One fish, two fish....

...dammit, lost the Stranglethorn Fishing Extravaganza again.

Being the one day in summer when I'm actually free (ie. not going to work), I decided to try the new version of the STV fishing comp.

I had actually thought it might be easier this time around - after all, there are 3 winners now, right?

Wrong. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lot harder, since you're competing for pools with cross-realm people and it's harder to gauge the number of people in each zone since you can't use /who to find them.

In fact, now more than ever you need to find a quiet place to fish... and because I rarely do the comp, I don't tend to know where the best places are.

Looks like I'll have to wait until daylight savings is over in the US for me to get another chance.... oh well. One day :)

It's beginning to look a lot like

...that time of year when I don't have time to make a proper blog post. Oops!

It's been an interesting year in terms of WoW. My playstyle has changed somewhat; generally I try to race to level cap, race to get exalted with all the new factions, race to get all the new mounts and pets, race to try and solo achievements I missed in previous expansions... but since WoW is now extremely casual-friendly, I feel as if I'm playing more "casually" as well.

I still do make sure I do my LFRs every week as soon as possible, but apart from that, I haven't done many dailies, I haven't seriously gone after Scenario or Heroic achievements, I haven't finished all the quest/exploration achievements... and I'm actually playing my druid, which generally doesn't happen until I'm well into an expansion when I've completed all of the above.

(Of course, things like Double Agent and Jack of All Trades probably have something to do with that too, but still... there are easier achievements to get)

I haven't even actively tried to join raiding PuGs when I see them (which admittedly for a hunter isn't often). In fact, I actually feel as if I'm playing the way I used to play WoW when I first started, before I started raiding - like a single-player game.

I'm pretty sure that when my guild does manage to pull together a 10man team (hopefully early next year), I'll be keen and ready to raid, but at the moment I'm quite comfortable with the dabbling. :)

Hunters are Just Awesome

Frostheim over at the Warcraft Hunters Union has put together a hunter-themed cover of Boom de Yada entitled "Hunters are Just Awesome" that I had the pleasure of singing a few lines for:

I'm proud to say that I'm one of the contributors listed that is still writing about and playing WoW... and I still love my hunter!

Arena Mastered

I'd posted way, way back when that I had needed 10 Darkmoon Faire trinkets to go to be a Master Pit Fighter....

...and I've finally done it.

Granted, a lot of these wins were me in the Arena by myself, but a few of them weren't (I still have as much ease killing casters and as much trouble surviving melee as I have always had), so I feel as if I've earnt my title!

Next aim: Wait patiently for a Monday when I'm either not working IRL or daylight savings stops in the US so that I can actually try for Master Angler again...

The Final Ka-Pow!

After finally reaching exalted with the Golden Lotus crew, I was excited to see that the final quest wasn't going to be easy - I always love a challenge.

...until, that is, I found out A) how difficult it is to time jumps with Aussie latency and B) pets don't jump with you. Not a great quest for a BM hunter... and yes, I actually did it the long way, since I didn't realise that there were a few ways to get around doing it properly.

Still, it was definitely a nice end to the GL rep grind... or so I thought.

Unfortunately, I realised today that I still haven't seen the Roll Club quest at all, so I'm going to have to go back and do at least 1 full set of GL quests so I can get the Achievement... and that's *if* I know the quest will be up.

I'm thinking I may need to brave General Chat if I want to get this done, because I sure as hell don't feel like continuing to do 2 hubs of GL dailies just to find out if the appropriate hub for Roll Club will be up for the day!

LFRest

After doing 5 LFRs in a row after the last reset, I decided that I had had quite enough of the usual daily grind.

To that end, I haven't done any dailies, heroics or scenarios this week. Instead, I've played on alts, levelled professions (jewelcrafting is an absolute killer...), ticked off a few Cata achievements I hadn't managed to get yet... and generally avoided everything I usually do in WoW.

I have to say, it's been a pretty good break. I'm in a nice position where I have a high enough iLvl for all the LFRs, but no pressure to gear up further because my guild still hasn't started raiding yet.

Next week I'm sure I'll feel obliged to get back into it - particularly as I only have about a week left of the dreaded Golden Lotus dailies - but in the meantime, I've rediscovered that having a spirit beast heal is pretty damn useful for soloing things like Lazy Eye! :D

Sce-niche-io

Every class in WoW has something that they excel at.

For mages, warlocks and shaman this year, it happens to be 3v3. DKs are elite soloers, druids are hit-and-run farming kings, paladins never die... and hunters, well, over the full 8 years of WoW you really can't beat us for levelling/questing (what do you mean, you have trouble tagging and/or killing goats?).

This expansion, however, I've found something else we're good at - Scenarios.

Not only can we solo everything, we're also the most versatile class anyone can be put with, since we can bring 5 different pets and act as tank or DPS depending on group makeup.

As a bonus, the PuG queue times for DPS are short, unlike LFR and LFG... so if you're as sick of dailies as I am and need to top up your VP for the day, it can be a quick and easy "dungeon" where you aren't as likely to wipe... purely because you're the hunter and you can make it work!

I don't do it often...

I usually have an extremely high tolerance for people in LFR. Low DPS, excessively talkative, stands in fire, low iLvl - I won't ever initiate a kick if you're one of those people, although I may vote if someone else does, depending on how bad I think you are and whether I think you're trying your best.

Today's LFR, however, brought an absolute @#$%head healer who missed the mage table at the beginning (even though it was announced as a raid warning through someone's mod) and then proceeded to complain after every pull that he was out of mana and refused to heal.

I was, quite frankly, surprised this priest managed to last in the raid all the way until the first boss, especially as he took on a rogue that had told him to shut up, apparently not only arguing in raid chat but also whispering the rogue and several others to demand free mage food.

Right before the boss, one of the mages finally put a table down, so the priest got his way... except I chose that moment to initiate a kick.

Totally worth the couple of minutes' wait for another healer. Totally.

Single-Minded

If you've started repping up with the Klaxxi, you will probably know that one of the NPCs gives you a buff to control a minion for 10min.

I was rather amused to discover that since you can MC any NPC in the zone, you can get some rather amusing companions:

This poor sod just can't stop mining, whether we're attacking or AFK. Can't imagine he has much of a life... wonder if he sleepwalks and mines too? o.O

That was a raid?

About a week ago, I ventured into LFR for the first time.

I hadn't read anything about it - no strats, lore, screenshots, dungeon journal, zip - and none of the PuGs had offered strats, so I was rather surprised to realise halfway through what I thought was a trash pack was in fact the first boss encounter.

In fact, I didn't feel there were any really difficult boss mechanics for an average group of PuGs until the very last boss, although a couple of the previous bosses may have had tough mechanics for tanks and healers.

I went in again as soon as the VP cap reset this week, and absolutely blew through both halves of LFR in just over an hour.

Once again, I can't really see anyone wanting to do this raid past the first tier or so of raiding, which means that pretty much every tier people will only ever do the most current content and good luck if you want to do the rest.

Maybe this system will work out, I don't know... but for Achievement hunters like me, it'll be that much harder to fill PuGs for older content.