Casual Huntering

I want to know how many of you have ever ran an instance with one of your kids on your lap. I admit, I don’t do it, but when our son was a baby my wife use to. There’s a certain age where you can get away with it. My kids are past that age. My younger daughter hangs on my mouse arm, making my pointing accuracy the equivalent to one who was raging drunk. My little two year old boy won’t be happy unless he’s pounding the keyboard. Long gone are the days where they would be content making me jump a lot.

So, no I don’t play with my kids on my lap. Not anymore. They most insist I get on different ponies and prance about. (I think my main reason for getting vanity pets is because they entertain my children).

So, I’m playing in a random dungeon when all of a sudden we pull way to many things and we wipe. Who was the culprit? The boomkin druid. He then proceeded to explain himself.

I was very amused. How could you get mad at this point? Well, I guess you could get mad if you are a heartless big fat @sshat (hmm, there are plenty of those out there I suppose). He was completely forgiven of his trespasses and we went on to finish the dungeon.

So, maybe I should get my kids to play with me more often…. maybe not.

Its been awhile since I’ve add to the Praxton story, the young magelock. Well, recently he kind of went crazy and saved this criminal (Kalende) from the cult of the damned. He wasn’t sure what came over him. At the last second his mentor, Dreth, save them and teleported them to Winter Springs. You can catch up with the comings and goings of Praxton Seamsmith on my RP/Story Page. I want to see if I can catch up on Prax’s story. Anyway, here you go, if you aren’t into Fan Fiction/ RP stories, then don’t worry, I limit this stuff to Fridays.

Prax searched his feelings, he cared deeply about this girl, but he had no reason to, he barely met her. Her face her mannerisms continued to feel familiar and comfortable. Now she was awake, he felt silly and let go of her hand. “So- S- sorry, I was just um, er…”

“Well I don’t know about you”, Dreth interrupted, “but I’m starving.” He pulled out an especially sharp fingernail and started slicing the skin off the corpse of the bear that lay nearby. “The cultists are obviously not happy with our conversation Kalende. We should leave her in the morning, it isn’t safe anymore.” He stopped to lick some bear blood from his hand. “For now though, I think we need some food and rest. It’s been an eventful day. I’m not sure our stunt in Stormwind made any of us very popular there. Luckily they may not have identified Praxton in all the chaos. I’m sure your parents are wondering about you… is there any way they could offer us some seclusion while we wait for this to blow over?” Dreth reached in to the bear’s chest cavity and pulled out it’s warm heart, and extended it to Kalende for first dibs.

Prax’s eyes widen, “uh… that would hm er take a little explaining to do. My da knows that um, I’m um, learning from the t- tower but he doesn’t um, know the details.” Prax started to imagine what his mother would say, he shuddered at the thought. Prax’s shudder turned into a shiver, “Maybe, its um, not such a b- b- bad idea, st st stormwind is warmer.”

“Of course if you’d rather visit Undercity, I could probably convince the abominations not to rip you apart… well maybe. If we go back to Stormwind, we’ll have to find some sort of disguise. Why were the guards after you in the first place Kalende?”

Prax was a little curious himself, he looked towards Kalende waiting for an answer while shivering in the snow.

Voljub hoped his distraction was enough to get his Master where he needed to be. He continued to dart into allies and over crates to get away from the pursuing guards. Suddenly he felt the presence of his Master vanish. He skimpered up a building and on to the roof. He looked back to where his master was. He saw a huge crowd and a portal closing. He hoped his Master was safe where ever that portal took him. With a great distance now between him and Master he wouldn’t stay in this world long. He began to fade away. As the fading continued he hoped that Master Praxton would summon him again soon.

Kalende studied Praxton around her headache. “I was part of a small Cultist party sent to Elwynn. We hasn’t received our final orders. Our hide-out was raided and I was caught. I was being taken back to Stormwind for questioning.” Kalende looked to Dreth, “I think the sooner we get Praxton back to the city the better off he’ll be. I, on the other hand, had better stay out of sight.”

Prax looked towards Dreth, the undead mage, “H- how exactly would we d- disguise ourselves?”

