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?

Quaranteene protocol initiated.

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…

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.