There i was waiting for some RvR to pop (warhammer battlegrounds) moping over the lack of open Tier 3 RVR (warhammer wintergrasp style zones for the level 22-31) and staring in contemplation at this inn sign I find really disturbing on a personal level in Altdorf (no really really – it is a dog’s arse with a face protruding from where the arsehole should be @_@ it draws my horrified gaze like a bloody and burning traffic accident @_@) when I realised that warhammer will never hold me.

Warhammer is fun, especially if you have a chatty group of friends to hang with who burble and slurp noodles on skype while questing together. That part is awesome because warhammer is totally MADE for guilds and groups… but it is really lonely if you log in @ midnight on a work day. Warhammer just doesn’t seem to have the population density of warcraft… which is well demonstrated by how they have reduced the number of available servers and implemented a weekends-only for some of their RVR scenarios (battlegrounds.)

I am adoring the open RVR zones it is like old style south shore from vanilla wow, bands of chaos clash against bands of order and people gravitate to where the action is.

However warhammer is also not really an addictive game… everything you need to be successful (i.e gear) comes to in the natural order of things… there’s no grind for mats to create a piece of epic gear nor any real need to chase the epics at all to participate in the RVR. The crafting frankly sucks balls although it does remind me of Nintendo games (like Pokémon poffin creation on the DS) and because it is so lack luster I feel no need to develop my skills in any craft. I like games to avoid reality and forget my worries… I need something to obsess about that doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. My goals are almost non-existent in warhammer, other then levels there is not much I really want for my toon.

I wanted a pony. Now I have a pony (in fact I have ponies on about three toons) and now I have no real aims in the game. I am finding Warhammer is one of those games you can pick up and subsequently put down with very little regret.

Solo play is pretty poor and due to the lack of player density it can sometimes be hard to find action outside of the weekends. And I am really a bit of a solo player.

So I sit around staring at this dog-arse with the protruding face and reflecting on what I could do to make this game more fun for me. I did considered a blog… the first post would be a picture of this … dog-butt-face O_o I did realized that I frankly really enjoy being the boss and tank (loven this blazing knight character)… but I am missing the wow world and the blogging (I like typing shit at work I do!).

But in short I think I am back. If changed.

It is all thanks to the great dog-butt-face that I have realized I still want to play wow.

I have decided to create a new blog (because hunters are not the only class I am fascinated by these days) and I have decided to pay to server transfer and faction change so I can socialize with some other friends and still have my happy solo warcraft life (and keep my weekend only warhammer life lol)

Didn’t take long did it? Guess after five years I am still in love with the warcraft… i love its funny little ugly cartoon toons, and its vibrant unrealistic coloured trees, and its funny NPC political dramas… and even its occassional TARD players O_o

I should name this blog dog-butt-face or something O_o: http://realityafk.wordpress.com/

Picture is worth a thousand words hey so I hope the one above (where I am lacking the dead fish eyes and snotty nose lol) goes to show I’m at least 80% happy with the direction ima choosing to take today.

Just an update on where the warcraft and blogging thing is standing, the gist is at the end of the post.

Ima finding I really can’t play on my old server – the only thing I’ve done in the last two or so weeks was log in and open an oracle egg.

Early on, right after the crap went down, I played a few dungeons on the SAN server alliance-side where I shot at things on my baby hunter and randomly burst into tears (surprised I didn’t cause more wipes really.) I met this cute gnome called Candyman (hum yes… a few peeps in the blogging sphere have really given me a fondness for the little sods,  feelings contrary to my original take on the common gnome which was something along the lines of “omg brightly coloured hobbits! Get me outa here’ lol) in a random PUG, we bonded for a short space of time as an ego hissy fit and personality conflict erupted over our heads in the stockades. Tank and healer conflicts remain full of drama and amusing (so long as you have crafty ways to avoid the inevitable wipes) at any level.

Drama Lama Game On!

