Tuesday is for Phat Lewts!

An upgrade for a hunter's ranged weapon slot is usually reason for great celebration. With a dwarf hunter, however, it is somewhat shameful when it comes time to trade in his gun for a "better dps" bow. This is what happened last night when HiredGun picked up Final Voyage during his trek through Naxx. Having only 1 skill point in Crossbows was something he was actually proud of. Let the fruity night elves use the bows, damnit! A dwarf needs the smell of gunpowder and a loud BANG BANG sound to make him feel as if he's doing his job. (The racial +1% crit when using guns doesn't hurt either) Unfortunately, in terms of dps, the only guns available as an upgrade were from KT (normal and heroic). So a quiver was made and arrows purchased. HiredGun flew down to Crystalsong Forest to shoot some wolves, trees, and dryads. In less than an hour his crowssbow skill had reached 400. *sigh*

But some more mad hunter loot dropped last night, some monster upgrades actually. Shoulderpads of Secret Arts and Torn Web Wrapping replaced blues on HiredGun. That was pretty awesome. At least now I don't have to contemplate spending 4000g on the belt! =) Hunter loot continued to fall... Arrowsong dropped, a Warrior won it with an uncontested greed roll. Grim Toll fell and was nabbed by some other dps, as was the more common Aged Winter Cloak.

Tonight should be lots of Vault and OS running. I didn't even know that there was a rare mount from the Vault. BigBearButt got one from 10-man, so run that thing.. even if the T7 stuff is kinda junky lookin after a while.

Weekend Update - Jane, you ignorant slut.

I played WoW all weekend but feel like not much was accomplished. I'm talking about in-game accomplishments... anything outside of game went to hell, nothing new there.

With three characters now at 80, I need some kind of schedule or to-do list for each of them to plan out activities for each day. HiredGun needs to work on is Frenzyheart Tribe dailies. Both he and Failsauce must keep up the grind with Sons of Hodir as well as the Kalu'ak. Make sure everyone does their cooking quest. Try and remember to use the Titansteel cooldowns. Who's saved to what raid? Which raids am I not joining with what toon because I'm going to do them with guildies later? Do I want to try the fishing contest this week? How many days left on the Lunar Festival? Is it too late to make some of those trinkets at the Darkmoon Faire? Argh.

Breathe. Relax.

I joined several PUG raids and heroics over the weekend with less-than-stelar results. "Heroic HoL?" Hell Yeah! HiredGun still had the Sons of Hodir quests for this instance. I zone in, get saved, wait just inside the instance. "Oh, btw we're on the 3rd boss." Awesome. Way to wait til I'm saved before serving up that little nugget. Two of the party members yammered on and on about some "stupid druid" who had just left the group. I did my best to /ignore it, but had to wonder if the said druid was actually the smart one.

We immediately have 2 near wipes on just trash. My well-timed feign death combined with Jumper Cables (er, knife) saved the priest a long run back. Ionar is not a difficult boss but you wouldn't know it by watching this group in action. Twice in a row the priest died very quickly, causing wipes. Both times she was unable to get away from the nasty spark-things on the ground. The group broke up shortly after that. Momma told me there would be pugs like this.

Then a guy named "TheJuice" was putting together a 25-man OS. Everyone loves OS! Great loot, short fight, even a nice 22-slot bag at the end. Chock-full of win! It wasn't until everyone zoned in that we noticed: "Hey, where's the dragon?" Mother f... TheJuice you are now on "The List." Blizzard, please...please...please just put up some kind of warning the first time you try and enter a saved instance/raid with a group? "Entering this portal will save you to RAID: 6951233.. do you wish to continue?" Would that be too hard?

2AM Sunday night, about to wrap it up.. "LF2M DPS for 25-naxx, 1/2 of Military left plus Construct, Saph, KT". Sleep could wait for this! HiredGun had much room for gear improvement so I joined their vent and caught a summon right away. Gothik the Harvester peered down at me from his balcony. I could see the fear in his eyes, as HiredGun had arrived. Apparently not everyone was on vent, or something, because the fight started with only 5 or so other people with me on the dead side. GG. After everyone got back we tried again, this time with a proper number of folk on each side. We got it done this time and were on to the Four Horseman. Despite good dps, the raid wiped several times as healers/tanks/whoever didn't know their duties. After the 4th try we downed the quartet. I was actually a bit surprised to get past this fight; most unorganized groups don't have a chance.

