Bob's Casual Huntering WoW Blog

New Domain, New location

2009-04-10T21:33:00.001-06:00

Alright, I finally did. I actually moved to WordPress and got a domain name for my blog. Can you believe it? I'm finally growing up. So, this is the last post I'll be putting here on Blogger. I've moved everything over to the new blog with a new name: http://www.casualhuntering.com/. I have been wanting to change the name of the blog for a long time now. I mean really "Bob's Casual WoW Hunter Blog", could I make this any longer?? Maybe I should have named the blog, "The Ramblings and Exploits of Bob's Casual Part-Time WoW Gaming Hunter Blog". Now that would have been good. Dang it, I should have bought that domain name, hmmm....www.theramblingsandexploitsofbobscasualparttimewowgaminghunterblogetcetc.com that might hvae been a little cumbersome to type on a regular basis, but it would have stood out. Naw, I like "Casual Huntering" more. Especially since Huntering isn't a real word. Does being a speech language pathologist give me the write to make up new words? Hmmmm.

Anyway, come check me out at Casual Huntering, because that's where I'll be hanging out for now on.

Spring Break

2009-04-09T09:33:00.002-06:00

So, its been spring break so I've had the whole week off. Time to catch up wow, right? Those of you who are married and have children are shaking your head. Nope, actually I've played less WoW this week than I would during a normal work week. Why? Well, I'm sleeping in so I'm not playing a whole lot before the kids wake up (I normally play a little bit in the morning before I go to work), we recently hit level 80 and now my brother wants us to raid/run heroics with him nonstop. Kydra isn't too much into that, would rather just play with her husband (me), and we got reintroduced to how fun our wii is to play. Oh, and I've been reading a book to my wife when we have some free time (I'm reading her New Moon - and no I'm not a big fan, their okay books not amazing books, that's all that I'll say about that).

So, I'm kind of in a WoW low right now. I decided to roll characters with my wife on a different server (Feathermoon - Alliance), so that we can play without my guild knowing. That way we can play just ourselves. Any suggestions for our class combination?

So, what do you do when you have a vacation from work/school? Do you play more or less WoW? Why?

First time in Naxx

2009-04-07T14:06:00.004-06:00

Okay, I have finally went on Naxx for my first time, now that everybody and their dog has already played it too death from what I hear. We did Naxx 10, but we only got through 3 wings of it. We could have done the whole thing, but my little brother was having internet issues and he was kind of our key healer.

So, most everybody in the run were kind of over geared for it. Which is nice so someone like me who was very under geared for it could still play. I was a little afraid when I saw 2 other hunters there, but I was told not to worry because they didn't really need anything here anyways. Well, I got like 5 pieces of gear, no joke. Lots of mail stuff kept dropping (a lot of shammy healer stuff too). So, I finally replaced my bow from kara(Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix), replacing it with the Accursed Bow of the Elite. Its about time I replaced that old thing. I probably should go get my hands on a gun (as any good dwarf should do, but hey, I'm kind of use to the bow thing, kind of feel like an elf). I also replaced my melee weapon, my belt, my something or other, hmm, I don't know but, I'm doing much better off now.

Wow, its been so long since I have ran an raid. I'm sure I looked like a noob. For one I still had my gorilla (haven't leveled any other pets up yet). I still had my lvl 70 goggles on (I have better, but I like the emote finder capabilities), I had some pretty crappy gear, but if they didn't care then I didn't. At least I didn't cause us to wipe at all (which I did once or twice in Kara).

Anywho, I don't know how much raiding I'll actually do. It takes a lot of time that I don't have so I'll keep it to a minimal. I do love raiding with a bunch of friends jokeing about this or that. I don't like it when people take it too seriously. My favorite raid moments were when we were goofing off and just having a good time, not necessarily downing a particularly hard boss.

We're all Ears

2009-04-06T10:27:00.005-06:00

Alright, what have I been doing lately? Well, getting back to my obsession with mounts. I'm currently trying to get my rep up with Cenarian Expedition so I get can get my Cenarian War Hippogryph, which you can get from these guys once you are exaulted. So, one of the easiest ways to get rep with these guys if you are already in Northrend is by cutting off the ears of these scuba divers and taking them over the the D.E.H.T.A. (Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals) for a repeatable quest: Ears of Our Enemies. I do think its funny that these druids are all for treating animals ethically, but not scuba divers, well, whatever. As long as I get my Hippogryph.
What's really fun is to live out the last of my Gorilla's glory days. A final tribute to the great gorialladine. We like to pull up to 16 of these guys at a time. And yes, I got a little too eager sometimes and pull too many of them at times. Mungula wasn't too happy about that seeing that he died and me to. I guess 20 guys even at level 70 are just too many. Anyway, good times, I only need about 300 more ears to get my rep up. That may sound like a lot, but when you are pulling groups of 15-17 at a time, its really not that bad.

Teaching with WoW

2009-04-02T08:26:00.002-06:00

So, I have joked about using World of Warcraft at my job, but I was never very serious. However, I got this comment from my WoW at Work post from Lytlady:

We actually use WOW in one of our classrooms. For the students that do want to play, they are learning social skills, math, etc... These are students have disabilities that effect their daily social interactions, such as Autism. They must share a toon.. So there are two students per toon. Their time is restricted... each group is allowed to play for about 1hr a week, though they are able to earn more time if available. It is really a joy to watch a 5th grader and a 12 grader, who never normally would talk to each other, discuss how to do a quest or which items they should keep, use, vendor or AH. For the advance students who play there may be math problems that include % of stats and such. It keeps them engaged and learning. This would not be possible without the amazing teacher that is in that classroom. His success record with these students is 2nd to none. And his ability to see each of their needs and how to reach these through alternative teaching tools is..... He also is a huge advocate in self-control, which is also part of these students' learning. Yes, WOW in the classroom.

I really don't think the school district I work for would buy into it, but using WoW as a teaching tool really has a lot of potential. Just think of the reading, math, and problem solving involved in the game. You could teach social skills to children with autism. And there would be some instant motivation. I only wish more admistrators (and parents) would be open minded to something like this. Its actually a very good idea. I know a lot of students that aren't motivated to practice reading, but you have to be able to read to play WoW. My nephew actually started playing before he could read and I'm sure this was a motivation for him.

Interesting idea, I've heard of it before at the college level, but never in elementary or high school. Thanks Lytlady!

Happy Stupid Internet Day!

2009-04-01T08:27:00.001-06:00

Okay, April Fool's day on the internet has become a "most avoid the internet at all costs" day for me. Its over the top and beyond ridiculous. Okay, I do enjoy some of the stuff. Especially the Bard class that Blizz did last year. I don't even have a clue what's going on this year. Our computer specialist has told us to avoid the internet if all possible. So, I guess I will. Need to do work anyway.

Are you planning on doing any april fools jokes on any of your guildies? I'm expecting my mother-in-law to call and tell me someone was in an accident. She does that every year. I think as my april fools joke this year, I'll pretend I completely believe it and have a nervous break down. Oh and I need to call my mother and tell her that we just found out that we're expecting again (we've done that several years in a row, I'm just waiting for the time we really are and she doesn't believe us).

Farewell BRK

2009-03-30T12:11:00.003-06:00

Wow, I just read BRK's post about him no longer blogging. It was a moving blog entry and it makes you think about your own life. What is the most important things in our lives, and are we making the most important things the most important. That makes me think about Steven Covey's book First Things First. We often neglect that which is the most important.

Of course, we'll miss BRK's blog, I think there are many of us that got into blogging because of him. I remember first reading his blog a long time ago when I saw his links from WoW-Insider. He'll be missed from the WoW community at large, but its like hearing about one of my favorite bands breaking up because they want to spend more time with their families (Toad the Wet Sprocket), you can't get upset at them, but rather you look up to them all the more. Hopefully more people will look at their own lives and follow Dan's example and make sure we do not neglect our families, our spouses, and our children. I don't think this means that you have to quit the game, but cutting back and becoming a part-time player for some. For others the only answer is quitting. Some people can be social drinkers others can't.

Many of us will miss BRK's wit, humor, darn helpful information, etc.

Here's to you BRK, farewell and good luck IRL.

Edit: Just wanted to add this link, a request in the forums that BRK be honored in the game somehow.

Define Casual

2009-03-30T08:22:00.004-06:00

I've been thinking about the definition of a casual gamer lately. I mean come on, I claim to be a casual gamer, I even named my blog after it.

So, what is a casual gamer then? Is this anyone who isn't in a super hardcore raiding guild? Well, that would be just about all of the people I know (or who are probably reading this blog - I imagine the word "casual" might shy some away from here to begin with). Maybe a casual gamer is someone that can only raid 2 or 3 times a week, or ... maybe not. There isn't a hard fast rule, or a magical number of hours played in a week that draws a fine line, one that separates the causals from the hardcores.

No really, what makes the difference between hardcores and casuals? I don't think its just the time spent (however that does make an impact). Hardcore doesn't equal full time player just as casual doesn't equate to part-time player. Instead, I think, its a state of mind or a player's gaming style. Using this definition I would probably consider myself a "part-time" player instead of a casual player. Why would I say this? Well, for one, I write a freakin' WoW blog. The very fact that I'm writing this probably kicks me out of the casual camp altogether and makes me a bit of a paradox, or a least a misnomer. I might not have ran Naxx yet, but I have quite a few WoW podcasts on my iPod, my Google reader is full of other WoW blogs, and I even have a WoW shirt that says "I'm not addicted to WoW, I just want to finish it."

Perhaps I should rename my blog, "The Part-Time Huntering Blog". I'll have to think about that. So, here's the question. What do you consider yourself? Hardcore? Casual? Part-time? Something else?

Level 80!!!!

2009-03-27T08:10:00.008-06:00

Last night Kydra and I finally hit level 80!!!! Here are the screen shots to prove it.

I think we may be some of the last people who actual reached level 80 (even though we were 70 before the WotLK came out).

By the way, thanks to all who suggested mods to take the screen shot, I ended up going with Multishot (suggested by Anea). This is a great little mod that takes a screen shot when ever you hit a new level, down a boss, or get a new achievement. I would suggest that if you know you are about to down a boss that you try to position your screen so you can actually see the boss downed or at least angle it to show your better side. Here's a shot it took when we finished Culling the Strat:

So, now what to do, what to do? I thought I would get back with my obsession with mounts and get my hippogryph by getting my Cenarian Expedition Rep up. I need to also get my Chopper which means I need to get off my arss and get my engineering finally leveled. Oh yes, and the many heroics that need to be done. Oh and I could work on my DK who is currently level 71. So much to do now, so little time.

Any other suggests as to what I should do now? Go to disneyland or something? Any suggestions for a new dps pet?

Almost 80

2009-03-25T09:53:00.004-06:00

So, this whole time I've been writing this blog I've had to admit that I'm not at level 80 just yet (and I'm still not, but I'm closer now than ever before. Now I'm only 1 1/2 bubbles away after running last night with my wife Kydra, my brother Kygongyn, Stromboli, and my cousin Delu. Wow, I have a lot of family play this game with me.

You see how close I got to hitting 80 last night???!!!

I did get this drop in the Halls of Lightning, Avool's Sword of Jin BoE, market value of 2162 gold. I've still been using this Legacy that drops from the crone back in Kara. Its probably about time I start getting some new gear. Heck I'm still wearing 5 level 70 epics. And they weren't amazing epics, mostly again just stuff from Kara. My brother has been primping over me and my wife's toons like a BFF Jill over a teen age girl at the mall in need of a serious make over. Ha! Could you see Aoirselvar in Gap clothes, probably not.

So, after this my brother has a regiment of heroics that we get to do to get geared up for Naxx. I still think my wife and I will probably quest when we play together, we've enjoyed doing that the most. However, even though Kydra hates PvP, she really enjoyed AV (where she wreaked havoc with her mage of death), so maybe we'll do some BGs as well.

So, does anybody know of a mod that will take a screen shot for you when you level?

Oh I thought this was funny. She makes my helicopter look like a slightly oversized remote controled toy.

