Casual Huntering

Posts Tagged ‘Raiding’

I’ve been debating lately what to do in the game as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Our guild was running 10 ICC, 10 ToC and 25 ToC with pugs. There’s no way I’ll get into the 10 ICC without a lot of work, and even then I’ll be behind these crazy single people and these crazy married people without kids (actually I do believe a married couple of to man ICC team do have kids, but both husband and wife enjoy raiding and they play a lot more often than I do).

So, I’ve been happy running ToC stuff with the guild, but they recently did away with 10 ToC. They were still doing 25 ToC guild runs with pugs. Come to find out that they are also doing away with that as well. So, I’ve officially decided to hell with them, I’m just going to bag raiding until the expansion. I officially don’t give a rat’s behind about gear now. There’s going to be a gear reset soon enough anyway, may as well put all my focus behind stuff I’ll be able to keep going into the expansion. So, I’m going to focus on alts, professions, and achievements.

Luckily there is plenty to do before the expansion for the likes of me anyway. I should be able to keep pretty busy before then. I’m starting to get back into hunting for mounts, slowly leveling my druid, start to level my priest, and continue to work on the holiday achievements on my hunter and DK (I’m still worried about the PvP achievements in children’s week).

Yup, there is plenty to do even if I’m not raiding. We’ll take another shot at raiding in Cataclysm.

Okay, I admit to all of you that I have a lousy memory. I have to give myself reminders constantly or I will forget important to-do items at work, at home, and during raiding. How many of you hunters have been guilty of forgetting to get out of Aspect of the Viper after your mana is completely replenished? I use to have a nice little addon for that called ViperWatch, but the mod writer stopped updating it. So, I tried to just remember on my own. Well, that has been a joke. The only thing that will cut down your DPS more would probably be dying early on in the raid. I don’t know how many times I would look at the dps meters and wonder why my dps was in the pits and then look up to see myself having perfectly full mana. It was a little embarrassing.

Consequently, I had to show my friend Dave that Aspect of the Viper is not the default aspect even if it’s nice because you never run out of mana. We had that discussion awhile ago. Turns out he did a lot of leveling that way. I can’t remember if I covered that in a Dave’s Hunter Guide or not.

Anyway, I always knew when to switch to viper because I couldn’t do anything but use autoshot, mana is completely gone. It’s just way too easy to keep on Viper too long… way too long. Really, you want to get back to Aspect of a Dragonhawk as fast as humanly (or dwarvenly) possible.

So, here you have it. This is the Aspect of the Viper reminder addon that I’ve found that works for Patch 3.3. It works beautifully. It’s called ViperNotify and it very simple. When your mana is back up it give an annoying “ding” sound over and over and over again until you switch it off. The last viper addon was too easy to miss, but you won’t miss this one. You’ll spend less time in Viper and more time DPSing the h3ll out of those bosses.

I’m sure many of you already have this figured out, but for those of you who don’t I hope this helps out.

I’m finally getting back into raiding with my hunter. Its been awhile since I’ve done much. I got the alt bug (altitis) back in November and its been difficult to focus on any alt for more than 5 seconds which you could read about on a recent blog post Alts and ADHD.

So, I’m not exactly going gun ho or anything. I’m only raiding once a week on our “gearing up” raid night. We’ve been running 10 man ToC on Tuesdays for those who aren’t quite ready to go to ICC. My dps is slowly increasing as I’m learning the fights and improving my gear. I was very happy this last Tuesday to finally get a gun. I’ll admit that I haven’t had a gun on my dwarf hunter since Burning Crusade. I know I know, it’s sad. I’ve been told that my dwarf probably should cut off his beard because of the shame (especially with the dwarven racial gun crit bonus). In my defense, I’ve seemed to have the worse luck in this regard.

In the last couple of weeks I have replaced a lot of gear, my shoulders, bracers, a low low trinket, range weapon, melee weapon, and head piece. I know I could do it probably a little quicker if I exclusively focused on the hunter. Probably should do more daily randoms, but I don’t. I still got the alt bug (not to mention the holiday bug, or worse yet… the alt holiday bug – that’s where you have to do the holidays with your alts as well.) I’ve been trying to get my death knight the “Love is in the Air” meta achievement on her way to getting a 310% speed violet protodrake as well. She has a little farther to go than Aoirselvar does. I guess there is just too many things I want to do with the very limited time I have to do it.

So, I’m slowly becoming more and more useful to my raiding team. My gear is at the moment in disarray. I just picked up a new trinket with hellova lot of hit on it. Also haven’t gemmed or enchanted any of my new gear that I got this week yet. Oh, and I need a scope for my gun (yay!!). Too much to do. But at least each week my dps is getting better (I won’t admit my dps as to not shame and embarrass myself – maybe later).

