Spiderheart hit level 80 this afternoon while doing quests for the Brunhildvar in Storm Peaks, an area and set of quests I continue to love.
Later in the day, I did my first heroic-level tanking, for acquaintance sin the Nexus. At first I stank. Then I stank some more. Gradually I didn't stink quite so much. We finished up downright okay.
I have a lot to master yet.
As you can see:
I owe my non-WoW-playing readers a post about the achievement system, along with other stuff. The short form is that you get these points for accomplishing discrete tasks. Thus I got 15 points when Spider earned exalted status with the Kurenai, and simultaneously earned another 10 because it was the tenth group she'd gotten exalted with.
The Kurenai are one of the groups that sell mounts to those exalted with them. Check out Spider on her new cobalt war talbuk:
I can't remember right now if this is actually the first time I completed the Kurenai grind, or the second. Still a novelty, in any event, and one I'm happy to have done.
So I wrote the other day that Spiderheart would soon be exalted with the furbolgs of Timbermaw Hold.
Voila:
Characters who reach exalted then get a quest to smoke out the demon tormenting High Chief Winterfall. That done, they're asked to carry a message of peaceful intentions to King Magni Bronzebeard of Ironforge. He is pleased:
I don't know as how I'll ever want to do it again, necessarily, but I am very happy indeed to have done it this time.
Something unexpected has come up in my WoW play since I went on hiatus from <Archon>: I've become more of a single-character than I have ever been before. (There is one category of exception, which I'll write about in another post.) This intrigues me enough that I'm going to write a post about it.
There's an interesting conjunction of factors. I have a character class that I like as much as liked hunters before the current wave of tweakings: the combination of melee and magic, the horror-rich background, the way cool abilities, it's just great. Furthermore, it gave me the chance to bring back a favorite old character in a way that makes complete sense for the world and gives me plenty of roleplaying opportunities whenever I feel like it.
Socially, I have a best-of-both-worlds environment. I have a small guild—six members right now, and it seems unlikely that we'd ever get beyond eight or perhaps ten or so. But I also have a couple channels' worth of overlapping friends, some going back three years and more now in real time, and one of the current incarnations of Earthen Ring's amazingly strong and productive cross-guild not-necessarily-raiding kind-of-an-alliance. For instance: random pick-up groups will not in general be glad to take level 75 tanks to, say, the Halls of Stone. But groups who include people who know me, or just who've seen me around in chat and have a sense of my style, will. And do. (Tanking Halls of Stone at 75 is some tough but fun work, lemme tell ya.)
So there's a combo of factors at work:
• Performance. Death knights can do a whole lot, and I like watching Spiderheart in action, and I'm with people willing to help me do my best playing her.
• Comfort. I just plain feel safer and more relaxed where I am. I am at, as nearly as I know, no risk of insult or recrimination for advancing faster than anyone else. There's a large continent who are already at 80 and thoroughly entrenched in the existing raiding, so I don't threaten anyone's need to be at the top—I'm not going to be at the top anytime soon, so I don't court a repetition of the emotional trouble that made maxing out Tivara turn so bad. But then people I am advancing with don't feel threatened by my progress in that way, either. They aren't worrying if I get to 75 while their character's at 73, or whatever. They're happy that I'm happy, and when our paths cross, we collaborate.
The biggest single gain for me out of all this is, slightly to my surprise, reputation. Here comes the primer for my non-WoW-playing readers.
• Reputation. Once your character makes contact with any member of a faction, they have a reputation with that group. The spectrum runs from Hated, to Hostile, to Unfriendly, to Neutral, to Friendly, to Honored, to Revered, to Exalted. You earn reputation points by performing quests for the faction, and for killing their enemies. The rewards for these range from a single point (for killing trivial enemies) up to thousands (for completing the final steps in long quest chains and killing major bosses). Going up, it takes 3,000 points to go from just barely neutral to friendly status, 6,000 to go from friendly to honored, 12,000 to go from honored to revered, and 21,000 to go from revered to exalted. Going down, it takes 3,000 points to get from neutral to unfriendly, another 3,000 to get from unfriendly to hostile, and 36,000 to max out hostility. (You won't often want to do that, but it can come up.)