WoW at work

2009-03-24T09:11:00.005-06:00

So, here I am typing at work a post that I don't really have time to write. So, I write a little bit here and there when I have a free moment between students. (I blame my tangents on this very fact). I sometimes also read blogs a little bit during lunch, and I play on twitter, talking to tweet friends about random stuff.

I think a lot of us do something like this at work to help get along and to keep our mind off of the mundane drudge of work. Of course there are some of you who play while at work. I don't know how you can get away with that. I'm a little jealous. I mean come one, why not use WoW in speech language therapy, lol. I don't think the school district would been too keen on the idea.

There are several people in our guild who play during the day, my brother use to. It seems like most of them were IT guys. There is no way I could ever keep up. I had to decide a long time ago that its not a race. Some people can put more time into it than others. Some people can play at work, and the rest of us just have to shake our fists (not in anger, but in envy). Of course, how are you getting anything done if you are playing at work? I can see it with my brother, he would either read or play wow between tech support calls. Oh to have a job where you could actually read. /sigh.

I suppose you could play in class as well on your laptop. The other students might be able to see it, but the teacher wouldn't (I'm talking about college of course, not high school). Of course, your grades might suffer that way. Didn't some study blame WoW for the increasing college drop out rates? I did get started playing WoW when I was in graduate school, but we only had about 16 people in each class. It would have been far to obvious, and alas, I don't have a laptop. So, I guess that was out of the picture altogether.

So, do you do something wow related at work or school? Are you a work wow player?? And if so how are you getting away with this?
At any rate,

WoW Burnout

2009-03-23T09:09:00.015-06:00

I've been hearing about a lot of people getting burned out in the game lately. I believe I'm immune to burn out because of the fact that I am so unbelievably behind y'all, but I thought it would be interesting to find out more about at any rate.

I always have something I could do with the amount of time I put into the game. At that I still stop playing for periods of time here and there. Sometimes you just want something different. Does that mean you go to another MMO or play console games, or just pull out a book.

Well, I wanted to find out what people do when they get burned out so I threw the question out in twitter.

Stompalina: I tend to read a lot more than usual, play console games, bake obsessively... the usual stuff. lol

Areant: My solution was to explore a new side of WoW by rolling a new character on an RP server. Tried a new class too. Worked for me! Switching from Hardcore raider/GM to Casual RPer and regular member makes a different game. Nice break w/out actually quitting.

Chaoticwhizz: I stop for a month or two then come back. I tend to play more faster-pace games during that time

ghostangel: I play other things mostly. Or if it is nice out, I'm outside. But I'm one of those people that can disappear. I just will randomly leave WoW and not play for sometimes months at a time without warning is all ^^; Because I effectively have a permanent account with WoW, not unless it's free :)

Arrens: Take a break from the game. Even if it's only a few days, a week or a few months. Or give a completely different class a try.

ladygypsy: When I get burned out on WoW, I walk away from the game for 2 weekends. That's usually enough for me to get recharged. #wow

Spoonwolf: when wow burns me out I play L4D or Starcraft

Would you or have you considered trying out another MMO? Which ones?

etherjammer: I've been thinking about trying EVE Online or reactivating my City of Heroes sub.

Arrens: WoW is my first and only MMO thus far. Other games I play when I'm tired of WoW are Guitar Hero/Rock Band & Grand Theft Auto. Never tried any and I'm really not a fan of paying a subscription fee unless I like it, obviously ;)

Stompalina: Right now I am probably not interested in trying out another MMO. We are broke nowadays... Lot of console games gathering dust.

SlowWolf: Actually, if I burned out with wow, I'd play DotA. =P Or lots of smash bros.

Rilgon: Only MMO I can tolerate other than WoW is Ragnarok Online.

Areant: It would have to be one my friends played.The social aspect is what keeps me playing, which is why I can't ever see quitting WoW

stoppableforce: I'd probably go back to FFXI, or CoH, or Eve.

Nightravyn: now that I'm awake and responding... yeah, I tend to go console. Not as much of a time sink. ;)

Spoonwolf: yes I would try other MMOs (eve, WAR, etc) but honestly after researching, their Ui is horrible and the gameplay is garbage

Faulsey: Last time I played an MMO when I was bored of another MMO, I quit the first for the second... Do not want to do that again...

Narayu: I used to play FFXI, I've considered going back at times, I like that you can level all classes on one character

Jezriyah: I didn't answer, but: most of my love for WoW is based in my guildies and friends. Without them, other MMOs don't interest me.

isheepthings: Only MMO that's caught my eye would be "The old republic"...other then that various PC games...not much on console for me atm.

Fimlys: not burned out, but downloading runes of magic right now.. taking 3 days to download.. just to try.. :P

Kikipewpew: As a break from WoW I have played other MMO's, like recently Runes of Magic :3 but not for very long, previously when I had the 360 set up I would play that as a break from the computer in general!

I would have thought other MMOs would have been more popular, but a lot of you seem to rather take time off of WoW by playing console games. That makes sense because its a completely different feel. You probably need a break from the MMOs in general (which WoW is included) or at least get away from the fantasy MMOs and try something different. Maybe Blizz is hoping that when you take a break from WoW, you'll play one of their other games (if they ever get around to finishing them), like Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3. Bliz better come out with some kind of Warcraft Rock Band, that would help, hmm, maybe some kind of minigame with in the game.

What do you do when you are getting burned out of playing WoW? I'll have to come up with a list of things to do when you're sick of wow. Maybe we can get @stompalina to bake us something. Hmm....

WoW free weekend - almost

2009-03-22T21:48:00.002-06:00

Wow, no WoW all weekend. Weird. We just didn't have time to get to it all weekend.

Oh wait. I did play wow with my 7 year old nephew in West Fall. Good times. I helped him ding 16, woot. He was super excited. That's his highest level toon and he has about 30 toons. Can I tell you how much quest helper helps when you are trying to help a 7 year old quest. They don't have a clue as to where they need to go, but you can also see other people's quests stuff on the map with that addon.

My nephew was particularly impressed with our mad murloc slaying skills. Good times.

Random Ramblings

2009-03-20T15:27:00.005-06:00

So, I've finally dinged 79 recently. Now I'm in the last stretch to 80 (fans gather in eager anticipation). My brother all ready pretty much has a schedule laid out for us once we hit 80 of heroics gearing up for Nax. I have been pretty much clueless as y'all talk about this raid and that. I honestly haven't done that much research in the matter, partly because I want it to be new (to me at least) and also because... well, because of boredom. Not that raiding is boring, but to read about raiding that you aren't able to do as of yet, yeah that's a little much.

Oh, we did AQ40 last night in a pug. I got 2 new mounts out of it (even if I can only use them for AQ, at least they count towards the achievement). I'm up to 62 mounts now, still need 38 for the Mountain of Mounts achievement. I still have a lot of huntering to do for that.

I've noticed that the google searches that make their way here are mostly about hunters. I haven't written too much on huntering as of late. I should get back to that a little more. I probably will when I'm level 80. I did get one google search that found me by searching for "casual bobs". Well, you found one, although I'm not sure sure what that entails. Maybe it could be a title for some future achievement. Casual Bob Aoirselvar the Brave. Hmm, I'll have to think on that, its kind of catchy.

My Hx with RPGs (part 2)

2009-03-19T08:27:00.013-06:00

Okay, here is part 2 of my history of RPGs, enjoy the history lesson.

One game that we really liked was Eye of the Beholder. We thought the graphics were to die for (pretty silly of us now that I think back on that). You got to have gear, you gained experience, you have got to go in dungeons to fight mobs, find secret levers, etc, etc. Of course you could only move one block at a time. And as with other games that I played, I never beat it. I wasn't the kid who had to beat the video game, I just somehow lost interest, or got stuck/frustrated or something. But I remember this game being pretty exciting at the time.

We had an old Commodore 64 computer which had Ultima 4 (or 5, I don't remember). Wow, I loved that game. Why was I playing that at about the same time as Eye of the Beholder? Because we happen to have a that cool commodore. (later taken by bill collecters, another post right there). You could go anywhere, you had to level up, you could talk to NPCs, go through moon portals, get attacked by these scary wraith like things, etc. Good times there. That was a great game. I loved the Ultima series. I never did try Ultima online or anything, but that was before I was willing to pay a fee every month to play a game. I'm apparently way past that now.

Thus we entered the time of blizzard. No one heard of Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, but Warcraft 2 was a huge hit. It wasn't technically an RPG, but instead it was a real-time strategy game. I think most of you know how that game was played. You build up your base either being human or orc (the horde) and you build up an army to destroy the other base. One of the coolest things about this game was that you could play it against your friends. Oh the days prior to the internet when you had to connect your modem direct with your friends (with all the technical problems included). We also would have LAN parties where we connected all of our computers on a network so we could play together (or was that later on), I'm not sure. I was in high school at the time all of this was going on.

Yes, I have to admit, we were also big into the Heroes of Might and Magic games (/facepalm from the embarrassment). Looking back on it now, it seemed pretty corny. And the turn taking style to your fights was pretty silly as well. But I think the element of growing your army, improving the type of troops that you had to the point where you could own someone, that was fun. You could play this with other people but we played it hotseat style, where you take turns (yes the whole thing was turn based). There were many a times when several of us were playing this game while doing other stuff, just taking turns on the computer.

I took a two year vacation from video games altogether. When I came back there were some pretty cool games out. I remember briefly playing Diablo, but I’m not sure when. I really liked Dungeon Siege a lot (but the camera angle could never look up towards the sky, that really bothered me). One thing about Dungeon Siege was that you could specialize in a certain talent (magic, range, or melee), but you didn't have a class, it just depended on what you did. If you attacked things with your sword a lot you got better at that, the same with the magic. Sometimes I wish in WoW that we had more specializations like that. Anyway, these games were a lot of fun.

Oh, and one more game that I played before World of Warcraft, Fable. What a fun game, I don't know how long I was being called "chicken chaser" as my title. I liked the fact that as you did good or evil things it reflected how you looked and how people treated you in the world. I haven't tried Fable 2, but I've been told that it’s very addictive.

So, now I play WoW and I'm still not on a RP server (well, I have toons on there, but I'm not there in spirit). The RP aspect of the game has intrigued me. I didn't even consider it until I got into twitter, where some of my friends got the idea in my head. At any rate, now I get my fix through World of Warcraft which totally kicks the other games out of the water. I'm here to stay. Well, until something better comes along (/looks towards blizzard with raised eyebrow).

What games influenced you?

My Hx with RPGs (part 1)

2009-03-18T09:43:00.007-06:00

My Hx of RPGs (part 1)

So I have a history with RPGs that goes all the way back to the 80s. Now I've missed a lot of the games that were crucial to the overall development of RPGs in general, so this defiantly isn't a history of RPGs, but rather "my history" with RPGs, which is of course much more interesting. Well, maybe not, but you're here.

I've been obsessed with the concept of a role-playing for a very long time that naturally lead me eventually to World of Warcraft.

Of course the first RPG that many of us played was the original Zelda on the old school Nintendo system. I think my dad had this game, I'm not sure. I remember my friends in my neighborhood were so good at it, they knew how to get through every castle and where all of the hearts were. I liked this game, but wasn't addicted. Now the 2nd Zelda game I was more into, Zelda 2 - Adventures of Link. Consequently about 3-4 years ago I almost beat this game at my in-laws house during our Christmas vacation from college. It was fun to play on the old school Nintendo system again.

I don't think this next game counts as an RPG, but I loved Karatica. This was one of the first martial arts games that I can remember, and you had a health bar, you got to kick/hit high, medium, or low – lots of options. I use to play this game on our old school apple computer. We never figured out how to get pass the dropping gate, always killed us, we were so close to saving the princess.

Okay, I got introduced the King's Quest games. Do you remember these games?? You basically had a screen shot that you could move around picking up certain items, talking to certain people in order to solve riddles and save the girl and such. These games weren't so action packed, and the fighting sucked, but you weren't stuck on one level Super Mario Brothers and you could go any where you want (at least the parts that you've opened up). I think they even eventually made a version that was in a 3D world like Azeroth, but apparently it wasn't as popular because you probably never heard about it either.

