Breaking news!

Yesterday, a DPS in my heroic 5man PuG apologized for accidentally pulling aggro.


(Those of you who PuG will understand why this is worthy of a blog post)

Brewfrost

If you haven't been killing Coren Direbrew during this Brewfest, start doing it.

You'll have to queue through the Dungeon Finder this time around instead of finding your own group (the queues are quite short, even for DPS).

Even if you don't want any of the epic loot that comes in the once-daily Keg-Shaped Treasure Chest reward, you'll still want the 2x Emblem of Frost - easy for what can be less than a minute's work!

How much?

...that much.

To tip me over the 9000 edge, I got this one:

...which is also cool, although I am not wearing the Kingslayer title - overused and means little these days; I'd rather stick with "Knight".

It will definitely be useful for linking in PuGs though... and I've finally avenged Sylvanas Windrunner, which I've wanted to do ever since the brave elven Warcraft 3 ranger was forced to become a ghastly banshee.

@#$% you Arthas, this one was for the Dark Lady!

Battle for the Under-Gnomer-City

So apparently Blizz threw me a bone to alleviate my boredom by implementing the re-taking of Gnomeregan event.

Sure, it didn't take long to complete, but at least it was something different. Besides, it's about time those gnomes got proactive about their irradiated home town; even Undercity, built in the sewers of Lordearon, is a cooler hangout.

I will also likely be doing the equivalent event on my tauren druid, 1) for the troll lore, and 2) just so that every 4hrs I can actually fit through doors properly (why I felt the urge to make my druid a male, I have no idea).

Hooray for new content! :)

All quiet on the Western front

Not much is happening on the hunter, sadly. Pre-Cataclysm slump seems to have hit most people (either that or post-Starcraft 2 launch... :P), so I've been hanging around on my feral/resto druid.

Of course, whilst healing is a nice change from DPSing and world PvP (my druid is on a PvP server, as opposed to my hunter) is an adrenaline-generating thrill, I'd still rather be hunter-ing.

The problems is, I'm having trouble finding things to do that aren't too boring, grindy or require a group - all of the Achievements I need involve Arena, battlegrounds, raiding, or have terrible odds (ie. killing all the rares or fishing up a turtle).

Soloing elites has also lost its appeal slightly - it takes longer for me to travel to ZG or MC than to kill the bosses that drop the stuff I want, and since I've done them a few times it isn't really much of a challenge any more (which is the main reason why I like elite soloing in the first place).

What to do? I hate leading guild raids, let alone PuGs. I managed to put together a PuG for 20man OS recently without too much trouble, but was lucky in that the tanks knew what they were doing and I didn't have to type many instructions at all. Any PuG that would require Ventrilo is definitely out.

Guess I'll just have to hope the Americans on Proudmoore will start running Achievement runs in a friendlier time for me one day... hopefully before I get so frustrated I transfer my hunter to Frostmourne Horde :P

(Well, either that or Blizzard could send me a beta key. Come on Blizz, I have a blog and everything!)

Boned

It's amazing how many ranged DPS never bother to hit spikes that they can't hit with random AoE...

It was mainly due to a lucky draw, since only 1 spike was outside melee range (on me, and I was standing in as close as I could to the group).

Tangent: why *is* this Achievement called "Boned", anyway? Shouldn't it be "De-boned" or something, considering the whole point is to free people?

Volley in Cataclysm - or Lack Thereof

If you're reading this post, chances are you'll already know about the fact that Blizzard intends to remove Volley and "replace" it with Multishot as our main AoE ability in Cataclysm.

Probably every hunter would have something to say on this matter... and whilst I've resisted commenting much on Cataclysm changes, this topic motivated me enough to post the following on the official Blizzard DPS forums:

If Volley is going to be scrapped, I have the following concerns:

1. You cannot control where Multishot lands. With Volley and other targeted AoEs, you can target a specific area and not hit anything outside of it. With Multishot, anything close to your chosen target may be hit (or not hit, as the case may be).

