The 50th Post!

This was meant to be a sweeping post, congratulating me for finally having some substance to this blog. Except if you look at my last post and even my last few posts -- I'm not sure I have anything of substance to talk about.

Last night, in Kara, we started talking about our various blogs and I mentioned that I was blocked. "Some of my most popular posts were about the sex buffs, maybe I should continue in that vein," I asked. We have a rather fun and loose group and that was met with relative cheer. "Having done Straight and Gay buffs," I asked, "where do I go from there, bestiality?"

To which my raid leader responded, "Oh -- cross race -- I'd love to hear about Tauren-Gnome couplings."

Okay, let that image sit in your head for awhile and then start laughing.

Funny... but not substantive.

I'll work through this block, however it does kinda mess up my celebration of the 50th post.

In the meantime, here is a edited/modified version of the entry I had in mind:

50 posts! Wow, that is just great, I just... well I don't know what to say. There are a few people I have to thank, the ones that helped me get here and all. Well, first off, we must thank Elune, ya know, just because. I, also, owe a big debt to Big Red Kitty, without reading his blog I'm not sure I would have even considered starting one of my own (and I have a feeling that many of my fellow colleagues feel the same way.) I want to thank all my friends who came to this site and gave me very positive feedback and I want to thank all the readers, lurkers and commentators alike.

When I began this blog i said in the very first post:

If you, like me, feel as if there are aspects of this game that you don't get, come here and share -- I'm certain that I will always have n00bish moments but hopefully, I can start learning from them -- maybe one day I will learn not to use Multi-Shot in a Crowd Control situation!

So hopefully I have entertained and informed in these past 49 posts and I will continue to do so... in the meantime, here is a list of some general "Don'ts" that I have learned from my time in WoW.

Don't:

• vendor stuff that may be useful to another player. (Quick hint: "of the whale" vendor or DE it, "of the bandit" AH that badboy)
• be an arrogant ass in PUGS
• be an arrogant ass in Guild
• be an arrogant ass anywhere -- there are people on the server that can kill you. (It may take ten of them, but they'll get you down.)
• come to raids without Pots, water and food (the ones that give you buffs)
• keep epic (or really nice blues) un-enchanted, you are doing yourself and your group a major disservice
• put up with BS from your friends and guildies. At the very worst, you can always move to another server and make new friends (assuming you are not an arrogant ass)
• go into an instance ignorant. Before entering anywhere new go to wowwiki or bosskillers and learn a little bit.
• make the game not fun anymore -- if that happens take a break.

and finally:

• Don't (on the stairs leading to Moroes in Karazhan) send your pet wildly after party guests, only to return having aggroed the entire ballroom. (Yes I did AGAIN last night -- that would be the fifth time... in my defense though I assisted the tank and he changed targets)

So, fifty posts later I thank you for your interest!

How I Roll -- Macro Edition

I know I like to hear about other people's play styles, especially other Hunters, but really anyone. I like to know what macros they use, what keys are bound, what add-ons, etc. So I am starting a continuing series called "How I Roll" -- and today is the macro addition.

First a caveat: As a n00b it took me a long time to discover the usefulness of macros in-game (I used to use them all the time in Lotus 1-2-3 -- am I dating myself?) but my play and DPS really improved when I started using them, so if you don't use a shot rotation macro (for hunters) or any class appropriate macros, you may not playing up to your full ability.

Okay, I'm gonna talk about my macros and if you get some ideas - great, if not, you've only wasted two minutes!

Shot Rotation Macro:

This is my Shot Rotation Macro.
There are many like it, but this one is MINE.
My Macro is my best friend. It is my life.
I must fire my bow true.
I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me

Sorry got a little side tracked there -- much apologies to the USMC, semper fi boys!

/castsequence reset=2 Auto shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot, Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command


You'll notice there is no multi-shot in this rotation -- that is on purpose so that I do not break CC. I have Multi-shot keybound to no.2 and throw it in when needed, and it usually doesn't mess up my rotation too bad. (To tailor your own Macro to your weapon speed, I found this guide very useful.)

Now -- here is my little secret that I use with my macro. In addition to binding it to the "1" key, I have bound the macro to my scroll wheel on my mouse. I just spin that sucker all day long and that macro keeps going.