Now in jr high I played some games that were definitely headed more towards WoW. And this was where I started to get into the table top games a little bit. We were really into Dungeons and Dragons, Robotech, and Dragonlance role playing games. I loved the fantasy world and all the potential these games possessed. However, I usually ended up spending more time creating a character and coming up with the story behind him (I always like the hybrid classes like a rogue mages or your half-elves). Anyway, I loved creating characters, but when it came to actual game play it didn't go too far. I think we didn't have any really good DMs or something. I still get the urge from time to time as I drive by a gaming store to buy the latest AD&D (advanced Dungeon & Dragons) book and start to make a new character. I also get the urge whenever I listen to The Smiths or Nine Inch Nails (the music I listen to at the time). But who has the time for that anyway. Not me, I barely keep up with WoW. But at the time, table top games continued to increase my love for RPGs.

More to come tomorrow... hopefully.

St Patty's day - DK RP

2009-03-17T08:55:00.002-06:00

Happy St Patty’s day to y’all. I work at an elementary school so wearing green today was essential to my survival. (aghhhh, death by pinches….).

My Death Knight finally hit level 70 and after getting her mining all the way up she is now in Northrend. I decided to do something a little different. I’m actually attempting to play her slightly RP style. I don’t think I could ever completely play a crosstoon RP, because I’m not going to even pretend to know what’s going on in the female brain, let alone pretend to be one. However, I’m actually reading quests and interacting with NPCs. Northrend is perfect for this especially since the NPCs specifically talk to you a lot more now (remember who people in Dallaran say hello to you when you enter their shops?) Okay, the interacting with computer people seems a little silly to me, but the whole thing adds a new dimension to game play that I’m enjoying, trying to see through the eyes of my character.

Really why do we play the game? What do we get out of it? I for one love the social aspect of the game, even though I play solo quite a bit, but I usually keep twitter on and I chat with some of the other early birds in my guild. We play to try to get our next piece of cool gear? I know a lot of people who are all about getting uber gear (my little brother for one). Spending all of your time getting the best gear possible can be fun, but eventually it can get boring. I know so many people who were burned out on raiding before WotLK (and some who are as of now).

We play for the overall experience of the game, right? I say this, but that doesn’t explain why we farm. Farming can’t be that much fun. But we are trying to improve our toons, or collect cool stuff. It’s nice to be able to make a lot of gold in the economy (even if making gold IRL isn’t as easy… or fun). I say this but I’m pretty poor in Azeroth and IRL.

But I regress to random tangents as always. So, I’m trying out the RP thing (even though my main characters aren’t on an RP server). And so far it has increased the game play experience quite a bit. It adds a new element to the game that has made it exciting for me again. I’ll have to come up with some story about people doing crazy stuff, I best avoid capital cities I suppose.

So, maybe I’ll have to actually visit those level 1 characters that I rolled on RP servers and give them a shot. I just have a hard time spending time on other servers and redoing the whole leveling process. At least it’s a lot quicker than when I leveled my hunter /sigh. Yes, I know I could roll a Death Knight, but I really would like to try RPing a hunter. I guess that’s just something to look forward to.

How to get your signficant other to play.

2009-03-16T09:22:00.007-06:00

How does one get their significant other to play WoW?

I have been asked many times how I got my wife to play WoW with me. I could tell how she got playing, but I've never had a really good answer as to how to help others get their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc to play the game with them. I do understand why people want to have their significant others playing with them. For one, you can spend time doing something you like to do with them. It brings down contention in the relationship (as related to WoW at least). You now have someone to talk IRL about that new piece of gear you just won in your raid last night (that could be a negative point too, as you will see below). You have a questing partner. etc, etc. Its really fun to be able to play with my spouse. I've enjoyed the game so much more being about to explore azeroth with @kydragirl.

But how do you get your significant other to play? Well, it depends. You can't manipulate anybody into playing, it won't work. Beggin has proved to be ineffective as well. I wouldn't suggest just buying a second account for them (sorry Arrens). If they absolutely hate video games in general then they probably won't want to play, but if they already like video games to some extent and they aren't so completely against the idea then you might be able to tap/nudge them over the edge (into playing the newest sensation, that is world of warcraft - but I guess its not that new anymore).

My sister-in-law plays with her husband and ourselves sometimes (although we haven't played with her in a long while). She use to play Heroes of Might and Magic with us when she was dating my older brother. She got into playing WoW by watching my brother play for awhile. She would watch him raid and listen to the conversations. One day my brother got her to role a warlock because she wanted the beautiful flaming horse that those warlocks get to have.

So, in my wife's case, she wasn't against video games, played them on and off with her brother growing up. We both really got into Sims at one point in time and we were addicted to Donkey Konga. You'd have to ask her more about her pre-WoW video game experience yourself (@kydragirl), I don't know all the details.

I was wanting to get her into it, but she was kind of like "meh" about the subject. She wasn't against the idea, but she wasn't exactly for it either. By this time my sister-in-law was already playing and one day while were were at a family party I told my sister to show @kydragirl what some of the alliance girls looked like. (I could be wrong about the details, but that's essential it - I'll add an edit if @kydragirl lets me know anything different). They sat down and played around with it, working out a character, coming up with a name, figuring out the beginning area, etc. As my sister-in-law put it, "there's crack in that game, what can I say".

I think if you can get someone to play the game long enough with an open mind they'll get hooked, most of the time. It also helps to have someone there to explain things when they first start in a way that won't make them feel stupid or overwhelmed. If they try it and don't understand how to play it they might get frustrated and quit early. My other sister-in-law rolled a toon just out of curiosity, got frustrated with a quest in Silvermoon and gave up before she really got started. She didn't have anybody right there with her to help out or show her how it works. Now she won't pick it back up because she thinks it's stupid.

I have had several people from twitter and from my guild wish that they could get their spouse into the game. It has become a source of contention in their relationship. I can understand why, you see your significant other might think that you like playing the game more than spending time with them. Of course its not that you don't like spending time with them, but you enjoy this game as well. Of course if you are using the game as an escape because you are having problems then thats another topic altogether. In my opinion, if the game is causing too many problems for you in real life, then its time to put the game aside, or at least try to limit your game play. A silly video game is not worth ruining a relationship. Of course if you are lucky enough to get your sweetheart into the game then more power to you.

Here are some comments from friends in twitter when I asked how you could get your significant other to play with you in Azeroth.

stoppableforce: I tried that once; it didn't really work. Good luck!

kirikitten: Bribery. Probably using sex.

SlowWolf: Only way would be to at least get her to like dressing up the characters... but she's never going to actually play. =D

Ithato: my gf has finished Rock Band 2 on her own and loves The Sims and a few other titles, but didn't have the patience for early WoW

pugofwar: I love research like that. Hmm. One tactic is to play up the lore so that s/he feels like part of a greater narrative.

Arcania: My husband and I played together from the beginning, but for anyone I would suggest appealing to the aspects the SO would enjoy.

Arrens: If you can figure that out, lemme know. I've been trying for the past year with zero success.

Spoonwolf: I actually met my wife playing WSG WAY back in the day in vanilla wow

pikestaff: the main thing to remember if that if he/she doesn't want to play, he/she probably won't, in my experience >.>

Jezriyah: I plan to meet my significant other through WoW and save myself the trouble.

It looks like a lot of people have had no success with this up to this point. But to look on the bright side for those who haven't been able to get their snookums into the game, Pike mentions that there can be some negatives about having them play as well:

Pikestaff: Be aware that there are downsides too, heck, sometimes I think a lot of things would be easier if my boyfriend didn't play =P For example we raid on different nights because of scheduling. So that's two nights of not seeing each other Oh and the realization that 90% of things you discuss as a couple are WoW-related is always a lil'... shocking Oh and sometimes you get tired of WoW and don't want to talk about it . But guess who wants to tell you all about their raid =P

So, there you have it, I don't think I really helped anybody, but what is your take on the matter?

Balance

2009-03-12T10:39:00.003-06:00

I've been playing the game for almost 3 years now and I've had my fair share of neglecting RL for the game, but I like to think that I've found a much happier balance in life at this point. The game use to be an issue of conflict between me and my spouse. I would play too often or when she needed help with the kids. She still reminds me how much she hated it when I would play all morning on Saturdays. More recently I've cut back my playing time and this has greatly decreased contentions concerning this game, and added more balance overall to my life.

In my opinion there are certain things that should always supercede playing WoW. If you have a family they should always come first, you probably shouldn't lose your job or fail a class because of the game. Your health and personal hygiene would be bad to neglect as well (lol - don't forget to eat & bathe).

The people who don't do this make the rest of us look bad. These idiots give gamers in general a bad name and are the reason people do studies that claim that WoW breaks up marriages, makes students drop out of school and increases the crime rate in the lower 48 states. Its pretty common sense if you think about it.

Yes, I understand WoW is more than a video game for those probably reading this blog. Most non-WoWers think of our game as something that should be easily set aside like a nintendo game. They don't realize that we consider this game more of a hobby. We all have hobbies, our just consists of killing demons and dragons and stuff with our guild on-line.

Now, I have kids, young kids. My oldest is 3 years old, and I have 2 others that are younger. I have come to the point where I try not to play when they are awake. So, I play in the morning before I go to work and intermittently after we've put the kiddos to bed. We got a second account so that my wife and I could play together. Now its together time instead of contention time (of course those times when our computers are being stupid we are still contentious, but not with each other). Now its much more balanced. Of course we aren't raiding (we're still level 78), but we'll get there. We'll never be hard core raiders. We'll never be doing the hardest raid. We're okay with that. We are much happier this way and we can always talk about WoW through out the day if we want.

Now, during holidays all of this balance stuff is kind of thrown out the windows for us. Its a good thing there aren't holidays all the time.

Arrrrthas

2009-03-10T09:54:00.004-06:00

So, I was opening World of Warcraft the other day with my 3 year old daughter on my lap. She looked up and so the Lich King sitting on his icy throne (the loading screen). My daughter, looked at me and said, "A pirate, dad. A scary pirate." Well, I shared that with my twitter friends and Nightravyn decided to make Arthas the pirate a reality (with a little bit of photoshop). Here we have it. I'll have to see what my daughter says about this picture (probably just about the same, but he's a little less scary as a pirate in my opinion).

I've been Tagged

2009-03-09T08:13:00.007-06:00

I've been tagged...

I got tagged by Brajana from Mend Pet where I get to answer questions from my main characters perspective.

So, here is goes.

What is your name and where did it come from?

My main character's name is Aoirselvar. Where did I come up with the name? Honestly I think I just used the random name button when rolling the toon. The name since then has given me quite a bit of grief from my guildies. My guild leader keeps telling me to get a name change, one guildie even said that he'd finance it. But I couldn't do it. Once I figured out a way to pronounce it that is.

("A"(as in the letter)-"Your"-"cell"-var(rhymes with car)).

I'd write it out in IPA (international Phonemic Alphabet), but I don't have access to all the symbols here. Most people find it easier to just call me bob though.

How old are you and what is your birthday?

Gosh, I've never thought about that. I don't know how old Dwarfs get. Technically he was born in August of 2006 when I rolled the toon (which means he's turning 3 this year). In terms of the game, well. He's in the equivalent of his late 20's (whatever that is in Dwarf years). And his birthday? Sad, I don't have a back story to my main (that's what happens on non-RP servers). Lets say his birthday is August 26th.

Are you in love and with whom?

This is easy, my toon fell in love with a human mage named Kydra (my wife's toon). Right now they are still dating (questing?). I guess dates in Azeroth consist of killing stuff together. So, we're currently killing stuff together.

What is your favorite mount and why?

I really like the engineering mounts, I have my flying machine and I like the gnome mechostriders (especially the yellow one). I'm currently working on making the Mechano-Hog but I still have to level my engineering, farm a million different mats, and get my rep up with Alliance Vanguard. That's still a ways off. But I also love my drakes, I have the nether drakes and the albino drake. Oh, the the red nether ray is pretty cool looking as well.

Do you prefer a certain type of Azerothian meal and where do you get it from?

Definately the ice cream from the the salt flats that you have to get your orphan during children's week. I'm a sucker for ice cream IRL as well.