“There are some apprentice robes and shrouds we can wear in the tower. We’ll have to wait until nightfall though, when the tower is vacant.”

Praxton nodded his head, still shivering.

“Are you cold my boy?” Dreth looked at Praxton and cackled. “You should never have to be cold, mage.”

Prax looked up as more snow fell around him. He felt like his feet were going freeze into place. “wha what?” Prax whispered as he tried to rub his arms for warmth.

“You left this in the tower,” Dreth pulled Praxton’s training staff from behind his robe and handed it to him. “I was on my way to the tailoring shop to return it to you, when I saw you and Kalende in the courtyard. Anyway, I convinced that old goat Braewynn to enchant it for you.” The staff seemed to glow with a warm amber light. “Take hold of it and channel the heat through your body. You’ll know how.”

Prax grabbed the staff eyeing it in wonder. The young teenager focused on the staff focusing on the heat. It began to burn his hands. He almost dropped the staff as had earlier that day during his training. Prax grimaced in pain. He couldn’t help himself. The pain was too much and he dropped the staff for the second time today. Praxton didn’t wait for what he knew his teacher would command and he reached down to pick up the staff. ‘Don’t feel the heat, be the heat. Be the heat..’ Prax mumbled to himself. This time he held the right focus. Being the heat. Warmth flooded from inside extending to his limbs, he began to sweat. The snow around his feet began to melt. Prax looked up towards Dreth smiling at his success.

“Well done boy!” Dreth slapped Praxton on the back and laughed. “Now remember this, the staff will help with channeling, but it is not the source of the heat, you are.”

Praxton nodded feeling good about himself for a moment. Now that he felt comfortable his mind returned to their situation. “Do we ju just need to to stay here till nightfall?”

“We’ll need to wait for the city to sleep.” Dreth looked up at the sky. Dusk was setting in. “We’ll open a portal at midnight. In the mean time, I believe I hear some charred bear kabobs calling my name.” Dreth walked over to the nearby hut wear the bear’s corpse lie to finish skinning him. He pulled a dagger from his belt and worked quickly.

“You have to eat? I don’t understand aren’t you dead?” Prax said as he watched the undead mage.

Kalende watched the two, interested most in Prax and the staff. Her own staff was among her confiscated belongings back in Stormwind. “Praxton… I hate to ask this of you, but I don’t suppose you know someone who could retrieve my belongings from the city?” Kalende asked.

“umm, I … I don’t know…” Prax thought about it. He felt like he didn’t really know anybody. He continued thinking,”Wait.. I I might know someone who who can help. There is a night elf that I kn know that might be able t t to help. I don’t know her well, we only met recently, her name is Loreli. She’s suppose to come to the sh- shop in a few days. We can, um talk to her then.” Prax looked down to see a good circle of melted snow surrounding him. He smiled.

Kalende nodded, “I think it’s best if I find somewhere outside the city to stay. But you’ll know where to find me.”

Prax looked perplexed, “We do?” He shook his head, “If you, um er say so.” He was beginning to feel hungry. He started eying the meat Dreth had cooked up. He wasn’t so sure.

“Old habit,” Dreth said to Praxton. “Not that I have to eat, but I was lucky enough to be raised with a few taste buds left. In my former life I was quite the culinary wizard, if I do say so myself. My relationship with the arcane order in Stormwind was poor to begin with. We can’t hide forever, and I need their help in Northrend.”

Prax took a step closer to examine the meat debating in his head if it was worth trying, he raised an eyebrow. And then thought to himself, ‘What the hell.’ and he took a piece of meat, which wasn’t half bad.

I feel bad, my brother calls me up quite a bit to invite me to go on mount runs or to do other such things in azeroth. I usually weasel out of it. Why? Because I have a family.

There are always a million things that go with that one line “I have a family”.

I feel bad, but I turn him down all the time.

Those players out there that aren’t married and don’t have children have no clue what its like to be a WoW player with a family. They don’t understand why we don’t have time to farm, do endless randoms, work on the latest achievements, etc. I would like to, but I can only do so much. Often times the prime time to play with others is also the prime time to spend time with the kids, help them with homework, help out with dinner, yard work, spend some quality time with the spouse, etc, etc.