I am afraid that one day I will want to zoom in on something that I have targeted and start a pull and wipe my raid/party... but everyone knows I'm a n00b, so when that happens, they'll all make fun of me -- virtually tussle my hair and forgive me.

For misdirection I set my focus as our Main Tank and can knock this one off when ever I feel the need to add a little bit more aggro to the mix (and if no focus exists, my pet gets the aggro):
#show Misdirection
#showtooltip Misdirection
/cast [button:2] Distracting Shot; [target=focus, help] Misdirection; [help] Misdirection; [target=pet, exists] Misdirection;

I usually use MD in conjunction with this macro below to max out threat -- just have to watch out for global cool down on the timing, but it leaves me only one button to press.
/castsequence reset=5 Distracting Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, Auto-Shot, Steady Shot

I have other macros, but I don't use them as often and I find I change them around a bit as I need them. I'm trying to learn more about macro writing and wowwiki has a nice guide. Even Blizz is getting into the act with more Macro info -- and macro flexibility should be increased with the release of 2.3. Even if you don't want to make them, copy and paste them, there are many sites that warehouse macros (that's where I got the misdirection macro from.)

Hope this helps your game!

We got a Letter!?!??!!!!

Yay! -- I got a letter -- and even though Justin posted his comment as well as sent me an email, it still counts. (And I know others of you have sent me email and I appreciate it, but this one actually asked me a question that I can try to answer.)

So, this email was about my favorite Post to date: What Kind of Buff would you get from Sex?

So Justin writes:

:) Hilarious... and might be implemented lol.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on how gay / lesbian sex would work considering they know how to please the same sex easier as they have experience with their own body.

Regards!

So BRK gets letter asking him about mechanics of the game, what shots to use, what trap where, I get asked about sex... I win.

Course, now I have to opine on the Same-Sex Sex Buff (SSSB), which as a heterosexual male, I'm not sure I'm fully qualified to do so, but I am going to try and if any GLBTI MMO friends/readers would like to tell me I am crazy or have a correction, please feel free -- you know I like comments!

Here goes:
First off I am going to take Ratmaggot's suggestion in the comments and say that males need attunement to have sex (females may need a much easier attunement). However, should the attunement be easier if you want to have same-sex sex or more difficult? I'm gonna say from my experience that a man trying to understand women is a little harder than understanding someone of the same sex, so I'm going with an easier attunement to be able to have homosexual sex and, as Justin notes, since they are more comfortable with similar parts, a very high Proc rate for the buff, say around 90% -- as to what that buff would be, we have to look at more factors.

Well first off, we have to make it so that there would be a chance that any partner in any same sex liason could get either the Male Sex Buff (MSB) or the Female Sex Buff (FSB) but there should also be a very small proc rate for the SSSB. And would the buff from gay sex be different from the lesbian sex buff, I suppose there is no one that can testify to that, so for simplicity sake, the SSSB needs to be for any non-hetero sex.

Other issues include a cool down timer -- There would also have to be a cool down time before you could have sex again, whether the buff procs or not. I'm thinking 12 hours for men and 4 hours for women.

We also have to decide if you can be bi-sexual in the game or do you have to stick with the lifestyle you have chosen for your character? If you go with the same sex attunement, can you do the hetero attunement and then go both ways or should you be limited to your first choice? Personally, if I were playing I would want my character to be bisexual and get whatever buff I could get (and good lord, can you imagine the orgies before raids)! However as a programmer, I'm making you pick one or the other -- you're either straight or gay, once you've been attuned to your sexual orientation you'll need to pay lots of gold to re-attune to a different sexual assignment. No one is on the down low here!

Now here is the rub in all of this... the Daedalus Project (PDF) has done a great demographic study of who is playing Warcraft. In their study men outnumber women by 5.25 to 1 and those men are 7 to 8 times more likely to play a character of the opposite sex:

"In other words:
about 1 out of every 2 female characters is played by a man
about 1 out of every 100 male characters is played by a woman"

And I would guess that 80% the straight males who play a female character in Age of Conan are gonna want to play a lesbian character... which means that there will be about 1 woman for every 5 men and that is even if as many women play Age of Conan as those that play WoW (which I doubt). So unless a lot of straight men are willing to have their characters be of a different sexual orientation than themselves they are going to have to go without those great buffs or else start "self procing".

