Setting goals in WOW
It is important to have goals in WOW or you’ll end up advancing at a slower than levelling a restoration druid or worse loose interest in the game. Personally I have a few goals, both short term and long term goals. When you’ve defined your goals you can break them down into more detailed tasks – and then start working on them.
My Short-term goals:
* Get Engineering up to 300
* Earn 20 Warsong Gulch badges to buy Forest Wind Bracers before levelling past 39 (13/20)
* Earn 20 Arathi Basin badges to purchase the mail boots before leveling past 39 (completed)
* Get Mining up to 300 before level 58 (I want to be able to mine as soon as entering the Outlands)
* Earn enough gold to buy a mount at level 40 (completed)
* Level to 47-49 before starting next round of glorious battleground PVP
Long-term goals:
* Get the hunter up to level 70 before next expansion (39/70)
* Max out Engineering (235/350)
* Max out Mining (180/350)
* Get full PVP gear
So right now I am spending all online time in Thunderbluff signing up for WSG games. With my limited play time I can usually manage to get around 20 badges over the course of a week. I’ve had about 50% wins so far in WSG and 75% in AB. Obviously the goals change as I level up.. I imagine that once I’ve reached Outlands I’ll add a few reputation goals.
What are your goals?
Sick with flu
I have been out of comission for almost a week. I’ve finally regained my health and then my little kid gets sick. Its a bad omen since he was the first one to get it meaning we are already in the next cycle. I hope we won’t catch it again.
Quaranteene protocol initiated.
Action in the Needles
So the other day my hunter finally reached Thousan Needles. I did get there a bit late so most quest where very easy for me. Now at 1k needles is usually where I start to bump into higher level opposing toons… and this time was no different. There is an escort quest up in the Highperch and alliance have a quest to collect poison sacks or something similar from that area. Anyway I was happily killing my way out of the area with the tauren escort when I spot a mounted dwarf warrior… and of course his level was ???.
At that time my hunter was 32.. and mounted meant that the dwarf was at least 40. The dwarf charged me and managed to chip away almost 50% health in the first round. However.. I did manage to wingclip him and gain distance and lay a trap… of course I managed to plop down the wrong one and the dwarf was incinerated (fiery trap). Both my pet and the escorted tauren started to bash at the little dwarf while I ran away for some distance… and then promptly started to kite him. I was sure I was going to eat an intercept – but none came.
The dwarf must have paniced, realizing that he was himself at 50% health. He started to target my pet. Big mistake. It allowed me to focus all DPS back on him… and voila – a dead dwarf! I checked him up on the armory afterwards and he appeared to have been level 47. Poor dwarf.
In the end I did not suffer one death in 1K needles… a new record for me.
My hunter is now 34 and questing away in Hillsbrad. Still very little PVP…
Earning gold through engineering
I’ve always loved the engineering profession but I’ve always felt that it was more for fun and a helpful for PVP (remember the glory days of the iron grenade?). When I started anew with my hunter I went engineering for the ability to craft ammo and other cool trinkets and relying on money generation to come from ore harvesting.
When training up engineering I made a large number a number of Deadly Blunderbusses , a semi-crappy rifle. I went to the AH to sell the stuff I made figuring that I get at least a few silvers worth out of it. There was already a couple of deadlies in AH – with the price tag set to 5 gold. Interesting. So I listed a few at 4.5 gold a piece. Two hours later I had sold 5 of them…. I have a feeling that it has something to do with a horde quest in Ashenvale, where a NPC requests a Deadly Blunderbuss as part of a quest objective. For alliance you could probably make a gold or two on Bronze tubes which is required for a quest in Duskwood.
I’ve been making these guns like crazy and sells about 3-4 each day. I have made a lot of gold in very short time for a new character that doesn’t have a main to support it.
I’ve also discovered that an accurate scope sells for about 5-6 gold on my server. Not bad. So all you engineers out there – go make some gold!
Warsong Gulch & Arathi Basin
Around level 26 I started getting serious about WSG and AB. Besides getting a "DING" going up against real people in the battlegrounds is what I really love in WOW.
I prefer WSG since I really think the fast paced capture-the-flag mode is exciting and calls for interesting strategies. However in WOW the matches in WSG often turns into honor grind somewhere in the middle. This is not what I sign up for. Those games can drag out for ages. Therefore I usually sign up for AB at the same time… By the time an AB opens up you can usually tell if the WSG game is a deadend or a great one. I’ve read somewhere that in an upcoming patch there will be a time factor in Warsong. I can’t wait. Right now fighting to collect the 20 or so WSG tokens you need for a PVP reward takes too much time.
Going into Arathi Basin at 29 is a whole other ballgame. It is fun, fast and interesting as people still have no mount or tier 4 talents. I had great fun defending the Gold Mine together with two other hunters (Slampan & Hottopic). Unfortunately they came from another realm so the odds of us three defending the GM again is slime to none. Needless to say nothing could get through our defenses letting our team focus on other nodes.
After a day and some odd hours in Arathi Basin I had enough tokens to purchase the AB boots. They are amazing for the level with an added bonus of increased movement speed! Nothing beats increasing movement speed before having a mount to royally transport you around.
My hunter has now turned 30… and while I gained the valuable hunter skill Feign Death it also means being the lowest of the low in the next BG bracket. I might stay away from the BGs until at least getting to level 35-36.