Mind you, my brother isn’t a jerk about it at all, but I really don’t think he understands that I can’t jump on at a drop of a hat. I have to plan it out so I can change my schedule, do dinner earlier, or put the kids to bed slightly earlier or something like that. I’ve asked him if we could just schedule a time where we could play and he’s always been resistant to that (except for raiding). He always just tells me that I can just jump on sometime and then we could play. But when I do jump on he’ll be in the middle of something else.

The problem is much more general, married people and single people don’t speak the same language. In fact married people without kids and married people with kids don’t speak the same language either. And few people can understand crazy couples like my wife and I who have 3 kids under the age of 6 with a 4th kid on the way. I know we’re crazy, what can I say? I think WoW has been a great stress reliever, which is definitely needed in our house of chaos.

Oh, I loved this gamer family Van stickers, I wonder if I can talk my wife into it.

BC Priest Clown outfit. Where are the big read shoes and the big nose???

Apparently many of us hunters have a small little side project that we like to affectionately call priests. Why we rolled them we were never quite sure to begin with. Maybe it’s because we wanted to use Mend Pet on our other friends. Maybe we got so loyal to trying to protect them from nasty mobs we started to feel a kinship to them. Whatever it may be, many of us rolled priests alts. Mine was for the longest time just a bank alt. With a name like “Aoirbank” how could he have been anything else?

See, see I'm not such a bad priest, really!

At any rate, I used the time I had with RAF to level my bank alt to a whopping level 60. Now he’s level 63. I honestly didn’t do hardly any healing till level 60. Before hand we had a hunter/shadow priest combo which was pretty fun, but I always wanted to get my try at healing (I once did heal Dead mines, and I thought it was fun). I wanted to be useful to a raid, not just another hunter (we seem to have a lot of hunters in our guild lately). So, I did a little homework, decided to go discipline (thanks to my brother), set up heal bot, got on my hot keys and clicks ready to go and went into fray.

I can’t believe, I actually did pretty well. Nobody died, group was great. We ran a couple of dungeons together before we parted. I was feeling pretty good about myself. The next couple of days I tried again with the same results. I had a few times where I got scared because everybody’s health was going down at the same time, but we pulled through. I even got a “Great Healz”. I was surprised that I was doing so well seeing how I was brand spanking new to the role of healer. Of course it couldn’t last, right?

So, on Sunday morning I get into a group with an overzealous tank. You know, the ones who pull too much and tell you how awesome they are because they can pull 2 rooms of mobs? Yeah, that kind of tank. Well, I was barely keeping up with the healing, and of course there was never a time where I could sit down and get some mana, I just tried to fly by the seat of my pants.

Well, nevermind, I guess I am a noob priest.

I admit, I’m still learning how to play a disc priest. I may have speced a little too much down the holy side (I thought some healing bonuses would be helpful), so I didn’t have penance or some of the other bottom tree disc stuff. And I haven’t been wonderful with healing when the whole party goes down. I panic a little (now keep in mind I’ve only been trying to do this for the last week or so). So, when we start fighting bosses in the Underbog, I had some difficulty. Yes, I forgot to heal myself, but no one else died in the fight and I had a nice pally willing to throw me a rez. Well, by the time we got to the next boss fight the pally was gone (probably sick of an @ss hat of a tank), replaced by a rogue. Well, I died again, but they managed to pull it off and still kill the boss.

I then read in party chat from the rogue “Go, run back from the grave you NOOB.” And the tank adds in “All we’re saying is that you’re not awesome”. Okay I get that. I’m not awesome at healing. I’ve only been trying my hand at it for 4 days with only one or two instances a day. Yes, I am a healing noob, I admit it, but that guy was an @ss hole.

Here's me being a noob again.

Why should I have any loyalty to a group of jerks when I’m just playing to have fun? It’s one thing if you ask someone what went wrong and maybe even tell them maybe they could do this or that. Advice (as long as it’s not condescending) is welcome as far as I’m concerned. So, without trying to explain anything to a couple of jerks, I decide my time would be better spent doing something else. I was out of rest xp anyway. I left the group. And since then I’ve started trying to learn more about my class so I can something like that won’t happen again. I’m going to tweek my spec and figure out what other disc priests are doing and what’s effective.

