Some Picture-Taking

Freeze-trapping large targets is fun and pretty.

So I found this Portal in Zangarmarsh…

…and this one in Black Morass.

O.O

P.S. Got my Spore Bat pet today. It’s tiny and awesome.

My Ghost Saber, Buttons

Buttons is the pet I’ve had the longest. I tamed him at level 19, the lowest level possible to tame a gorgeous Ghost Saber. I made the trek through Ashenvale, walked up the coast of Darkshore, and was confronted by hordes of Naga. An obliging wolf became my temporary pet while I made my way to the cat figurines to find my beloved cat, having to kill level 20 ghost sabers until I found my level 19 one. I said goodbye to the wolf, and fell in love with my Buttons.

I stabled him at 68 when I got Cuddles, my raptor. Cuddles dinged 70 with me, while Buttons waited patiently in the Stable, still level 68. Honestly, I think I’ve played the longest with Cuddles, judging by my /played time. But I faced the dangers of Azeroth with only Buttons by my side. We went to Outland together, came to Shattrath together…

So now that I’ve made another major change in my playstyle, I think it’s time to go back to an old friend.

I respeced to Survival last night after an upsetting series of events that I’d rather not talk about. I’ve been thinking about going Survival for a little while now, because I missed my utility as a trapper. So now my freezing traps last longer than their cooldown, and I have Expose Weakness to help out the raid. I’ve read that BM and Survival are the two most important raid hunters to have, so I guess all I’ve done is switched sides.

Honestly, ever since I learned how to trap in Hellfire Ramparts, I’ve always been a bit of a Survival hunter. I went out of my way to watch Chain Trapping videos to master the skill. Nothing makes me more proud than to get complimented on my trapping.

So, goodbye 25% of the raid’s damage. Hello trap master!

We’ll see how my damage fairs next raid.

But as soon as I brought Cuddles out of the Stable, I couldn’t help but love his green eyes and look at myself through him like I used to. I love the way he runs, his yawn (even if it doesn’t make a noise), his paws…

It’s good to have an old friend back.

Edit: I went back to my old BM spec because I’m a loser and BRK told me so. I don’t have the stats/gear for SV, and Marks just doesn’t cut it.

Things Change So Quickly

So, I checked the Target Dummy forums this morning to find that we’re going to be keeping ourselves to one group. We’ve had some jerks join recently, and our guild leaders have decided that we would rather stay a small, friendly guild than a big agitated guild. We’re discussing new raid days and where we would like to see this guild go.

This should mean (hopefully) that we’ll be seeing (mostly) the same group of people going every week so that we get some geared guildies that can clear Kara! So, we’ll see how things go.

Edit:

Okay, looks like we’re running the first half of Kara on Wednesdays for badges. On Friday we’re going to be trying our hand at Zul’Aman and on Sundays we get to pick which one to try and continue. I like this idea because it gives us some choices and some outside-of-Kara content. Maybe I can get my bear shoulders to get rid of my PvP ones…

We are still sticking to our single-group method, which makes me happy. We’re establishing a roster of 15 main people to gear up (including ourselves) and working that way. To maintain our small, close guild, I think this is going to be a good method.

When a Guild Starts to Grow…

…you need to form more raiding groups.

This is what’s happening to Target Dummy right now, and as much as it’s exciting, it’s a little worrying. We’re forming a second raid group for the weekdays for those members with different schedules. However, when I say ‘raid groups’ I don’t mean that we actually have set group members. What we do is have people sign up for certain days (first come first serve, for the most part) and go from there. What this means is that we usually have the same core group and a couple different healers now and again and some interchangeable DPS. My biggest problem with this is the fact that not enough people are getting geared for the later bosses. Myself and two or three other people (as far as I know) are almost done getting gear from Kara. I’m most certainly geared enough for Gruul’s and Magtheridon’s Lair, but most of our raid isn’t.

So now we are opening up a second set of days. Awesome! This means twice as many people consistently getting gear. However, a fair share of our members do not regularly sign up for Kara. This could be because of schedules and other things, but this means that on any given week, we are going to be short raiders. I hope that I am proven wrong, but I worry that we’re going to end up short more than once, sitting in Kara’s entryway scratching our heads. I would also like to assign people to the different groups so that we know who we should be seeing sign up, but we are a casual raiding guild. We don’t want to feel like we’re forcing people to show up just because they’ve joined Target Dummy. I am walking the fine line between ‘casual raiding’ and ’serious raiding’ in my way of thinking.

