Fishing with the DKs

So, here I am fishing with my new DK friend. Why am I fishing when I should be leveling to 80???? Yeah, I'm still level 76, what am I thinking? Good questions, the truth is that its kind of relaxing. After killing things all day long (even though I make Mungula do most of the work), it feels good to sit back in Stormwind and catch fish that you plan on throwing back (because they stock the canals here with trash fish apparently). I thought it was fun to fish on top of the water thanks to my random DK friend.

 

Another reason (the real reason) I do random things like fishing, looking for mounts, searching for vanity pets, and other random non-leveling things, is because I'm only leveling with Kydra (played by my wife). I think we're making great progress considering we have 3 kids under the age of 4. Yeah, we don't get on very much. We started leveling the day the expansion came out so, thats not our excuse, we point the blam at our kids, bless their hearts, lol.

It is fun to have a leveling buddy. I got all the way to 70 practically by myself killing boars (well, not just boars), not as fun (back in the days before they decreased the time it takes to level from 20-70 /shakes fist). Back in the day leveling from 50-60 was a nightmare, now it's a joke, but that's another blog post on another day. So now Kydra is at my level we're staying together. I'm just glad that Bliz added so many other things to do in the game.

Not Much of a Hunter

So, I was talking to one of the other teachers at my school. Their family went to some kind of outdoor hunter convention.

I mentioned to her, oh, I wouldn't know anything about that, I'm not much of a hunter. At that moment the irony of it all hit me. I have never hunted a single day in real life. I don't think I've killed an animals (not even in fishing - I usually throw'em back). I don't consider myself an animal rights activist or anything, just not very violent, I guess. So, why was that the very first class that I picked in World of Warcraft? Why has the hunter class been my favorite class this whole time? That got me thinking...

I suppose it wasn't the killing things so much as actually having a pet that would follow me around. I love animals. I bet a lot of people when they first come to the game choose a hunter for that very reason. Yeah, we're great at killing stuff, but playing a hunter means that you never have to solo anything. Its always a dynamic duo. Always a pair, in cooperation to slaughter the enemy. (oh here we are at killing stuff again, lol).

It's nice having a companion that goes with you everywhere. I always feel guilty when I accidentally let my pet die, like I let him down or something. Hunter's actually care about their pets unlike Warlocks. Maybe its because our pets don't constantly complain. Maybe we are just weird enough to build a relationship with a bunch of pixels on the screen, I don't know.

And noncombat pets, albeit cute, don't have the came camaraderie. You can talk to them I'm sure, but they sure don't help out much when there is a fight. Would that be cool if they did, but then I guess that would mean they could be killed and that would just turn into a mess.

What kind of pet is right for you?

Sorry, I've had to re-post this a couple of times to fix a couple of things, So, if you have this on RSS then you are probably thinking I'm a little crazy, and you wouldn't be far from the truth...


This is my first installment of Dave's Hunter guide. The first thing I'm going to talk about is pets. What is a hunter without a pet? Well, really pathetic, that's what we are. So, you get to make a big decision. What pet do you want to have? This really depends on your play style and what you want to do in the game. There is a great article on how to choose a pet on Petopia. This is a wonderful resource, everything you need or want to know in regards to hunter pets is over there. Technically, you could just go over there are stop reading this post if you would like.

Okay, since Wrath has started the way hunter pets work has dramatically changed. We use to have the lamest system where you would have to tame pets you didn't want just to learn their talent so you could teach it to your own pet. Some of us hated this and never got the latest rank of Bite, or Swipe, or whatever. But now, we have talent trees for pets. Yes Dave, if you haven't already noticed, there is a tab on the right of the talent trees that's marked "Pet". If you click that you'll see one of 3 talent trees for pets.

Now there are 3 talent trees and each pet family is assigned to one of them.

Tenacity: This talent tree is for tanking pets. These pets will be your best pets to level with. They will hold aggro the best and they have the best armor. When you are out and about soloing in the world of Azeroth, you best have one of these. These include Gorillas, Bears, Boars, Turtles, Crocolisks, Crabs, Worms (yes Dave, you can have a worm for a pet), Rhinos, Scorpids, and Warp Stalkers.