Was I wrong to leave the group? Should I have stuck it out? Part of me hoped they wouldn’t be able to find another healer for at least 20 minutes. How awful of me! I guess I’m not as the nice guy my mother thought I was.

So, I was actually going to get on this morning and type something about my experiences running dungeons as a Disc Priest, but instead of Tuesday morning Maintenance, we had Tuesday morning rolling restarts. How could I miss the opportunity to play?? Seriously, I really write a lot more when we have long extended maintenance time.

Somethings that I’m finding interesting right now.

• Healing as a Disciple priest. My randoms didn’t actually wipe, who would have thought a hunter could learn to heal??
• Remote Auction House. Yeah, I thought I could maybe through some auctions up while I’m at work when I have a break here and there. I don’t have an iphone or an ipod touch, but I plan on getting one… soon. You could say I’m wasting my money, but really? Isn’t the whole game a waste of money?
• PvPing on my Warlock – okay I haven’t actually done this yet, but I would like to give it a try.
• Having crafting added on to the Remote Auction house. Wouldn’t that be just the bomb??? Buy your gems, cut them and throw them back on from your iphone while you are waiting in line at the store. I would love it!!

Anyway, I really don’t have time to write. So, there you go, what’s going on in my brain, I guess each of those things could be their own blog posts. Oh well. I gotta go donate some plasma, fun fun fun.

So, I woke up at 3am with one of the most annoying things in the world, heartburn hiccups. Yeah, could that sound any worse??

Just imagine a bad painful case of the hiccups that you get a little burst of indigestion with each hick. Hurts like hell. (and consequently – completely deserved – that’s what I get for eating mint Oreo cookies right before I go to bed.) So, I scrabbled half awake stumbling for the kitchen for my cure of the hiccups, a spoonful of peanut butter. Seriously, works every time for me. (well, almost – it didn’t work when I was drugged up after getting my wisdom teeth yanked out – that was a miserable day of hiccups – hopefully never to be repeated). I really need to start eating healthy and exercising, but you see the only time I have to really exercise is when I play WoW in the morning. I better figure something or buy a lot of peanut butter.

Anyway, on to something more important:

So, I was looking at the patch notes for Cataclysm Beta, wow, they still have a lot of work to do. All hunter Lock pets were deleted because of data corruption, their attempting to have people stream the game instead of downloading the new patch (must be huge), and the level cap is only 83 at this point in time among other things.

Here are some of the things that I noticed categorized by classes that I care about:

Hunters

• Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.

• Focus has replaced mana as a new resource.

• Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.

• The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.

• Ammo has been removed from the game.

I’m so stoked. This is freakin’ awesome!!!! They said at this point, if you put a pet in the stable then it’s talents will get wiped. That’s annoying. Oh, and I’m not sad at all the ammo is leaving.  Well, that’s not entirely true, I really wish they would have did to ammo what they did to throwing weapons, make it so  you only had to buy one of them, then they could have done some cool bonuses to them, but whatever, at least I won’t ever run out in a raid again.

I’m already getting a list of pets that I’m going to go tame the second Cataclysm comes out. I’ll have to post that sometime soon.

Warlocks

• Soul Shards have been removed from the game as items. Instead, they now exist as a resource system necessary for using, or altering the mechanics of certain spells.

Warlocks everywhere will cheer out loud for this. I’m so sick of having soul shards take up so much bag space with my level 60 warlock (and yes I’m still working on getting his flower picking skills up, I’m almost to 300 – yes I know my life is boring, but what can you do?).

Death Knights

• A dedicated tanking tree has been implemented.

• The way in which runes recharge has changed.

Looks like I’m going to have to relearn how to play that Death knight with all the changes coming through there.

Paladins

• We are in the process of overhauling many paladin talents, spells and abilities. Expect updates in upcoming patches.

Okay, so I only have a baby Paladin, but I’m going to start paying more attention to the class. Apparently, everything is going to change anyway (again).