This change in scheduling also means that Raid leaders are getting moved around. Our main tank has been leading the raids for the past couple weeks, and I’ve known for a while that when a second group formed I was going to be leading it. Well, our main tank is going to be working on the weekday group, and I am more comfortable with the weekend schedule (especially since I’m still going to be in school come the fall semester) so it looks like I’m going to have to put on my leader hat and do a bit more talking in Vent. I also need to start reading up on boss strategies myself since I’ve been a bad officer and have neglected my studies. ^^;

So I’m not sure who is going to be staying on the weekend raids, and who is going to be migrating over. This means that we have to worry about where the tanks are going, where the healers are (thank god one of our members has 3 healing 70’s and can do both if need be =3) and what dps is going where. Myself and my rogue buddy are the top two on the damage meters, and I believe that he’s going to the weekday group. Which is both good and worrisome. We as a guild haven’t been able to down Shade without being polymorphed yet, and with this change in the way polymorph works… Either way we aren’t close enough to having enough dps together let alone apart.

But, we have the second half of our single Kara run tonight, and then on Tuesday the ‘Kara 2′ group starts. I suppose I will report back after I see how things go!

P.S. Got Garona’s Signet Ring from Curator on Friday. =3 Only need my Girdle of the Prowler off Illhoof and Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix from Prince and I’m done with Kara gear! I know that the Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle is supposed to be the best BM weapon in Kara, but I think the speed might be too fast for me to weave my shots comfortably, and I just have made a point to avoid guns.

Hawana

Just wanted to introduce my Druid alt, Hawana.

Dramatic Tauren is dramatic. I made her before Onawar was close to 70, and therefore she does not have the naming pattern.

Phat Lootz

Okay, this isn’t actually a post about my gear.

Wait, no, I’m a liar. I got my Leggings of Pursuit yesterday morning. I only needed three badges after Kara on Sunday, so I made sure to run a heroic. After much agitation with people leaving the party, we eventually got a great team together and finished up Heroic Ramparts. I got my badges and happily trotted off to the Isle of Quel’Danis to visit the smith. I then gemmed them up, grabbed some Clefthide Leg Armor because they were only 90 gold, and was good to go!

Anyway, my other fun loot.

After six days of semi-casual farming (this means that I didn’t farm for about 8 hours a day, only like 2-3 hours about once or twice a day) I finally got my Disgusting Oozeling! I farmed it out in the Eastern Plaguelands in the two main scars that are filled with oozes. I think I was asked by about 4 people over the course of my time there if I was mining (since you have to go there to level up Thorium) and I preemptively told other miners that I was just farming oozes, and not to mind me. =3

And last but not least, on a whim I got some packs of WoW Trading Cards, and found myself a loot card for Papa Hummel’s Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuits. Needless to say that as a pet collector, I’m going to have a lot of fun.

I forgot to take a picture with the oozeling. Whoops.

Edit:

There we go. And I used one of my biscuits on him. He’s so cute. <3

Twitter

I added a little Twitter RSS feed on the side there, and I’m surprised by how quickly the messages get sent from my phone to the site! Most of the Twittering will probably not be very related to what’s going on with my hunter, but that’s okay. =3

Edit: Okay, because WordPress doesn’t fully support Twitter properly, I’m not seeing updates like I should. So, if you’re interested, you can just click on it and get the full updates!

Raiding as Beast Mastery

So, now that I’ve been BM for almost a week now, it’s time to report my findings I suppose.

Right off the bat I got a nice increase in my dps. This is a mix of the re spec and finally using shot rotations properly. A guildmate and I joined a PuG for Magtheridon’s Lair and on the second attempt (the one that took him down) I was second on the damage done list (out of people who were geared from raids past Kara) and had a whopping 918.9 dps done. Wow! Not to mention I got my snazzy t4 chestpiece thanks to a good roll.

Now that I am more comfortable with the way the shot rotation works I’m timing my own shots without the help of the macro. Using the macro helped me see what the shot rotation should look like so that I knew what I was looking for when timing myself. I also had to actually bind Kill Command to a key (I was used to just clicking it when it popped) so that I didn’t have to waste much time while still maintaining a good weave on my shots.