Example: Pull pack of mobs, mage is slow off the mark and sheeps something right next to the rest of the mobs, everyone else shifts their AoE so that it doesn't hit the sheep, hunter hits Multishot and breaks the sheep.

2. Flare/traps have a long cooldown.

If you know there's a stealthed player around, you can stand on a trap and hit Flare... but since rogues can sap from *outside* the flare area and disarm traps, they can get
around it. Not only that, they can vanish and wait until you waste both cooldowns again before they reappear.

Possible solutions:

1. Make Multishot a targetted AoE, or at least a consistent area of effect so that we can control where we're aiming at.

2. Remove (or at least reduce) the Flare cooldown. If you need to compensate for hunters spamming this ability, make the Focus cost high. Alternatively, make Multishot targetted and spammable (or at least a fairly short cooldown), and obviously as an AoE it will have a fairly high Focus cost anyway.

One other concern I have that I didn't put into my post because Blizzard doesn't really support it anyway - keeping your tank pet alive when doing elite soloing is going to be that much more difficult.

Currently in fights with several mobs, you can easily spam Volley wearing 2pc T5 and have your pet healed 15% of the amount of damage you do.

That won't be possible in Cataclysm unless Blizzard makes Multishot spammable (and even then, we're going to be limited depending on the Focus cost).

Blizzard may want to make classes unique, but really.... the way hunters are looking, it'll be that we're missing abilities rather than having something special to bring to the table. Not good.

Random PvP stuff

Firstly, congrats to "team chris thormann" in Blizzard's North American WoW Arena finals.

No, I'm not actually cheering the hunter on the team for once - it's the Aussie warlock I was supporting; even though they only won against one team at the event (and that team managed to defeat them later), managing to get to the top of the Arena board in the first place with Aussie latency is a bloody impressive feat.

Secondly, trying to excel at, and get Achievements in, PvP takes so much more individual effort than any PvE Achievements.

Sure, you can argue that it's difficult finding halfway-competent people to run a raid in the first place, but really... if you're willing to wait until everyone is geared up (or at level 85 in Cataclysm, for example), you'll finish all the PvE Achievements eventually.

Besides, if you're willing to spend a huge chunk of gold, usually there's at least one guild on your server that will run you through raids and Achievements for a price.

For PvP, on the other hand... if you suck, you'll never be able to get an Arena title no matter how many games you play... and even if your entire battleground team is communicating in Vent, the other faction can still pwn you if they're quicker.

(Props to that team of Horde, by the way... we didn't have any AFKers, only 1-2 PuGs, and a group of about 5-6 Horde - possibly an elite Arena team, but still - managed to roll us and win 1600-1590 in AB)

PuGs? What PuGs?

After being back for a few days, I've noticed the PuG scene on Proudmoore at Oceanic peak times has... kinda disappeared.

So far this week, I've only seen a couple of PuGs for VoA10/25, 1 PuG for Ony10 and 1 PuG for ToC25... and I started logging on on Wednesday, which is usually the best night for PuGging (being the night after maintenance for Oceania).

No ICC, no Ruby Sanctum.

To be fair, Proudmoore *is* traditionally more a US server (the PuG scene is certainly a lot better on Frostmourne, my "Oceanic" horde server), so this weekend I'll be logging on in US peak times to see if I can at least get some ICC in.

Even so, I'm disappointed about not being able to raid on weeknights... I can only do so much Battleground-ing before getting sick of it, even if Alliance are actually winning!

(Note: My guild is on a raiding break this week - back next week - so if I want to do anything this raid lockout, I have to PuG it)

Back in Action

I'm finally back from my vacation... and surprisingly, I haven't missed all that much.

Sure, I'm a little behind on character development in terms of PuGging/raiding, but I somehow managed to keep up with the beta news, RealID kerfuffle and Starcraft 2 launch while away, so I'm not doing too badly.

Hopefully I'll have new stuff to blog about soon, although the jetlag is still winning :(