This is I guess what I would consider an “update” post, letting you know what’s going on in my neck of the woods. I’ll try to keep these to a minimal, I don’t know if you care to know what I’m doing or not. But then again you are here reading this on my blog so maybe you do. I have some more informative posts in the works. I’ll make sure when I do such things that I either have first hand knowledge or that I at least do my research.

Oh, I wish us hunters had more of a useful job than just shooting things. Don’t you?? I love it when I get a job in a boss fight that isn’t “just dps the h3ll out of it”. I mean come on just sitting there going through my shot rotation is fun and all, and yeah, its cool to try to get as much dps as humanly possible and to top the damage meters (which I am totally not doing right now).

I just wish we had more fights where the hunter was really needed to provide something nobody else could do. Like trapping, I love trapping for crowd control. It’s a blast and it can be nerve racking, but nobody asks for that anymore. Or kiting, I love kiting something, its just so much fun. I remember in Kara when we were at the opera and we got to do the wizard of oz fight. I always got to kite the tin man around the room while they downed most everybody else. It was a blast, I loved it. I love the jump shot that is a must when playing hunters. The other fight I remember where I actually had a job… I think it was Gruul’s Lair. In this fight one of the bosses we always had two hunters ping pong back and forth.

I still do love playing my hunter. But I miss being important. Occasionally I’ll be asked to drop a frost trap here or there. That’s about it. Makes me want to level a healer or a tank. Sad I know. Of course those guys don’t get to go out and tame their very own pets, which is like the coolest thing in the game.

I really want to get my hands on pet tanking like they talk about on Big Red Rhino. The problem is that no one in my guild takes me serious. And now with duel specs there is generally always someone available to tank. Come on, let me at least off tank. I want to do something other than “dps the h3ll out of this guy”, you know?

Come you hunters out there, do you have any special jobs in your raids? Do you miss the days when chain trapping was important, when kiting was essential? What do you think? Maybe you guys are doing co0l stuff and I’m not, I don’t know.

Okay, so I finally got in Naxx 25 again after like… a month. But the circumstances were a bit… well… difficult?

First off, as you may or may not know (depending if you follow me on twitter or not) I’m on a vacation visiting family in Texas. So, my cousin and his friends are all in my guild. We had set up all the computers to play wow, but because I’m the only old person who plays I get last pick on the computer to play on (if I get one at all). The reason being, I have kids to take care of, so while I’m feeding my kids, changing their diapers, putting them to bed, etc, they are playing WoW. They’re mostly all teenagers with exception to my brother-in-law, Emithal.

So, all the computers were taken up when I got to the point where I could raid. So I figured, I’ll just watch a movie with the rest of the family. Then applebiscuit said “we only need one more to have a full 25 man group, jump on my dad’s computer”. Okay, so that’s what I did. Little did I know that this computer was built with no intention for the user to play wow at all, but warcraft still worked, so I got in the raid.

Now, my uncle is in serious need of a new video card for gaming (seeing how a nerosergeon really has lots of time to play games such as wow). So, although I was getting about 20 fps, everything was flashing. I could see through walls in a strobe like fashion. Characters had random pieces of gear flashing on and off. I could see through the ground often in blinks. Needless to say, I was starting to get sick watching it all, it was a little too much for my eyes and brain to handle, but I continued.

Did I mention also that I only had 4 hours of sleep the night before? I was a bit out of it. Usually the best thing to do when this happens to is /follow someone you trust. I wasn’t thinking clearly apparently. I was struggling with my blinding epliptic-causing strobe lights to think that it might be a good idea to follow someone. So I was running into walls and not paying attention to mobs.

This computer also didn’t have TeamSpeak or Vent and it was in my uncle’s office, so out of shouting distance from my cousins. Apparently I was meandering about too close to a pat. People might have tried to tell me in raid chat, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was told later that they were trying to get my attention in TeamSpeak, but I had no head phones on.

The conversation in TeamSpeak, I was told, went like this:

Hm, Bob you need to move, there’s a pat.

Bob? Come over to the wall, move over here.

Is Bob on TeamSpeak you guys?

No I don’t think he is.

Oh crap, he going to pull that pat.

Yup, he’s going to pull it, hmm. Bob?

At this point they decided to make a raid warning.

Move Bob

Move over to the door way.

This finally got my attention. Like the voice of God almost. Felt a bit like Noah “build an arc”. Seeing the text in the middle of my screen saying my name a midst the flashing walls and gear finally woke me up to the situation at hand. I moved away from the pat.

