Count your blessings

Every now and then I am reminded to count my blessings in terms of the calibre of people I raid with. This weekend was one of those opportunities.

We had our weekly 25 man raid and took down all bosses in Tempest Keep except Kael. Due to spending longer than we would like taking down Alar we skipped out on attempts on Kael and decided to move the raid to Hellfire and take down Mags instead. It's interesting how sometimes whether it be 'one of those nights' or just a slightly different group, things that were easy or hard previously change up. In our previous visit to TK we had downed Alar on the 2nd attempt on our second visit to TK itself. This week we just couldn't seem to get it together, I'm not sure why, we only got Alar down after about 6 failed attempts. Mags though was a breezy one-shot which had us exclaiming over Vent that something surely was wrong. It was a nice morale booster for the raid to down Mags so easily, which was the reason we headed there instead of spending time on Kael - that and with an hour left of the raid we wouldn't have got much learning in.

Raiding is truly all about team management comparable to a sports team or team of people within your company. Keeping morale up, playing to strengths and ensuring a fun environment are things that any leadership group should be concerned with regardless of the context.

I've read other peoples comments on it and know that I speak for myself that when you spend a lot of time with a group of people working to achieve shared but challenging goals you can start to feel a bit jaded, personalities start to grate on you and having to repeat the same things over and over wears thin. My personal bug bear is the amount of talking that happens over Vent and the tendency of some people to, in my opinion at least, talk just for the sake of hearing their own voice. I believe that voice chat is a really integral part of successful raiding but it is also one of the more tiring aspects and after a few solid hours raiding (our scheduled raid bracket is 5 hours) I often find myself taking my headset off so that I don't have to listen to people talk.

So I'm basically having a bit of a moan about our regular raid group, but all said and done they are a fantastic group of mature and skilled players. I was reminded of this and to count my blessings the day following our raid when we for some strange reason decided to put together a pick up group for Gruuls. It's kind of amusing that an instance that not all that long ago was really challenging is now one that we feel confident throwing together a pug for.

As anyone knows a pick up group is a minefield of potential asshats and noobery. Sometimes combined in one heady mix. While we didn't get any specific asshats we did get a strong dosing of huntard courtesy of the LFG tool. I was the lucky person who got to coordinate the 5 hunters for MD assignments. While I'm naming no names I'd like to present my top tips for what not to do when you are a level 70 hunter looking to get into end game raiding.

1. Ignore instructions
   Setting up MD assignments for the High king Maulgar can be kind of challenging if there is a chance that the tank assignments may change - which is more than possible with a pick up group. Therefore having to tell a hunter 3 separate times what their assignment is just adds to the annoyance. We have a specific raid chat channel for all the hunters. They should be in it and they should be paying attention. Ask once, I'll forgive it, chat can move fast. Ask twice I'll start to think there are pebbles rolling around in your head instead of a brain. Ask three times and I'll be sure of it.


2. Bring your level 65 pet to the raid.
   This is so obviously a no-no. You want to bring your best A game to a raid, especially if you are a BM hunter when your pet is doing around 1/3 of your damage. A level 65 pet no matter how cute and potentially awesome (once he/she levels up) is going to do diddly-squat in a 70+ instance.


3. Forget to stock up on arrows/pet food
   Come on people! Seriously! This is like the first dot point in the 'Raiding Prep 101 for Hunters' hand book. Even before flasks, pots, stat food and bandages. If you are a pick up hunter in my raid and you have to ask me for ammo or food to borrow that's an instant mark against you. I'll be more forgiving in a 5 man that was thrown together kind of scenario where you may have been rushed but there is just NO excuse when 25 man raiding.


4. Neglect to repair, die three times within 10 minutes and ask for a repair bot.
   ZOMG. Where to start? A: Repair before you accept a summons (see reference to Raiding Prep 101 above). B: Don't expect people to use expensive items to help you because you were unprepared. You will just have to zone in and then out and go to the nearest town that you can repair at. Don't expect the raid to wait for you either. Remember kids: your lack of preparation can potentially hold up 24 other people - and that's not cool.


5. Equip items with +strength
   If you are levelling your first hunter, sure ok I'll forgive it. I made such huntardy mistakes too. But if you are a level 70 looking to raid you need to learn about your class and what stats to stack to do your best. Maybe the item has +agility too. So what, there are definitely better pieces out there. In my opinion you don't ever use an item that takes up one of the stat bonus slots with a stat that you don't get any benefit from whatsoever.


6. Neglect to socket gems into your items
   Ok they might only be blues and you're holding out for the phat purples. I don't care. Get yourself some cheap green gems and get them cut. improving your performance now will help you get those phat purples.

There you go, Jez's tips on what to not do if you want to be taken seriously as a raiding hunter. There's more too, maybe I'll write an actual Raiding Prep 101 for hunters one of these days. Still there are plenty of other great blogs that have done similiar, BRK being one of the obvious examples.