You know those giant mushrooms in Zangarmarsh? What is your theory on how they came to be and why are they so huge?

Too much mositure I suppose. It happens in my front yard too (although their not quite so large).

If you saw the Lich King walking toward you, what would you do?

Depending on my mood? I would do one of two things, either run in with Mungula and go ape sh1t (and die really quickly) or play possom and leave my pet in a lurch (what a crappy pet owner - either way my pet dies, sad).

These people I'm tagging may have already been tagged, but oh well, I'm tagging them again if that's the case: Jezriyah, Faulsey, and Brigwyn. So, get to it already, lol.

Lost in WoW

2009-03-06T11:33:00.017-07:00

I wanted to confirm that the Hatch on Lost is definitely in the Northrend. I read about this on OneAmongMany's blog when Will wrote a guest post there. This revelation answers so many questions in regards to where the stupid island is. No wonder no one can find it, the Lich King has control of it, and its stuck in an MMO on Northrend of all places.

But this also brings up some questions.

Like what time are we at in the game? Apparently the timeline for WotLK is before 2003 or so, but after the Darma Inititive landed on the island. So, Azeroth is somewhere inbetween 1970-1990 or so. You see the hatch hasn't imploded yet. Oceanic 815 hasn't crashed yet (well, maybe they have). But then we still might be able to see our friends Jack, Locke, Hurley, Kate, etc, etc, (if you watched the new episode this week).

Another question, what are our heros from Lost doing in Azeroth?

Now that gets me wondering about what class all of those characters from Lost are going to be (now that we have found out that the island is really Sholavar Basin).

Hmmm, Jack has to be a paladine. He's noble, crys a lot, and hmmm, probably would look good in plate. Oh and Jack should be able to heal, he is a doctor.

Sayid has to be a rogue with all of the assassin work that he does.

Locke, well, duh, Locke is a warlock, mostly just because of his name. I might also be a deathknight given certain events that have taken place this season.

Sawyer is a, I don't know, I want to say he's a warrior. I don't have any good reason for it. Maybe a hunter without a pet, because he's pretty good with a gun.

Faraday is some kind a mathmatical wizard, so he gets to be an Arcane Mage (what does arcane have to do with math, I don't know, go ask a mage).

Kate is a druid, a kitty druid. Doesn't she already seem like a cat? Cats like to run, Kate likes to run, right? And if you take the "e" off of her name than is spells Kat. So there you have it.

Well, what else would Juliet be? Of course she's a holy priest, because she's our healer who can't seem to get off that stupid island.

Okay, Miles will be our Deathknight, not because he's particularly scarey, but because he talks to dead people. I guess if we had a Necromancer class he would have been that.

Desmond is our awesome sorcerer or something, master of something or other. I'm going to say he's a fire mage, because hmm... he had a fire in his heart to get back with Penny. Okay, that was a stretch.

Jin has turn out to be one of my favorite characters. He has his fishing skills all the way up. What class is Jin? I'm going to say that he's our Shaman. Mostly because I see him doing Melee combat and hmmm... he...uh... well, I need one of them to be a shaman, right?

Oh, evil and coniving Ben. I wouldn't put it past him to be working right along side with Arthus himself. Ben I'd say is a warlock. He's evil, but often makes others do his work for him.

I've decided that Hurley is a hunter. Why? Well, no good reason other than that Hunters are awesome and Hurley is awesome. Dude.

Well, there are several characters that I'm missing, but I best get back to work. I obviously got a little too carried way with this post. Maybe not.

DHG - How not to Pick up Women in WoW

2009-03-05T08:14:00.002-07:00

Here's another installment of Dave's Hunter Guide. How not to pick up women in WoW. I didn't realize how serious Dave might need this until I saw some recent comments in Facebook. So, here you go Dave...

First off, there are actually many females that play world of warcraft. You might not believe it by looking at our guild lately (besides my family members and a few others). But overall you'd be surprised. That being said, most girls that I know that play WoW (actually all of them, but maybe I'm wrong) don't play WoW to be hit on. Seriously, I don't really think they do (at least my wife doesn't). I'm guessing that hitting on someone randomly in the world of azeroth will get you on ignore lists very quickly.

But if you happen to be in Ironforge or Stormwind and you see a Night Elf or a Human female with next to nothing on dancing on top of the mailbox, if you see that then you must definately refrain. You see, those are not females playing, but rather 13 year old boys or 40 year old pervs. They might respond to you in a positive manner, but I don't think that's what you are looking for.

You might want to go hit on the female guards in StormWind though. They can't respond because their on duty, but maybe after they get off work...

Stupid Computers

2009-03-04T12:00:00.002-07:00

Well, we haven't been able to play since last Wednesday when our internet connection started acting all funny. Finally got that working then the router started being stupid, got that working then the other computer was being dumb. aghghghghgh. Finally both computers are working, internet is working, router is working. What then? WoW won't work on the old computer because of the system restore. So, I got done reinstalling WoW on the older computer this morning, I'll have to work on getting all the updates this afternoon.

On top of that, I went from 40 fps (frames per second) down to 5-11 on my newer computer. I'm trying to run things like Malware bytes and Spybot Search and Destroy. I'll have to scan the computer with AVG tonight. We got a on that computer last week, but so far we haven't been keylogged. I think we've gotten rid of it, but I'm still having flucuating performance on WoW. :(

So, I haven't played as much as of late for the above reasons, but I did get my DK to level 69. Now I have lines from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure stuck in my head. /sigh.

Family of WoWers

2009-03-02T08:32:00.002-07:00

So, pretty much my whole family plays this game. It started with my older brother who worked on us. I was in graduate school with dial-up internet at the time. But he let me play while I was at his house. How quickly addicted I was. I started playing on a friends account on my dial-up modem (which wasn't as bad as you might think). Later I upgraded to my neighbors fast speed internet (inevitably someone you live by will have an open wi-fi connection).

My other brothers started playing as well. My older brothers wife started playing because she thought the warlock fire horses were pretty. Later she sat down with my wife and rolled a cute human mage.

Kind of a snowball effect going on here. Now my brother-in-law plays, my brother's kids play (rolled a DK with one of them the other day). I have 3 cousins that play.

So, at family parties we frequently talk about wow. My poor mother usually is clueless and one of my sister-in-laws think we are clueless for playing (or at least very geeky, but she tried to play her self, got lost and frustrated and refuses to try again. Meh.)

So, should I work on my parents? Should we start having family raids instead of family parties? (family raids, lol, sounds like we are going to attack the next door neighbors house - they put an encryption on their Wi-fi - they must go down).

We have interacted more, but we don't always play together. Its really fun when we go do an instance together, but that doesn't happen very often. sad I know

Does your family play? Has your family given into the modern day epidemic called World of Warcraft?

Sad Gorillas, Happy Crabs

2009-02-26T15:38:00.006-07:00

Wow, is there some crazy stuff coming out of the PTR. Some crazy crazy hunter pet stuff. As always, keep in mind that this is always subject to change at any given moment. If you don't like something that you hear then don't hold your breath, it will probably change in a day or two.

Okay so this came out on MMO Champion and I quote:

Thuderstomp (Gorilla) has been removed as a pet skill and replaced by Pummel - Pummel the target, interrupting spellcasting and preventing any spell in that school from being cast for 4 sec. (20 Focus, 5 yd range, Instant, 10 sec cooldown)

Thunderstomp is now a pet talent available to any Tenacity pet. Now your bears, crocs or ESPECIALLY CRABS can join in the AE tanking fun.

Savage Rend (Raptor) now temporarily boost the raptor's damage by 10% for 30 seconds.

Furious Howl(Wolf) now only affects the wolf and its master, duration increased from 10 to 20 seconds.

Wow, so all tenacity pets can have Thunderstomp! This is absolutely huge! (sad for the once popular tanking gorillas out there). But think of the possibilities....

crocadine, bearadine, wormadine, and my favorite (a said by stopableforce) bacondine. Oh, and all the other tenacity pets there too. Now you can actually have a viable tenacity pet that isn't a gorilla. I'll still hold on to Mungula for awhile, he's so cute and cuddle, but he does smell a little bad sometimes.

Random Comments on Patch notes 3.1

2009-02-26T09:33:00.003-07:00

Lots of new crazy interesting stuff coming out with patch 3.1. I highlighted a few of the hunter changes, but mostly stuck to the BM hunter stuff.

Highlighted Changes to Hunter Glyphs (the ones I choose to comment on anyway):

Glyph - Aimed Shot -- Reduces the cooldown of your Aimed Shot ability by 2 sec. (Old: Reduces the mana cost of your aimed shot ability by 20%)

Why?? well, I guess I didn't use this one anyway. That extra mana reduction was so nice before, especially when the reduction done with the hunter nerf.

Glyph of Snake Trap -- Snakes generated by your Snake Trap take 90% reduced damge from area of effect spells. (Old: Your Snake Trap creates 2 additional snakes)

I think mage AoE will still probably be able to take them out easily, but not as easily as before, this would be better for PvP I think (I could be wrong). Those darn pesky buggers.

Glyph of Explosive Trap *new* -- The periodic damage from your Explosive Trap can now be critical strikes.

Oooo, that's nice if you are an SV hunter.

More hunter changes (or at least those that I choose to comment on):

*New Skill* Call Stabled Pet - A pet of your choice busts out of its stable and joins you no matter where you are, replacing your current pet. Cannot be used in combat. Instant. 30 min cooldown. Requires Level 80.

Yay!!! 30 min cooldown isn't bad at all. The hinted to it being a lot worse. Boo on the level 80 requirement.

Improved Aspect of the Hawk now has a new spell effect.

What? What is it??? New spell effect, ah, too bad I don't have enough time to get on the PTR. Does anybody know what this is?

Duel Specing:

Characters level 40 and up may now use the dual-spec system.

So they decided to lower the level to be able to do this to level 40? That's cool, it'll help leveling (group vs solo) big time. So, you can level as a shadow priest, but still group holy. Not so bad I think. I'll like this for my DK, yes I will. I like unholy spec (because I like having a pet - and its been fun up to this point), but then I could switch over to frost easy enough to tank if someone needs it. That's nice

The cost to activate the ability is 1000 gold.

This was expected, a good money sink for the economy. I'm glad its not like 5000 gold or anything.

The ability no longer requires a Lexicon of Power.

This is nice for everybody, but those who thought they could make money with inscription. I don't have inscription, so good news to me, I wouldn't hold my breath though.

Switching specs has a 5-second cast time. It may not be used in combat, or in battlegrounds or arenas.

Fair enough, I still like the fact that you don't have to go to a capital city to do this.

There is no cooldown on switching specs.

Nice. That makes me happy.

New mounts:

Aquatic Riding Ray

- aquatic ray??? oh cool, now if you could make it so you don't have to breath while riding it. With something like this coming I just got my mind thinking about a whole expansion based on water. That would be soooo cool. Again, as long as they made an improved scuba helmet or gave somekind of buff or something so everybody doesn't drown. And also, if they bring Jar jar binks into the game with something like this??? /quit, I'm pretty confident that blizzard wouldn't do something so stupid.

"Mimiron's Head - Summons and dismisses a rideable mechanical gnome head. This is a very fast construction. This construction can only be summoned in Outland or Northrend."

Okay this is kind of creepy, a mechanical gnomes head??? As long as we don't make this a trend and started making other gnome body part mounts. Who came up with this idea anyway???

New Vanity Pets:

Lots of new cool pets, woot!! I know I only have 40 pets and I am not even close to being obsessed compared to some, but I'm so glad that more pets are being introduced. Woot! Here are a few of the pets that are coming out: Durotar Scorpion, Teldrassil Sproutling, Alarming Clockbot (that would be so cool if you could set this thing to remind you of something, lol), Enchanted Broom (a little reminiscent of Mickey Mouse from Fantasia if you ask me), Gorloc Orphan/Wolvar Orphan (yeah, this means they are adding northrend children's week quests - I suppose we didn't really think they weren't, right?), Sen'jin Fetish (I don't even know what the heck that's going to be), and last, but not least the Plump Turkey - don't pull him out during November.