I was there for like 3 bosses, at which I whispered my brother “Stick with me with a fork and turn me over because I’m done.” I couldn’t see straight and I was falling asleep at the computer. I was doing that head nod thing when you are trying desperately hard to keep your eyes open, but your body wants sleep very badly.

My guild was surprised that I even came. I get a call once a week asking if I want to join them for a 25 man. I usually turn them down because of parental responsibilities. Its become kind of a routine and a running gag. They know that I’m not likely to go, but they call anyway. What they don’t know is that I really do want to raid, but life happens.

My guild is so nice to not kick me out, but that’s because our guild is based on friendships, not just gear and raid progression. Sure we like gear and raid progression, but our guild will never fall apart because the foundation is based on a bunch of people that know each other in real life and enjoy spending time together. (if you want to check my guild out go to their website: Can of Aggro.)

At anyrate, with only 3 bosses, I still managed to replace one of my green rings with a purple. woot! So, I guess I at least got something, a piece of gear, and a story. Good times.

So, today I realized just how behind I am. /sigh. I watched my brother-in-law go through a bunch of dailies that I had never seen before. And now he’s matched me in number of mounts. (We both have 63 mounts currently). So I had better get to work. I can think of 5 mounts that I could get pretty quickly with just a little work. Just need to cut off some more ears for my hippogryph. Need to do all sorts of stuff for my Motorcycle. And well, I need rep with about a hundred different factions. Hmm….

I guess you can’t have it all, right? Or maybe I can, just by the time I get it will be into our next expansion.

So, I admit, I’m a collector. I want to collect things in the game, its getting pretty bad, my main’s bank is full of junk, completely and utterly full of …. stuff! Well, that’s besides the point.

So, yes I’m pretty behind the times (was to begin with and now I’m way behind), I keep seeing mounts that I want, gear that I want, vanity pets that I would like to have. I want. I want. I need. I need. Give me. Give me. blah blah blah. But its all good. The day I don’t have something to work towards in the game is the day I put the game away for good.

Well, anyway, yes this is a ramble post for the day. I have some decent posts in the works that I’m thinking about.

So, its been spring break so I’ve had the whole week off. Time to catch up wow, right? Those of you who are married and have children are shaking your head. Nope, actually I’ve played less WoW this week than I would during a normal work week. Why? Well, I’m sleeping in so I’m not playing a whole lot before the kids wake up (I normally play a little bit in the morning before I go to work), we recently hit level 80 and now my brother wants us to raid/run heroics with him nonstop. Kydra isn’t too much into that, would rather just play with her husband (me), and we got reintroduced to how fun our wii is to play. Oh, and I’ve been reading a book to my wife when we have some free time (I’m reading her New Moon – and no I’m not a big fan, their okay books not amazing books, that’s all that I’ll say about that).

So, I’m kind of in a WoW low right now. I decided to roll characters with my wife on a different server (Feathermoon – Alliance), so that we can play without my guild knowing. That way we can play just ourselves. Any suggestions for our class combination?

So, what do you do when you have a vacation from work/school? Do you play more or less WoW? Why?

Okay, I have finally went on Naxx for my first time, now that everybody and their dog has already played it too death from what I hear. We did Naxx 10, but we only got through 3 wings of it. We could have done the whole thing, but my little brother was having internet issues and he was kind of our key healer.

So, most everybody in the run were kind of over geared for it. Which is nice so someone like me who was very under geared for it could still play. I was a little afraid when I saw 2 other hunters there, but I was told not to worry because they didn’t really need anything here anyways. Well, I got like 5 pieces of gear, no joke. Lots of mail stuff kept dropping (a lot of shammy healer stuff too). So, I finally replaced my bow from kara(Sunfury Bow of the Phoenix), replacing it with the Accursed Bow of the Elite. Its about time I replaced that old thing. I probably should go get my hands on a gun (as any good dwarf should do, but hey, I’m kind of use to the bow thing, kind of feel like an elf). I also replaced my melee weapon, my belt, my something or other, hmm, I don’t know but, I’m doing much better off now.

Wow, its been so long since I have ran an raid. I’m sure I looked like a noob. For one I still had my gorilla (haven’t leveled any other pets up yet). I still had my lvl 70 goggles on (I have better, but I like the emote finder capabilities), I had some pretty crappy gear, but if they didn’t care then I didn’t. At least I didn’t cause us to wipe at all (which I did once or twice in Kara).

Anywho, I don’t know how much raiding I’ll actually do. It takes a lot of time that I don’t have so I’ll keep it to a minimal. I do love raiding with a bunch of friends jokeing about this or that. I don’t like it when people take it too seriously. My favorite raid moments were when we were goofing off and just having a good time, not necessarily downing a particularly hard boss.