Stay awhile….
Well not really in the middle of updating backend things which has messed with the theme I used (then again I was thinking of changing that anyway)
Until I fix it the Blizzcon pages are under the Pages Tab up top
might even post something proper soon as I have a few posts almost ready to go
Still alive 
– just been overloaded with work mostly
I’m up to 8 hunter toons now (still missing a Tauren tho)
I did successfully get Blizzcon 2010 tickets for me and some friends so I suspect I’ll be updating my guide pages shortly as thats something I’d really like to do – as well as finish some of the various hunter posts I’ve been working on .
Still alive –still reading (some) blogs but have taken a real hammering with work related stuff in the last few weeks, just my luck really. I have pretty much worked every single day for 5 weeks now, with some added extra out of hours work to boot.
On topic (ish) – more than a few Cataclysm changes announced in the last few days, which are interesting to say the least. I like the honour and badge changes there is no real need for those systems to be as complicated as they are. Not so sure about the raiding changes, as much as I’m not currently a raider I was debating building up to maybe have another go at the start of Cataclysm, not so sure how that will work out now. I can see that part of the plan is to stop all the T* and T*.5 stuff going on but dropping the same loot from 25 and 10 man raids? and having both on the same cool down? I mean I haven’t read all the stuff yet and obviously its still a work in progress but I’ll be really interested to see how the raid lockouts work for this.
In Hunterland my current ambition is to have both my Troll and Orc to 80 before Cataclysm, and the next obvious thing after that is to level one of each race *wibble*
Obligatory post is obligatory *nods* *nods*
Only bits and pieces on this and I certainly am not reposting the changes in their entirety, that’s what
mmo-champion and WoW.com are for
The usual – omg your breaking our class wtf are you doing! forum twaddle has of course been sprouted by many (and yes the vast majority of it is twaddle!). Personally I can’t believe the outcry over switching to Focus – people you have had since last August’s Blizzcon to whine about that with maybe a vague hope of changing it – you don’t now it is now way to far down the development lifecycle for that kind of change, I’m not 100% sure yet but I think it might just work but none of us will be able to tell until multiple people with different viewpoints get access to the beta.
As to the other changes – MOAR PETS! yes that is all – now maybe I can waste my time camping the rest of those Spirit Beast spawn points.
Trap launcher, so far a lot of hunters I have spoken to don’t like the idea of this or are unsure based upon whether it will mess up cool downs with our current ability to drop multiple trap types. I however am a fan of the idea. I have this image of having a mortar type device for launching traps, not sure why but this led to the idea in my head of having the mortar mounted on top of our pet, which in turn led to me searching the internet for images and I found this -
Oh yes, in fact lets change things – no more trap launcher but lets have a PET launcher instead – “Is it a bird?, is it a plane? No, it’s a Flaming Core Hound headed at your face!”
Camoflage – hmm I’ll await comment on this until I see it I think, tho as my main hunter is a Night Elf, I’m curious as to how it stacks up with Shadowmeld – then again that’s if we still have that as a racial, Blizz have said that some racial’s are changing just no comment yet on which ones.
Well there has been one – only partially planned, I’ve been far to busy with ‘work’ work recently and any spare time is spent with my 4 different current levelling projects (2 Gnomes on 2 different US servers one in SAN US and the other one part of a pre-Blizzcon level a Gnome to 80 project) and my Orc Hunter (now lvl 34) and my new BE Mage (lvl 14) both in SAN EU.
I have been working on some other stuff to do with my blog, a few articles half written and some plugin & theme debating. Not to mention starting research for the Blizzcon guides on here as I need to update and improve them. In amongst that trying out different desktop blogging software as I’m not a fan of the WP web based posting page.
So in short, project not dead just not posting general rambling posts until I have some proper ones worked out a bit more.
Finally the dates for Blizzcon 2010 have been announced and the official site Blizzcon has been updated.
I’ve copied over my old website pages to be pages on here with my hints and tips for travellers, these are primarily meant for people travelling from Europe so some of the details are more focused there, but hey I’m sure theres stuff in there that nayone might find useful 
EDIT: US Forums FAQ and Survival Guide is now up from the good people there who do the same thing – if your thinking of goign read this, it contains a chunk of stuff that my guide doesn’t as I see no point in duplicating effort
Oh and warning these pages are a work in progress – I sitll have to confirm things like the tax rates etc for this year…
The links at the top of my Blog should work , I’ll organise these a bit better when I work out how to my my WordPress theme, also I’m thinking of changing my theme anyway so may jsut do that. Any other blog writers who read this please feel free to comment and criticize – This whole blog thing is meant to be a learning exercise for me, and trust me you can’t say anything harsher than I already say to myself! – remember if you don’t tell me I won’t necessarily know to learn it.