Okay, so with all that in mind, what would the SSSB be and how would it work within the mechanics of the game?

Here's what I would do: If the sex buff procs from gay sex here is what may happen: you have a 63% chance to get the MSB a 33% chance to get the FSB and a 4% chance to get the SSSB and just reverse it for lesbian sex.
Now because of the small proc rate and to encourage competitive straight men to play gay characters I think the SSSB should be pretty special, say something like this:

"Teh Gay" Buff: A 4 hour buff that improves all stats by 20% and haste rating by 10%. Additionally, when this buff is active the character may have sex with 4 more players (1 an hour) of any sex with a sex buff guaranteed.

Whadaya think?





Wow Item Creator!

That Sinking Feeling Part II

When I started this endeavor, I kept having these great ideas of things to write about. Not just the "here's what happened to me today" posts, but the "Really helpful, really useful, boy was I dumb but you can learn from my mistakes" posts.

I had a whole bunch of things to talk about, and now... I can't remember them.

I really, really want this blog to be more than entertaining. A place to help us learn something... or at least make everyone go "Yeah, I feel that way too dude!"

But I am finding it harder and harder to write posts of substance and so I write less and less and so people visit less and less and then it just dwindles away to nothing.

I'm not sure if anyone noticed but I removed a blog from my blog roll this week. Huntard with Cheese went away from my blog roll because he hasn't posted since August and I figured if he wasn't updating, there was no point in having a link, but I really, really liked his site. I thought he had a weird and snarky quality to his blog that I would love to have in mine if I had the talent for it. I'm not sure why he stopped blogging, maybe he wasn't getting enough hits or maybe it was taking up too much time, but I find it sad.

My blog colleague Exanimo from Full Time Wow Addict has a recent post questioning the usefulness of his blog.

And I can certainly understand where he is coming from. And even though I have in-game friends who have told me how much they like the blog, so I know some people are reading and enjoying it, I can't help but have that sinking feeling again that I have nothing important or even entertaining to impart and I should just stop doing this.

But I probably won't, I guess I'm just channeling my mother, trying to guilt my readers into saying something nice about me, even though you're already here and reading this.

So, you come here, you read what I have to say, would it kill you to show me your affection through a comment or two, is that too much to ask?

Hacked like a n00b

Well, technically, I was a hacked like a n00b, because I was one.

I had only been playing for about two months at the time and I knew nothing!

I had just hit 60, I was starting to get some gold thanks to a lucky drop and I logged in one day to find my character naked in Ironforge, everything gone except my mount and my hearthstone and all my money gone.

I put a ticket in right away, they closed down my account until I could verify I was indeed myself. (I had to fax a copy of my passport to them) and then in about a week I got much of my stuff back. My guildies had been nice and threw some money my way so it wasn't that bad.

But how did I get hacked in the first place? I run Norton anti-virus and Internet Protection and the definition were up-to-date. So then I downloaded Spybot: Search & Destroy and they found a couple of cookies that they thought were a problem, but no keyloggers or really malicious threats. SO what was the deal?

Here was the deal... I only use about five different password and username combinations (except for my credit card and online banking stuff) and when I signed up for WoW I just used my most popular one. Obviously, it was on some list somewhere and a hacker just used it randomly. They may have even known about it for awhile and lay in wait until I had enough gold to make it worth their while.

In my defense, I will say that I was unaware of all these hacking shenanigans when I signed up for WoW and figured I did not need to use a super secret Passwords. Now, I use a password that I use no where else except WoW.

When I was communicating with a GM about all of this, they tended to be very circumspect about how their fraud department went about penalizing the parties involved, but here is what I fathomed about what happened and I got a "Could be..." reply from the GM:

Someone bought gold from a website selling it, and this fly by night operation, instead of farming the gold themselves, hacked accounts, sent the gold to the unsuspecting sap who paid $108 for 1,000 gold and then got their account canceled because there was a clear trail right back to where the fraud began.

So the moral of this story is twofold:
1. If you buy gold with real money -- you are a loser and I hate you.
2. Don't use the same username and password for WoW that you use to register for your local newspaper!

