T Minus 1 Day

This time tomorrow, NCP will have completed our first raid of WoD.

As with everyone else, I haven't had time to do a blog post because I've been too busy levelling and gearing up for it.

Luckily, even my relatively laid back approach to levelling hasn't been affected too much by the new guild's requirements; I finished levelling to 100 in just over 1 week and managed to pick up enough gear from heroics and one challenge mode dungeon to get a 634 ilvl.

I would have preferred an extra couple of weeks just so that I could do what I would normally do at the start of an expansion - max out my professions, finish every single quest (and associated achievements) and explore every single zone on the map - but I'm relatively comfortable with the timing, considering I haven't really played any more than what I usually would.

Things to note on my early expansion experience:

1. Using alts to access alternative buildings in the Garrison seems to almost be a necessity to be completely independent of the AH; I may need to level my alts a little earlier than I usually would.
2. The CM dungeon I did, Auchindoun, was about the same difficulty as the level 90 CM dungeons were, and only the last boss gave us a lot of trouble. I would imagine after working out how to maximise gearing and after Blizzard balances all the class abilities, it should be fine.
3. The Proving Grounds were no trouble at all - I hit these as soon as I dinged 100, knowing that I'd need to run at least Silver DPS to get into heroics. As it turned out, I did Gold DPS and Bronze Tank with only a few wipes and almost all Mythic level 90 SoO gear. Would be interesting to see how Silver Tank and Endless DPS run now that I've shed all the 90 gear, but I have other things higher on my priority list...
4. Run the level 100 MC with guildies and friends, preferably those who you raided with in Vanilla. It is an absolute SLOG to get through for not much reward (unless you collect pets and mounts), so nostalgia is the only thing that would make it more palatable. Luckily I got what I wanted out of the one run I did - I'm certainly not bothering to go back!
5. The Southshore vs Tarren Mill BG is quite fun, for a FFA Arena. Not interesting enough to keep as a permanent BG, but I wouldn't mind running it again in the future (if Blizzard decide to bring it back at subsequent anniversaries). I could see how it might be frustrating for melee, however.
6. I am a hunter. New pet skins/families are frickin' awesome. Carry on. :)

Five Bye Five

It's the eve of Patch 6.0 and as we bid farewell to MoP, it's been a slightly more disappointing than exciting couple of weeks for me.

Firstly, I had hoped that merging with the new guild would allow me to completely clear an expansion at the appropriate time for the first time in my WoW career, but unfortunately they were only taking 1-2 people through heroic Garrosh a week and didn't get around to taking me. Yes, I realise the expansion isn't quite over yet (and we are planning to continue raiding as a new 20man team), but it still feels wrong not to do it with the old MoP abilities.

Secondly, although I did manage to get to wave 18 of Endless DPS Proving Grounds as BM, I didn't manage to get further. I'm confident I could have made Wave 20, but making a single mistake means pretty much starting from scratch and unfortunately these days I have less time to play outside of raids. Plus, I'm not sure I would have had the patience to re-learn cooldown usage as Survival (pretty much every hunter guide I've come across has used Surv to get through Proving Grounds).

Thirdly, I didn't manage to get all the drops required for the Deck Your Collection Achievement of Brawler's Guild - random drops are annoying :(

On the upside, I did manage to finish the Gold Challenge Modes and I am excited about the new hunter changes (hooray for keybind space and new pets... although boo to losing Scatter), so maybe the shiny new UBRS will help to swing the mood. Or maybe not - I was rather disappointed to read that there wasn't an updated version of General Drakk to kite down the hallway!

An Apology...

Yes, I'm still alive.

I've been incredibly busy this year and haven't prioritised time for blog posts... sorry about that! Anyway, I've finally decided to stop putting off a catch-up post, since my hunter exploits have certainly not been neglected in that time. Plus, we're on a raiding break so there's a few extra hours this week :P

Here's the recap:

1. Raiding. My last post made reference to downing heroic Iron Juggernaut. Well... we've gone a little further than that now - Dark Shaman, Nazgrim, Malkorok, Spoils and Thok have all fallen, making our guild 11/14 heroic in Siege. Exciting? Hell yes! Haven't ever been in a position to potentially clear any final heroic raid boss at level, let alone the final boss of an expansion.

2. Challenge Mode dungeons. I managed to get a regular group going for CMs. They're almost as bad as heroic raids in terms of difficulty (and sometimes even more so depending on the dungeon), so it was extremely satisfying to get those Golds done.

3. Proving Grounds. The DPS challenge naturally didn't give me too much trouble, although I haven't managed to get the Endless version done yet; mainly because the AoE phase annoys me (I might have to actually use a flask to get it done; it's terrible! Also, I refuse to switch to Surv to make the AoE easier...). Because I am who I am, I of course had to get You're Doing it Wrong (seriously, it's like Blizzard made that achievement for me... I'd wear it as a title if I could; it sums me up in a nutshell :)).

I tried both tank and healer, and just found tank a lot easier. The tank in the healer challenge tends to taunt a lot more than my pet can keep up with... but if I have time I'm definitely going to try and get at least Bronze healer on hunter. My achievement pane says Gold healer only because I did it on my druid (yeah, the rare occurrence where I actually did something on an alt and not my hunter! I can only think of a handful of things where that's the case and I think this is the only non-horde specific achievement where it would be).

4. Old Achievements and Random Stuff

a) I managed to solo Halion 25 on heroic, which was a bit of a pain to get through. Can't think of any particular tips apart from drop traps and wait to DPS until he gets pushed into your phase, then blow your cooldowns.

b) I also got my last achievement (Stay Chill) for Glory of the Cataclysm Raider, which means the only non-MoP dungeon/raid achievements I have left are Ragnar'Os, heroic Spine and heroic Madness - all of which I expect to knock off in this raiding break. I expect I'll have to bite the bullet at some point and start working on some of the other "farming" (hi2u, fishing and archaeology) and PvP achievements that I've been neglecting.

c) Last but not least, I have a shiny new heroic warforged bow - once again, first time I've ever had the absolute best bow you can get in an expansion. Rhok on! :)

Phew, epic wall-o-text. I'm going to try and post here regularly again so that I don't get so far behind in updates - there will be plenty of LOL-worthy moments in pipe-jumping for heroic Siegecrafter that I'll want to post about, I'm sure. Plus, I've probably missed posting about so many things, just because I can't remember what happened between now and February. Half a year is way too long!