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting

2009-02-25T12:13:00.004-07:00

Okay so there is a quest called Kicking Nass and something Manes (honestly don't quite remember the rest of it). In this quest you are suppose to go take an undead guy with you and whenever you are done killing a troll you kick Nass in the behind and make him get some hairs or something.

The best part about this is you get to have a /kick emote for awhile. So, we did some kung-fu fighting. Mostly Kydra was kicking my nass.

I'm still confused at how she does that in a dress. She got me right in the noggin.

Maybe the WoW killer MMO will be a martial arts one. That could be cool. Or maybe we could mix martial arts and The Oregon Trail. That'll teach us some history and have some cool kick-you-in-the-face kind of action. Something to ponder.

Future WoW killing MMO

2009-02-24T08:49:00.003-07:00

So, we're recently learned that Jeff Kaplan has given up his lead position with the World of Warcraft team to work on the secret new MMO that Blizzard is making. So, this leaves so much room for speculation. Hmmmm....

Most people think this means World of Starcraft, or the Universe of Starcraft (which I think sounds better) and there are just endless possibilities with this. Yes the Sci-fi MMO has already been done, and many argue, not very well. But when has Blizzard ever done anything haphazardly. I think could make a sci-fi MMO be freaking amazing. They wouldn't develop the game if they couldn't. But someone on twitter told me that they heard from this guy who heard from this other guy who... well you get the picture, that Blizzard's new MMO won't be based on any of their current games. Really? I don't know.

So, if that's the case what does that leave us with? Bliz can't do another fantasy because that would pull away from the WoW crowd unless its a completely different spin.

They could do some kind of vampire MMO? /ponders the notion... Naw, that would be too close to Twilight and all of those silly Edward lovers out there.

Could it be historical? No, that makes me die of boredom just suggesting such as ridiculous notion. Sci-fi still sounds good if you ask me. The mounts would be awesome. ooOOoo we could do some robotech or firefly based MMO. I'll have to ponder that.

But what are they really doing???? Oh, I'm dying to know. They would have to do something completely different than WoW of course. I really haven't tried any of the other MMOs out there, so I don't even know what has already been done. WoW was my first and so far only MMO. And of course we probably won't know for another 5 years or so.

So, what are your speculations about this future secret Blizzard MMO? Do you think it will really be a WoW killer?

Current Projects in WoW

2009-02-23T08:41:00.002-07:00

Just thought I'd quickly say what I'm doing in the game these days. I have 3 main projects. The first one is to level to 80 (yes I'm not level 80 yet). I know only work on leveling my main (my dwarf hunter) when my wife is playing. So, we're doing pretty good, we're both level 78 now... plugging along.

When I'm not playing with my wife I have two projects going. I'm trying to level my DeathKnight alt as a farming alt. At least that was the idea initially. I'm finding myself really enjoying the DK class. I speced unholy so that I could have a pet. The ghoul might not be as lovable as Mungula my Gorilla, but its comforting to have someone to hang out with, even if it stinks from decay.

My other project is the one everybody else has, to make money. Right now I really want to get enough gold to help fund my wife's epic flying training. When you haven't had an epic flying mount you don't know what you are missing, but when you have had one, you don't ever want to go back.

I'm still obcessed with mounts (I'm up to 60 now) and vanity pets (up to 40). I still have a lot of mounts to get, but there all going to take some work and/or luck. And I just need to get off my butt and look up which vanity pets I'm missing. Oh, and whenever there is a holiday I also get obcessed with that.

I'm still not raiding, so when I hear all of your talk about this 10 man or that 25 man in twitter or on the podcasts I'm pretty confused cause I have no idea what you are talking about. Pretty sad I know, but thus is life.

Anyway, what are your current WoW projects?

I've been tagged - 6th Screenshot

2009-02-20T17:36:00.009-07:00

So, I got tagged by @Brigwyn who writes a lovely blog entitled The Hunting Lodge. I have to put a screen shot here, but not just any screen shot. No, it has to be much more random than that. You have to look through your old screen shots and pull out the 6th screen shots.

Now I've gone through a few computers, well, not a bunch. But when looking through this computer this is what I found as the 6th screen shot:

Here we are showing off our Vampire Batlings that we got in during Halloween. I think the shaman is my cousin, I'm not sure what we were doing with him. This was just a little bit before WotLK came out (obviously) and we were working on leveling Kydra as quickly as we could. We finally got to the point where our mains were the same level, as it should be. Oh, and I had only recently tamed my gorilla, Mungula. So, this was after 3.0.

However, I realized that maybe I should look at my older computer (more authentic, more vintage). So, this was the screen shot on my older computer:

Whoa, this is a random pic, back from August 2007. Still working on leveling my hunter to 70. I was in the middle of Nagrand (can't you tell), and I'm apparently floating in the middle of a ravine. The computer was being stupid, you couldn't see the bridge I was standing on. So, what does any decent WoW player do when something weird happens? We take a screen shot, so there you go.

Oh, who should I tag????... (1 day later) Couldn't make up my mind, but here goes: I'm tagging Kate & Johnathon at Tastes Like Lint and GamingDiva at ... GamingDiva.

Happy hunting.

PvP vs PvE

2009-02-20T11:59:00.003-07:00

So, we had a debate on twitter a little while ago. It was the old PvP versus PvE server argument. I play on a PvP server, mostly because that was the server my brothers were playing on when I got started. So, I didn't really have a choice, I'm guessing that a lot of people have similar situations, you play on your friend's server when you get started. Its not till later (or right away in my brother-in-law's case) that you venture into other realms and test the waters.

So, lets say you just started playing world of warcraft. What are the pros and cons of the different realms.

PvE

Pros
You don't have to watch your back constantly.
You can PvP in controlled settings.
No camping. Nobody is forcing you to play an alt.
You can have a horde and an alliance character on the same server.
Farming in peace.

Cons
Not as exciting. (that can probably be argued).
You don't get the real feeling that you are at war with the other faction (heck you can have an alt of the other faction - which might be a pro instead of a con)
fluff fluff fluff (at least according to those on PvP servers)
Get made fun by friends that you are on a carebear server (yes, that's what my guild calls it).

PvP

Pros
Okay sometimes it is fun to gank other players, especially if you had a bad day.
You really really hate the other faction which feeds in any RP you want to do.
Yes you have to watch your back, but that makes it more exciting.
You can make fun of your PvE friends.
More PvP skirmishes through out Azeroth.
The feeling you get when someone tried to gank you and you totally owned them!!!

Cons
Farming can suck.
Did I mention getting camped by some 14 year old undead rogue???
Sometimes you might decide to leave a zone because their is a jerk going around on a killing spree.
Running back from the grave yard, again.
Death Knights (unless you are one).

Did I miss anything? Any other Pros or Cons?

When Are We Too Old To Play?

2009-02-19T08:26:00.004-07:00

So, I had been wondering when I was going to give up on WoW or MMOs in general. I'm an adult and adults aren't suppose to play games like this, right? For some reason I was using my parents and in-laws to gauge what I would be like when I got to their age. What would I enjoy or do? Part of me thought, well, they don't play video games so eventually I probably won't either.

However, they didn't grow up with video games either. They did grow up with TV and they still do that. So, why would I eventually stop doing something that I grew up with? We aren't the previous generation. We evolve.

So, now I realize that I probably won't grow out of this form of entertainment. I like it a lot more than TV because its more interactive and more social. If I were a betting man I would bet that our brains do a whole lot more when we are playing video games than when we are watching TV. We have to think, make decisions, plan, strategize, etc, etc. When you watch TV you have to ... sit, and ... watch. We also do more socializing with MMOs. We have guilds, we play with friends, family, etc. We meet new people, make new connections. That doesn't happen when you watch TV either.

Don't get me wrong, I love TV. But I really only watch my favorite shows and nothing else (The Office, Scrubs, LOST, Grey's Anatomy, Simpsons). But I'd rather watch my favorite shows while playing WoW (unless its a new episode of LOST then everything stops).

Sorry about the TV tangent. Anyway, So, when I'm old and grey I'll proably still be playing some kind of MMO. Weather that may be Starcraft Universe 3 or World or World of Warcraft 2 I don't know. But I'm not likely to stop playing just because I reached my parents age. I may play less because of more family responsiblities, but I think in the years to come we'll see the average age of people who play MMOs will go up. Do you think you'll still be playing MMOs in 10 years?

WoW addons, at least what I use

2009-02-18T10:36:00.005-07:00

I thought that I'd make a list of my addons to give other people suggestions, but to also get some ideas (via comments) of what other people like for addons. I'm sure that I'm missing something, but I'm pretty happy with what I have right now. Here are the addons I use the most with a link to where you can download them.

Auctioneer
If you like making money on the auction house then this is just mandatory.

PetEmote
I love this mod, if gives your pet a voice, weather its a pet for hunters, a demon for locks, or a ghoul for DKs. This mod is especially important I would imagine if you roleplay.

SmartBuff
I'm an idiot. If I don't have something to remind me to buff up, I'll forget. Mind you who's a hunter going to buff, but my DK's bone shield thing is constantly going up. So this is mostly for my alts. My wife loves this mod with her mage.

SexyMap
Just added this one, I'm not sure of all the features besides the sexy animation that is around the minimap.

Cartographer
Nice map mod, I love that it includes the dungeon maps. There is a lot of features of this mod that I don't utilize. Sad I know.

Quest Helper
This little mod has changes all of our lives. Of course in Northrend it doesn't always get it right. Can't always trust Quest Helper (like the time it told us to go to Nagrand to assassinate that one guy instead of Borean Tundra /shakes his head at his own stupidity).

Gatherer
If you do any flower picking *herbalism*, or mining, this is a must for you.

Kharthus's Hunter Timers
This mod keeps track of timers for me. Like my serpent sting, lets me know when I last put it own and how soon I'll need to refresh it.

ItemRack
This is a nice little mod that will let you change your outfit quickly. I haven't had much use for it, but someday I'm going to level that Druid, and by golly I'm going to have at least a couple sets of gear on me. This mod (or one similiar to it) will especially be helpful when we get into duel specing (unless Blizz adds some feature to the game like the hinted about).

Minipet
This mod will remind you to pull out one of you noncombat pets, and gives you a button to do so, randomly. I'm a dork, I love this mod!

Mountiful
Basically the same randomness of Minipet, but with your mounts. As stated in previous posts, You get to the point where if you have too many mounts (I have 60 now!) then you can't fit all of them into a macro *even if you are using numbers instead of the names of the mounts*.

Omen Threat Meter
Gotta keep your aggro down. I've heard it said, if you aren't being forced to feign death then you are dpsing enough. Here is your aggro meter so you can make sure that you don't pull from the main tank.

SKG *suicide kings*
This is our guilds current system for distributing loot. Its designed for a casual guild, but I think we are going to more of a traditional DKP system sometime in the future. I for one like SK more because I'm more casual and I'm not punished for it.

Deadly Boss Mods
I love this mod, it helps out in all of those nasty boss fights. It gives you useful stuff, like telling you when the next phase of the fight is coming up, when you are suppose to spread out, when are suppose to hold still, etc, etc. All of that junk. "Don't move - Flames!"

ViperWatch
This is a Hunter only mod that gives us a little reminder to turn your Aspect of the Viper on when your mana is down and turn it off when your mana is back up. I don't know how many times I would forget to turn the d@mn thing off!!! The funny thing is the sound that they use for this particular reminder is the same sound when you failed a quest, so at first I was always thinking, "crap I failed something, what did I do". But now I'm use to it so it's no big deal. This is a must if you are a hunter, not so much if you aren't. There is another one called ViperNotify. It looks like its more popular according to Curse Gaming, but I haven't tried it out.

Little Black Book
I just got this and I haven't played with it yet. This is particularly nice to have on a PvP server. It is a kill-on-sight mod that keeps track of the Horde (or Alliance) characters that have killed you, it puts them on a list. I think its suppose to let you know when you are in the vicinity of someone on that list so you can kill them. I only got it recently (after being ganked by at stupid level 80 DK when I was minding my own business). But I think if you are on a PvP server an addon like this is a must. If anybody out there has a kill-on-sight mod that they love, please do share.