Tales from a n00bside I

In the lands of Azeroth there are thousands of tales from the n00bside, this is just one of them:

I was level 60 and I felt like I was walking on air. I had 300 gold in my pocket and I was in the Eastern Plague lands killing scourge and building my Argent Dawn Reputation, when all of the sudden -- GONG -- I'm honored, so I go to the quartermaster to see what new stuff I can buy.

Hmmm... what is this[Hallowed Brazier]? The tool tip doesn't seem to help, so I right click on it to get some more info.

I here a clink of gold, and I think oops, I bought it -- and then I look at my gold and OMFG more than a third of my former stash was GONE! This thing that I just bought and had no idea what it was just cost me 120 gold! And it was red in my inventory so I couldn't even use it!

Argghh -- I could put in a ticket to a GM and see if I could get my money back or just vendor it back for 30 gold and chalk it up to lesson learned.

I took the lessoned learned route and now I look up things and their prices before I buy em.

That was a tale from the n00bside, there are many more, if you would like to share your's email them to eternal.n00bie@gmail.com.

Good Idea, Bad Idea: The Auction House

There are many n00b stories surrounding the AH and how it takes some people a while to find it. A couple have been posted here in the comments, some I have heard and then there is my own story which does not differ much from most of the n00bs. Below is the conversation I had with my RL Friend introducing me to the AH.

RL Friend: Grats on hitting level 20. Hey what skills are you leveling?
Me: Well I was herb & skinning, but I dropped the herb for leatherworking.
RLF: That will be useful for your hunter.
Me: Yeah I thought so too, except I have all these recipes that I will never use for myself.
RLF: Well, you can make them and sell them on the Auction House.
Me: Auction House? What's that?

And then I am told all about the auction house and I learn to stop vendoring my light leather. w00t.

Nowadays, I feel that I am no longer an Auction House n00b. I believe I have graduated and I'm pretty good at playing the market and there are some essential tools that are needed to maximize profit and minimize your expenses when you need to buy materials or items.

Those tools are: Auctioneer, a wonderful add-on and allakhazam.com.

Now Auctioneer only works if you spend sometime scanning the AH. Basically, you have to have your character sit there and the program looks at every auction and looks at the price ( about 15 to 20 minutes). If you are just installing Auctioneer, you probably need to do this three times in the first week you install and once a week thereafter. The more you do this the more reliable your data is going to be. It is important to get as much info as possible for those weird things you pick up in your travels as well as keeping tabs on popular items.

Another important time to scan auctioneer is after a major upgrade. After 2.1 was implemented the prices of knothide leather and netherweave cloth plummeted, I was hoping it was a momentary blip because I made a lot of money off of these materials, but alas it was not. Keep in mind that there can be other unforseen changes to the economy after upgrades, so to make sure you get a handle on these quickly, scan often.

Auctioneer is also very useful in making sure you don't get taken for a ride. If you want to buy some felweed so someone can make pots for you and there are only a few on the AH and the price is way higher than Auctioneer says it should be, then you should probably wait on buying that item until there are more on the AH.

Now the best way to use Allakhazam is when you find a rare or weird item that you may only have one or no scans of the item.

Several weeks ago, while doing Netherwing Dallies, Formula: Enchant Chest - Major Resilience dropped. I did not have any info in my auctioneer on the item, but it was a green enchant, I probably would have put it up on the AH for 20g or something. However, since I had no info, I went to Allakhazam and it told me that this measly green sells for 475 gold on average and I gave it to my RL friend (yes, the very same one who hipped me to the AH) in hopes that he would get his epic flight form sooner, who sold it for 350g.

So, those are some good ideas.

Of mixed use is prospecting the AH (buying low and selling high). I will do it sometimes, but only with items, that if they don't sell I can actually use (with some exceptions -- like Primal Mana on the AH for 2g each.) I did it recently with Don Santos' Famous Hunting Rifle. I found it on the AH for 1,000 gold and tried to sell it for 2,000. I wound up selling it for about 1,400 -- still a tidy little profit, but it took several weeks. (Auctioneer has an add-on called Bottom Scanner, that will recommend you buy things that are very low in price -- if you decide you want to go that route.)

Here is a bad idea: Cornering the Market -- or attempting to. In this circumstance, you buy up everything on the AH of one kind of herb, leather or cloth and then resell it at an inflated price. This is a bad idea because you can never truly corner the market in this game. I have cloth and leather stored in my bank toon that I wait for just such a moment and then throw a bunch of it up on the AH at prices significantly lower than the other seller has set and yet still higher than the normal market price and I and others who do that same thing make a tidy profit off of other people's risk.

