging at me. Now when I shoot something, Juniper automatically starts running to it. Sure, I can put the kitty on passive, but then when something spawns directly on top of me and I’m kind of flustered, Juniper just stands there like an idiot till I click the mob and tell her to attack. I guess I’m going to have to get used to passive if I plan to have any control over her at all and if I want to be able to pull mobs in a certain way, trap them, etc. GAR. (okay I guess number 7 is just ranting)

Even More Wrath-Hunter links:
Less QQ, More PewPew has a great “getting started in Wrath” post here.

I am resisting the urge to run to the mall and search for a copy of Wrath. I keep telling myself that the servers are going to be too laggy and the quest areas will be too full and I’ll only be FRUSTRATED. Furthermore, I bought that stupid Beta key and then only played the Beta for a grand total of 2 hours. So clearly I do not need to leave my house in my pajamas to do rounds of Kmart, Walmart, EB and Best Buy hoping that they somehow didn’t sell every copy at 12:01, right?

So. Now what? *taps foot*

…creating a new UI is always good for hours upon hours of zombie-like distraction…

Since the wowace-updater thing got killed and patch 3.0 broke many of my add-ons, I decided to just Start Over. I deleted everything. Macros, add-ons, saved variables, and libraries are all gone. (Do you say “the what-the-fuck folder” in your head every single time you see /WTF ?)

My old UIs were different for every toon which was annoying to keep up with. For example, I had one set of party frames for my hunter because I liked the way the pet frame/happy box looked and another set for my priest because I liked the way the backwards-health bar looked for healing. So this time around, I’m designing my UI to primarily be perfect for my Hunter but hopefully will work well enough so I can use the majority of the same settings for all my toons.

So…. time to cruise blogs and look for ideas.

Links:
* my old add-ons posts are here
* Tank Like A Girl has a great UI! She’s got me sold on Data Broker.
* Aspect of the Capricious- so much hunter goodness!

um, hrm. I just looked at the add-ons tags of most of my usual hunter reads and you’all haven’t posted anything about interface in a loooong time! I need ideas! Screenshots, reviews, links! pretty please?

After a month-long hiatus…

I rolled a Baby Hunter!

I never really understood why people would have multiple toons of the same class. I always figured if I felt like playing a hunter, I’d play Gretadelle. Otherwise, I’d play my druid or priest or whatever.

But I can honestly say after playing all the classes through the newbie zones and some into the 20s and 30s… I just love being a hunter. Love it. And at this point, there isn’t much for Greta to do other than dailies and waiting for the expansion. So. Baby BElf Hunter. In just a few days, I’ve leveled her to 21. I really liked the BElf starting zone and even enjoyed the Ghostlands. (I usually don’t like the “dark” zones.)

It’s so comfortable, so familiar. Whenever I play my sweet priestie, I’m constantly trying to figure out how to get the monsters off me, what button do I press next? Paladins have all those judgements and blessings and shamans have all those totems and I can’t remember which is which and I’m forever reading tooltips and reorganizing my button bars. Hunters are natural to me, like a reflex. The shots are so logical. A perfect sequence. It’s beautiful, really. I don’t get flustered with adds, I’m not being pounded on, I don’t die. The dieing was the strangest part for me when I started leveling other classes. What? So dieing is like NORMAL? You do it often? Hunters never die!

I’m rediscovering my hunter love with perfect timing. I’ll play Adelise until the expansion comes out and then Greta will join her guildmates in Northrend, for real.

I’m so glad to have my WoW back.

I think it’s fair to say the blog is dead. I do still have an active account, but it’s getting rare for me to even login. (I didn’t play even once this week. Not on purpose. It’s just that even simple little games like “Farm Frenzy 2″ are more entertaining than WoW these days.) It’s funny to say this, but I actually miss the addiction. I miss the excitement of playing each day, of wanting to stay on just a bit longer, just one more thing. I’m not sure what changed. I played WoW for almost a year, which is much, much longer than I’ve ever invested in a video game. I’m not sure if I got bored with the game itself (after hitting 70 and raiding, there isn’t much left to do) or if it’s simply a change in ME. I started playing WoW during a really lonely time in my life. I’m home alone a lot. Talking to people on Vent all day and helping each other do things made me feel less alone. But for whatever reason it doesn’t work like that anymore. The social aspects of the game changed for me. Many of the people in my guild are quitting right now, either until summer (because of school/work/kids) or until the expansion. I’m not sure whether or not the expansion will be enough to get me hooked again. I bought a BETA key (yes bought, and yes it was expensive) because I thought new content would get me hooked. I played the Beta for less than 3 hours. It’s more of the same. Go kill some stuff. Go wonder around for awhile. I’m not really being clear here. For whatever reason, WoW isn’t doing it for me anymore. I’ll keep the blog up though. Maybe someday that will change.