I would highly recommend the Quartz addon as well. It’s a castbar replacement that also shows cooldowns and other timers around the bar. It also has a thin auto shot timer for us hunters that helps me keep an eye on my timing. The addon also has ‘mirror’ bars that show what’s going on with your target and your focus target. What I like to do with my trapping is make my trap target my focus target so that I have a little freezing trap cooldown below my castbar at all times while the other mirrored bar shows my target’s bars. It required some tweaking on my part because I used to have my focus target bound to my Hunter’s Mark, but I’m pleased with the changes I’ve made.

If you look at the castbar, the bottom little blue bar is for my focus target, and the top one is my normal target. It takes up a lot less space than Sorren’s Timers and I had to turn off too many variables with Sorren’s to see what I actually WANTED to see. Other addons that you can see are Bongos, X-Perl, and Omen with the compact skin.

The only downside to the respec is my loss of functionality. I felt the absence of Scatter Shot and Tranquilizing Shot early on while in Kara (my first real raid/instance where I would need to trap). I also lost my points in Survival, which meant that my traps were only lasting 20 seconds again instead of the buffed 26 I had gotten used to. So now I find it much harder to trap casters (though my normal tank has been especially good about remembering this now) and I can’t Scatter Shot an early-broken trap target. I’m having to learn to pull my pet onto the target and hitting Intimidation until it goes off. It’s times like these I’m glad I have a 3 second racial stun. Not being able to chain-trap part of the Moroes fight was a bit of a kick in the teeth, but I bit back my pride and let the priests shackle. =/

Re Spec and an Alt

So, I decided to re spec Onawar to Beast Mastery today. After much deliberation and brooding, I decided that it was for the best. One of the major factors was going on a run of the heroic daily with a friend of mine and some very geared PuG members. Not only was I at the bottom of the dps chart, but I was even below my Prot Pally friend. This made me sad. =( As much as I liked Marks, I really hadn’t tried BM at 70 and I know that it is the best DPS spec at this point and as someone pointed out to me, I’d have a bit less threat since I wouldn’t be doing as much damage myself.

So I re spec’ed and found myself doing over 700 dps in a Gruul’s PuG (!!!). I’m used to seeing 500’s in Kara with the rare low 600’s. Needless to say, so far I’m pleased.

I also picked up this macro:

/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide()
/castsequence reset=3 Steady Shot, Auto Shot
/cast Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()

This is your standard Steady Shot/Auto Shot +Kill Command Macro out there. This is for when I either don’t have as much time to worry about weaving my shots manually like during a crazy boss fight, or when I’m feeling lazy. Because I am a lazy person. Either I’m going to fall back into my pushing whatever is available habit, or spam the macro. I personally got this from Pike’s blog, along with part of my inspiration to go BM. Reading her post mentioning that she hits almost 1k DPS in Kara made me wonder what the hell I was doing wrong.

I have also been working on an Alt, Onathia. She’s a Prot-spec paladin I’m sorta leveling with my fiance and his blood elf priest of the same level. She’s my first alt to get over 20, since most of my time has been devoted to Ona for the past few months. =D

Here’s a shot of her I did in WoW Model Viewer. It’s old (like, level 16?) but shows off her good looks. ;3

Of Cooking, Fishing, and Whelplings

So, due to some crappy things happening to me yesterday, I decided to take today to level my fishing and cooking. My cooking is now in the 350’s (from a whopping 160-something this morning) and my fishing is in the 320’s. I also took time to do the Children’s Week quests and got myself Speedy the Turtle and Peanut the baby Elekk. Though I am wondering… do Elekks lose their ears when they grow up?

I also managed a stroke of luck this afternoon while on my way to the islands of Azshara to do some fishing. I stopped by the elite blue dragonkin on the off chance I could get myself an Azure Whelpling.

Let’s just say I got it in about five kills and almost fell out of my chair from shock. It also turned out a lucky blood elf rogue got one at about the same time I did, because when I ran past her to the water she saw my pet and whispered me. We had a short conversation about the whelpling pets, and I showed her my green one. Then I went to continue my fishing, a little more cheerful. =3

Oh, and I have a Red Riding Nether Ray. And a Tan War Talbuk. Because I am a huge sucker for special mounts and pets.