We then met up with Patchwerk. I'll save you a lot of time here and just say it was horrible. People were dying within seconds of the fight starting, and this happened over and over. From the confusion on vent it was clear that the proper tanking/healing strategy was eluding them. As ranged DPS, I haven't really learned a lot about how these roles function for this fight. I just know there's nasty attacks and healers have to be spamming heals. Besides steady DPS, I could only contribute ScrapBots to help move things along. Around 4am people were dropping and the raid was called. "No More Play", indeed.

Is the game too easy or are players just better now? Both, however I think it's more of the latter. The game still feels very difficult when you're grouping with clowns. My role as DPS is usually one that doesn't take much thought (pew pew!). Is it unfair for me to judge when tanks/healers/raid leaders fail at their jobs? Probably, but clearly people can do much better.

DPS need to do better also. At least put an enchant on that 2-hander you got at level 75. Yes, other hunter in the raid.. I'm talking to you!

You have been disconnected from the server.

It was HiredGun's turn to do some raids. The only thing I felt was sub-par about his gear for being 80 for less than a day was his pet. However as a survival hunter, the pet does such a small amount of damage. Bringing a level 76 cat wasn't going to bother me too much, and it wasn't going to be the difference between success and failure.

First up, it was time for 10-man Naxx. This should be fun! Also it was the first raid I'd be doing as survival. The first couple trash pulls. "Anyone else seeing spikey lag?" Nope, I was the only one. Shortly after that I was disconnected. Hmm.. Ok, log back in. Disconnected again after the next trash pull. Wow. This is going to make it hard to see where I stand in the damage meters. We got to the first boss in the Spider wing, I made it thru the fight this time. Hiregun getting his "First Heroic badge" achievement was a bit embarassing, but oh well =) My DPS was 200+ higher than the other hunter which had been joining this raid for several weeks now. Not bad for being a day-old 80 I thought!

It went steeply downhill from there. Disconnected over and over and over. What the hell was going on? Did they move the "bad router" to my corner of Blizzard's server room during the morning's rolling restarts? Since I moved to this city 7 months ago I've never had any problems with my ISP. The disconnecting problems continued. We got thru the Spider Wing. A *explitive deleted* pally took my Wraith Spear to boot. This trip had not gone at all like I had hoped.

We then did the Military quarter. Struggled a bit but did down all the bosses until the Four Hourseman. These guys pwned us over and over. The raid DPS was seriously lacking (me disconnecting twice on average on Thane alone didn't help). I offered to be replaced because I wasn't doing the raid much good. After a couple guys had had enuf, the raid was called. I doubt if anyone felt satisfied with how it turned out.

After that I joined a 25-Man pug vault run. How bad could this be? It's one friggin fight. The group had a massive amount of DPS and healing, as is typical on Tuesday raid pugs. (The ones on Monday people seem to come in greens and 70's gear) More of the same, I disconnected twice on trash. At this point I just wanted to finish this raid and go to sleep. Start of the vault boss fight (which has to be done in less than 5 minutes). I disconnect no less than 4 times during the fight, getting reconnected the last time just as the boss fell. I sheepishly looted my badge of valor. What a nightmare. The uber-pug was going on to 25-man OS which would have been awesome to join if I wasn't in DC hell. I let the group know that I was useless and that they needed to replace me.

I always hear others complain about days like this. It's easier for me to relate now. I can only hope this was a one-night thing and when tonight things will be back to normal. It's easy to take a stable connection for granted.

Edit: Drotara from LessQQMorePewPew also had some problems with connection last night. He also is a comcast customer. Apparently comcast was doing some maintenance last night so hopfully thats the reason why my service was crap.

And then there were three

HiredGun hits 80

I finished off HiredGun's last 6 bars, yay! Pictured with his pet, Pitch.. er, I mean BadCat. Burned some saronite to get Engineering to 450 and made a gun. Gemmed, enchanted, scoped, all the fancy new gear. Ran more quests after that for the Sons of Hodir rep. More later...