Of absolute stupidity is what someone on my realm tried to do a last week and that is make gold off of something you obviously have no clue about. This person bought all the epic recipes on the AH (selling for around 300 to 800 gold). Then they proceeded to mark them all up to 1,500 gold, what they did not discern in many of these recipes is that the item was Bind on Pickup (BOP) which meant that only the crafter could ever use it. No crafter is going to buy a recipe for 1,500 gold, then get the mats that will either take weeks to farm or hundreds more gold to buy, just for a single piece of gear. I would like to think that this person did not even realize that they were BOP items and thought that if the crafter was going to make money off of the recipe they would be willing to pay top coin for it. Sadly they were mistaken and wound up slowly dropping the price all week. It also didn't help that no one else putting these recipes up on the AH followed this person's lead -- they kept the old prices.

One final note: Inflation. As time goes on, Auctioneer will not keep up with inflation. You will start to notice that most popular items are being listed at 5 to 10% higher than your Auctioneer has them for. Since gold, copper and silver are created out of thin air, and once your epic flying mount is bought, you have no mortgage to save for, inflation is always going to be a problem -- just keep farming and doing quests to keep up with the Joneses. (This may also happen in reverse with high ticket items, which get farmed more as more people get better geared and do higher instances and get better drops.)

In the end, it's all fake money anyway, so if you lose money on the AH, its not as bad as having your entire IRA in Enron -- just like the rest of the game, it is something to have fun with.

It shouldn't be this easy...

One of the posts that I wanted to do since I started this has been a general compendium of sites that are really, really useful. I've sprinkled some in here and there, but there hasn't been one major blog roll, that I can then turn into a side column that we can always click on to check on stuff.

The jobs a big one and I just haven't had the time to focus on it yet, lucky for me Lassirra at The Hunter's Mark has already a lot of done it for me in two great posts.

Being a Know-it-All Without Knowing it All

Being a Know-It-All Without Knowing it All: Part 2

These are close to what I was going to write anyway, so that made it pretty easy, now I have to tie all these up in a little bow and put them in a sidebar -- add a few sites of my own choosing and voila!

In the meantime, I would call these two articles required reading for all of us n00bs.

It's the little things....

Everyone has guides for all the big stuff. Guides on how to pick talents or mob specific macros. Bosskillers is a whole site devoted to killing the big time bosses. There are guides to creating gold, to crafting, gathering, etc.

So, what about the little things? What little things in WoW did we have to learn all by ourselves? Number 1 right off the bat for me were the abbreviations, they are the worst, because there is nothing that says "n00b" more than asking what STV means, so I have provided a link to a guide from wowinsider in the column to your left. the other thing that had me flummoxed right away and took awhile for me to figure out were guilds.

Now if you are joining your real life friends on your server this is generally a no-brainer -- you and your friends either create a guild or join one together. But if you are alone and people keep whispering you to "Sign my charter" or "Join my guild" as a level 10 or 16 or 20 whatever, how do you know what guilds to avoid and what guilds to join?

At least if you join the wrong guild, you can always /gquit, its not like if you picked the wrong gender, class, race -- at least you're not stuck with it. (I would say hair style, but we'll get to change that eventually.)

Truly, the answer to these "tells" is either to ignore them or give them a polite no. I would not join a guild until you have run at least one instance with a PUG (Pick up Group) and if you get along with someone in that PUG, who is in a guild, ask them about it -- if you like what they tell you about it, ask how you join. (I did that with my first guild after a Deadmines Run and as soon as I asked how to join, I got an invite and then that person bought me a tabard and it was a great guild.)

There are also plenty of class specific things you wind up having to learn by yourself, for me one was how to learn new talents for your pet without going to the trainer.

But one thing I will say about these little things... when you do discover them all on your own, there is a sense of accomplishment. Sure you're not the first one to have figured it out, but you did figure it out -- without a guide, without a friend, without asking.

So take a lot of pride in those little things you figured out along the way-- those wonderful AHA moments -- one day, one of us n00bs is going to have an AHA moment that no one else has ever had before and then, well then, we won't be a n00b anymore and we will have graduated to n00b first class!

