Hunter's Rejoice!!

The day of goodness has finally came for us! Oh where oh where do I begin? I can't wait to finally be able to have a mortal struck target without having to have a warrior in the group. Also, I love the fact that now they're coming out with those 46dps arrows for Violet Eye rep. Considering the fact they've stuck us up until this point with the crappy 37dps Cenarion Expedition junk. But most of all I can't wait to start dispelling some Paladin BOP's among any and all buffs that players throw on one other.

Well we had a HUGE breakthrough in my 3v3 team this last week. Basically it's me and my best friend Elistana(Rogue) and his brother also a good friend of mine Kaynos(Resto Druid). We've always been hovering around the 1720's in rating but Elistana changed up things a bit and started using the armor penetration mixed w/ wound poisons and it allowed me to just ramp up the dps done on targets BIG time. Just that quick change alone allowed us to move up to 1917 in just one night! So now with us all getting buffed today and next week I'll be able to spend my 5k arena points and 35k honor I can't wait to see what lies in store for us in season 3.

Oh by the way, my 3v3 team we have an interesting strategy similar to what I do in 2v2 as well; that is basically just shadowmelding/pet prowl and the druid goes into stealthed cat form and the rogue also is stealthed and we just use that time to pick out targets and setup an attack plan. Occationally, we'll even have the other team come to our doorstep where we can then surprise the hell out of them...which is always fun and quite successful. I'm thinking for this new Aimed shot/mortal strike effect I'm going to hang back just a little bit longer and allow the rogue to engage our focus fired target and then come out and pop BW, rapid fire, abacus, then queue up a quick aimed shot, and pretty much lay waste to that target. I'm curious to see if any of you my fellow hunter's are going to have any new strategies with our new skills in this patch.

ALTernate Reality

So I figure I'll try to finish up some of the introductory stuff and show you guys my alts o' fun. First off is the character that I was just about to play instead of my hunter as my main before the game was released and that is my holy paladin, Zechariah. I chose this character mainly because I liked the whole holy righteous thing about this guy and wanted to be able to help other players in battle(aka my noble side). As of now he's pretty decent with like 1550 healing 26% holy crit...but this guy has been hording honor/arena points like crazy so come time for season 3 he's going to have 5000 arena points and around 30k honor ready to unleash on tasty new s3 gear. So I am quite excited to see what he'll be capable of when that happens.

My next level 70 alt is my frosty goodness of a mage Zophar. On my old server my hunter Daelimar was once named Ghaleon(unfortunately that name was taken when I transferred from the Kel'Thuzad server to the Stonemaul server). So if any of you out there in Internetland are fans of the RPGLunar, then you'd know from my mage/hunter I'm a HUGE fan myself. Anyway, Zophar was fire spec since level 10 up through 70 and I thought I was gonna pwn some people w/ my POM Pyroblast...ya...pretty much itwas the other way around and realized I had to give into the cold side. After that this guy is a monster! I had the most damage done in every Kara raid I've been on with him and do close to the most damage done in arenas while hardly ever tasting dirt(which for mages is a miracle).I'm still trying to perfect balancing the act of dps and cc in arenas but definitely have a fun time playing him.

Last but soon to be not least...is my shadow priest Celestrea. In one of my previous posts I mentioned of how me and my friend Elistana are planning on doing the whole lock/shadow priest combo for arenas and easily roll over most other group combo's in 2s. Then when we do 3s we'll include our ever powerful resto Druid friend Kaynos...it will be then we'll achieve utter dominance(at least that's the plan). She's only lv 33 right now but thanks to the new faster leveling patch hopefully I can bring her into the arena rotation soon enough.

Well that's my little WoW gang that definitely give me a varied play experiences and keeps it fun. So I'm curious to see who are your main characters and what are some of the alts that you guys chose to play.

World of Warlocks?