Is there anything I'm missing? I'm sure there is a uber mod that I should have and I don't at this point. I'm open to suggestions. I'm also wondering if there are any good mods spedifically for Death Knights (I've been Playing Elliahna a lot these days). Let me know what mods you like and what they are good for.

Holidays & Achievements

2009-02-17T09:30:00.002-07:00

So, another Holiday has come and gone. And no new title... /sigh. Couldn't Pity any Fools in Naxx. So, I thought that I'd have to wait 1 year from this point to my Violet Proto Drake, but it turns out that the Brewfest achievements take an entire year on their own because of the Brew of the Year achievement. That's right, for this achievement you have to join the brew of the month club and taste a new brew which comes... once a month. So, if you didn't do it last year then the best you can hope for is to start it this next Brewfest holiday. Which means that most of us won't be completing the "What a Long, Strange Trips Its Been" achievement till Oct 2010!!! Many of us might not even be playing WoW by then (they'll have already launched world of starcraft or something).

I can't get too mad about the achievements. For me, it has added a lot to the game. There is something more to work for other than leveling and new gear. My wife and I have really enjoyed the holiday activities, but were never before properly motivated to participate (as was everybody else). If anything these holiday meta achievements has given us proper motivation to get to level 80 before Children's Week arrives

Duel spec news regarding Hunters

2009-02-12T12:48:00.004-07:00

Just read an interview with Ghostcrawler where he tells us all about duel specing (Talent Spec Q&A). Interesting stuff.

This is what GC had to say about hunters in regards to duel-specing:

Nethaera: What about hunters? Often their pet talents are set up to match the talents of the hunter. Will they be able to switch their pet specs as well?
Ghostcrawler: We will wipe the pet talents. However we are going to remove the respec cost for pet talents so that players won’t feel like they need to jump through an additional hoop to respec their pet. In addition, we are going to provide hunters a new core ability to let them remotely access their stable on a long cooldown. This way if their exotic pet heads off to the stable, they will be able to get a different pet. We hope to be able to discuss this new spell in more detail when we get a little further along.

Sounds like you are going to have to respec your pet every time, but for free. Pain in the butt to have to do that constantly, but more flexibility. I would have liked to see a way that you could save at least 2 different specs for your pets where all you have to do is hit a button to switch.

As for this new ability to remotely get your pets from the stables? That is awesome, no longer will Locks be able to tease me with their summon demon spell. Too bad it has a long cool down time. It would be nice to be able to pull out the Gorilla when ever you happened to need an off tank in an instance. I don't know how many times this would have been useful in the past.

One other thing:

Nethaera: Will players be confined to only setting up two specs?
Ghostcrawler: We will be launching the feature with just two specs, but depending on how we feel it works out, we might consider additional specs in the future.

More than 2 specs in the future??? Are you serious? Part of me thinks that would be cool, but then another part of me thinks it sucks. Why, because we're losing our individuality of we can every spec we ever dreamed of. Even with that said, I'm excited to have 2 specs. That way I can stay a BM hunter and do some trap dancing to boot! So, I may be losing my uniqueness, but I'll fun in the process.

WoW and Marriage

2009-02-12T08:30:00.003-07:00

Over the weekend I saw an add in Facebook for a survey for people who play WoW and are married. Since I fit this category I decided to do the survey (I use to do surveys as a college job, I hated it, but now occasionally I'll give in because I know how badly it sucks to get people to take them.)

Well, having worked in telemarketing, I can see a biased survey a mile away. I wouldn't say they were asking leading questions (which companies are notorious for); however, the questions it did ask were very interesting. You could tell that this was going to be one of those "look how awful WoW is" or "WoW is destroying society as a whole" studies. After asking demographic questions the online survey asked things like "how often do you fight with your spouse because of MMOs".

Some of the questions just were ridiculous (maybe they apply to some, but not to me). They asked how often you preferred to play MMOs instead of being intimate with your spouse. Come one guys, I like playing WoW and all, but I'll leave my toon stranded with mobs all around given the choice between that and woopie. I suppose that we could compromise and RP it. Well, no that wouldn't be the same...

There were other questions that pointed to the great addictiveness of MMOs. I will admit, I'm addicted to WoW. But I'm not having withdrawals from it when I'm not playing. "Do you get depressed and anxious when you are not playing MMOs?", no, not really, I might be thinking about what I want to do on this toon or another, but I'm not a basketcase just because I'm not playing.

I think that most of us enjoy the game or we wouldn't be playing it, or reading about it on-line. Are we a little obsessed? Probably. Are there people more obsessed with Twilight? Yes. I won't even tell you how many times my sister-in-laws have read the series (but its in the double digits now). Is a little obsession such a bad thing? As long as you keep it under control and its not hurting anybody.

So, does WoW ruin marriages? I suppose it could if someone is being stupid. In my opinion, if WoW was a major factor into destroying someone's marriage then there are much deeper problems than the game. It seems really stupid to blame World of Warcraft. Its my guess that if WoW ruined your life, it could have easily been something else in its place.

Now, I do admit that when I first started playing WoW I neglected my family a little too much. My wife wasn't too pleased when I would play half a Saturday. But I've gotten that under control. Now I put my family first and only play when the kids are asleep. Plus, last summer we got a second computer and a second account. Now in the evenings I explore Northrend with my wife (or work on achievements during one of the holidays). So, now its a way for us to spend time with each other. Should we probably try to do more outside of the house? Yes, however, what are you going to do when the kids are asleep anyway? We're kind of stuck here. So, we can watch TV, play board games, fight mobs on WoW, play the guitar, examine my penny collection, etc etc. WoW (and watching grey's anatomy or Lost) often wins out.

Wow, that was a lot of rambling. So, has WoW affected your relationships for good or bad?

Love is in the Air

2009-02-11T08:44:00.004-07:00

Alright is that time again, that's right, Valentine's Day (well, not quite yet). But the Valentines Holiday in WoW has began. The guild that I've seen so far is at WoWInsider. WoWhead has also post their guide. So far I just started it this morning myself. You go buy your self perfume or cologne and dowse yourself. Then you go hit on the guards (female guards in IF were difficult to find. Go talk to the lady by the tailor trainer.) There are a bunch of achievements you get to do. And you only have till Feb 16th (at least that's what someone told me on twitter).

If you complete all of the achievements for Love is in the Air, then you get a meta achievement with a title: Fool For Love. And who wouldn't want "The Love Fool" title, I mean come on?? Pull that out at parties to impress the ladies (or at least the lady guards if you can find one).

Pretty much my experience so far has been logging on once an hour to get your new gifts of adoration (actually my wife has been doing this for me while I'm at work). You'll get the things you need to complete the many little achievements. Oh, and it took me a while to discover that Gifts of Adoration (needed for all achievements, but particularly for: Nation of Adoration(Alliance) or Nation of Adoration(Horde)) okay for this you need to go to vendors not guards. I thought Darnassus was broken for a long time until a twitter friend pointed me to the light (or rather... a vendor).

Oh and you need to be at least level 75 to get the meta achievement because you have to go into dungeons for I Pitied the Fool and My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose. I still need to do those ones myself. Anyway, happy valentine, good luck.

Big Doggy Down

2009-02-10T08:29:00.007-07:00

I'm sure everybody else and their dog (wow you let your dog play WoW?) has downed Omen, but we finally did it recently.

For those of you who don't know who Omen is (Ryan, or Dave). Omen a 2 headed dog that's bigger than a monster truck that only appears during the Lunar Festival. Killing this big hairy beasts is required for Elune's Blessing, which is need to complete the meta achievement To Honor One's Elders, which is how you get your "Elder" title and puts you one step closer to finishing the What A Long, Strange Trips It's Been achievement.

We decided to not even try for the Lunar Festival achievement this year because we're only lvl 77 and there is no way we're going to hit 80 before Feb 14. You see, in order for you to get the Elders of the Dungeons achievement you must be level 80, because one of the Elders is chillin' in a heroic dungeon. I was very upset. I could have made my toon look like a missionary.

Well, anyway, my sister-in-law really wanted to get the achievement so we decided to kill Omen anyway, anyway (could I use that word more???). So, we got our group together from our guild and made our way to Moonglade (we tried to get there by initiation, but we weren't smart enough - but we did figure it out after we were completely done, /facepalm). One of our guildies told us to rush over there because someone else already summoned the dog.

So, we rushed over to see the battle already unfolding. For awhile we were fighting the big dog right along side with a bunch of horde. It doesn't matter who taps him, as long as you are around to stand over his dead body once he's... well, dead. We were all trying to kill him. Oh my gosh, he took forever to kill, like 20 minutes or something.

I think we accidentally killed the horde in the process, I kept seeing HK:Scout, HK:Private, etc, popping up on my screen. Maybe I used multi-shot once too many times, maybe my gorilla just didn't like the smell of the Horde. I don't know, but we ended up killing all of them. We could have used their help gunning Omen down.

Our clothies also died a lot, but since the graveyard is like, right there, it wasn't a big deal (which is easy for me to say because I did die, thus didn't have to worry about the repair bill). You see we did those horde a favor, cutting down their repair bill (I'm guessing that they probably didn't see it that way).

Anyway, lots of fun, kicks and giggles. I love the holiday stuff, it breaks up the monotony. Not that the game is boring, but I love world events nonetheless. Oh, I think I got a little too happy with the Print Screen button.

Dave's Huntering Guide - Pet Management

2009-02-09T08:31:00.003-07:00

Okay Dave, now that you've chosen a pet of sorts (remember you can have up to 5 now), its time to learn how to use him (or her - if your pet is a girl).

With the new expansion several things have changed. All pets now have a growl (which they could have before unless you were being really silly and didn't train it). All pets have a fear, they all have a focus dump (what else would you do with all of that focus coming out your ears), and last but certainly not least, they have their nifty talent based on their pet family.

You'll also get several pet abilities when use up your pets talents in his (or her) given pet tree. Your tenacity pets will have lots of cool stuff that will help them hold aggro better, like taunt. They also have some intervening abilities that can save your tank, or a clothie's butt if needs be. Ferocity pets have some neat things that will help them stay alive longer, like Lick Your Wounds, and a spell that will Rez them with full health (Heart of the Phoenix) which currently seems to be bugged.

Speaking of bugs, sometimes your pet will automatically turn on the abilities. You know when their spell glows, that means its suppose to go off whenever the cool down is up and your pet has enough focus. Well, some abilities were not meant to go together. For example: the pet's fear spell was not meant to be put up the same time as growl. You have an ability that increases your pet's aggro and one that decreases your pet's aggro. What generally happens is that the mob gets so confused as to weather or not he wants to attack your pet that he gets extra angry and he takes it out on you. If you have this problem generally you be thinking your pet is stupid and can't seem to hold the aggro to save your life. Your pet is not stupid, he just doesn't know what to do, he needs you to tell him.

Some people have set up macros to turn off the pet's fear ability, but I find if I just drag the pet spell down to the his ability bar that I can keep an eye on it and make sure that its off when I want it to be off, and on when I want it to be on.

Basic rule of thumb, if you are soloing and you want your pet to take the beating, then turn your pet's fear off, leave your growl on. If you are in an instance/raid, do the opposite. I know most people are thinking, duh. Well, I'm trying to state the obvious... just in case.

Now when do you want to use use passive/defensive/aggressive. Well, when you are in an instance you will almost always want your pet on passive. You get yourself into all sorts of trouble with your pet on defensive and especially on aggressive. If your goal is to wipe your instance/raid then by all means put your pet on aggressive. You're pet will get all excited an pull every mob in a two mile radius. When you realize your mishap your pet will come running all excited lolling his/her tongue all over the place (with about 20 mobs following). If you have your pet on defensive anything that attacks you with range will get your pets attention, usually also a bad idea. Best to be on passive for those situations. Now when I'm leveling I like to keep my pet on defensive so I don't have to tell him everything to do. And my pet reacts quicker than I do. Now there are only a few times that I would actually put my pet on aggressive. The best is if you are fighting rogues. Your pet can find rogues quicker than you can and he can help you sniff them out. Sometimes I leave them on aggressive if I want to clean out an area in a low zone while I'm farming. Oh, and also when I'm mad and want to cause a wipe for my raid (okay, I've never actually done that, but if I were mad I know how I could get everybody killed quickly, then you just feign death - this doesn't win friends or influence people, but if you are pissed at a pug it might be entertaining).