Ferocity: These are pets meant to do lots of damage. This is the main dps tree for hunter pets. They are especially good for instances and raids, when you don't need to keep the aggro. You see, hopefully you already have a tank to do that for you. These pets include cats, devilsaurs, core hounds, hyenas, moths, raptors, spirit beasts, tallstriders, wasps, and wolves.

Cunning: At first glance you'll be thinking, what are these pets for? Well, I like to think of this as the utility tree. These pets are still really good at dps in their own way, but they have a few other tricks up their sleeves. Some argue that these are good for PvP. I have one, but haven't used him at all. These pets include bats, birds of prey, chimaeras, dragonhawks, nether rays, ravagers, serpents, silithids, spiders, spore bats, and wind serpents.

Now, you may have noticed that you have 4 spots available at the pet stable. That means that you can have 5 pets!!! You can have a pet for leveling, and another for instances/raids, and if you really like PvP you can have one for that. You can keep an old favorite pet for sentimental value and one that looks really cool.

Bear in mind when you are picking a pet that each pet family has a different talent/ability. For instance, Gorillas have a cool Thunderstomp and is an AoE aggro pull. Wolves do this howl thing (Furious Howl) that is a raid wide Attack Power buff.

So, now you are thinking, what talent points do I use for my pets. That is another discussion, one that I don't want to go over because Pike did such a good job at that at Aspect of the Hare. She gives us several different pet talent builds that work for different circumstances. My suggestion is to get your self a good tenacity pet while you are leveling. I personally like the gorilla, but everybody does that so, do what you would like. When you hit level 80 then you probably would go more for a ferocity pet and focus on kicking butt.

Dave if you have any questions, email me or post something on my facebook page or something. If anybody else has questions, comments, suggestions, corrections, or anything else. Let me know, either by commenting on below or by emailing me at aoirselvar@gmail.com.

Taming Druids and other Ramblings

I have a low level druid alt (well, technically it's my wife's but we never transferred the toon over when we got our second account). I know the toon isn't mine, but it's my goal to level her and have her as one of my alts, well one of my wife's alts on my computer.

 

Wow, I'm going to scare of readers if I keep rambling like that. Okay, so when I'm playing with my (her) druid I keep thinking, "Why can't I tame one of these bears with my hunter." BRK mentioned this when he got interviewed on the Twisted Nether podcast. If we can fear druids with our scarebeast spell, and we can track druids with out trackbeast spell, why not tame them??? That would be cool; it's like having 5 pets in one. It would especially be cool if I could tame a horde druid. I hate those stupid lions sneaking up on me; it would be a good change of events.

 

When I was running around on my armored bear mount I got thinking, "why not let druids become mounts and let other people be passengers." I guess there are too many dirty jokes that could go along with that, so maybe we'll just leave that one alone.

Kitty Saves the Day

Okay, story time! So, my story takes place back in the BC days when we were just barely starting to run ZA. We were working on the bear boss, it was our first night on trying ZA and we had already wiped on this boss 2 times. We were going to try it again one more time.

 

Wow, my memory is fuzzy on this one, lets see what I can remember… So, we're finally getting him down and when he has about 15% health left our Main Tank goes down. Oh cr@p! So, this was the way we started our wipes previously, DPS starts going crazy (not that we weren't going crazy previous to this). Then I'm a little unsure what happened at this point, but I think we started losing healers and our Off Tank goes down. /wipe. Yeah, but the bear boss was down to like 6% health left (around there somewhere). We have pretty much only dps left. At this point the bear is going around finishing off the party. You know all of those clothies wearing their pajamas are getting taken down in one hit.

 

What do us hunters do when everything looks like its going sour? Well, we keep a finger hovering over the feign death button. Yes, like h3ll we are going to spend the extra money on repair if we don't have to. So, I have my kitty, ShereKahn wailing a way on the boss and I'm just getting ready to FD.

 

Mage down, Lock down, then the bear looks towards me for a meal. 1% health left. I then pretend to die (what a wuss). Who is still trying to help us take out the boss? Why my cat, that's who. The bear boss, content that I'm already dead, then turns on my cat, but … tah duh, my cat had something else for duh bear. My cat hits the final blow and the bear goes down.