OMG -- The Pressure

What was BRK thinking when he linked to my blog? There were like eight people reading this beforehand and now... god I just checked my meter and well there's a lot more people now! I can't do this-- there's too many people watching, what if I screw up, what if I write something stupid, what if people don't like me?

Actually, I am ready. I can do this.

Welcome all -- since your all fans of BRK, you must be intelligent, thoughtful, insightful... ok, I'm laying it on too thick now.

Pressure situations -- thats what I want to talk about today. The higher the imaginary stakes the more you have on the line. Here are pretty much all of my highest pressure moments in WoW:

Grouping up with someone I didn't know for the first time (around level 3).
Grouping up for my first instance.
Raiding with my first guild for the first time. (We had one 60 and we went down to the crossroads, and got our butts kicked.)
Real raiding with my guild (ZG, I think).
Switching servers and finding new friends.
Submitting the application for my new guild.
My new guild interview.
Signing up for a Molten Core run while still not being attuned (and praying that I get attuned in the next two days).
The Molten Core run as a brand new member of the guild.
My first run of Karazhan (as a replacement of the Kara 2 team). For the full story of that read about it here.
My first run of Karazhan (as a replacement of the Kara 1 team).
My first run of Karazhan on my team.

Each of these circumstances dealt with working with new people, new situations and potentially the death of everyone involved, ok not potentially -- inevitably, but you don't want to be the one the Tank yells at that you are costing him gold.

The n00b inside me quaked at each of these moments and even including the stupid raid on the Crossroads (a nice guild bonding moment) they all turned out great! Sure, mistakes were made, but I wasn't the only one making them and if people were talking about me behind my back , I didn't hear it so I didn't care. When I needed to be nudged, someone would nudge me. When I did something well, someone would praise me.

So a little fear, a little pressure is a good thing. It made me read up like a madman on Molten Core and the bosses in Karazhan to look like I knew what I was doing. (It also made me re-read and re-write this entry three times.) I find that it's the braggarts that go into the instance without any preparation and think that their massive gear will show everyone and the MoBs who is boss. They are the ones that usually wind up wiping the group over and over again, while we insecure, overly prepared n00bs try to correct their errant course and set the raid aright with all our big book learning.

And everything turns out great!

Reputation -- What's that?

I'm trying to remember when I first became cognizant of the fact that there was even a reputation tab on my character portrait. I do know that the first time I was aware of Reputation was my first visit to Menethril Harbor when I went up to guy with the horses and he told me I had to be Exalted with Stormwind before I could get one.

I was a level 20 Night Elf who had just ventured off of Teldrassil for first time ever and kept taking the boat all around to explore this strange new world.

But I never took the time to analysis or even worry about rep until I got to Desolace and needed it for the whole Centaur thing, and even then I didn't really care about it until Argent Dawn and Timbermaw, when you could actually get some cool stuff by getting higher reps.

(Oh... I have a whole n00bish story about Argent Dawn Rep Rewards that I will tell sometime soon.. It was so stupid and it cost me a 1/3 of my gold!)

Anyway, you would think that by the time I got to Outland, I would know enough about Rep to not be stupid -- do things in the right order to maximize rep grinds. Well if you thought that, you'd be wrong. I barreled through Hellfire Peninsula and I'm still 3500 rep points away from being Revered with Honor Hold. (And they have some really nice rewards too!)

So, first and foremost, before you start a rep grind, do your research. wowwiki is the best for getting the nitty gritty on how to maximize your rep grinding points. (For example, it tells me that the first thing I should have done in Hellfire is kill Shattered Hands until I was Friendly, then I could start doing the quests, but I was anxious to get leveling so I did the quest for the experience right away, thats a n00b move.) There is also a Reputation Calculator that shows how to maximize your grind based on your armory profile, but its not working right now (40,000 hits crashed the free web service that was hosting it).

Now, I'm not saying abandon all fun or your playing style to maximize Rep, but if it is important you, look at the rewards and the best way to get the reputation and then go about doing it your own way.

That Sinking Feeling

Yeah, the feeling that no one likes you, no one is paying attention to you, everything you do is crap? Thats the core of the Eternal n00b. I've been thinking about that, as I check everyday for new comments on this blog and finding none. (Except the excellent shout out from BRK, which is in and of itself, almost a seal of approval from the God of Hunter Blogs.)