It starts with GOGOGO

They almost try to make the hunter heal O_o

The stereotypical conflict amuses my gnome buddy

I book it because they are giving me a headache

I also logged my neglected druid in over on Aman’Thul and met a nifty hunter randomly in a LFD PUG, I proceeded to tell him he was a nifty hunter and was then surprised to get a tell from him worldside after the dungeon ended… it really wigs me out when the randoms have toons that are in fact living on my own server these days because it is so incredibly unexpected. Anyway me and Mr ‘Quite a good hunter really’ hung out for a while before he out leveled me in what felt like a day.

So heres a shout out to that nelf with a mohawk Mr Huntchoo of Aman’Thul (aye I though it sounded like a sneeze too), for knowing how to pull, how to trap and mark in the PUG group and for dragging my miserable butt out on a questing outing even though you didn’t know I was miserable ^_^ it was nice… especially since hunters solo particularly well and you didn’t really need my under-geared healing ‘not-even-a-tree-yet’ self along for the ride. Yar the dude really cheered me up.

With all these good experiences why am I finding it so hard to continue on with warcraft you may ask? Well my guild was made of local RL friends so this isn’t just happening on the virtual side, it is in my RL too. Sadly on my home server I even recognise the ex-guildy toons as they walk past in Dalaran even though I am pretty sure they totally do not recognise the big cow-man druid sitting in the middle of the road or outside the Dalaran bank. Not really a conductive environment for me to be moving on from crappy feelings and the like hey.

Unfortunately the toons on this particular server, well these are also my favourite top end toons. I could transfer them off to a server that I would actually be comfortable playing on, without the headaches of ‘yesterday’ getting in my face,  however all my other servers are alliance. So I would be facing the costs of server transfer, and then if I want to get down and social, a faction change. I feel I would have to move 4-5 toons because they all have professions dependant on the others… hmmm so costly.

As to hunting a new guild, well apparently I’m not really up to making new connections although I did think about it, and made a few false starts on the issue… but I am so tired of rejection, the social muck and the like I don’t even want to make the effort anymore even with online-only relationships - it’s a pity and I’m sure it won’t last forever but that is how things stand at the moment. Ima tired, I’d rather go it alone… but that stinks of the taste of giving up and “what’s the point of playing here”. I think for me personally, at the moment solo warcraft play would become an angst-wank fest where I begin the think along the lines of “oh poor me, I am so alone, fuck the world” – I don’t want to encourage that in myself. Or more to the point my personality can’t operate along those lines for long anyway, so there is no point going there – I may as well move along now as wait for an ekked out painful mopy end.

Another local friend has extended the hand of socialisation over on Warhammer online MMO or alternatively I can go play the Aion MMO with this fluffy female friend I have…

…okay I kid on the Aion angle as a viable option…nah I am not that desperate. Honestly playing Aion makes me want to stab myself in the eye with my wow authenticator (closest thing to hand). In fact even this particular fluffy female friend found the actual game sold in Australia so bad that she plays on an illegal(?) Asian rip off using a client patch O_o yarr. I have issues with that as I am not particularly comfortable playing when I am sure it is not 100% kosher on the legal side of things. But on her server they have removed most the Aion grind of misery by giving you unlimited fly ability, 6000 times the exp from mobs and all spells that are learnt automatically for free… to be honest even if it wasn’t as dodgy as all fuck it’s hard to get interested in a game that flys by with the ease of a greased pig.

But I have taken the warhammer offer up.

Reloaded the game, resubscribed, found that they have merged all my old servers meaning I can’t play any of my old toons, and that they have changed a lot of the ground I discovered during my 15 levels of witchelf / witchhunter leveling back when the game first  came out. After fossicking around on the net and discovering that the warhammer blogging community doesn’t appear to be as well developed as the wow one (maybe I just have to try harder) I am also reasonably sure the friend that invited me over did so because they are bucking for a special mount you get if you can sign up five or so players… of course I could just be jaded because I am having social apathy but I don’t really think so – sadly by reactivating my old account and not signing up under a new name I am reasonably sure I won’t help em qualify for that one – they’ll just have to deal with me as I am, foot sore, heart sore, matted fur, warts and all. *cackle. So yeah I’ve rolled a Shadow warrior order side which seems to be the equivalent of a petless hunter. I am even an elf.