 

We finally got the boss down, and ShereKahn was our hero. Never before was there a more popular pet in the world … of warcraft. There was talk about giving ShereKahn officer status in the guild. People wanted to give him presents and invite him to parties. I was such a proud pet owner.

 

Of course the day came when I started spending more time with my Gorilla, ShereKahn was spending a lot of time in the stables. He was getting restless. He wasn't meant to be caged. So, finally I took him back to the old world and let him loose. He's now having a good old time in dark shore where he's like 65 levels above everything else, so he's pretty much king. So, if you see a high level mountain lion in dark shore, let him be, for he was our bear killer, and could mess you up.

Got Fireworks?

Yay! Its time for lunar festival. Now that there are achievements attached to it, we get to stop everything we're doing an get that title. How cool to be Elder Aoirselvar. That would be the second time in my life that I had that title. lol. (The first time took even more work).

So, there is a great article over at WoWhead that guides you through everything. I was ready to stop leveling my hunter and DK and start to work on this when I saw that Elder of the Dungeons requires a minimal level of 80. /cry, seriously, who still isn't level 80??? /meakly raises his hand. I'm all the way to level 76 *woot*, but for reasons previously mentioned, I'm still not level 80. So, I'll just have to catch this next year I guess.

Does anybody know if the achievement "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been" has to be done in one year? I already botched it up if it does with not finishing my Hallow's End achievement. But by golly I got my Merrymaker title!

Dave's Hunter Guides Coming Soon

I was talking to my friend Dave yesterday. This is my friend who likes to play WoW, but who's a lot more casual than I am. (I admit, I only fit in the casual player category because I lack time to do otherwise). Dave is a truly casual player to the point where he doesn't keep up with the changes of the hunter class. He doesn't follow blogs, doesn't really look at the patch notes, no podcasts, etc. Dave only gets his info through people in the guild like me. Which is fine, but then I think people like me assume that he knows some obvious stuff when he doesn't.

I have let Dave down.

For instance, I would have just assumed that Dave would have known that Aspect of the Viper is only really good when your mana is down. You don't want to keep Aspect of the Viper on all the time. He told me yesterday that 2 weeks ago he realized that Aspect of the Viper was cutting his dps in half. So, for a couple of months Dave thought Viper was great to have on 24/7, he never ran out of mana.

Upon hearing Dave's viper story I thought, I had better do something about this. I had better start writing some posts about how to play a hunter. I had just assumed that if someone came to my blog that they would already have gone to BRK's blog or other's like Aspect of the Hare that have great notes and guides on Huntering. But I know my friend Dave would probably never go to one of these websites.

So…

I'm going to have a new feature entitled, Dave's Huntering Guide. I'm going to touch base on the more obvious hunter issues that are well known or things that all hunters should know about their class. And since I know that Dave doesn't go looking around for hunter blogs, I'll send him an email every time I post about it. Hopefully, someone else will also get something out of it as well.

In death we shall not part

So, my wife and I love playing WoW together. We go running around, my Gorilla, Mungula, AoE tanks while Kydra uses her AoE to bring things down. We do a pretty good job, but one thing we suck at is …. PvP. Wow, can we get owned so badly. It's not even funny. If I'm prepared for PvP I do a little better, get those hot keys out, blow off the dust and get ready. But when I'm snuck up on I get flustered. I run around like a chicken with its head caught off and start hitting buttons randomly. When I know I'm going to die I kind of just sit there (okay just get it over with). So, we were pleasantly surprised when we actually won half the little skirmishes here (even though in the end we still got owned).

 

We're really sick of being ganked, especially by those we should have killed ourselves (I won't tell you stories, its embarrassing). I like PvP in a more controlled environment like in Battle Grounds, but I'm not much of a fan of the impromptu PvP that happens so often in these gankfest servers. So, why are we still on a PvP server? Well, until you can convince my guild to move, we're probably going to stay.

 

Oh, by the way, my wife pointed out to me that I sometimes make reference to my wife, and other times make reference to my girlfriend. lol, didn't realize I was doing that. Okay, in RL my wife is my wife, lol. And in the game, my hunter, Aoirselvar, likes to refer to Kydra as his girlfriend. I'm not sure how Kydra feels about the whole relationship. As far as I know she might be stringing the dwarf along, but its all good, Aoir doesn't mind.

