Lethal Shots

At least that is what I felt like last night. I figured the initial crowd in the Ebon Hold had cleared out, so I decided to go ahead and make my Death Knight last night. I parked Santyn at an inn so he could build up some rested XP and headed off to character selection screen.

First off I had to decide which alt to delete. Tough decision, I know. So, I said goodbye to a little level 10 Gnome Rogue that I hardly ever played and went on to make my Death Knight. I pondered what race to make him for a few minutes, then settled on a Dwarf. Grayish skin and white hair because, well, he is a Death Knight.

And a name. Always the hardest part. I chose Santan, a spelling variation of Santyn. This is a naming convention I have adopted to make it easier for my guild mates to know it is me. Not very creative, but hey, it works.

Anyway, logged in and started questing. Did a little talking, a little running around, the usual. And then my first chance to fight something, a failed Initiate. And I died.

Stop laughing…..

This is where I became a button mashing noob. I had no idea how to play the class. Still not real sure to tell the truth. So I spent my whole time last night simply mashing whatever skills were ready and hoping I somewhat resembled a Harbinger of Death. And what made it worse was that there was no one to give advice either. a few of my guildies have made a Death Knight, but none felt confident enough yet to give advice on how to play one.

So button mashing it was.

Whatever. It worked.

I really am impressed with the class so far. Survivability was great. I only died a few times, due to pulling more adds than I could handle, though that could also be blamed on my complete lack of knowledge on how to play the class. Damage seemed pretty good, though with no damage meter running, I am basing that strictly off of “feel”. What really surprised me though was the complete lack of downtime. I hardly ever had to stop. It was almost as good as playing a Hunter.

Almost.

Tonight I plan on doing a little research so that I can allocate my talent points decently well and start to figure out a spell rotation. Then back to leveling Santyn.

On a side note, one of my guidlies misspelled my Death Knight’s name in guild chat last night. He wrote it as Satan. I thought it was a deliciously and fittingly evil coincidence.

Many classes have some form of crowd control, though most have severe limitations. A Mage’s Polymorph and a Priest’s Shackle are limited by what type of mob they work on. A Warlock’s Fear is too unpredictable. A Rogue’s Sap can only be used out of combat. A Druid’s Entangling Roots shows promise now that it works indoors, but most druids are busy healing or tanking. The one class that provides virtually un-hindered crowd control is the Hunter.

A Hunter’s Freezing Trap works on almost every type of mob (the exception being some elementals), can be used repeatedly before and during combat, and with the addition of Freezing Arrow can be placed anywhere in range. The price we pay for such flexibility (read – Awesomeness)? All traps are on a 30 second cooldown while the effects of the Freezing Trap only last 20 seconds. This does require a Hunter to plan ahead and pay close attention to trap placement.

But is this unique flexibility what makes  Hunters the kings of crowd control? No. It is our ability to crowd control two mobs simultaneously that grants us that title.

Yes. You heard me right. Two mobs. At the same time.

Some may be scratching their head and wondering how. Others may think I am talking about trap juggling to catch 2 mobs, which, by the way, is unreliable because it only allows for very short term crowd control. But the Hunters who know their game already know what I am talking about.

Pets.

Tenacity pets to be specific. As long as the Hunter keeps Mend Pet up, a properly specced tenacity pet can take quite a beating, even from elite mobs in dungeons, with very little help from a healer. What this means is that a Hunter can use his pet to occupy one mob while he traps another, effectively taking two mobs out of the fight. No other class has this capability. And the beauty of it is the pet is still doing DPS to the mob he is controlling, which helps keep the Hunter on the top of the damage meter, right where he belongs.

That is why Hunters are the Kings of Crowd Control.

In a word – Crowded. Everywhere. Not just in towns, even out trying to quest. I play on a 2 year old laptop, so I am down to around 2 FPS when trying to move around town. (Maybe I can use that as an excuse to get a new PC?) But man is it amazing. I am definitely hooked.

When I got home last night I proceeded with the install, which took a little longer than it should have due to a few issues with the installer not wanting to work right in Ubuntu. A little bit of googling and a new version of WINE had those solved. Once that was done the install went off without a hitch. Then it was off to the races.

I grabbed the boat in Stormwind and headed up to Borean Tundra. Once in Valiance Keep I started grabbing quests, made a small detour to train professions, and then headed out to start leveling. And man it was a blast. I made it about a third of the way into 70 before calling it a night.

The one biggest complaint I had last night was the competition for quest spawns. I started out trying to wait my turn, but after about a dozen re-spawns of one mob watching players just waltz in and start dishing out AOE non-stop to tag, I broke down and started it too. No, I am not proud of myself, and I hope that tonight I won’t have to stoop to that level. Though I did try to make back up a little karma by doing my best to put together a full group so that all 5 of us could get it done with one kill.

I did log off a little early last night to take care of a few issues. I was suffering from severely poor game performance, and while I know there were hundreds of people all around me, taxing my PC accordingly, I don’t think that my poor performance can be blamed on that completely. I did a little bit of routine PC maintenance, and then decided to look at my addon situation. Lets just say I didn’t like what I saw.

When 3.0.2 hit, I tried to go through my addons and eliminate unnecessary ones. But I was soon back up to about 60 addons, which used over 100 mbs of memory. Not good at all. So I backed up my Interface and WTF folders, and then emptied them. I then started to add back in addons one at a time, trying to keep it just to the necessities. I will continue with that tonight, and hopefully by tomorrow morning, I will have a fully functional UI again. And hopefully it will be a lot less resource intensive.

A while back I wrote up and discussed my Pre-Wrath Checklist. While sitting here waiting on Wrath to install and patch up to 3.0.3, I figured it was a good time to take another look at it and see how I did. Here is an updated version of it:

1. Acquire Nether Ray
2. Acquire Nether Drake
3. Max Engineering
4. Max Fishing
   
5. Make Turbo-Charged Flying Machine
6. Level Shaman alt to 70
7. Build back up gold reserve
8. Become Karazhan attuned

As you can see, I completed all but one of my goals. Even though my Shaman didn’t make 70 yet, he is parked in the inn at Honor Hold ready to take off leveling in Outland. I have no idea when I will get back to playing him honestly. More than likely he will sit in the inn until Santyn is level capped.

Well, it looks like Wrath is almost done patching, so I better wrap this up and get started. See you in Northrend.

/rant on

I’m not happy today. I work for the government in the US, which means I had today off. I knew there was maintenance this morning, so I slept in, worked on the blog a little, ate lunch, and then sat down to have an afternoon of WoW. It all started well, but then about 10 minutes after I logged on, Blizz sends out the server restart message. I figure its no big deal and log off with the intent to come back in about 30 minutes.

Yeah right. Nine hours later and still no WoW. Nine fucking hours. And next to no communication from Blizzard on the outage. After a few hours we were finally given something. Someone dropped the ball and screwed up the in-game mail system. Not bad enough to make the game unplayable, but they decided to take it down anyway.

And here we sit. An hour past the promised time. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m not too happy about this. Why in the hell would Blizzard introduce a change that breaks the servers less than 48 hours before Wrath launches. Not smart.

Anyway, I better wrap this up and get my son ready for bed. And then I will look into heading there myself. Here’s hoping for better luck tommorrow.

/rant off

On the upside of this whole thing, my son is ecstatic. He had a whole day with daddy home, and daddy had nothing better to do than play cars and Duplos with him.