This is of course delaying me from making some more constructive posts on here which was the plan for this week, as I’ve proved to my self now that I can post, just need to bang it up a notch on the odl spice weasel and post more well thought out and constuctive things, however Blizzcon travel research is top priority for me at the moment, yes I’m aware there are months to go and I don’t have tickets yet but still, this will be the 3rd year for my guide and from the last 2 years I have actually had people come up to me at Blizzcon and tell me that they have used it – which is really nice and to be honest a bit unexpected, as I do it primarily for me as a reminder
Now I know one of my only real hunter posts so far has already been about pets – this was meant to be a hunter blog – but I’m sensing that its going a bit more wow general
than that *shrug* ah well, but last night whilst faffing about on my Orc on Argent Dawn (EU) my little boar pet finally managed to annoy me. I was doing the quest to find the 3 skulls near the bottom of the barrens where all those stealthed razorbacks are… and lo and behold did mr boar (Ruk) not keep running about agroing everything in sight (or not as the case may be!!). Not to Gorilla standard tho thankfully, that hairy armed beast still deserves the special place in hell
Now see I can deal with this (well mostly) but it bring up a topic I’ve long had thoughts about and that is why don’t we have more control over our pets? Even if it was only for BM specced hunters (actually that’s not a bad thought), yes you get harder more survivable pets but that doesn’t help when they go running off all over the place. Even worse is when they go running off so you target a particular npc (say the healer or ranged spell caster in my case most often) then after 30 seconds your pet decides that it has been agro’d away by some other mob, which up until then you’d cheerfully been CC’ing (or tanking in my case a fair bit ) thereby leaving you wide open to taking a whole lot more damage than is necessary. I’ve lost count of the number of times this has nearly / actually has killed me.
And yes hunters do have some pet related talents…. but really nothing that really ‘communicates’ or ‘controls’ what your pet is doing, other than attack / stop attack, growl, don’t growl and even those are a bit vague.
Also as BM you do get another 4 Pet Talent Points and yup they do lead to some damned useful talents, but why on earth do I get a ‘better’ animal just because I’m BM specced over say a MM or SV hunter who has to all intents and purposes trained the same beast. Surely my (if I was BM – I’m not on my main currently, but there is a Spirit Bear out there with my name on it sometime soon) closer relationship with the beast than the other specs would be better placed with more communication and therefore more ‘control’ over the animal? Yes ok they are still beasts at the end of the day, but even so as BM I am less likely to send my pet off to attack and not heal or care about it than a MM or SV who gets less dps out of it.
Now in the old days you had to feed your pets to keep them happy and contented, yes it was annoying sometimes but still nowadays how many of us bother? Well actually I do on my lower level toons but on my 80 its just a case of chucking the odd heal in the direction of my pet (ohhh magic ‘food’ )
So Ghostcrawler you can keep your freakin pony (moose ftw anyway), just give me pets I can actually feel more of an affinity with and can control better, that would make me (and I’m sure maybe at least 1 other hunter somewhere a happy bunny).
Bit of a quiet weekend everything for me, was really tired and any online time was spent reading other blogs or not doing much on WoW. My little orc is now level 23 however and praise the lord now has Aspect of the Viper this really is uber important as Hunters just eat mana at lower levels.
I’m quite enjoying just pottering about on him not doing very much at all and leveling slowly and trying to figure out if I can skip Ashenvale as I really do have an issue with that zone. Also come Sunday I had had enough and I transferred my lvl 71 Troll hunter over to Argent Dawn, now he may only have had 500 or so gold but still that’s a few frostweave bags. He also has a couple of mail heirloom pieces which I may or may not send over to Skado, haven’t fully decided on that one yet. Indeed it must be said that I’m not that fussed about leveling speed but bag space is something that, I feel is NEEDED as I hate having to go back to the nearest settlement every 30 mins of questing just to empty them.
Overall it must be said I’m quite enjoying the atmosphere in SAN as its a bit different to most guilds I think. I can’t think of any others where you can spend more time reading gchat than actually doing anything
On the Sunday there was a guild fishing event and at the start I was hesitant about joining in as I wasn’t sure what would be ‘expected’, as in would there be full on roleplay? did you have to take part? and all that good stuff. So initially I stayed away and just carried on with a bit of questing, but soon enough there was so much going on in gchat that I had to pop over for a look. I sort of just wandered up and stuck myself at the end
So yeah gate crashing a fishing event – how rock n roll 
. But still it was a bit of fun (apart from certain gnomes being a bit annoying during the awards ceremony), tho my targeting went a bit awry during the awards bit so I kept cheering the wrong person 
. Most of my hesitation at the start had been connected with the RP element as I wasn’t sure I could do the whole RP in a game thing (tho I’m no role playing n00b as I used to do a fair bit of pen and paper and some LARP) but I really just don’t know enough of the whole WoW lore ( I thought I did until it comes down to this kind of detail)but as Issy says in her blog I can do alts, me that little events like this kept in guild do seem to be the way to get started. I know now that Skado is the non-speaking / quite type I’d thought off and whilst he will turn up to things he will stay on the sidelines ( he even sat behind the benches during the awards ceremony – although this fitted in with my thoughts of not jumping in as I’d just turned up halfway through without speaking to anyone even in gchat).