Adding new blogs
A minor update: I’ve added two new blogs that I tend to visit quite frequently.
First one is Aspect of the Hare: Pike’s World of Warcraft Blog – a hunter blog chronicling the adventures of a hunter and her quest to be a girl who loves the hunter class and made the most of it.
And the second one is Out of Mana – a PVP oriented blog which I used to visit all the time on my last WOW cycle. She has some great advice on arena play and PVP in general.
Great Hunter Macros I
My hunter is getting older and dinged 26 the other night. I thought it was time to start learning to play with a few macros. There are a ton of hunter macros out there but most of them aren’t really that useful. Personally I prefer macros that either give me a definite edge in a pinched moment or macros that allow me to get away with less buttons on the actionbar. Less is more.
After scavenging the web for great macros to help me tidy up the actionbar I’ve found these:
Pet Engage Macro
The following macro first of all checks if your pet is present. If not it will cast Call Pet and if it is dead it will cast Revive Pet. The next part is that it will check if you have are attacking a target – if not attacking then your pet will attack. If you already are attacking your pet will be recalled. Finally you will cast Hunter’s Mark on the target.
/cast [nopet] Call Pet;[target=pet,dead]Revive Pet
/clearfocus [target=focus,dead]
/focus [target=focus,exists]player;target
/clearfocus [target=focus,noharm]
/petattack [target=focus,exists]
/petfollow [target=focus,noexists]
/cast Hunter’s Mark
Heal/Feed/Revive Pet Macro
This macro is useful to further minimize the bindings for controlling your pet. Specifically this macro calls your pet if not present, revive if dead, heal if in combat and feed specific food if not in combat. Holding down any modifier key (shift, ALT or CTRL) while activating the macro will heal him instead of feeding when out of combat.
If you select the "question mark icon" when creating the macro your icon will show what action it will perform when activated.
Remember to specify the food item in the macro.
#showtooltip
/cast [nopet,modifier] Revive Pet; [target=pet,dead] Revive Pet; [nopet] Call Pet; [combat][modifier]Mend Pet
/stopmacro [combat]
#showtooltip Feed Pet
/cast Feed Pet
/use <food item>
These and more macros can be found at the wow-europe.com hunter forum in this topic.
Laptop survives coffee spill
Yesterday I did it…
After lunch I got myself a nice cup of black coffee as I always do. Actually I almost always have a cup of coffee when at the office. (I typically drink about 6-7 cups during the day). As I reached over the desk to get a stack of papers I knocked over the coffee cup. About half a cup’s worth of coffee spilled directly onto my Dell XPS M1710 laptop. With lightning reflexes I didn’t knew I had I swooped up the laptop, turned it upsides down and powered it off and ejected the battery.
Keeping it upside down, the poor laptop was dripping coffee. I wiped the worst of it and then brought it downstairs to the support department. The engineer just laughed at me and asked: "So this is your way of getting a new computer?"
This morning Support came back with the laptop – it reeks of coffee but it works like a charm! My lightning rescue apparently paid off! I’ve improved my backup settings… no longer do I have all the important files on the hard drive but on the network. Phew.
Sad thing is… now I have to wait a year before getting a new office computer.
PlayStation 3
In an attempt to avoid putting up new wallpaper at home this weekend I asked my wife if she didn’t want a PS3. To my surprise she was instantly happy and forgot all about the wallpapers. We rushed away to the store and bought a PS3 system together with Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and SingStar…So far I’ve been very impressed with the PS3. Uncharted is incredible beautiful and runs excellent. The gameplay – while heavily inspired from Tomb Raider – very fun. I love both the jump puzzles and the gun battles. I am a bit rusty when it comes to using the PS controls to run around as I am much more used to mouse & keyboard.Installing the PS3 was very easy and it detected my network without any hassles. The PlayStation Store is not as impressive as the XBOX marketplace but I’ve downloaded quite a few demos and movies already.I need faster broadband!
I also tried the demo of The Club, a FPS (First Person Shooter) game I was looking forward to play. It was not my kind of game… very arcadish and the controls nowhere near what I expected. I know I am still very fresh to playing FPS on the consoles so it might change. I am still going to check out the Club for PC as soon as a demo appears on steam.
WOW on a MacBook – Get a good mouse!
Last night I took my little hunter out for a trip to Darkshore. My goal – to tame a Ghost Saber. As he just turned 23 I thought it wouldn’t be too hard, yet still a wee bit challenging if I would run into any alliance going hostile on me. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to try out my MacBook. In could be interesting to know that I’ve pimped my MacBook to 4 GB of RAM.
The game flows very nice on the Mac although I’ve turned down the video settings a bit. It still looks good. The biggest problem though was the mouse. I have a wireless mighty mouse. Using the right mouse button is a pain. I died a few times due to my inability to maneuver correctly. I blame this mostly on myself being unused to how the mouse behaved – and not having all my usual mods installed. That’s right. I played "naked". You quickly realize how important certain mods are for your playing experience. For example I use Bongos2 for a good actionbar layout.
In the end I got my new Ghost Saber and headed back to Ashenvale. To my disappointment, I was never bothered by any alliance. In fact the area felt very desolate. I did spot the Moonstalkers and I have to admit that they are probably the most cool looking cats in the game with their black and blue stripes. Damnit.