Well, that's all for now. Let me know if I missed anything.

Hunter Changes 3.1.0

2009-02-06T11:46:00.003-07:00

I know there's a lot of talk about the changes coming out on patch 3.1.o with some interesting changes for hunters.

I want to look at that and give my opinion (if it counts for a whole lot of anything):

Consumable ammunition has been removed from the game. Arrows and bullets no longer stack, but are not consumed. Ranged attack speed bonus gained from quivers and ammo bags will be preserved in a different capacity.

Yeah for bag Space!!! /cheers. I run out of space so stinkin' quickly in my bags because I have an ammo bag and I have to carry all of my engineering junk around with me in my toolbox (lol, irl I never use anything from a toolbox, but then I suppose in real life I've never been hunting either). Anyway, yay for bag space, but it seems a little unrealistic... I mean, we just get this magical arrow/bullet thing? How can we justify this in the RP servers? But all and all I'm happy for the increase in bag space. Now we just need to throw a bone for those warlocks and make soul shards stackable once and for all.

A new tier of hunter pet talents have been added. In particular, this allows Beastmaster hunters to improve their damage per second (DPS) with their 51 point talent.

This is cool, mostly because I'm still a BM hunter. I hope that we get more bones thrown to us for that stupid steady shot nerf we recently got. I don't really have a lot to say about this, but I'm wondering if the Tenacity tree is going to add DPS as well, or give them better pet tanking stuff. I love the idea of pet tanking even though most people scouf at me when I bring it up (not my wife though, she loves me).

Hunting Party – this talent has been reduced to 3 ranks and also grants a passive bonus to the hunter.

Meh, don't have a clue about this.

Piercing Shots – this talent has been changed. Your Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of damage dealt for 8 sec.

Meh... You know I really should look into the other specs for hunters, lol.

Sniper Training – this talent has been changed. After standing still for 6 sec, you gain a 2/4/6% damage bonus to Steady, Aimed and Explosive Shot.

This seems cool, but haven't been a MS hunter for a long time (back in the BC days), so I'm not very helpful here either.

We are also looking to add additional trap functionality to Survival.

I love traps (even if my traps as a BM hunter suck). When I went MS back in the day I had the rest of my point down the SV tree, why? So, I could get improved traps cause I thought they were cool. It turns out that I didn't do enough 5 man raids to make it worth my time, but I still thought they were cool. Here BRK's discussion about trap dancing almost made switch over to SV because it sounded like a lot of fun. But then I realized "you idiot, why would you want to make the switch when you aren't even 80 yet???". So, I didn't switch.

So, yay for bag space and a new pet talent tier!

Cold Weather Flying - Here we come!

2009-02-05T08:16:00.005-07:00

Finally!!! I get to fly again. No more do I have to sneak over to the Outlands to mount up and fly about. I got my cold weather training last night and I can start breaking out my epic flying mounts. Now I need to farm like crazy to help get Kydra her epic flying training. I care a lot more than she does. But she hasn't yet experienced the epicness of epic flying (maybe should have used a different adjective, getting a little redundant).

So, I'm up to 54 mounts right now, I just found out from twitter friends that I could buy all the nether drakes. I thought I only got my free one. So, I'm going to do that once I get my money up. Why would I want to do that seeing how I already have my 50 mount achievement (Leading the Cavalry). Well, I don't have a good answer for that. It is really fun to use a random mount add on (I use Mountiful) and you never know what mount you'll use. Many people in the guild (including my brother) think I'm a little silly with my obsession with mounts. They're probably (most likely) right. I got him convinced that its what I like to do when I'm not leveling with my wife, but truthfully, I would do it anyway.

I just like to collect things I suppose. When I was in high school I was really into collectible Star Wars cards. I spent hundreds of dollars on those stupid things, and now they are just collecting dust. When I was even younger I collected pennies. I have several Indian head ones and one that goes all the way back to the 1880's. Wow, information you probably don't care about. But what do you collect?

I really like getting vanity pets as well, but I've been lazy about doing that lately. I'm still at 39 vanity pets. Need 11 more to get my skunk. Wouldn't want that for a mount, that's for sure.

Guide to playing WoW with Children

2009-02-03T09:07:00.010-07:00

Does anybody else have children? Okay, here's your guide to playing while you have a child or infant on your lap.

First of all, you need to master the art of playing one handed. You would be amazed what you can do with only the mouse, nothing else. All moving, spells, etc can be done with the mouse. Now, mind you, its pretty much impossible to do more than one thing at the same time. (macros help). You'll just have to get use to this. However, if you get yourself in the right direction and press the Num Lock key then you'll keep going thus freeing your one (and only) hand to do many other things (but beware, you might run into a tree, wall, or a big enemy town, or run off a cliff).

Sometimes it becomes mandatory to use both hands (like when you have to hold shift down and click something). This can become pretty tricky. It's possible with a sleeping infant, you can lean in and hold down a lower key (like Ctrl, Alt, Shift, etc) and the press the the mouse button. I find that if I do this when they are awake this give them the perfect opportunity to attack the keyboard and droll everywhere, and cause your character to go into hysterics.

If someone whispers to you and you want to reply, I'm afraid you'll just have to stop everything and type one handed. One handed typing isn't so bad, oh sure it takes your typing speed from 60-70 words per minute down to 2-3 wpm. But you have an excuse, "sry, got baby boy, I slow" Oh and grammar goes out the window because who cares about grammar when you can only get out 3 words anyway. Its just better to get a microphone and some software like Ventrillo, TeamSpeak, or whatever your guild likes (not the in game voice chat, no one uses that). Make sure its voice attivated or you defeat the purpose.

And if anything else happens while you are typing in reply to someone, don't have many options, you can either press enter mid thought and use your mouse (which will confuse people, but with your poor grammar they already think there is something seriously wrong with you) or you can, well, you could /lie down and die. If its a mob that's interrupting my conversation then its not a big deal. If its a undead rogue, then usually lay down and die is the more likely option (not that it was an option).

Which brings me to my next point. PvP sucks one-handed. Unless you are some kind of amazing PvP god, its not likely to happen when you have a baby on your lap. Don't try, you'll get pissed off and start swearing and then later feel really bad because you swore like a sailor with your baby on your lap, hoping that they aren't adding all of your colorful words to their blossoming vocabulary. And you'll likely embarass yourself with your voice attivated ventrillo program, your guild will be shocked and dismayed.

Raids, don't really work either, but we've done them before. Don't tell our guild.

Also, if someone asks why you won't stop jumping, don't bother explaining that your toddler thinks its really neat to make your avatar move. Just make something up, like its the new thing in IronForge, or you've taken it upon yourself to add the new dance that Blizz keeps talking about or some junk. Most likely you won't have time to type it one-handed anyway.

You should also expect to have random windows pop up (like your talents, or the character screen, etc), this is normal. Don't panic.

And last, but not least, be prepared for the occasional disconnect. My daughter can manage to turn off the computer with like 2 buttons. Kids are amazing.

Probably what you should do is focus your attention on your child while they are awake and play WoW when they are asleep and accept the fact that parenting is causing you to be a casual player. Remeber you are in company. For those who don't have children, bask in your bliss, but remember, your day will come.

Mushroom Hopping

2009-02-02T08:31:00.004-07:00

Well, I was running to the flightmaster on top of the mushroom town in Zangermarsh on my level 63 Death knight. And for some reason my mouse button got stuck or something and I just kept running. I thought that I was going to promptly fall to my death and have to run back to my body. I think (I'm already dead as a death knight so I'm not quite sure how that works, but we'll leave that alone.)

Anyway, I didn't die, I landed on top of another mushroom, so I spent some time mushroom hopping. I felt a little like Mario.

Fishing with the DKs

2009-01-30T09:11:00.001-07:00

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

2009-01-29T09:24:00.001-07:00

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?

2009-01-28T18:58:00.006-07:00

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

2009-01-27T09:50:00.001-07:00

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

2009-01-26T08:32:00.001-07:00

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?

2009-01-24T13:51:00.001-07:00

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

2009-01-23T13:10:00.001-07:00

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

2009-01-22T08:07:00.001-07:00

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

2009-01-21T08:49:00.001-07:00

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

2009-01-20T09:02:00.002-07:00

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

2009-01-19T10:52:00.001-07:00

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

2009-01-18T18:24:00.002-07:00

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

2009-01-16T12:39:00.003-07:00

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!

2009-01-13T23:46:00.004-07:00

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

2009-01-11T10:56:00.002-07:00

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

2009-01-01T18:33:00.003-07:00

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.

Holidays almost over

2008-12-30T21:38:00.001-07:00

Sorry about the lack of posts. The holidays have kind of taken over around here. Still playin' WoW, but I'm sure all of you are way beyond me (hence the "casual player blog"). I recently hit level 74. I'm still leveling with my wife and only when the kids are asleep. So, when I play solo I've been working on making money and rep. I'm going for cross-faction mounts, which pretty much means questing in newbie zones. Just need to figure out how to get the rep with those darn gnomes.

Aspect of a Viper Mod!

2008-12-20T10:10:00.003-07:00

Its about time! Us hunters who forget to look up to see what aspect we are in finally have a mod to save us!!

Have you been in a raid/instance, run out of mana? You switch to aspect of a viper to get your mana back only to find 30 minutes later YOUR STILL IN ASPECT of a VIPER???!!!! Oh @#$@!, maybe you haven't done that before but I have, felt really stupid. /facepalm.

Now we have an answer: ViperWatch! It keeps an eye on your mana and when your mana gets to a predetermined level it reminds you to switch and when your mana is back up it kindly reminds you to switch back to aspect of a dragonhawk (or if you are a slow leveler like myself - aspect of a hawk). No more embarrasing moments. As long as you keep growl of your pet and don't ramdomly have him pull new mobs to your group.

The Instance

2008-12-19T08:53:00.003-07:00

So, if you like following world of warcraft stuff then HERE is the PODCAST for you!!! This is by far the best WoW podcast out there, and I'm dorky enough to listen to about 5 of them. So, click here and check it out. You can find the instance also on itunes.

Dual specing

2008-12-18T08:30:00.002-07:00

So, I'm really excited about this whole dual-specing thing, but a little bummed at the same time. Why am I excited? I can have improved traps when I need them (survival hunter) and then I can be awesome dps, even after the great hunter nerf, (BM, MS hunters). I can have my cake and eat it to!

But..... is Blizzard making us all the same???? Are we utterly going to lose our uniqueness in the world of warcraft? They already made it so you can take anybody you want to a raid. No need for a particular class for a particular fight (like doing the demon dude in Kara without a lock - or the hawkdragon guy in ZA without a mage). Now, we're losing the uniqueness about how we spec. Sooner or later we'll all be dressing the same (well, maybe not that).

All in all, I'm still excited about it. What do you think?

nothing new to you

2008-12-15T08:38:00.001-07:00

So, a big shout out to Ryan for hitting 50 with his main toon. OOooOOooOOo. When an altoholic hits such accomplishments it needs to be let known. lol, Ryan in 5 levels you can get yourself a DK, aren't you so excited???

Anyway, I'm pretty boring lately. While everybody is now talking about 80 level content I'm still level 73, no big deal. I'm not actually very upset. All you people are obcessed, lol. I've been trying to level my professions for my DK to make gold! So, I spent the morning running around killing raptors for leather and got my skinning skills up to 204 I think. Wow, this is so boring, lol.

Winter Break

2008-12-08T07:42:00.001-07:00

So, while everybody is playing more and more I'm playing less and less. Do I like the game less than I use to? No. Does a father of 3 have time to do anything besides working and Christmas preparation at this time of year? No, not really. So, my toon is still at 73, and hasn't budged since I posted last. You have to have priorities right?