Some reputations stand alone: the Argent Dawn doesn't care what others think of a character, and vice versa. Others come in pairs: the Steamwheedle Cartel cares very much what the Bloodsail Buccaneers think of your character, and vice versa, and your character loses as much (or more) rep with one as they gain with the other.
Why bother? Well, several reasons.
First of all, some factions (by no means all) have rewards at various levels. Every one of your faction's base groups gives a price break with rising rep rank. Arms and armor, recipes for different kinds of crafting, consumables like potions and foods with special restorative abilities, even pets (this one's going to be mine for Spiderheart in just a few days) are scattered all through the lists of rep-based rewards. Honored rep with various factions lets you buy keys to get into related dungeons' heroic mode.
Then there are other rewards for some. Notice that in the screenshots below, it's "Ambassador Spiderheart". That's because she has exalted status with all five of the Alliance's core groups: the humans of Stormwind, the dwarves of Ironforge, the elves of Darnassus, the gnomes of the Gnomeregan Exiles, and the draenei of the Exodar. When she's exalted with the furbolg of Timbermaw Hold, the Kalu'ak, and the Sporeggar, she'll have the option of displaying the title "Diplomat Spiderheart" instead.
(Note to my knowledgeable readers: these screenshots were taken early on the 9th, when I started writing this. Now, as I finish it up, it's the morning of the 12th, and I've made progress on several.)
Rep grinding is just what it sounds like: performing a set of tasks repeatedly. Sometimes it's a daily quest, like the one I wrote about where Spiderheart has to help a confused sea lion bull find his way to true love with an equally perplexed sea lion cow. Sometimes it's a task that can be performed as often as you can get it done; Spiderheart is in the midst of earning the trust of the Timbermaw Hold furbolg by bringing them ceremonial feathers taken from the bodies of enemy tribes' members, with 300 rep for each set of 5 feathers.
Some go fast—it can take just a few days' dedicated effort to get to exalted with a faction like Stormwind or Orgrimmar, because many, many quests give rep with them and a high-level character can recapitulate philogeny, I mean, start with the level 1-10 quests and go from there, and zoom. Some are, by design, slow—I may be at the Wintersaber Trainers one for weeks or months yet.
They all take time, though. And what I'm really liking most, I think, about the single-character play is making all this progress on goals I've always been interested in, but always distracted away from. I have, for instance, never had a character get to revered with Timbermaw Hold before. But Spider has, and exalted isn't that far away. This is fun.
A guildmate suggested to me a few days ago that we should go ahead and get enough Bloodsail Buccaneer reputation to get the cool parrot-summoning hat and accoutrements. I was skeptical, but read up on it at Wowwiki, and figured, sure, what the heck. In fact it went even easier than I expected. We went from high in hated by the Bloodsails to friendly with them, and therefore eligible for the quest that gives the title and hat, in something like four hours' total grinding. Amazingly fast.
Raising your rep with the Bloodsails proves easy enough: kill Booty Bay Bruisers, and a lot of them. They give 25 rep each, and they come in twos and threes when Booty Bay people are attacked, so this adds up very quickly indeed. It turns out that it's possible to do that in relative safety, too. Come in through the tunnel at the north and turn right, to the path that leads to a couple of small buildings with armorers and smith. Very few people use them these days, and if someone does need them, the respawn rate is fast enough that you can just stand down from the attack and let them do their business easily enough. You get pauses in which you can drink, eat, and heal. It's certainy soloable at 70, but I highly recommend duoing it with someone - the company makes it more fun, and gives you a safety margin in your Leeeeroy moments. (It particularly helps when your companion is an outstanding holy priest, as mine is, but anything'll do.)
And the results of that effort? I got a hat! And duds! And, as you see, a title!
Alas, the ship I've been given command of needs a bit of work. It lists, for one thing:
Ahh, this must be the problem:
But hey, everyone has to start somewhere. (That ship is part of the Kirin'Var Village area, in case anyone's wondering.)
Summary: I had fun, and like the rewards. Now we'll see about repairing our rep with the Steamwheedle Cartel factions without costing ourselves Bloodsail rep. Slower than grinds that knock Bloodsail rep back down, but I hear there are goodies coming and like having the option open.
Early impressions of the Echoes of Doom Era
So. It's been a full day and some hours since the update. How do I feel about it? I feel great about it!