And in conclusion: I think I’ll be taking a break from wow until I no longer have any negative emotional kicks when I touch it. Still not sure what I’ll do with my toons (keep em? close the account? Try to find a new server and regain my love? I remain undecided.)

The end: The blog will have to come to a halt as well  – when not playing wow it is reasonably hard to blog about it.

Thankyou for all the fish: I just want to thank blog commenters because really you do brighten the day… especially since I know that this blog doesn’t really contribute to the wow piggybank of wisdom (more it’s just me blabbing on about stuff I’ve experienced in game hey) and I want to thank the owners of the 360 odd wow blogs I have in my feed reader (particularly the hunters and the gnomes and the healers and the druids and the warlocks, and the hordies  ^_^)  – my god you lot made life and long night shifts entertaining! Your efforts really made warcraft more fun for me – like icing on my cake, awesome nation-spanning icing that you can read.

Some timewaster sites in the meantime if you need a laugh

• Texts from last night
• Crazy things parents say
• Fail My Life
• It Made My Day
• Bash.org (terrible chat outtakes)

All that is left is for me to take my druid on a cruise of the best sights of Azeroth, you know the ones that may never been seen again come Cataclysm. Druids are made for the cruising.

Its been a great five years hanging with the wow community.

A pretty good couple of years on the blogging end of it.

I don’t feel like any of it was wasted time!

What am I going to do with all my level 70+ hordie toons?

/sigh

Bit of a rough week for me guys; this blog will either fold as a result or really take off.

We’ll see after I’ve finished the grieving process hey.

…

…

Also excellent commentary by Michael Gray on the video over at wow.com. But it is interesting that such a good video didn’t place in the Blizzard competition isn’t it? What I would think is that slashdance has really portrayed well the impact that awesome new changes are having on some of the social aspects of the game eh… and it’s not all good impacts.

EDIT: Actually it has also sparked a nice post over at Escapist Scrawl on Immersion.

Its live action and kinda cool – if short!

..and a little dark, I had to lighten my monitor

It is I, Fessran the little, hunter noob of Argent Dawns SAN guild.

Greetings.

Oh and meet… hum Chucky? – the horde wind rider cub. He is filling in for the position of Pet bodyguard until I hit level 10. He is a little useless in that regard, but people like to talk to me because they think he is cute so he is a bit of a conversation starter.

So a rundown of the hunter levels 1-10?

It was bloody painful!

I have gotten so used to running around with a level 80 hunter who is well geared enough to at least two or three shot most northrend mobs on the outside of instances O_o that this experience was… well it was like my main had suffered from the grief of having the Lich King eat her pet wolf or something which caused an orgy of despair driven boozing and gambling leaving her destitute, gearless, skilless and talentless. I hit keys that weren’t bound because the skills didn’t exist… and I was well kinda lonely if a funny way. No pet you see… which resulted in me running around with a companion pet out at all times. But back to the experience.

When you roll hunter you get a couple of wins:

• One you have a ranged attack right off so mobs are half dead before they reach you and you have awesome pull ability.
• Two that ranged attack is autoshot… once you get it rolling there is no need to keep hitting keys. This helps make hunters feel like easy drive in comparison to a lot of other classes.
• At level one you also come equipped with ‘Raptor Strike’ the hunter melee ability which gives you a cool sword attack animation (but which has an annoyingly long cooldown/use timer) and the track beasts ability… which is brilliant for either avoiding wildlife or finding particular types of wildlife. Before the new quest help addon that Blizzard has implemented hunters had a real advantage in “finding” the beasties we were required to harvest eyes etc from heee. It is still a useful ability when taking cross country shortcuts and looking for particular beasts to tame.
• You get an extra bag purely for stuffing ammo in

Levels 1-4

So yeah levels 1-4 you shoot at stuff and whack it with your whacking stick when it gets in your face.

At level 4 you get an aspect: Aspect of the monkey. Keep this turned on so that the mobs hitting you in the face hurt you less. You also get Serpent Sting… the basic tactic is to nail your target with this first once you have it because it is a DOT (damage over time). At this point in your leveling career you may consider the strafing shooting tactic (running sideways to get in those few extra shots on the mob)… or you could just flog stuff with your melee stick as usual… up to you.