I've begun to start telling friends about this site, I put a link to it in my Guild's Forums (on the bottom of my signature) and I'm just hoping that people kinda of find their way here.

And yet, I still have that sinking feeling, that this just isn't good enough for the general public, and I think I know why: This blog doesn't know that it is. That it is a World of Warcraft blog is undeniable, but I meant this blog as a forum and guide for all of us with that sinking feeling that we just don't know well enough what we are doing. It was supposed to be filled little tips and tricks to make the reader feel like, well at least if they didn't know what they were doing, could at least fake it. Of course, up to now, it has only been about me and things that concern me. I hope to change that... in the future, as for today, I will share another one of those sinking feeling stories and maybe by example someone will learn something.

So getting ready for a Kara run yesterday, sitting in the main Vent chat room talking to two other people, when one says "Beast Mastery is stupid, any hunter who is a beast master is stupid." At first, my intention was to crawl into a hole, he had an opinion and I didn't want a fight. Then I thought, how could this person say that? That's when I remembered -- this person, playing a level 70 hunter, is not a level 70 hunter, they just inherited that character from someone who quit the game. So, I stood up for BM hunters everywhere "You have no idea what you are talking about, Beast Mastery is currently the highest DPS hunter tree in raids." "Well, but..." He starts to say, "Look," I retort, "I have played a hunter from level 1 to level 70, I have studied this class in depth and I know what I am talking about, Beast Master is a very good tree." That shut the other guy up for a while and the third hunter in the conversation went on to say that all the Hunter Trees are pretty good now, and it really depends upon your play style -- a very true statement.

So here what I hope the reader will take away from this:

When someone questions your deeply held beliefs or states an out and out fallacy as truth, tell them they are wrong-- forcefully-- having references to back you up also help, but don't just let them spout off their stupidness, people might start to believe them, and then where would we be?

What the hell am I doing?

Okay... so I guess this title applies not just to this blog but to what this blog is about. It applies to this blog, well because I've never done one before and because I'm not really quite sure what I am doing. I am certainly not sure what I am talking about... but that is what this blog is supposed to help with.

I started playing World of Warcraft on February 4, 2006. ( I know this because I checked my account Payment history.) I started playing because my friend Brian was hooked on the game and he gave me his disks and his trial code and I loaded up the game and created a character... and as a n00b, I created a Night Elf Hunter. Now, I like my Hunter, I play him well and I enjoy playing a Hunter, however even after a year and a half of playing I am the eternal n00b for playing an NE Hunter.

To add to my status as a N00b I am one of the nameless generation, in those 5 years between baby boomers and Gen X is where I reside - now almost middle aged - I have no generational identity, I grew up in a world where computers were not ubiquitous. Where all my music was on cassette tapes and I played Dungeons & Dragons in its very first incarnation. I don't know l33t speak beyond the basics and I have very rarely been considered "hip". Therefore I don't seem to blend in well with the crowd and that also makes me feel like a n00b.

But with my background in RPGs and computer games, I figure that, even without playing any of the versions of Warcraft and only doing a cursory reading of the manual I dove right in... to the shallow end of the pool.

My first problem was that the server my friend was on was closed to new characters, so I started on another PVE server and had no friends and no one to play with or help me get started. (I did convince some real life friends to create characters on my server and help me out one day, but all they did was teach me everything I should have but did not learn in my first 20 levels.)

My second problem was that I was a Huntard -- a very deserved title for those Hunters who just don't know how to be a Hunter. (I remember repeatedly Multi-shotting into rooms in the Stockade and everyone wondering why we were pulling the whole room!) I heard a theory once, that I really think may be true, that because as a Hunter you can do so much solo leveling, that unlike other classes, you can get to 60 or 70 without knowing how to play your character.

How did I fix both of these problems? Well, by reading and learning from other players. Certainly not the manual, which I did read all the way through eventually, but reading the forums and hunter guides and blogs and websites. I've linked to some of my favorite on this page and I will be adding many more as the time goes on. If you, like me, feel as if there are aspects of this game that you don't get, come here and share -- I'm certain that I will always have n00bish moments but hopefully, I can start learning from them -- maybe one day I will learn not to use Multi-Shot in a Crowd Control situation!