3.08, hunter spec decisions

So many changes with patch 3.08, what to do? I like the idea of trap dancing, sounds tricky and since I haven't been weaving shots that sounds like fun. It's nice to finally have a shot rotation instead of steady shot spam. Listening to BRK's recent podcasts with the SV and the MS hunter is really making me wonder if I want to respect. But I really like my exotic pets… I still won't be losing my gorilla while I level at least. Oh, losing my good AoE spell, at least I have a mage girlfriend that can take care of that for me.

 

What to do? What to do? Should I be true and stay BM? It doesn't sound like the nerf was as bad as we thought it would be, with the new shot rotation and decrease mana for arcane shot we are about even. But SV and MS are sounding kind of fun, shot weaving. Well, idk. I'm kind of partial to my pets. And the thought of one day getting a spirit beast /sigh.

 

I do love the fact that my wife now can cast slow fall on me, so now we can go paratrooping. Woot!

Meeting Myself for the First Time

I always thought it would be interesting to meet myself in the future and see what lies in wait for me, or to have the chance to go visit myself in the past to see how far I’ve come. To show myself in high school that I actually finished college and have kids, etc, etc. To see where I would be in 20 years, what I will be doing, how are my kids going to turn out, etc, etc…

Well, I finally had that experience… and to tell you the truth, it was kind of a let down.

Future Aoirselvar came to help me out with a quest, and he was kind of a tool. I mean come on, he tells me how inexperienced I am and then he runs into a fight, as a hunter, with his axe. I always thought that if you are meleeing as a hunter then you are doing something wrong. Apparently at level 80 I become the biggest noob of a hunter. He (I mean “I”) had no pet, he (I) never used (will use?) a gun or a bow, or anything range. What kind of huntard do I become when I hit 80???? I mean really, I apparently will never replace any of my gear too.

Well, I maybe should give up the game now if that’s what I have to look forward to, huntardness. (/log roll toon in warhammer)

Hunter Macros that I use

Well, I have gone from never ever using macros to not being able to play without them. I got to the point where I wouldn't play on any other computer besides the one where my macros are stored, but now macros are stored on the wow server and go with you, which makes playing wow on my friends computers much more enjoyable. Now if only they saved the addons on the wow server… Anyway, I wanted to compile some of my hunter macros in one place so in case they might be useful to someone else and to save them somewhere.

 

I'm not a macro writer so I won't claim that I wrote any of these. I found them in random places on the web. And they aren't that complicated, I'm sure that if you are a hunter above level 70 then you are probably using better macros (if so please let me know what they are so maybe I could use them).

Aspect of the Cheetah/Pack

This macro saves me a button space. Normally the button will be for Aspect of the Cheetah, but if you hit CTRL or ALT or something it suddenly becomes Aspect of the Pack, tah duh…

 

#showtooltip

/cast [nomodifier]Aspect of the Cheetah; [modifier] Aspect of the Pack

 

Misdirect Macros

This one is for my Gorilla, when he wants extra agro or when I want the mob to come to us.

 

/cast [target=pet,exists,nodead] Misdirection

/assist  nameofpet

 

Now in raids/instances I like to have to MD macros, one for the main tank and one for the off tank. I use this macro and I just change the name of the tank for each one.

 

/target tank's name

/cast Misdirection

/assist tank's name

 

I would love to have a simple macro like this to use for the focus target so I don't have to change the name out, if you have one please share.

 

Start Attack

I had the problem that I was constantly forgetting to put Hunter's Mark on the target, stupid way to lose dps. So this one is a simple way to remember, whenever I have my pet attack something I also put on a Hunter's mark (and I added the charge for kicks and giggles)

 

/petattack

/cast Hunter's Mark

/cast Charge

 

Mend Pet

This is a simple Mend pet macro that won't allow you to use mend pet again till it is already up. This saves on mana and makes you feel less stupid.

 

/castsequence reset=15 Mend Pet, null

 

Pet Care

I got this from one of those huntering blogs and I modified it slightly. This macro will rez your pet if its dead, call your pet if dismissed or feed your pet. On the last line you can replace it with "/use (insert your pet's favorite food)", but I'm lazy, so I've made it use what ever I have in my backpack's top right slot so I can feed him whatever the h3ll I want without changing the macro. I love this macro, because it saves so many buttons, but sometimes it makes me eat the food instead. /baffled.

