Lo-Quality WoW

Again, a relatively uneventful weekend. Primarily due to a lack of sleep and coming down with a cold. But I did get some WoW time in, and that’s what’s important.

First off was some general stocking of items. Running low on chilled meat and borean leather, I ran around a bit to build up my stock. Then I ran some dailies to start building up the gold I spent getting my Traveler’s Tundra mount. I also was running short of items to make my critical strike buff food. I still haven’t quite decided if I should be carrying attack power, crit or haste food on a regular basis. I’ve always been a big crit fan but since Expose Weakness isn’t the kick ass thing it used to be and I finally got my crit percentage over 30%, I’ve been playing with the AP and haste foods. Either way, I get bumped to a nice damage output, it mainly depends on how I’m doing that damage.
I didn’t get into any heroic 5-mans, but not for lack of trying. Still don’t quite understand how some people are so picky on their dps. “Oh we already have a hunter” and “we wanted a range dps other than hunter” were the two responses I usually got. I did get into one PUG, which dissolved within 2 minutes of my joining. (I’m almost positive it wasn’t my fault.)

I did get into one heroic Vault of Archavon. It’s pretty much the only 25-man thing I can get into nowadays, especially since I’m not actually in a raiding guild. I wasn’t even looking for one but one of the few people I regularly run with invited me. At it was awesome. I’ve been in there several times, and since it’s usually a total PUG, generally get our asses kicked or it takes three or five tries. Not this one. I got in, we buffed up, and then we went wild on Archavon’s butt. I was only 12th on the dps list, dishing out about 2400 dps. Most heroic Vaults, I’m with people like myself, who for whatever reason aren’t in a raiding guild or raid at all, and I often find myself in the top three of dps output. So it was nice being so far down since it told me that I was with well equipped/well played people. In fact the top person was a rogue doing 4400 dps. The two other hunters, both BM, slotted in at around the 6th and 7th dps slots. BMs are acknowledged as the “DPS Hunter” build but I often find myself out dpsing them in PUGs, so it was so nice to see it done properly.

Sounds like I’m gushing? I am. It’s very rare that I get to experience high quality play, that’s usually seen in high level raiding groups and I very, rarely ever get attached to one of those. And since I’m survival, I expect to be out dps’ed by other builds and classes but it’s rarely that it actually happens. But when you’re with people who know what they are doing, you sort of realize how good the game, even PUGs, could potentially be.

Anyway, Archavon goes down and among the loot is a hunter item. Again, I was actually happy that one of the other hunters got it. I’ve been in too many PUGs where some lunatic 80 goes into a heroic instance with 60-70 level gear, doing less dps than the tank, and at the end, they win the high level item. In general, if I can tell that you are playing to the level of your capabilities/equipment, I have no problem of you wining something that I actually wanted. Then again, the two other hunters may have thought I’d been goofing off, which I’ve been accused of more than once. There’s a weird assumption that all hunters are BM hunters and some are actually surprised when they find out I’m not. Ah well…

Now I also managed to get into a couple of battles for Wintergrasp. Those didn’t quite go well. In one of them, we were on defense and the horde managed to break in and get the artifact in the last 30 seconds of the battle. The other battle I was in, we were on offense. I joined and immediately tried to join the raid but was ignored on all three of my requests so I said heck with it. Then I saw what was going on and I didn’t feel quite that bad since it was apparent that the Alliance side had no idea what they were doing while the horde did.

I saw that the horde had all 12 vehicles out while the alliance only had 9 of their possible 12. That number dropped really fast. When I got to the fortress, I saw why. All 12 horde vehicles were catapults and they were doing a good job of swarming the few alliance vehicles and from what I could see, not a single alliance was ganging up on a target themselves. The alliance side would get demolishers and catapults, but most of the demolishers would concentrate on the horde catapults while the alliance catapults would concentrate on the walls. (And if you’re wondering, it should have been reversed.) Later, when the alliance finally concentrated on taking out the catapults, they would then go and attack the towers. Which would be fine if the cannons weren’t already disabled! So naturally, going into the last two minutes, only one wall was breached and I decided to just go and head back to the flight point to wait the end of the battle.

Normally I hate giving up. I’m one of those “fight until it’s over” type of players. I think I was just too frustrated at that point to do anything. Especially after getting yelled at by the guy driving the demolisher I was riding decided he would go chase down horde and then getting mad that I wasn’t killing off the horde who were attacking the vehicle. Now in the first place, if you want to chase down unmounted horde, get on a damn catapult! Second, although I’m just a “gunner”, I still need to face my target and if you’re gonna be constantly spinning about randomly, it makes it hard for me to fire anything other than an instant shot.

Oh well, just grumpy and sick I guess. See you later.