Lo-Quality WoW

I haven’t done much recently in-game except for a brief Heroic Violet Hold run and a very odd, very laggy Alterac Valley BG. The VH run was only notable in that in made me realize how just plain lazy some players can be. Both the daily and heroic daily dungeon quests givers are a little outside the VH instance door. Yet, one person kept asking for us to share the heroic daily (which was VH.) When I checked, I was flying in from Dragonblight and HE WAS STANDING IN VIOLET HOLD! In the time it would take me to fly over there and get over to the VH door, he could have easily picked up the quest directly from the quest giver. And then there were the two others, both who needed to be let into VH. Now to get the key to VH, you talk to someone outside the door, go across town and then talk to someone to get the key. This is a quest you can get as of level 75, it’s easy and most people are bumming around Dalaran doing nothing, so how does one not go and get this key? I swear it boggles the mind at times…

Anyway, since I hadn’t done much, I might as well talk about why my very first character was a hunter. Which I had planned to do and I need the filler for today. So why a hunter? Was it the thought of having a loyal companion pet to fight with me? The ability to drop traps that did all sorts of nasty things to creatures? Nope, it mainly has to do with my real life enjoyment of archery. I like archery. I’m pretty decent at it, decent enough that I would regularly hit the bullseye in PhysEd even with my eyesight going bad. (You wouldn’t believe how often the person behind me had to tell me I had hit the bullseye.) And this was with simple bows, not the more modern ones with fiberglass, stabilizers, pulleys and what-not, but a length of wood with a string on it. Most of the time I didn’t think about it, I just released when the shot felt “right” and bingo! Target hit.

This colored a lot of my character choices when I played role-playing games or even a lot of video games. Given a preference, I’d pick a ranger or rogue as my character, as long as they had easy access to a bow, I usually was happy. (Never really liked crossbow though.) Remember the game Gauntlet? Yup, the silly green elf was almost always the character I chose. And going with that theme, I characters generally became elves or half-elves? Why? Because often they had some kind of bonus to their bow skill or at least had a bow stashed in their starting kit somewhere.

So naturally, when I go to create my first character in WoW, what I ended up with was a Night Elf Hunter! Come to think of it, that’s probably why I went Alliance at the time as well. If Blood Elves were around when I first joined, who knows? And also quite naturally, after I created my Keyalnon, I started reading and figuring out what else he could do. The more I read, the more I realized what a good fit he was for me and my style of play.

First off was the emphasis on Agility. Yes, it’s a standard thing in games that usually a bow skill is tied to Agility. But as most of my friends can attest, my general preference in games is always the quick, agile characters over the powerhouse damage dealers or the intimidating hulks that shrug damage like most of us shrug off rain. I value mobility and quick, precision strikes, all stuff based on how agile you were. Oddly enough, that also translated during the rare times I played other character classes in RPG games. More often than not, agility would be one of their highest stats if I had anything to say about it, no matter if they were a Warrior, Priest or Mage. In fact, when I talk about my Warrior, I’ll talk about how that mentality affected her build and play. Believe me, for the longest time my Warrior was a very non-traditional setup.

So what else does a NE hunter bring to the table? Well, shadowmeld for one. Sounds odd but it has to do with what one of my friends referred to as my “ninja mentality”. In popular culture, ninja heroes are kick-ass assassins with superhuman martial arts abilities, nigh invulnerable with a bag of tricks to use when cornered to escape. Well, that’s all well and nice except that if you’re a really good spy or assassin, you don’t get caught or get put into a position of direct conflict. You’re supposed to be subtle. If you’re noticed or seen, well, then you messed up. (Sort of like a Sys Admin come to think of it.) I don’t like to be noticed. My favorite ability of K.I.T.T. in the original Knight Rider series? “Silent Mode.” So an ability that allows me to “hide” from things that will potentially pound me into a red paste, yeah I’ll take it.

Ah, but what about pets you say. I know some players made hunters because they really, really wanted a pet. Others have lives that revolve around their pets, both in-game and in real life. In game, these people are Beast Master hunters. I’m not one of these people. For me, the pet was actually peripheral to my decision. It’s a nice part of the class but not my purpose for being in it. In game, my pet generally serves the same purpose that my real life cats do in my real life, they allow me to do things by myself without seeming to be nearly as insane as I probably am. Since I spent most of the time playing solo, I would often take on elites, group quests or even instances by myself, mainly because I had a pet to help me out and take some of the heat off.

And to be honest, my pets in RL and in Wow are sometimes used to entertain me at times. I still carry in my heart the scene, in the middle of an AV BG where I and several others had just finished off a couple of horde, where I look up to see an undead priest run past me with my cat hot on his heals. We actually watched my cat chase him for maybe 20 seconds before we finally put him out of his misery. To this day, I’m not sure why he was running like that but it sure was funny to watch. And nowadays when I have low level players bugging me for gold, my general challenge is “if you can defeat my pet by yourself.” Amazing how pissy some people can get when you insist they earn something rather than have it given to them for free. And there’s nothing like watching a lvl 5 rogue trying desperately to take out a lvl 80 pet.

So that’s it? You became a hunter because you like archery? Well, yes. I didn’t know anything about WoW hunters, my co-worker played a rogue and I didn’t even start looking at sites like wowwiki until much later in my game playing life where I found myself going into instances as stuff. I knew next to nothing about how other players played their hunters or even how hunters were “supposed” to be played. I just played how I wanted to play him and for the reasons I wanted to play him and screw what anyone else thought. And like I said, I’ve tried the other classes. Even after all this time, my hunter is still the character I have the most fun with. Is there anything more I need to say about it?