 

/cast [modifier:alt] [target=pet, dead] Revive Pet; [nopet] Call Pet; [pet, modifier:ctrl] Dismiss Pet; [pet, nocombat] Feed Pet

/use [nocombat] 0 4

 

Steady Shot (with some other stuff)

Okay, so this is my steady shot spammer. This shot will start Auto Shot (get that in before your steady shot), it will, of course, cast steady shot, and it will also do a few more things. It tries to use my trinkets if they are available and it will attempt to cast Kill Command if that is available. This way I'm using my trinkets and kill command as often as they become available.

 

#shottooltip Steady Shot

/cast !Auto Shot

/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command

/use (insert 1^st trinket name)

/use (insert 2^nd trinket name)

/cast Steady Shot

/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear();

 

Love those Horde

And of course I have a macro that tells those hordies that I love them. One of my guildies bothered to figure out horde talk (two accounts and too much time), So this macro will tell those hordies that you love them.

 

/y O i p Ac ap

 

 

Well, if you actually got through all of that and are reading this (I wouldn't, I have no attention span), then please share your macros with me. I would like to get some macros for more of my pets special abilities like Intervene, Roar of Sacrifice, Heart of the Phoenix, Lick your Wounds, etc.

Mount up... Randomly

So, if you like to randomly pop up on one of your mounts then here are a couple of things you can do:

Here is a link to a great macro that will work from, but it needs some explanation from the place I got the macro at Less QQ, More PewPew.

#showtooltip Swift Red Wind Rider
/run if IsMounted() then Dismount() return end local t if IsFlyableArea() then t={7} else t={1,2,5,6,8} end CallCompanion("MOUNT",t[random(#t)])
/dismount [mounted]

However, if you have over 50 mounts, even if the macro is using numbers instead of full mount names, a macro still can't be long enough to truly be random for all of your mounts. At this point I went to look for an Addon that can do it for me. And i found Mountiful. This addon will let you preselect which mounts you would like to randomly select from and it will know if you can be on a flying mount or if you can't. It also has a feature that will act like a safeguard, not allowing you to accidentally dismount midair. One more thing it will let you randomly pull out one of your vanity pets (but I don't use that feature, I use an addon called Minipet for that.

children and wow

So, being a casual player and having little children means that I don't get to play whenever I want. I guess the "casual" part comes from the busy lifestyle we lead. We have 3 children all very young (oldest 3years youngest 8 months) so... yeah, we have our hands full. We really can only play when the kids are asleep. So that's when my wife and I play and I solo a little bit before I go to work. That's about it... Raiding hasn't happened mostly because we haven't hit 80 yet.

What we really like to do is instances with my brother and sister-in-law. They have 4 kids (not quite so young), but their youngest is like 11 months old. In order for them to play when their baby daughter is awake they have to get a baby sitter to play (which means the pay their oldest to watch her). So, they don't get to play very often either and we just can't stay up late when all the kids are asleep because my brother goes to work at 4am. Ouch!

So, last night we were determined to play together, they had a babysitter (their 5th grade son), we hadn't decided on a time (we had to run errands and then get our kids to bed). So, we rushed home, called them up and told them that we would be there shortly, then rushed the kids through their bed time routine (they have to have several songs every night). Finally get them all to bed, jump on the computer, wait for the stupid queue time, etc. Finally, we get on and I whisper my sister-in-law asking for an invite.... nothing.... okay, I pst my brother for an invite... silence....then a reply... "Oh, we thought you were going to take longer, we filled your spot."

This was suppose to be a big deal to coordinate our schedules and everything. We really needed to clean our house and get ready for guests, but we wanted to spend time with them. I was so pissed I replied "k" and then instantly logged, as did my wife. Then I get a call from my friend telling me to take his spot, so I did that. We had a fun time.

Our children have to come first so we just can't play when they are awake. They tend to get on your lap and hit random buttons, consequently you can tell if I'm holding one of my kids, my toon jumps like there is no tomorrow.

Well, that was a little rambled, anyway...

50 mount achievement, finally!