Druids

• A new Eclipse mechanic has been added for druids. The feature is functional, but the interface art is still a work in-progress.

I honestly don’t know what’s going on with druids, but I love the class. I heard they’re changing something with the tree form. I still think the tree form should change with the seasons of the year. You know have lots of leaves in the summer, have them slowly change color and fall off in the fall, look dead in the winter and start to blossom in the spring. How cool would that be!! Seriously! But really, I got my druid up to level 60, but I skipped 20 levels thanks to RAF, so I don’t have a clue as to what’s going on with that class.

So, there you have it, I really should get back to work and try to get something done here for once in my life. I’m really trying to make an effort to put more posts out there. I enjoy writing, but life just keeps getting in the way.

I spent the entire weekend completely WoW free up in the mountains. It was my wife’s annual family reunion where about 80 of us meet for good times camping for about 5 days or so. We were in a trailer so we stayed warm at night, it was a lot of fun.

Interesting thing is that I was told by my wife to not discuss WoW related topics around certain people. Her brother and myself can get off talking about Warcraft related issues for a good long while you see. The reason I was told to keep quiet was because of our cousin’s friends that came up.  Apparently, his wife recently left him for somebody in her guild in WoW. Pretty sad if you ask me.

That’s the second time I’ve heard about a marriage dissolving because someone was having inappropriate relations with someone in World of Warcraft. I’m sure there are plenty others that I haven’t heard about.

What is with these people?

Again, as usual, its my opinion that if someone has an unfaithful heart, then they have an unfaithful heart. Really, if someone is flirting with the idea of finding someone else besides their significant other, they would do it with or without WoW. There are plenty of other things they can find on the web to mess around with that. Chat rooms, facebook, other MMOs, dating websites, etc. I guess where there is a will there is a way. I just hate it when they use WoW as their cheating medium. Then it casts a negative cloud over WoW for people, even though all the blame should be placed squarely on the shoulder of the cheater. Just my opinion.

It seems like often times the blame sometimes is thrown the wrong way. Don’t get me wrong, I know my wife wasn’t blaming WoW. She just felt that the guy didn’t need reminders of the fact that his wife just left him. I just think others actually feel that Warcraft is to blame, like the evilness of the game enticed this lady into looking for extra curricular activities. My cousin’s mom thinks the game is “the devil”. How is this so evil?? Come on, we’re trying to fight the evil guys (mostly, of course there are backstabbing rogues out there as well, and evil warlock gankers.)

Well, I don’t have much more to say about this. People are stupid.

Anyway, I didn’t get to talk about WoW all weekend.  Now its Wednesday and all I’ve done this week in Azeroth is run around picking flowers with my level 60 warlock, trying to get herbalism to level 300 so I can start in the outlands. I’ve been a little obsessed with professions lately. Meh, thus is life.

So, as of today I’m done with the recruit-a-friend time I had linked with my buddy. I got a lot of leveling done. I’ve been able to get my warlock from 10 to 60, my priest from level 31 to 60, my druid from 41 to 60, my shaman from 31 to 51, my rogue from 10 to 29 and a brand new pally to level 16. I’m sure many people out there could get more done with RAF, but with the amount of time I have, I think that’s a pretty good accomplishment.

Well, as you can see I’ve been focusing a lot on my alts, particularly the alts on the Deathwing server, neglecting all other servers pretty much. Of course, the way this is going I might transfer a toon to one of these servers (a PvE server – I’m so sick of world PvP!). I am planning on transferring the druid over to my wife’s account. It was hers to begin with before she got her own account. She left it there about level 19 or so. Time to give the druid back (that way I can play with her with my priest or warlock).

I’ve been so focused on RAF, not doing anything else (except for midsummer fire festival), that now I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. I’m still sworn off of raiding till Cataclysm. I’m a little burned out on leveling (particularly questing). I haven’t done BGs or dungeons while leveling with RAF (even though dungeons with RAF is absolutely amazing I’ve heard), I haven’t done this because the queue for these before 7am is ridiculous. We tried to do a BG and after waiting for more than an hour we gave up. So, maybe now that we’re a little higher level the queues might be done.