Levels 5-6

At levels six you get hunters mark and arcane shot and really having these you will find that ‘run shooting’ (kiting or strafing) things will be a faster way of killing mobs, well so long as you don’t run your butt into something else. Mark the mob and start running. Serpent sting and arcane shot can both be fired while you are moving so you only need a shot timer (see addons below) to tell you when to pause to let auto shot smack your enemy in the face. Hunters are a reasonably mobile class this is why we start bouncing like rogues after we have been standing still for too long in an instance. Standing still is not really what the class was designed to do.

Level 6-8

At level 8 you get concussive shot… this is going to make your life wonderful and easy… well not as easy as that pet you actually rolled the class for but so much easier… Once you have concussive shot on a mob you are faster (at least for a little while) than anything you are hitting. Shooting things while moving away from them is easy now. Feel lame just running? Well then check out Pike’s Jump Shot training video… jump shot is 133T hunter move!

Levels 8-10

DING level 10 is the glory level!

You get Aspect of the hawk for you are a real hunter now!

And you get the chance to tame your pet!

Oh they make you do three annoying quests to give you the idea of how to tame a pet but eventually you’ll be left alone and allowed to select your bosom buddy. You have no trap, so slap on aspect of the monkey to make the inevitable beating you are going to cop hurt less and set out to find your perfect pet.

If you’re like me you will have a particular type of pet in mind – boars and bears are good for leveling as they eat everything and are of the tenacity (tank) class, or you will have scoped out Petopia for something colourful that is level appropriate… if not the best for the job.

So yeah you will have an epic adventure, I walked all the way to Ironforge to get mine.

Had to stop for this sun rise/set.

Stormwind’s new docks are really epic.

Apparently the deep-run tram scares wyvern cubs and they hide between your hooves O_o

The cub and I rounded up some rats because travel is all about the experience as well as the destination.

I was level 11 by the end of it – but I am happy with my choice.

While you are sitting back and admiring the new pets most awesome skin and pixels hopefully you’ll also notice the dang thing is starving and unhappy. Yup you need to visit your hunter trainer to learn how to feed the beast. Else that pet will run away… and in any case an unhappy pet does less damage.

Congratulations you have stuggled to level 10 and now you are a farming machine … you are also fairly nasty on the battlefields but more on that later.

Addons for this level:

Omen – A most important hunter addon. Omen helps you maintain an awareness of your treat in comparison to your tank’s threat… that includes your pet. With omen you will never pull agro unless you are being lazy and not paying attention.

Recount – you’re dps, surely you are interested in marking how well you are doing?

Any kind of shot & ability timer – I have Quartz at the moment (pretty sure that’s what is giving me my timers… maybe) this allows you to run but not miss your autoshot while retreating, see auto shot requires you to stand still for it to fire. The most simple method of kiting involves you ‘strafing’ (running sideways) and firing shots. With a shot timer you know when to pause to let autoshot go off before continuing to flee. At this level since you have very few shots auto shot is particularly important in damage contribution.

Permapet – for fun because I was lonely and on an RP server! For a permanent companion pet I have selected the wind rider cub for it is very cute and shows a little of my hordie background.

Petemote – because it is classy (A GUIDE)

Macros for this level:

Feed Pet

# Feed Pet
/cast Feed Pet
/use [pet:cat/wolf/bear/spider/bird of prey/nether ray] XXXX
/use [pet:warp stalker/rhino/gorilla/wasp/crab] XXXX

(Where XXX = the food you have that is meat or vege, just shift click on the food pile while writing the macro to add it or type it in case sensitive. You can add as many pet classes as are in your stables really. Heh this macro came from my 80 its a nice snap shot of the pets I’ve had over the last two years.)

Call Pet Macro

# Call Pet
/cast [nopet] Call Pet; Dismiss Pet

(Alternates call and dismiss. Its just a way of making space really)

Pet Attack Macro

/cast Hunter’s Mark

/petattack

Casts hunters mark and sends your pet in, should be your standard opener.