So, all of this talk about WoW addiction and it being evil makes me laugh. You can do studies and show that anything is addictive. Heck reading books, watching TV, other video games, taking walks, running through sprinklers, giving dogs baths, eating old hard candies from nursing homes, etc etc could be labled addictive if you got carried away. So, what's the solution? Balance. I do admit I'm probably addicted, but its not effecting my life too much I don't think. I am able to stop playing when real life gets in the way. I mean really, my family and my job are more important and should come first. Do I always put them first? Well, no, but I'm a lot better than I was a year or two ago. I think my whole guild is going to hit 80 before I do, and that's fine. I'll get there sooner or later.

level 73

2008-12-04T08:36:00.001-07:00

73!!!! lol
yeah, while everybody is writing about level 80, I hit 73. But that's okay, that means I'm not playing as much as they are which is a good healthy thing. Now the fact that I'm not to far off from getting my achievement for catching 500 fish leaves something to be said. I have my fishing all the way up to 330. Wooo Hoooo! lol Why do I care? I don't know, I don't play my with my mountain lion who would eat fish anymore. The Gorilla doesn't care for it too much. He's rather have a bananna or some fungus or something. If I was a hardcore player I would be a geek about getting all of my achievements up and all of my secondary professions up. So, this is my casual playerness being geeky but somewhat muffled I guess.

I'm back

2008-12-01T08:52:00.001-07:00

Most people probably thought that this Thanksgiving weekend was a perfect time to get a little bit farther to 80 (or get some gear for you people who are already 80). Well, I didn't touch my Hunter at all this weekend. He's a whooping level 72. But I wasn't home and I don't like playing my main anywhere but on my home computer. I don't have my macros on other computers and now that I have... a lot of macros... maybe too much? idk. But I don't like playing without them anymore. So, I leveled my wife's druid all the way to 24 (I know I know, I'm bad@ass).

My wife and I finally got back to our DKs and finished the beginning quests. They are awesome. I don't want to give any spoilers away (sorry Ryan), but even if you are not planning on rolling a death knight, I would still suggest doing the beginning quests at least then make them your bank alt or something. It was just too cool of a story line.

Anyway, I'm back for all of you thousand of readers (ha ha).

too poor for epicly uber mounts

2008-11-24T08:36:00.001-07:00

Well, I'm kind of stagnant at lvl 72 right now. This weekend was too busy to play (BYU vs UofU football game, family thanksgiving dinner, etc etc). I did buy myself an Armored Bear Mount which doesn't do anything that special and only cost like 700 gold or so. But in my casual pathetic attempt to get every mount in the game I had to do it sooner or later. I don't know if I'll ever be able to get the Mammoth /cry. Too poor, 20k gold, it took me like a month to come up with 5k gold for my epic flying training (that was before the days of 25 dailies per day though). Maybe I should worry more about leveling before I focus so much on trying to get the gold for these mounts.

BTW, is there a flying mount that takes passengers? It seems like a gnome flying machine would be perfect for the job. I guess I should stop being lazy and find out myself.

On a complete different random subject, I've been finding myself wanting to do RPing more and more, but all of my family on friends are on a regular server. Should I just roll a toon on a RP server? I hate having to start from scratch, but then if its all about RPing then maybe it wouldn't be a big deal (because its all about the story anyway, right?). Well, maybe I should stop rambling and get to work since I'm at work.

hunter pets - What's in your stable?

2008-11-20T10:30:00.002-07:00

So,
As a hunter with new stable slots I got all giddy with excitement. What new wild and crazy pets will I get. Well, this is what's in my stable at the moment:

level 70 cat (mountain lion from southshore) ShereKahn
level 71 gorilla Munula
level 70 Devilsaur Kharon
level 69 Rhino (unnamed)
level 67 Slithid Twitch

Now, the gorilla is by far my favorite pet. My wife agrees, she can actually not die from doing AOE spells. That's doesn't mean that the gorilla can always keep the aggro away from my sexy fire mage of a wife, but he does a better job than anything else out there.

I'm holding on to the Devilsaur for raiding, but I'm not liking him too much lately. I think its just because of the fact that we're questing not doing instances right now. I'm iffy on the size, I love how cool it looks, but I hate it when I can't see anything but dinosaur butt.

The Cat is an old friend, but truthfully, its such a boring skin. However, you can't just kick out the family pet can you? He's been with me since level 35 or so. And he's cute. We've had many a good times, so I can't let him go (he wouldn't know what to do without me anyways).

The Rhino is just cool, but I can't see any practicality for him outside of PvP. And since I suck and PvP and my wife hates it, I don't know if he'll see much action. I would love to send him on the bridge in AV and make those hordies fly. he he, for that reason alone, I'll keep him around.

The slithid, well, I wanted a cunning pet and he looks cool (even if he is duped up on too much caffiene). But I don't like playing with him. I'm tempted to get rid of him as well. I'm not that attached to him anyway. I'll just take him back to his home in Tanaris and he'll be fine (I probably shouldn't abandon him in Northrend, the bug will probably end of freezing to death and I can't have that on my conscience).

So, I want to replace the bug, but with what?

Why the rush to 80?

2008-11-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

This is exactly what I'm talking about:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=12661344288&sid=1
Why rush through everything? I guess I'm a casual player so that's easy for me to say, because there is no way in h3ll that I could ever actually get to level 80 that quickly.

Speed Leveling

2008-11-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

What is the point of speed leveling anyway? I just read this blog post: "ISU vs Wrath vs Twentyfifthnovember" at Arms and Fury blog. The TwentyfifthNovember guild going through the PvE content as fast as humanly (possibly inhumanly) possible seems silly and a waste of time for me. As for me, I may use questhelper, but only so I don't get so frustrated that I quit questing (which consequently is what I do for much of my leveling up to 70 with Aoirselvar). But I've been trying to enjoy the story line this time and actually read the quests. It takes a little time and sometimes the NPC gets annoyed and walks away (which then annoys me, I mean come one I'm trying to listen to the guy), but its so worth it. Of course I'm finding myself wanting to play on a RP realm more and more, but not willing to leave my guild and pay lots of money to transfer.

So, what's the point of speed leveling through all of this new content? If this game starts to feel like a job then its time to go find something else to do, like watch TV or something. I mean come on, why add the stress of getting to level 80 in 4 days (while the rest of your life goes to h3ll). Just relax and enjoy the game.

Super Obama World

2008-11-17T19:35:00.001-07:00

Do you like mario brothers? Do you like Obama, then I got the website for you: Super Obama World. lol. Not wow related, but at least its a video game... I guess.

random pictures and random thoughts

2008-11-17T08:37:00.001-07:00

So, my wife and I got our pictures with Arthus. He showed us his sword and everything. Yeah, I'm cross tooning on my Death Knight, partly because I thought the male Dreani (spelling check, lol) are kind of ugly and I wanted their racial ability to heal theirselves.

The other picture is my dwarf, Aoirselvar, and his human girlfriend, Kydra. All the other dwarfs are jealous, they can stick with dwarven women and gnomes.

Okay, so my wife and I ran a couple of the first instances last night. Nexus, and the other one in Howling Hjord or whatever (i'm tired and I don't care too much about spelling this morning). I've been so use to rounding up everything with my Mungula (my gorilla) and tanking big mobs that I forgot how boring it was to sit there and just shoot at things. I really would like to get my hands on attempting to tank some instances with my pet, but I don't know if I have enough gear or enough people to take me serious. It really can be done. Check out this website for hunter tanks: http://bigredrhino.wordpress.com/.

2008-11-16T10:54:00.003-07:00

Okay, we've all been busy playing and leveling non stop for the last few days. I'm a little bit slower than everybody. I only play after I've put my kids to bed. My wife, Kydra, is a fire mage that I level with. We're having a blast questing in the Borean Tundra. I'm letting my gorilla, Mungulu, AOE tank tons of mobs while Kydra obliterates them with her AOE spells. But we usually have to call it quits. But we haven't been very good at going to bed at a decent hour. So now we're tired all the time (seeing how our kids don't let us sleep in past 7:30am. Oh what to do...

Anyways, here are a couple of pics of me pretending to have new mounts. I love having lots of mounts, but I don't do a good job of getting them (lack of time & money). Some day I'll get that white drake. Someday...

A little exploration and ... dum dum dum dum, The Expansion! yay!

2008-11-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I ended up going over to gamestop and waiting in line to get my preordered copy at midnight last night. I was debating of going or not (not last post) because I would go by myself. How fun is that? My wife and I can't very well go at the same time and leave the kids at home. So, we finally got the rascals to bed and we jump on, started exploring (I know there are a hundred other things to do, but got to get one more step to the world explorer title). 11:50 comes around and I jump in the car to take off while my hunter is following the cute human mage around exploring the last bit of the Eastern Kingdoms.

I stayed in line till about 1am. Nice to talk to people, we all had something in common, nerdom, yup thats right. Wife called me up to try to figure out where some last area was to explore and she got her achievement for eastern kingdoms. Yay! Too bad the guild was asleep. So, the first thing I did was roll a Death Kuh'ni'gut. These guys were cooler than I previously gave them credit for. Okay, first guy you talk to for a quest is .... the Lich King himself??? how cool is that? Maybe my death knight will be more than just a farmer for me. Anyway, I went to bed right after that.

And now I'm freakin' TIRED!!!! I guess its good that I didn't stay up and play or I wouldn't be able to function at work.

Dear shoppers, would the owner of a ....

2008-11-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

I saw this picture on http://outofmana.blogspot.com/ and just thought it was so freakin funny. A little pre WotLK action going on here. And don't you hate it when you leave your lights on?

midnight party

2008-11-12T08:32:00.001-07:00

So, WotLK comes out TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT! But I don't know if I should bother going to pick up my two reserved copies or not, seeing how I'm not going to be playing it tonight. I mean I kind of have to stay awake at work right? When I start falling asleep at work I have my students saying, "Hmmm, Teacher.... teacher?" Yeah, I think elementary kids forget that adults get tired too. Especially since the only time us adults have any time to ourselves is when our cute kids are in bed. So.... should I go pick up myself my copies tonight? Even though I won't be able to play until late Thursday night? Probably, if not just to say I was there at midnight, lol.

So, my hunter is hankering to go back to the good old leather working (which I dropped like 3rd period french back at lvl 60). But I'm hearing too many good things about leatherworking for hunters. Right now I have engineering and mining. I can't drop engineering. There are too many cool things that I can live without. But mining is my money maker (and I need all the ore to make my Mechano-hog). So, what to do... what to do... well, my highest alt is level like 32, man pathetic, can't switch my shaman to be a miner/skinner. Hmm, then it came to me! You can roll your self a death knight! I wasn't going to really, but h3ll, why not? I can skip 55 levels? I wasn't really interested in one before, but then I came make him have skinning/mining so I can have only crafting profs for my hunter. Okay, its a done deal. Shoot, I still have to level him from 55 to 80 now. Well, that's still going to take sometime.

Studpid servers down

2008-11-11T21:40:00.002-07:00

:(
I guess if the servers are going to have to be down I'd rather it be before WotLK than after the release.

Thursday is coming up and I want to jump right into it, but Lindy has a church thing that night and I think there's something else is probably up. So, I may very well be the last to actually hit level 80, but at least I'll have fun getting there.

First Post

2008-11-11T15:51:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I am making a World of Warcraft blog like everybody else and their cat. Yes, their cat. Why am I making this blog when there is way too many out there as it is? Well, I have no body to talk to about my geeky stuff. Even my family and friends who also play world of warcraft don't care about my geeky hunter related stuff that I ramble on about. So, this is a place for me to ramble about my geekiness to the world. Regardless if I get any followers.

I am a casual WoW player, I have a life outside of wow. I have children and a career that I must attend to. I have had to come to the conclusion that I will never be on the cutting edge of raids or will I ever get all the cool stuff, be on the top for arena or be the first to hit 80. If I did my wife would probably file for divorce, and my kids would never see me. So, I get to play some of the time (mostly when the kids are a sleep). So, I'll probably go off on casual gaming issues, time management, balancing life, etc. But mostly I want to share what I'm doing in the game, and geeky beast mastery hunter stuff. Is anybody actually going to read this? I have no idea, but what the h3ll, why not. So here is my first blog entry on my geeky wow casual gamer blog.