The huntard unleashed

I've really been looking forward to getting into the new patch 2.4 content. So many lovely new things to see and experience and my first opportunity to participate in a server wide effort to open new content since the gates to AQ were long opened on my server by the time I started playing.

I thought last night was the night but no. I'd just got in the door after work when the phone rang with our weeknight Kara raid MT asking whether the spousal unit and I would be logging on for the raid as everyone was ready to go. Righto then. Log in without taking the time to update my mods and head straight into Kara. We did almost a full clear only skipping Netherspite and by then it was laaaate and I logged pretty much directly after we downed Prince. As an aside it was a great run - probably our best yet with the Aussie group. Most probably since we had a larger than usual balance of over geared players and the other guys are getting well geared now too. DPS was totally off the wall although no one had a working damage metre to confirm it heh.

I did have one spectacular huntard moment though which the title of this post refers to. There are many excuses I could give like being tired, feeling rushed and so on but I take full responsibility for one of the worst f**k ups I can think of in my WoW career to date. We were clearing the trash before Moroes and as usual I had the MT set as my focus and smacked my assist focus macro key to focus fire on whatever mob he was wailing against. Normally I pay attention and make sure that the mob has a sunder or similiar on it so I know it's the right one (not to mention the appropriate charm mark). Not this time, no sirree, I sent the pet off to attack then realised my error, called him back and brought 2 mob packs back with him including the elite pack of dancers. Can you spell wipe? I was soooo embarrassed hehe.

So Kara done and tonight's the night I'm thinking but it seems it's not to be as not only was Curse running slow as molasses with log ins disabled - it's now completely down 'for maintenance' as per the picture. In my opinion having a 'click here to try again' link is madness as you can guarantee that people will just click spam and that ain't going to help the poor old server. So mod updating is not going smoothly. I could just log in right? Wrong. Feathermoon is down and has been for at least 30 mins as I write this although according to the log in news all servers are having rolling restarts applied to correct the apellation of server names in name plates for BGs. Seems things aren't running smoothly for the Blizz peeps.

Working in the IT industry as I do I can empathise with the pain of problems with deployment. There's nothing quite as stressful as a live roll out going wrong and with Warcraft that's some massive scale we're talking.

Fingers crossed that both Curse and Feathermoon come back online soon and I can get in some gaming. Otherwise I guess I'll... um.... I'll...

/blink

make an animated avatar about how I survived a WoW outage?

look at some lolcats?

get a life?

EEK! Elune forbid!

/wink

Guess I can go drool over some of the awesome new hunter badge loot. I like the looks of the Crossbow of Relentless Strikes yes I do precioussss. It's got a hefty 150 badge price tag but I'm pretty much almost sitting on that amount currently and there are definitely many more badge gathering opportunities in my near future. If I can log in that is.

/sad panda

Hope the rest of you are having a smoother patch 2.4 experience.

Confessions of a Huntard

I wasn't always the uber hunter that I am now *cue hysterical laughter*, no once upon a time I was one of the many many huntards that infest the worlds of Warcraft (worlds because we have both Azeroth and Outlands amirite?).

I like to believe though that while I may have displayed some huntardation there were things I got right pretty much from the start.

I was lucky enough to start playing at the same time as *cue further hysterical laughter from Morn specifically* the manbeast. But we'll call him Broichan now because that was the first toon he leveled and who Jez began her adventures in Azeroth with.

Do you still remember what it was like when the world was all new and fresh? When you'd enter a new zone and oooh and aaah at the lovely environmental graphics? Maybe you didn't ooh and aah. I did, because it was the first seamless 3D world MMO I'd ever played and it was a pretty exciting experience just inhabiting the world let alone all the cool things I could do as a hunter.

So Broichan is a drood and as anyone who has leveled a drood knows you get your first shape change ability at level 10 which is happily when a hunter can first train a pet. I think this is the reason that I never became a melee huntard. I had a nice fuzzy bear tanking the mob whilst I pew-pewed happily away. And yes I did send my lovely Azrael in to do battle as well. I had a pet and they were supposed to do the nasty up close fighting for me. I grasped that early on.

I adventured away, often with Broi until level 45 where I suddenly became bored with the game and stopped playing for about 6 months. I started playing Pirates again and Jezrael languished away. By the time I started playing again Broichan was 60 and Emelin the soul-destroying Warlock, the new toon of the manbeast, was almost there too. So I leveled my way mainly solo up to 60. My huntardiness therefore showed itself mainly with instances. I still remember the first time I was asked to lay a trap to CC a mob in LBRS. I had no idea what was being asked of me. This was back pre TBC and before we could lay multiple traps in battle so trapping was really just a tiny bit of CC to help with a multi-mob pull. Ditto on being asked to pull a mob to my assigned tank in Molten Core. You want me to what?! Ah yes I had much to learn about the ways of the hunter.

But probably my greatest transgression? I had an icy enchant on each of my Assassination Blade's .

/cringe
/cower

Whattanub.

I'm glad that through intensive therapy plus deciding to really understand what makes my class tick I learned better.