Twinking:

Best twink for a hunter is mobility. Get that lowbie run speed enchant for your boots and you will find the fighting marginally easier. Other than that you want agility enchants the most… or stam for survivability but the idea of huntering is that you let nothing touch you.

Engineering is the commonly used PVP twink profession as you can create and wear headpieces at a low level and craft some interesting utility items such as rocket boots, nets, parachutes and lasers etc. It is a nice profession for hunters because you can make scopes and ammo for yourself. Heh and hunters have so much utility already that throwing engineering in on top of our natural talent… well that this can make us feel like MacGyver… or Chuck Norris if you prefer .(Not what I took this time around however.)

Bandages, I kid you not. Max out your first aid it really gives you an advantage in PVE and PVP. Check out Bear’s article on the issue: The Fine Art of Bandaging

I hear heirlooms are the new twink items in any case. I put some shoulders on my baby mage and hit a battlefield to test it out… everyone targeted me it hurt. The resil on the heirloom gear didn’t seem to help the hurt.

So that’s 5 feeds.

To compare I set up three feeds for my own toons (targeting my top three servers, top five toons.)

So how good is this armory RSS for stalking?

Well if it is monitored by WoW achievements it shows in your feed… so when The Pally shot a cockroach and it contributed towards his pest control achievement I found out about it O_O and of course i was all like “omg you in game animal abuser you… really!” – because what’s the point of stalking someone if you don’t rub it in their faces that you “know what they did last night” bwahahahaha.

However monitoring my own feeds has turned out to be more interesting, while blizzard were working out the bugs (or adding stuff I dunno) I received a lot of duplicate RSS from own toons or even RSS about stuff I had done months ago. It was such an incorrect snapshot of what I had been doing in game that I started to think the RSS feed would be the world’s worst stalking tool O_o However the feeds over the last month or so have been pretty much spot on with what I have achieved in game in regards to achievements, boss kills and gear so it looks like they have worked out whatever the bugs were.

Has the stalking proved useful?

Hum well at a glance I can tell where these friends are spending the most time and what sort of things they have been doing (Dungeons or PVP or questing achievements) but really other than seeing at a glance the amount of activity they have been up to and the characters they are playing the most, I can’t say I bother to actually read the entries coming outa their armory… because reading a wow RSS feed is far more dull than actually logging in to talk to them. However I can see that the Warlock hasn’t been on for a month O_o and that prior to the disappearance the only toon she has been playing is her horde DK.

So stalking is as usual as stalking does… how much you get out of it really depends on how much you care about knowing… and I don’t really care enough beyond keeping vague tabs on my friends.

Below is a link to the Penny Arcade comic they did on that incident where the cops used Blizzard info to pick up the location of a baddie O_O

Moral of the story? Well perhaps it is: anyone could be watching you so mind your manners… and really don’t traffic drugs while playing warcraft and think you can get away with remaining incognito? *cackle

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/1/1/

PS: yes I made up the word stalkering yes it doesn’t even roll off the tongue well I know… can’t help myself, slaughtering my vocab online is part of my enjoyment in my blog O_O

A spirit beast (often brought onto the battle fields by beast masters… who are usually blood elves… I notice its one of the cat spirits? … weird that)

Crab-Crab-Chimaera … another weird Beast master pet that

Spider-Spider-Cat (belonged to a blood elf again)

Spider-Spider-Spider-Cat (belonged to an orc…  the man totally ruined my developing theory about blood elves and cats)

Crab-Bird-Worm (weirdest mix up yet)

So conclusions from this short snapshot:

• Spiders and Crabs are the PVP kings
• Everyone with a spider seems to pick either the icecrown spider or the redback
• People prefer the coloured crabs
• Beast Masters like to show off their showy pets and are more likly to rock on with a spirit beast or something crazy only a beast master could love
• There is something going on with Blood elf hunters… I think they have a slight cat fetish… could it be due to their starter zone?
• Cats are still strangely popular despite no longer being the top beast on the food chain