Lethal Shots

Pike recently made a tweet that got me to thinking.

• “I find it amusing that I like resto druids so much and yet IRL I am allergic to every single tree that I was tested for.”

After reading that I began to wonder how often an in game character that you create is at odds with who you are in real life?

Allow me to explain with myself as an example.

• Hunter:If you have ever read the class description you will know that it is all about the flawless teaming of a Hunter and his pet. You dedicate yourself to training your pet to be an extension of yourself. Yeah, definitely not me IRL. I am lucky that I was able to housebreak my dogs. Forget about any further training. They would be more likely to lick an intruder to death than protect me.
• Shaman: Shamanism is a very real thing. It has deep roots in many cultures and religions throughout the world. The in game Shaman borrows many ideas from these real life examples. I absolutely love this class (almost as much as I love Hunters). IRL though, I am about as far from a religious person as you can get. The idea of Shamanism is not even part of the culture that I was brought up in. Yet I continue to find myself drawn t the class.

How about you? Do your characters represent you? A part of you that you are afraid to show the rest of the world? Or maybe even the complete opposite of who you are?

BigRedKitty announced today that he is leaving the WoW community to spend more time with his family. Nothing definite on whether it is a permanent departure or not though.

BRK provided me with the inspiration to start blogging and I will miss his writing. I always loved the /Daniel mode posts, and the arguments with Brain were always hilarious.

Daniel, I wish you the best of luck in life. Enjoy your family and don’t let the women you love slip away. I hope to see you return to the community one day, but don’t do it at the risk of enduring a “Red-Headed Maelstrom of Fury”.

/salute

So you dinged 80 finally. Grats on that by the way. But now you have your sights set higher. You want in on end-game content. Heroic 5 mans. 10 and 25 man raids. You don’t care, you just want in. Well, I can’t blame you, end-game is some of the most fun I have had in WoW.

But you don’t want to be labeled a “Huntard”, so there is a small amount of prep work you need to do. Namely your spec. Your spec has the single most important impact on your performance in end-game (other than skill and experience of course). You can have the best gear in the game, but if you slop a spec together your performance is going to be dismal.

I have always been one to advocate playing how you want. You don’t have to follow cookie-cutter specs or spec into a specific tree just because it provides the best DPS. You can spec however you want to. But there are a few conventions that you will need to follow to be successful. Some talents are obviously PvP oriented, some are for soloing. But each tree has core talents that you will need to pick up to be a successful raider.

Below are some example specs that you can study, try out, even modify to suit you. Don’t feel like these are set in stone and that no variance is allowed:

• Beast Mastery: This tree is all about your pet. Most of the talents here buff the pet rather than the Hunter. Expect your pet to provide 45-50% of your overall DPS if you spec into this tree.
  • Build 1 – This build focuses on buffing up your pet for max DPS.
  • Build 2 – This build focuses on buffing up your pet, but emphasizes pet survivability instead of DPS. I consider this more of a leveling build, but if you are having issues with keeping your pet alive, you might look into it.
• Marksmanship: Mail wearing Mages. This tree is all about cranking up your RaP.
  • Build 1 – This is the build I used when I tried Marks out for a brief time. I know it is far from perfect, but I make no claim to be an expert in the Marks tree.
  • Build 2 – This is another sample spec that I pulled off the armory from a respectable Marks hunter.
• Survival: Hunters specced here are crit junkies who are all about explosions, whether it be a trap or a shot.
  • Build 1 – This is the build I am running with currently. I stay at max range and unload the pain.
  • Build 2 – This is one of the more popular Survival builds currently.

Like I said above, these are simply example builds. Feel free to move a few points around if you wnat to. If you hit rating is a little low, grab a point or two in Focused Aim. You can adjust how many points to take in some talents based on your crit rating. A player’s spec really needs to be tailored to them, not what some jerk on a forum claims is the best.

If you have any questions or would like some help with a spec, drop me a line, I’ll be glad to help. As always, thoughs and comments are appreciated.

*All builds linked here are current as of patch 3.0.9

Who I am sure also plays a Paladin. Or maybe a Druid. Tough call, but my money is on Paladin.

I spent a couple of hours in Naxx last night, clearing out Arachnid and Plague wings plus Patchwerk. Not the smoothest run, but it went pretty good. What got me worked up though was the loot.

I was the only Hunter in the run, and the only Shaman was Elemental. I get the physical mail items, she gets the caster mail items. Sounds simple, right? But how many mail items dropped? One. And it was a caster piece.

But what did drop? Plate. Lots of it. And if the boss didn’t drop plate, it dropped Leather. I swear the plate wearers love it when I come to a raid. Every time I go to Naxx, I see tons of plate drops.

Anyway, guilds continueing the run tonight, but I’m most likely not going to make it. Real life rears its ugly head again. I wish them luck, but I’m going to be pissed if all the Hunter loot drops tonight.

More maintenance today. Here’s what’s stirring in the old noggin:

• Not as much raiding as I would have like over the weekend. Too much real life stuff going on.
• Speaking of real life, Friday night was spent at the book/movie store for the Twilight DVD release (for the wife, not me). The wife was not feeling well, so I ended up standing in line for her. Would not have been bad if not for the insane teenage girls shrieking constantly about Twilight. I was very close to committing a felony.
• What raiding I did manage went fairly well. No upgrades, but fun was had.
• My Shaman is coming along rather nicely. As of last night he is 65% through 75.
• Due to my recent focus on my Shaman, I have been having several ideas for posts about Shamans, so I think I might start putting them up here. I know this is a Hunter blog, but I think it might be time to expand.
• Please tell me I’m not the only Hunter hanging on the edge of his seat waiting for the changes to pet hit and Focused Aim to go into effect.
• I go on vacation here in a few weeks. Two weeks in Florida. This will mean no raiding, instead my game time will be spent leveling alts and such. Kind of like a in-game vacation to coincide with my real life one.
• Did I mention I’ll only be 15 minutes from the beach while there? Yeah, it’s going to be that great.

Now that you know what’s on my mind, tell me what’s on yours.