Pet Notes, Level 70-72

Tivara hit 72 last night, thanks to helping out the swell undead guys at New Agamand. (Some of my characters would be horrified by it all. It's fortunate for my desire to explore that Tivara's personality includes plenty of room for finding the plague project fascinating.) Along the way I've been playing around with a variety of pets.

• Gorilla: Sagarmatha. No question about it, gorillas remain my pets of choice. The tanky pet is most comfortable and enjoyable for me in more circumstances than any other option.

• Wolf: Scourgebane. Almost as dear to my heart as Sagarmatha, Scourgebane is my instance pet of choice (everyone who does damage likes Furious Howl, pretty much), and I bring her out for questing when I feel like doing some single-target attacking and less volleying.

• Devilsaur: Gorynych. I'm genuinely uncertain about ol' Stompy. He's fun, and though he's taller than a rhino (see below), he doesn't have the bulk or thick fur, so he's easier to see around. But I don't feel any real urge to use him outside instancing. I suspect I should probably keep him leveled up and see how he does in higher-level instances and raids. I can afford the stable slot, at least for now.

• Worm: Kurgan. Not bad so far, but I haven't given it a really hard workout yet. Hoping to get the chance to do that soon.

• Rhino: Byran, retired. I gave it a shot, but it just wasn't the thing for me. They're big and massive enough to make the same kind of visibility and access problems for me that large-winged flying pets do, and while the knockback effect is hilarious to watch, it's much harder to control and maneuver with than gorillas' thunderstomp. I retired her, with thanks.

• Bird of Prey: Shravana, auditioning. I wasn't really planning to try out a new bird of prey, but then I saw someone with the fjord hawk matriarch in Coldarra, and Nyo's player asked me if I'd thought about getting one, and off we went! Not bad at all, so far. I'm not sure she actually does anything Scourgebane doesn't, but I'm willing to keep on experimenting. She has relatively short, thick wings, which means she interferes less than I'd have expected with my visibility.

Come level 74 for Tivara and I'll think about what to do dump to get a Blighthound to play with.

Some Gorilla Numbers

Tonight I thought to have Recount running during my Quel'danas dailies sweep, reset after the bombing run and the reinforcements attack.

My routine is to do the bombing run and naval battle first, then a loop to gather blood berries and mana remnants, fix robots, take ley line readings, and slaughter numbers of Dawnblade troops and demons, and finally a loop to free murloc prisoners, get ore, and finish off the readings. This is handy, it turns out, for measuring combat statistics, since there's a segment of all single-target encounters followed by a swath of multi-target fights.

As of this evening, with her current gear , Tivara is dealing about 360 dps to single targets, and Sagarmatha is doing about 150 dps to them. Still getting a sense of how high the AOE damage can get.

I do have a devilsaur. Here he is being nautical:

I hadn't reset Recount after the bombing run so I can't vouch for his damage beyond "it's good". But he just can't hold aggro like Sagarmatha, and so I visited the QD stable master after returning to the island upon completing this quest

For the future: I should try out a crocolisk and compare its reactive-damage special power to Sagarmatha's style.

 

My Gorilla's Aggro Is As The Aggro Of Ten

Tonight one of my guildmates, blood elf 67 hunter Lexxia, asked me if I felt like trying out gorilla tanking so he could pick up some achievements. I dithered, then accepted; we were joined by guildmate Amedina, tauren 70 resto druid who's just recently finished her epic flight form quest chain, who's one of my all-time favorite healers to group with.

We rocked the house. Three bosses down, no fuss, no muss.

Now, Sagarmatha is no rival at all for any really competent tank. But I've grouped with plenty of tanks who were something else. And I do now think that Sagarmatha could do an entirely serviceable job as tank in a full group for an instance at our level. I hope I get to try it soon.

 

Labeling Myself: Tenacious Beastmaster

I like having names for things. Makes them easier to talk about with others. in the spirit of useful identification, I've decided that the right name for the way I'm playing these days:

Tenacious Beastmaster

That is all.

Patch 3.0.2 T+1

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.

AOE Pets and All Outdoors

I spend a lot of time in solo play. I have an erratic sleep cycle, and chronic health problems often keep in in a skittish variable state where I'll want to take a break on very short notice, then ramp up unexpectedly and wish to engage intensely for a while. One of my goals for Tivara was to pick up the reputation benefits I keep skipping or losing track of, so I've been grinding at least as much as I've been questing.

It was more or less on a whim that I tried out a gorilla. Big Red Kitty has been talking up the advantages of Tenacity pets and the pleasures of pets doing AOE damage, and I thought, well, why not give it a try? So I did.

As I mentioned in my intro post, I've become thoroughly, strongly, delightedly sold on their merits.

Outland, as Burning Crusade players will have noticed, is filled with packs of critters. I presume that Northrend will be too. The problem with a pet whose attacks are all aimed at single-targets is that it's really easy for the enemies not currently being eaten to decide to go aggro me instead of my pet, and it's very unwise to do much multi-target attacking of my own. There are, of course, ways of dealing with all that, and good hunters need to know how to do it. I'm learning. It's just that sometimes I really don't want to.

Enter the gorilla:

Thunderstomp does some damage to all targets in range. It's got a 60-second cooldown now, going down to 8 seconds come tomorrow. And Blizzard's programmers made it smart - the gorilla thunderstomps only when two or more enemies are damaging it. It's a beautiful thing. In the wake of a thunderstomp I can use Multishot and Volley, as long as I'm not too stupid about it. All it needs now is animation showing the gorilla throwing barrels.

There's very little I can fight at all that Sagarmatha can't keep busy. The dps I get is of course lower than it would be with what'll be Ferocity pets tomorrow. But it feels less prone to annoyance, which for me includes having to feign death more than I like, needing to do extended efforts at shrugging off aggro, and anything else that distracts me from perching comfortably and shooting a lot. It gives me time to practice shot sequences, or to coast along happily, as I may wish.

There's also another advantage to having a gorilla pet: there is no fight in World of Warcraft that does not become that much funnier because it's a gorilla beating up something. It's funny in itself, and it also inspires jokes and comments when I'm grouped with others, or soloing but gabbing in guild chat.

I haven't yet taken Sagarmatha into an instance, except for one run through Hellfire instances in the low 60s when guildies at 70 helped a couple of us blast through. But I'm looking forward to trying real pet tanking with him.