Fishing with the DKs

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

 

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

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

Not Much of a Hunter

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

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

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

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

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

What kind of pet is right for you?

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taming Druids and other Ramblings

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

 

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

 

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

Kitty Saves the Day

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Got Fireworks?

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

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

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

Dave's Hunter Guides Coming Soon

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

I have let Dave down.

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

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

So…

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