To Raid or not to Raid, that is the question…..

With apologies to the immortal bard for pinching his line but this is the situation I find myself in at the moment.

I have fully explored Northrend, have only two heroics left to do (Halls of Stone and Occulus) and am within 30 quests of achieving Loremaster of Northrend. In other words I am approaching the point where there is nothing more to do, odd achievements aside, apart from raiding Naxx and Ulduar and this gives me some concerns of the ‘what next?’ variety. So what are my options?..........

One option is continue as I am and set myself some personal objectives like getting all of the non-raid BiS items or acquire money to the point where I can buy a gaggle of epic and unusual mounts or collect an example of every Leatherworking recipe ever invented. errrm dull, dull, dull, dull, dull.

I could go back to the beginning and clear all of the stuff that I missed when I originally levelled. Would it be dignified to see a level 80 toon running around Wailing Caverns? Actually this idea might offer a little light relief /consider

I could just call it a day where I am and concentrate on levelling my drood alt, which I have been promising to do for soooooo long, and just do daily’s on my main to finance other activities. Problem with that is that first, I would miss out on a huge amount of game content, second, it feels like a bit of a kop out and third of course, I am at heart a hunter so putting my main to one side would be a hard, hard, thing to do.

I could decide to have a go at this raiding malarkey but to do so I would either have to try and pug some runs or jump guilds with my main and look for a raiding guild to take me in because my current guild only has 3 level 80 characters. Trouble is I have never previously bothered with raiding, mainly because I have felt uncertain as to whether I could give it the commitment that it needs and the last thing I want to do is be unreliable and so inconvenience my raid mates. If I am honest, I still feel a bit that way /sigh.

Another option is to try and expand my guild until we have enough players to form our own 10 mans. I can't describe how much like hard work that idea sounds so bugger it.

I guess I shall just have to think about this some more and if all else fails I could always………….start a Death Knight!!!!

This place is ace......

Browsing the interweb at luch time and I found this place, The Armory Data Mine. What a cracking resource.

I'm off to have a little play. ........

Hunter Tactics Pt 1 - Heal My Pet

I have enjoyed a great few weeks of running heroics. UK, UP, CoS, Gundrak, etc etc. Lots of lovely loot, big power ups and great fun. Last night in particular cheered me up because for the first time ever I unleased my evil side, Mwahahahah!!!!

A friend and I agreed to assist what appeared to be a decent enough group with a Gundrak heroic run. Things all seemed to happen as they should until the first boss, at which point my beautiful wolf DancesWith was killed to death during the fight and I am ashamed to say I didn't notice /Gasp!

Now I know that as a fully specced BM hunter it is my responsibility to take care of by fluffy friend and the fact that he died is ultimately my fault. No argument at all. I was a first class huntard.

So I checked out Recount and discovered that my hirsute playmate had received no healing. Thats right NO healing. Not from me and not from our Lvl 80 Resto Drood in full epics. Being the polite fella that I am I whispered to my tree brother and asked that he include DancesWith in his rotation. He of course agreed.

He then totally ignored me.

So I spent the rest of the run healing up DancesWith on my own and taking him in and out of fights as needed in order to keep him alive.

And so to the last boss. Now all through the run I had made full and proper use of MD on the MT, but as we worked through the pre-boss trash an evil idea took root and ultimately I couldn't help myself ---- I MD'd the healer before the pull, then stood back and LOL'd as the squishy got well and truly stomped. Man, you should have heard the pillock squeak, he went ballistic and ranted away in Pchat.

When I explained to the party what I had done and why, they laughed too which didn't help at all and at one point the Drood threatened to leave the party. He calmed down in the end as he wanted the achievement. On the plus side he healed the nuts of my wolf on the last boss.

As much as I would like to take credit for this idea as an independant thought I can't, its not a new idea. Originally I read about it on another blog. Hey ho, it was still a laugh.

Some times sorry isn't enough...

This is an apology to the poor folks who had the misfortune to invite me to a Culling of Strathome run last night, where I performed like the worst kind of Huntard, because I forgot that the aim was for the group to succeed, rather than for me to do well. So what happened?

Well, after hanging around in Ironforge for an hour or so, levelling first aid whilst trying unsuccesfully to pug a UK heroic run, I was asked if I would help out on a normal run through CoS with some lower level players. It was getting late, I was bored, I had nothing better to do and hey - I like helping out. So I said yes.

The group took some time to get organised. The mage didn't portal to CoT to help summon, even though he said he would, which meant a twenty minute wait for him to get there by more traditional means. When he did get there he and the leader summoned everyone except me, so two of them had to run back out of the instance to summon me.

So finally we are assembled, me as a lvl 80 BM hunter, a level 79 Mage, a level 79 Pally, a level 78 priest to heal and a level 77 warrior as tank. Now in all fairness to the tank, he did question his suitability but we reassured him that it would be fine and off we went.

In we went and fairly easily made our way through the first waves of trash mobs and so to Meathook and wipe. What the hell? yep wipe. The tank immediately complained that he couldn't maintain aggro which was why Meathook got past him and into the healer, mage, me and pally. Ok no big deal. We rezzed and ran back in. Healed, buffed and tried again. Same result in no time flat. Again the tank bemoaned his inability to hold aggro and suggested we replace him but, because we were a team, we said no.

Third time round we decided to try a different tactic and went after Salramm the Fleshcrafter instead. Guess what? yep we wiped again.

At this point the tank apologised and left the group, the mage immediately did the same (without saying goodbye) and the rest of us decided to call it a night.

I'm guessing we all went away moaning about how bad each or all of the others were.

Driving home from work today it finally dawned on my thick huntard like brain what had gone wrong and I have to say that I think it was all my fault, and heres why.

I am level 80 with a good selection of pre-Naxx epics, a good trinket, with ap food and Saronite Razorheads. I'm using my heroic shot rotation and popping Bestial Wrath and Rapid Fire, add to that Blessings of Might and god knows what other buffs and me and my wolf are pumping out 1800 dps /pat on back.

But whilst I was patting myself on the back, was I remembering that the tank was only level 77? No. Had I remembered to 'downgrade' myself from my heroic set up? No. Was I watching my threat meter to make sure I didn't 'steal' aggro? No. And there we have it. Big, bad, Banturr burning up the meters but generating so much threat that the tank didn't stand a chance and wiping my group in the process. Not once but three times in the space of 15 minutes.

To my un-named colleagues who's only mistake was to invite me to help out I apologise unreservedly. You had a right to expect better and it was definitely /fail on my part.

The only plus side to this episode is that I will NEVER make that mistake again.