I finally got my 50 mount achievement. The darn gnome rep was a pain to get, but we finally got it. Runecloth was cheap yesterday, and I farmed Runecloth in some old school instances.

My random mount macro dosen't work when you have more than 50 mounts apparently. If you have fewer its great. You can find it at this link From Less QQ More PewPew. I've heard rummors from the instance about a random mount mod, so I'll have to go find that.

By the way, the albino mount was worth all the work. I really want to get my hands on a proto drake now.

Reputation

So, I have been trying to get my rep up with all the major city factions in order to get my mount achievement and get the Albino Drake. So far I am up with Darnasus and Stormwind so I have all of the kittys and horses. So, I'm up to 40 mounts. Okay, so Gnome rep is a pain in the @ss! So far I am up to about 15000 into exaulted and I have spent a lot of money on Runecloth. The price is getting ridiculous. The average price on the Deathwing server is about 6 gold. Whenever it goes below 4gold a stack I buy it all up. I'm really close with Exodar as well.

So, how do you get your rep with the factions to get the cross-faction mounts and to get the achievement Ambassador of the Alliance? The best way is to do quests. Low-Level quests give you full reputation. Many quests give you reputation with all the other major factions as well. For example: if you get 250 rep with Ironforge you will get 63 rep with Stormwind, Exodar, Gnom exiles, and darnassus. So, going to every beginning area will help you get all of your rep up quickly!

Well, the first thing to do is go to all the newbie areas (the level 1-6 areas to start with), put your tracker on track low level quests. Go nuts on the quests (you can do them very quickly, just as long as it takes to run from one place to another). You should be polite to anybody who is actually at that level doing the quests. And ignore the remarks that you shouldn't be there and to go back to northrend. Now you're going to feel like a God because all you have to do it look at things and they wither away. What I do is leave my Gorilla on passive because if he kills something without me doing any damage then I don't get the kill and I can't loot the mob. So, Mungula become a non-combat pet for much of this. Now if you don't need to kill anything and just need to run from here to there then I'll leave my Gorilla on Defensive, He'll kill anything that tries to annoy me and I don't have to worry about anything. This is particularly fun on old school instances, but I regress.

I would go through all of the level 1-10, then the 10-20 areas, it takes a little time, but then you get to see all the stuff you've missed (unless you are an altoholic). And you are getting yourself closer to all of the quest achievements.

After that, or at sometime during that go to all of the major cities and do the cloth donation quests, if you are unsure where these quest givers are just go ask a guard where the tailor trainer is. They are next to them. You will get 350 rep for 60 wool, 350 for 60 silk, 350 for 60 mageweave, and the same for 60 runecloth. After that you have a repeatable quest where you get 75 rep for 20 runecloth. So, if you have money up the wazoo or just numerous amounts of runecloth then you can finish up right there. Most of us don't, so questing continues. I do however check the AH often to see if anybody posted runecloth for less than 4 gold a stack, lately the pickins have been slim, so I quest. I guess I could go farm the cloth, but I think its easier to go mining and use that money to buy cloth. I'm enjoying old world questing anyway, I apparently skipped a lot of content while leveling, so I'm seeing stuff I've never seen before.

Anyway before you know it you'll be where I am, buying cloth for gnom rep because its hard to find quests that give you their rep.

free falling

So, I'm trying to get to Ironforge from Stromwind. I thought I'd take the tram. When I go through the tram is closed or something. I'm still on my mount so I figure, okay, lets get off my mount. Still can't get in, but now I can run really really fast (epicland mount speed). A little weird. What happened next I expected. I got booted. Something funky with the server. So, I log back on and I'm no longer in storm wind at all. Instead I'm in Silithus somewhere where I've never seen, but I'm still getting city rest XP. hmmm. There was a werid edge to the land that looked like water or something. Oh, and there were random objects in the air, like chairs and stuff. So, I run to the water to see what happens then I fall of the edge of the screen and I
consequently die.


Then as a spirit I keep falling, and the sky looks like the outlands. It won't let me log out because I'm moving so I finally just shut down WoW altogether. Get back on and I'm dead in the graveyard outside of Stormwind. I was curious as to where my body would be, but it let me rez the second I walked into Stormwind.

Weird.

Have you ever dropped through a hole in the game? Happened once before in a BG for me, kind of bizarre.