Ray, I Feel So Funky

Yes, while waiting for the patch to install, I get even more obscure than usual in my quotes and allusions. No, there isn't really anything you can do about it.

So anyway, in the two days immediately following Tivara reaching 70, I got to take her on two raids, one to Magtheridon's Lair and one to the top part of Karazhan (starting with the Shade of Aran). It certainly helped to have prior experience with those places, so that what I needed to learn was just what ranged dps characters do in the various fights.

First of all, I'm really looking forward to seeing how Distracting Shot works once the patch is done. It is hard (at least it was hard for me) to get enough threat generation going to actually pull my assigned trapping target to me rather than having it sucked up in the seething vortex of aggro that always forms around a well-geared tank. I've been practicing my trapping, and I'd say that I'm now fairly reliable at it. I'm hoping to drop the "fairly" part at it in the next week or two, and maybe be at what I'd consider genuinely good by the time Lich King comes out.

(In my personal hierarchy of performance, there's the point at which you can be counted upon to do your task at a useful level, and then there's the point at which you do it well enough that it's worth others' going out of their way to give you more chances to do it, because it really helps out more than the norm.)

Wow, raiding sure is easier and less stressful when you're not a healer or a tank. Responsibility? We've heard of it, but we have no truck with such nonsense. A little trapping, sure, but mostly it's just me and my pet blasting away except when we need to hold fire for a moment.

And what do we get for that heroic control? We get dead bosses, that's what we get. Here's Tivara, Alcyone, and guildmates in the aftermath of downing the Shade of Aran in Karazhan.

I want to be careful not to extrapolate too much from a limited set of data, generated in the euphoria of getting to try out hunter raiding. But if even just most of this level of satisfaction carries over into the longer term, I'm going to enjoy raiding a lot more in 2009 than I did in much of 2008. Repeatedly running into a wall and finding "I can't do this anymore" is tiring and disappointing. Even if I do find limits I'm not thinking of right now, I'm hoping to go farther this time, and to make a softer landing when and if I do have to say that I've gone as far as I can, since I know so much more about what constitutes an early warning sign of raiding trouble in particular for me now. But I really do hope to be in there plinking and trapping away as far as Archon and friends can go.

Oh, yeah, knowing that I've got some readers who aren't up on all the details of WoW: If I'm so happy with my gorilla (and I am), why aren't I bringing him raiding? That's simple enough. In raids, there are people who specialize in getting monsters' attention and holding it, while damage dealers (like Tivara) beat the monsters down. This works best when amateurs aren't competing for prizes in the "most appealing to monsters" category. Gorillas' Thunderstomp would compete with the real tanking characters for aggro (the monsters' attention), but Sagarmatha doesn't have nearly the capacity to absorb damage or do other useful things that, say, Marendyn and Grimfell (in the picture above) do. Alcyone's single-target damage dealing works great, however - if I play my part well, neither Tivara nor Alcyone draw aggro away from the tanks, but do help with the beatdown. Essentially, Sagarmatha is a tank for times I don't have a tank. But when I do have a real tank, it's foolish to try to duplicate that role, and Alcyone puts more hurting on the designated target per unit of time.

Hunters have Swiss Army Stables, essentially - the right pet for the job at hand.

The Usual and Customary Introduction

This is my third try at World of Warcraft blogging. Third time may be the charm!

I've played every class in the game, and gotten an affliction warlock, restoration shaman, combat rogue, and protection paladin to 70. But I find myself most thoroughly comfortable with my newest 70, Tivara the blood elf beast master hunter. Hunter turns out to be the class that most accommodates my wildly variable competence and willingness to engage in complex detail management - I can coast well, and I can get intense well. I can be a slow learner, but I'm trying to notice when I'm having fun, so that I can do more of it. So. Hunter it is.

In the past I got into blogging trouble by announcing over-ambitious goals. It turns out that I'm not one of those people who does very well living up to them. This time, therefore, I've got a more modest goal: I'll chronicle what I'm doing with Tivara and what I'm thinking about WoW in general, and talk about other characters when it feels like they're worth talking about.

Here's the scorecard the day before patch 3.0.2 comes out:

Tivara is 70, and geared with two pieces of season 2 (Merciless Gladiator's) armor, with more coming. She got to go help kill Magtheridon the day after she hit 70, and we've got a guild run to the Molten Core coming up on Saturday.

Her main pet right now is Sagarmatha (Nepalese for "The Head of the Sky", the Nepalese name for Mt. Everest). He's the rare white gorilla Uhk'loc, now level 69. I have completely fallen in love with pets that can do AOE. I get impatient and distracted with the flying pets (apart from nether rays and presumably spore bats), with wings getting in the way, but now I find my gorilla indispensable for grinding. I'm looking forward to seeing what rhinos can do, too. The pet families that will become Ferocity families are certainly cool - what in this game is just so thoroughly graceful and neat as a cat on the offensive? what is so much fun as the boom boom boom of a freshly tamed devilsaur? - but Tenacity seems likely to be my "home base" family of families.

For dps purposes, I have Alcyone, a nether ray from Slave Pens, currently level 68. He did quite well for himself in Magtheridon's Lair, and I think I'll keep leveling him up for instances where pet AOE isn't particularly wanted.

Tivara belongs to a cool guild, Archon on Horde-side Shadow Council. We're sort of the textbook casual guild, with a core of folks interested in raiding and a lot of dabblers, some PVPers, and like that. I came in knowing a few of the folks from elsewhere and have made some real friends among people I didn't know before. One of my real regrets about Burning Crusade is the progression opportunities I missed by spreading my attention among too many alts. I'm looking forward to focusing more and seeing more of the game in the upcoming expansion, rather than looping through the earlier parts more times.

And that's my introduction.