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?

Alas Kulkinski, we hardly knew ye

Well, I knew it had to be coming, this news from Mania's Arcania confirms that "The Scorpid Trick" is soon to be dead:

Bulldazhor was kind enough to let us know that this latest update to the PTR has also included some changes to the scorpid skill Scorpid Poison:

1. Scorpid Poison Rank 5 now does 55 damage over 10 seconds (instead of 44 damage over 8 seconds). This will make it easier to keep Scorpid Poison stacked when using Rank 5.
2. However, fewer hunters will be interested in keeping Scorpid Poison stacked since its damage no longer seems to scale with hunter RAP to the same extent that it did before.

In other words, it looks like the days of using the Scorpid Poison stacking trick to inflict massive amounts of damage in a long fight are over … or will be when Patch 2.2 goes live, anyway.

So, my Pet Scorpid, Kulkinski (named after a notorious mafia hitman who used poison to kill his victims) will probably be abandoned in favor of a Ravager. The first time I pulled out Kulkinski, after I had trained him, was for a Kara run in which I was a replacement on our guilds Kara 1 team. It was their first attempt at Illhoof and they one-shotted him and Kulkinski did over 100,000 damage. I was hooked on that pet from then on... of course, he's ugly as sin and I only pull him out for instances, but he does a lot of damage.

Since I was the only Hunter in my Guild to train one of these bad boys, I suppose I will be losing something that I felt was uniquely me, even if it is butt ugly.

The n00b is a Loot Whore

Last night was a great night for my Kara team. In 3 hours we polished off all the bosses up to the Curator and everyone was really happy with how things turned out. Except... me, I was ecstatic! Because I was a terrible, terrible loot whore. So much so, that unless no one else wants anything for the two weeks or so, I'm not rolling on anything!

So it started out okay -- Purples were dropping and many were dupes, so people were taking them as backups. I did so myself, after the Moroes fight I grabbed:

[Emerald Ripper]

A nice Dagger, I don't normally use daggers, but as a back up for when I need two weapons for some kind of double Mana Oil application or something like that, it could be useful.

The we get to The Curator... we get to him at 9:20PM with the raid scheulded to be over by 9:30PM, Curator down my 9:26PM.

What does he drop?

These:

[Gloves of the Fallen Hero]

[Garona's Signet Ring]

Now, as a n00b, I don't feel like I deserve either, but no one wants the ring so I get it by default... and its a really nice upgrade for me, but then I roll for my very first item of Tier 4 Gear and my 71 holds up against four other rolls... and now I feel very guilty, with my [Demon Stalker Gauntlets] I think I should post in Guild chat that I will not be accepting any more purples until I can pass on at least one tier 4 gear or two epics... or should I just shut up and take what comes to me?

Sticky Targets?

One of the options on the WoW Interface is a sticky target option. Meaning, once you target an enemy that target does not become un-targeted until you or they are dead. (Or until you hit 'esc' but thats not as dramatic.) So as a n00b hunter, you might think -- hey this sticky target thing is great... I click on the target and then if I mis-click something on my screen I don't lose my target. However that does not work with Hunters on Crowd Control duty so well, because you must shift targets pretty quickly and slamming the escape, when you are already slamming a bunch of keys for your Shot Sequence Macro, pet health, Procs, Pots, stones, trinkets etc. Just too much for my n00bified mind to even conceive. So inevitably, somewhere in the middle of the boss fight, I find myself spending 3 to 5 seconds doing nothing -- except mashing keys and causing no damage whatsoever. And, since I have just tried to convince everyone on my Kara raid team that my current specs is the best because of all the DPS is output -- its rather embarrassing. I can only hope that everyone else in the raid is just too busy to notice my n00bishness

Respeccing? Respecking? Re-Spec-ing?

My Raid Leader for Karazhan asked me to respec, and while I told him that I would, I went onto to explain how my current spec, Beast Mastery, was best for what we were doing. I then proceeded to send him a long email with two recommended specs, (A 0/41/20 Marksmen and an 0/12/49 Survival), with more reasons why my 41/20/0 was the best for raiding in Karazhan.

I advocated my positions well, I explained that I had done a lot of research on these issues and I convinced my RL (for the moment), so where was I the n00b? Well, I must heave spelled Respeccing at least three different ways. How do you spell it?

In non-n00bish-ness news, we downed the Curator in one-shot again and as the Flare guy (N00b moment-- what is the guy who marks and grabs the flares' attention called?) on both of our one shots -- that's a title I'm pretty proud to where, whatever that title may be.

Actually, the curator fight is fun because I love watching my Warp-Stalker warp to each and every flare I select -- it's so lovely -- and my two macros work really well:

/Target Astral Flare
/Cast Hunter's Mark
/Cast Send Pet

/Cast Sequence Distracting Shot, Arcane Shat, Multi-Shot

And boom the Curator went down -- then i wiped the entire party on the next trash mob pull!

Yeah for N00bs!

Bulking it up

I feel bad... well, I mean I feel okay, I just feel guilty because I haven't written anything in here for awhile and I need to fill out this blog before I invite anyone else to come see it.

I did not put a counter on this page, but I have a feeling that no one has come by, which is fine right now as there is very little to see. So, if I bulk up the page a bit, get three or four more entries into it maybe I'll invite some people to take a look at it.

But, back to the subject of this site... which is: Feeling like you don't know what you are doing. And while I have applied it to WoW, I may expand that and apply it to things in life as well.

For example, this weekend I was driving in Manhattan. There is a certain mind set and attitude that you need to have to drive there and with Maryland plates, no one takes you seriously -- so you have to drive like a total jerk, which I did, but I felt like I was faking it, because for the 3 and 1/2 hours it took me to get there, I did not drive that way, it was only when I emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel that there was any noticeable change in my driving temperament.

So, that is one example of "faking it" in real life. In fake life, (meaning World of Warcraft) things have not been quite so n00bish. My teams have down High King Maulgar in Gruul's Lair, Curator and Illhoof. I got some phat loot in the last weeks too, including:

[Maulgar's War Helm]
[Stalker's War Bands]
[Romulo's Poison Vial]

And now my profile in the Armory is beginning to look not too much like a n00b.

I'm still not ready to post on the forums in the posts where it asks you to rate the Hunter above you -- I don't think I'll ever want to do that, I mean if I want that kind of advice I would rather hear it from my friends and class leaders in the guild rather than some random person on the forums... probably Hoard too!