Super Weekend

Did everyone watch the Superbowl? Well, this is the WoW community, so probably not. If you didn't see it, you missed a very entertaining game. I watched it but at the same time powerleveled HiredGun to 6 bars short of 80. Considering he was only 75 at the start of the weekend, that's not bad at all! There was some serious quest grinding going on. Hiredgun has done every single quest for Borean Tundra, Dragonblight, Howling Fjord, and Sholizar Basin... in that order. He's currently burning thru Storm Peaks right now and has his ScrapBot plans learned. Mining has reached 450 as well (hello Titanium nodes!). He is leveling as a survival spec to get some practice so that it would become second nature for the upcoming raids.

Some things I've noticed about leveling as Survival:

1. Pet can't hold aggro. At all. The pet is just doing a way smaller portion of the damage, and if you lead off with a SS/ES, you'll have that mob bearing down on you most of the time. Trying to do any Volley with the Gorilladin was very frustrating. Even throwing a Kill Command to the pet, waiting for 2 Thunderstomps (zzzzzzz....) My volleys would still draw aggro at times. I also miss longevity which would keep those thunderstomps happening more often.

2. Pet can't tank. No buffed HP or Armor. No improved Mend Pet. No Improved Revive Pet (missed this one more than I thought I would). Even a tenacity pet like the Gorilla can't stand up to the elites I used to solo with no problem like the large green bird in southern Dragonblight. I blink and .. dead gorilla.

3. Even in normal dungeons, some people got annoyed at me dropping traps. Maybe they don't understand survival. /shrug

4. There are a lot of really bad tanks out there. Ok, this one has nothing to do with leveling as survival.. but how hard is it to tank the mobs at the f'in portals instead of the center of the room in VH? My god... Normal instance PUGs are not alot of fun.

I've got some gear for HiredGun's level 80 party tonight. Hornlove will craft him up some bracers and legs too. Now if I can only get another 3 points in Engineering so he can make his own gun. Can we get something other than these damned knives to level it please? =)

Darn is now known as Hiredgun

Ok, "so who's Darn?" you may be asking. Oh yeah, that's right... I haven't introduced you yet. He's the very first character I made on WoW, a couple weeks after the game launched. His name was randomly generated. I never thought he would be my main character when I created him on Warsong. Darn had many fine adventures on Warsong, up to and including the start of Burning Crusade.

Recently Darn hasn't seen much action at all, however. Warsong (PvP) has achieved such a state of imbalance between hoarde and alliance that it was nearly impossible for me to level him. As soon as I'd start questing in the Borean Tundra, packs of level 80 hoarde would swoop down with their flying mounts, gank, camp the corpse, rinse, repeat. I finally got fed up with it and just stopped playing him. Cenarius was on the "Can't-transfer-to" list, so things looked bad for Darn being able to expierience the wonders of Northrend and leveling up to 80.

Then transfers to the server suddenly became available again...

Run, Darn, Run!

Happy time for Darn! Except, of course, the name Darn was taken on Cenarius. So I had to give him a new name. "Hiredgun" was the best I could come up with. (Well actually, I liked "Triggerman" better, but for some reason the game wouldn't let me choose that one) Darn, *cough*, I mean HiredGun had some catching up to do. For one thing, his engineering was hovering around a meager 345. It was time to put all those materials Failsauce mined up to use. One powerleveling session had HiredGun's engineering to 446. He now has his nice Truesight Ice Goggles (what a treat to be able to use these at level 72!), a ton of bullets and arrows, plus plenty of bombs! Creeping up on level 75, things are looking up for him.

Ahh.. back in action!

So why two hunters? To be honest, when I created Hornlove it was because I wanted to level another character but couldn't stand leveling any other class. At the time I had level 40 Warlock, Mage, and Rogue, with level 20-27 Warrior, Palladin, and Priest. To me none were as fun or quick to level as the hunter. Also, I wanted to make Hornlove Beastmaster while keeping Darn Marksmanship spec. Finally, when the Ilse of Quel'Danas opened up with it's nice gold-spewing dailies I wanted to have another character I could run them with. So those are the reasons for having two hunters. What? None of these are good enough for you? Bite me! =)

So that's the story of Darn, now known as Hiredgun on the Cenarius server. Hopefully some of his adventures in Northrend will be worth writing about.