I spent a lot of Tuesday and some of Wednesday experimenting with pets exotic or just plain new. (Also the barber shops. Astute observers will note that all three of my characters have hair styles not available to their respective species before Tuesday.)
I like a whole lot of them, but it didn't take me long to come back to Sagarmatha. He quickly hit 70, so he has a new level of Growl and therefore gets the early aggro built up fast, and the reduced cooldown on Thunderstomp makes things amazing. I send him at many mobs, he stomps, I volley away...and since Volley no longer has a cooldown, I can do that as long as it takes. For me, it really is the fun parts of protection paladins' AOE grinding without nearly so much attention and stressful worrying about whether I'm about to get overwhelmed. Sagarmatha has a huge wide safety zone of health and focus, and I've got a bunch of things I can have Tivara and Sagarmatha do if Tivara ends up with unwanted attention. The kill tallies that follow from this just keep overwhelming me. Wow.
On Being a Single-Emphasis Player
I note that pretty much all the best hunter bloggers are recommending that hunters try out the range of specs and pets. That's good advice. Let me explain why I'm not doing it, though. For those of you who haven't read me before, I have chronic auto-immune problems, and cascading complications from that. I'm not the Boy in the Bubble, but I do face the challenges of dealing with berserk allergic reactions to common environmental things like soil molds and orris root (the base ingredient in most perfumes), abject failure on my body's part at repelling infections, and all that, plus depression rising from imbalances in neurotransmitter production, chronic fatigue and other nastiness from defective neurotransmitter recycling, lymphatic action, and on and on. I live a restricted life, and there's a narrow range of things that reliably provide me fun in gaming that I can manage without getting exhausted or anything.
I got on this hunter kick in the first place because of that, actually. I had to shelve my rogue and paladin as raiders because I couldn't commit to them. A random bad health moment the afternoon of a raid - or for that matter a flare-up of something acute during a raid - and pfft, there goes my participation. I had a lot of last-minute cancellations and a fair number of mid-raid bailouts, and while raid leaders never pressured me about it, I know it added complications, and furthermore, it made me feel like a failure. I have too many opportunities for that already. I wanted something that would leave me feeling more reliably successful - something that would, to abuse programming jargon, degrade gracefully, rewarding detailed manipulation of options when I feel up to that but also work reasonably well when all I can manage is simple commands. For me, hunter is that something.
The key to it is a very strong pet. The more the pet can lift the burden of being hit from me, the better: I get to focus on what I intend to do, rather than responding to things forced on me by enemies. (Warlocks also have this advantage, depending the pet used, but other complexities that wear me down right now.) So the Beast Mastery talent tree is the right thing for me, since it improves my pets in a bunch of ways. And Tenacity pets, or at least pets with a good solid AOE capability, are the right thing for me too, since they protect me most thoroughly in the widest range of circumstances.
I'm definitely interested in what the other specs can do for me, but not in an urgent way. I already have good reason to believe they won't make me better at the stuff I just described, and that's what counts for me now. I may well wait until the dual-spec option comes along so that I can keep this as a ready fallback and experiment with notional seat belts in place. For now, it's more important to me to succeed at something than to dabble and do okay, or poorly, or worse - reliability is the key. Experimentation will come when the foundation's in better shape. In the meantime, I am constantly cheered, and often surprised, and just how very, very well this particular little niche does work for me. I've got to arrange some pet tanking instance runs with friends and see how far I can really push it.
Alts
I have two low-level hunters on the Alliance side. Night elf Sengakuji is in her mid-20s now; draenei Cirna is advancing with recruit-a-friend experience multiplication and is therefore now (when you read this) nowhere near her level then (when I wrote it). It looks like both will go the same route: bear, then gorilla. The variety will be in the folks I play with and the quests done. It's the same mechanical operations, but it feels different to me as the context changes, and since what counts is my satisfaction and performance, my vote wins. (And of course there are some real differences with racial abilities, professions, and such.) I'll be experimenting some, but I'm really happy with Sengakuji's bear Higashiyama (originally, Mangeclaw from the east end of Loch Modan) and Cirna's Toulemne (originally a simple young black bear from the vicinity of Kharanos in Loch Modan).
And that's all the news for now.
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