Honestly, I kind of want to try something completely different. I downloaded Starcraft 2 recently which could be a great break till Cataclysm comes out. I’ve also thought about trying some of the free trials in some of the other MMOs. I don’t plan on leaving WoW any time soon. I’ve invested too much time in my characters to leave Azeroth for a few years … at least a few years. I played SC2 this morning for a little bit. I didn’t get a chance to play very long, but I realized that it won’t be taking over my time with WoW. It’ll cut it down quite a bit though.

By the way, if you can get a chance to do Recruit-a-friend I would highly suggest it. The XP gains are amazing, the other tools (like summoning) are also fabulous. I especially love my 2 seated rocket (it looks like jet skis if you ride it on top of the water – very fun!). My brother actually created a second account just to level some toons. He plans on abandoning the account once he’s done. Of course you’d have to have the ability to duel box if you did that, and that’s another subject altogether.

What are y’all doing with your down time before Cataclysm? Are you taking a break? Are you getting into some other game?

Well, until last  year I’ve been a single player gamer. I’ve played my hunter to the most part. But this last year I’ve gotten into alts more and more.  Mind you I started doing that for several reasons.

1. When I started playing, randoms didn’t exist, so you only had so much you could do by yourself at max level. I’ve never been one of those characters who sat around Ironforge looking to join a PuG.
2. I started making friends all over the place on twitter. One way to spend more time with these guys was to roll toons on their servers and join their guilds. I did that for quite a while, but I didn’t get my toons leveled very high. I didn’t do a whole lot with other people to be honest.  That was before Real ID came out. Now I can talk to them while playing on my home server.
3. Of course I often rolled toons that were there just to support my main character (Aoirselvar). That’s why my level 60 priest was named “Aoirbank”. I kept rolling new bank alts when I decided to play one of them. I also rolled my DK as a farming toon, and gave her mining and skinning (eventually I got rid of skinning for jewelcrafting). The druid had alchemy in order to someday to make my hunter flasks. In the beginning it was more like all of my alts were employees for my hunter.

Now I’m into rolling and playing toons to experience a different aspect of the game. I don’t just want to do dps anymore.

I want to heal, I want to tank.

I want it all.

I’m still scared to death to do tanking or healing in PUGs, but I think it would be fun play the game with these new roles. I just need to buck up.

However, I’m still a hunter before anything else, but I’m getting distracted with all of these other classes. I can’t promise that my hunter will be the first character I have that reaches level 85.

The only problem is that when you start playing with many classes you don’t hone in your skills.

As my brother asked me, “Are you going to be one of those guys that have tons of 80s, but doesn’t know how to play any of them?”

And yes, at this point, I honestly don’t know how to play many of these classes in PvP or PvE situations (Especially the druid and shaman; these were the characters that were granted tons of levels. I don’t even know what spell options I have for them). So, I’ll be a noob for a good long while, but I don’t mind. Gives me something to do.

Why do you roll alts? What do you do with your alts?

I’m still here, promise. I’m on summer hours right now so I’m actually home with the family more often. You’d think with this extra time that I’d write on here more often, but I don’t. Tuesday mornings have been busy I suppose.

So, what have I been doing this summer besides building play sets (which took me forever!!), mowing the lawn, making breakfast for the kids (which my daughter is asking me to do as I write), and other random stuff?

I’m still working on Recruit-a-friend leveling. So far I’ve gotten my priest to level 60, my druid to level 50, my warlock to 47, and my rogue to 29, and a new pally to level 14.  I still have 23 levels that my friend can hand to one or more of my toons, but I’m waiting till his mage gets to 60 so I can level the druid up, and maybe the shaman. I now have used up all 9 character slots on my home server of Deathwing, US. I’m going to probably give my wife’s druid back to her so I can have room to roll a worgen when the expansion comes out. (Of course I reserve the right to get on her account and play the druid when I feel the whim). I still have a good couple of weeks left of RAF, so hopefully I’ll get the druid and warlock, and shaman (and whoever else) leveled up.

Well, I now have 2 daughters asking for breakfast so I best be going. I hope everybody is having a happy summer. Remember that sunblock is your friend.