Roll on the next little event is all I have to say, I need to have skado skulking about, tho he does have that debonair look with his stylish Battered Jungle Hat .
I’ll maybe update this post later with a couple of pictures but I’m at work at the moment and I forgot to email them over last night after logging out.
Original Idea here - Whiny Post Day
Well apparently its Annual Whiny Post day, the entire thought of which amuses me no end.
I can guarantee that this will in no way be the last whiny post on here but who knows.
In fact this is more of a list of rants rather than whine – I blame the guest post on The Lazy Sniper for this. (that and for me having to explain to my boss what I was laughing about
where to start? oh yeah that DAMNED GORILLA you really are going to die a painful punishing death for standing on my fat lootz.
elitist pricks in WoW – I don’t give a f*ck I pay MY money to play this game how I want and if you don’t like that then sod off! (don’t get me wrong I DO play differently in groups but if I’m soloing then nob off its my money)
‘anit-fanboi twats on the forums’ yeah you you bunch of fakers – you really are actual fanboi’s yourself – until someone disagrees with you then you pull put the fanboi statement to cover the fact that you can’t stand losing or being wrong or stand the fact that people think differently from you.
Certain Customers at work, I’m a support engineer I have many customers – you ARE NOT as important as you think you are unless I say so I know what my workload is and I sure as hell know what a priority ticket is, you forgetting your password or your incapability to press the F1 help key isn’t – deal with it.
pre-TBC / pre-WotLK server requests – no just NO , I repeat NO! get the friggin hint – no matter how you phrase it or come up with some smart @ssed idea of how it could work just NO, the vast majority of people want the developers working on new content not faffing about re-fixing things they fixed years ago just to pander to your nostalgia.
People who insist on talking and laughing like hyenas on the train to work in the morning, most of us are trying to get 15 minutes more snooze – STFU
on a related note – trains in general
This just in – Sales people – just because you haven’t prepared for the meeting you’ve known about for weeks that doesn’t mean support can drop everything ‘right now’ to do a report for you, we have actual faults to be working on (and blog posts to be writing )
There should be more to this but I’m still chuckling at the Lazy Sniper ‘veal vs lamb’ hahahahah *ahem*
Pets – A subject close to the heart of any hunter, or at least should be . With the recent creation of my new horde orc hunter and the reaching of level 10 I was faced with the usual choice of what pet to go for. Now I have a raptor on my Level 71 Troll which I had since I created him BUT that was pre-Wrath and I didn’t start playing him again until recently, and whilst yes I have taken a bit of tangent with him and am trying leveling 65 – 80 as Survival which is interesting to say the least. I would suggest that if you plan on trying that don’t use a raptor
So for now on my new little Orc I have chosen a boar and so far it seems to be ok, and talent wise I’ll be staying BM for some time to come. I may switch out for a bear when I come across them but not so sure yet. Especially as I currently have that white lion quest in the Barrens to do, decisions decisions!
Now Shadowscout has 4 pets, the cat I tamed way back at the start, a wolf just in case I ever decide to do any group work (and in fact seems to be my pet by default at the minute), Gondria for my Spirit Beast lovin (pew, pew lazor moonfires) and a gorilla. Now as most hunters will know your pet can sometimes be annoying by standing on you kills when trying to loot them. Mr Gorilla is by far above and beyond in his capacity to do this… in fact the Gorilla has annoyed me so much that I have never even leveled him to 80! I believe I only tamed a gorilla due to the benefits of their thunderclap before the pet trees were changed. The only reason Mr Gorilla even still has a place in my
stables is the fact that I haven’t bothered to tame any more pets and needs the space yet. The only recent pet I’ve went for is the Spirit bear and every time I wander over that way there seems to be a plethora of hunters hanging around.
Actually I do almost in fact hate that gorilla, and now that writing about it has reminded me that I have him I may well do the anti-hunter thing and drag him out tonight wander over to Icecrown and send him off against some Elites and watch him get pummeled! Yes people hunter emotions for pets aren’t always good!
Actually I’m tempted to do a survey of other hunters just to see what pets if any have annoyed them over the years and why.