I really wonder if this was the other name for WoW that the developers were considering naming it before release. One would think considering the fact that they are extremely overpowered in the area of pvp content. Now typically in almost every arena battle regardless of team size I almost always top the damage done. But can I heal myself? No. Can I perform mass crowd control on people? No. Can I drain mana and recieve the mana I drained? No. So I think it's a fair trade off and I would think to consider it fair that I'm allowed to do the most damage done.

The funny thing is all of the questions that I asked that I said no to, the Warlock can do them ALL! ..and can still out damage me and out heal the healer in my party. Now how in the world is that possible? We're all wearing season 2 gear yet a single class can out damage a pure dps class and out heal a resto druid in full season 2 gear...I'm sorry, but it's safe to say that there's some class balancing that needs to take place here.

Now to Blizzard's credit they try to implement some realism to the game by not allowing me as a hunter to shoot arrows through stone pillars or a mage to cast a fireball and have it pass though walls. Now back to our friend the warlock, interesting that for some reason they are allowed to cast life/mana drain through pillars and walls just fine...sure that makes total sense..? So either Jeff Kaplan is playing a warlock or the developers are just that ignorant. Either way it's a little ridiculous.

So coming to the realization that Blizzard seems to have no plans in changing this mess my friend Elistana and I decided to adhere to the old saying of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em". So I'm afraid that is exactly what we plan on doing. He's created an demonology/affliction lock and I created a shadow priest. So time to get those cookie cutters out and cook up some mindless success at the apparent gift handed to us by our half-baked developers at Blizzard.

Hello World!

I just thought it fitting to title my first blog post after the first program every computer programmer has to learn how to write. Ok I'm not that big of a geek but I did take C++ programming in high school and a little bit in college. I had the crazy aspirations of becoming a game programmer some day but it just kinda fell through the cracks. Now I am a network security firewall engineer, so I guess it wasn't a total failure.

Well a little bit more about me...I started playing online rpg's ever since my good friend introduced me to Ultima Online. At first I thought I wouldn't like it but in just 30 min I was hooked and have been ever since. I just love the fact you can kinda take a break for a while and play a game that doesn't have a designated end which in turn forces you to go out and buy another game. Also, the best part is you can just sit back and have a great time with real life friends and since they all live in Phoenix (my hometown) and I'm stuck out here in Colorado Springs it's a great way to still keep in touch.

So anyway onto WoW. I started playing ever since the game was released and my main character is a hunter named Daelimar. I kinda just stuck with my friends and did quests and some 5 man's here and there with the occational pvp (which I kinda sucked at back then). It would just get my heart racing and I would be all freaked out and hit the wrong buttons and just look like a fool lol. Then a friend and I somehow got invited into a new an up and coming raiding guild and started raiding Molten Core shortly after it was released. I had a TON of fun and after I started getting some good ol Giantstalker gear I realized I could actually take some people down in pvp(assuming I still hit the right buttons).

Now that Burning Crusade is out I kinda decided for the sake of having a happy wife and being able to have more time to spend w/ my kids I needed to stop doing the hardcore raiding thing. But I still wanted to be successful so thank goodness Blizzard came up with the idea of the Arenas. Shortly before the expansion came out I made it a priority that playing on a pvp server I actually should know how to pvp...and try to do it well. I would have to say I've come a long way and can hold my own and then some. I'm currently in a 5v5 team with a 2109 rating and am absolutely loving it. Even though I kinda ran out of things to buy for arena gear lol!

Me and my good friends seriously can't wait until 2.3 and season 3 come out. Since hunters actually will be getting some love in the form of arcane shot being able to dispel player buffs and aimed shot now being able to apply a mortal strike effect on a target for 10 sec. As for my spec I am 41/18/2 Beastmaster spec and will in the coming posts be discussing strategies that I've found to work quite well. I also have 2 other lv 70 alts a Holy Paladin and a Frost Mage which I'll introduce them later too. So I definately look forward to this blog thing and hearing from other people about their ideas and comments.