More on the countdown.

Stormpaw's going on his first raid tonight, to the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. Unless it goes stunningly well, I'm gonna lean more and more towards Option 3 from yesterday's post. The more I think about it, the more I see the joy in Storm coming as much from the levelling and gearing up of the character as the playing itself.

If I pare Wulf down to something resembling this, then I have item drops that I can actually look forward to. Whilst it's nice having the higher tier gear, it's really only worth having for three reasons:

1) It makes the high end raid encounters much easier.
2) It makes you more powerful in PVP.
3) It enhances your "bragging rights".

None of these reasons are enough for me to stick with it, so in the bin they'll likely go. Although knowing my mind, I'll probably change my mind half a dozen times or so before the 16th.

Twelve days and counting...

In just under a fortnight, The Burning Crusade will be with us, and I'm faced with a difficult choice. Looking at the sheer amount of work involved in getting access to the endgame raid content in TBC, it's not something I'm gonna want to do with too many characters at once. Whilst it's true that a lot of the "work" involved will be accomplished in the process of levelling and gearing my characters through the new content, I'm honestly not sure what to prioritise.

I've been playing Stormpaw a lot, and I'm finding Druids a great, useful and faceted class. I've done a few small raids with CD with Wulfsblood to keep my hand in, but I just don't find him as exciting anymore. I've also accepted that because of the time I've played with Wulf, there won't be that much interesting gear at first whilst levelling. That said, there's still enough people in CD that I enjoy the company of (although fewer by the day) to make CD the place I wanna be.

I've got a few options and I'm undecided about what I'll go with:

1. Play Wulf with CD, grin and bear it and hope the fun finds me in the process.
2. Abandon Wulf and play exclusively with Stormpaw.
3. Sell a large amount of Wulf's high-end gear to a vendor to aritficially reinject the new content with challenge and excitement.
4. Start trying to level a Druid with CD, tagging along with the new CD alts.
5. Stop playing. And although some folks who know me may be skeptical, I've given this more thought that you might think.

Back to the Cat!

Well I took advantage of the Christmas break to get Stormpaw up to level 60. He hit 60 whilst main healing a doomed run to Strathholme Undead. As soon as that was over, I got asked to join an Upper Blackrock Spire raid being run by a guildmate's Raid Group.It went ok despite a few wipes and Storm's going be raiding with them a bit in the future.

Apart from that, I've sadly abandoned Storm's Moonkin spec in favor of something not dissimilar to what he used before the patch. He's now a decent healer, a capable damage dealer and a serviceable tank. In fact, last night I attempted Storm's first run as main tank since Wailing Caverns at about level 18, in Scholomance.

There was a steep learning curve involved, but two of the people in the party had played Warriors before and were in a position to give me advice. Despite some deaths, we managed a decent run on the place, everybody learning their new roles in familiar surroundings.

Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational Battle Chicken!

A couple of pictures of Stormpaw in Moonkin form:





I'm really enjoying the Moonkin whilst soloing. Not only does Stormpaw do a lot of damage, but he has the resilience to take some hits if an enemy gets close. The only downside is that it costs me some of my efficency as a healer in groups, but I should be able to mitigate that over time.

Stormy as it stands is 3/4 of the way to level 57, and I'm going to push to get him as close to 60 as I can before the weekend. Wulf hasn't been getting that much love at the moment, I only log on with him every so often to kill a few Dragonkin to keep my hand in. Part of me regrets stopping raiding with Adventure Lovers, but then again, I know if I was still raiding with them, then I'd be thinking about playing my healers. There's only so many hours in a day after all.

Attack of the Killer Alts!

Well, I haven't been playing Wulf that much recently, although I've managed to get on a couple of raids with mate's groups, and my current spec seems to be performing admirably under those circumstances. I'm going to concentrate this post on my two alternate characters who have been taking up most of my playing time right now.

Stormpaw's gone through some changes recently. Up until the patch, he was focussed on the Feral talent tree, dealing damage through his animal forms. It's great for soloing, but since Storm doesn't really use his feral forms that much when grouped with others, I decided to change his set-up. Initially I split his talents pretty evenly between the Balance (offensive spellcasting) and Restoration (healing spells) trees, which worked pretty well in groups, but Gave him some problems whilst soloing. That in mind, I ended up respeccing him to focus more on the Balance tree. The end result, he now has the ability to shapeshift into a Battle Chicken (well, ok, it's technically called Moonkin, but it looks like a frigging battle chicken!).

In this form Storm becomes more physically robust, able to take a pounding, but sacrifices his ability to cast healing spells. He also tends to draw a lot more aggro than a lot of other offensive casters, which means I won't be using it much in groups (no problem, I'll end up healing in most groups anyway). He also tends to run out of mana very quickly, although there are ways around this that he'll be exploiting.

I've also been levelling Delanthir, my elven priest. He's only level 28 at the moment, but I'm finding his ability to grind XP almost as smooth as my Hunter's, thanks to a slightly unorthodox talent spec reccomended by some friends. I doubt he'll hit lvl 60 before the expansion, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

On Altoholism...

Over the last few weeks I've been wrestling between my desire to do something different than just the "Monkey DPS" of a raiding Hunter and my compulsion to help my friends in CD during a time when most of our regular Hunters are becoming, well, less regular. Ideally I'd like to be able to play an alternative character whilst having the ability to assist CD in its progress on an ad-hoc basis.

Sadly, much as I love playing Stormpaw, he doesn't allow me to do this, since he's not only on a different faction, but a different server to CD. Earthen Ring is a flakey piece of crap as servers go, and there's always massive queues at peak raiding times. Even if I was able to recieve word that Wulf was needed, transferring from Storm to him would involve sitting in a server queue for anything up to fifteen minutes. Not ideal for me or for CD.

So obviously, I needed an Alliance alt on Earthen Ring. I first tought about my Night Elf priest, Delanthir, who is currently sitting at lvl 25 in Stormwind disenchanting whatever goods I send his way and selling the proceeds to fund Wulf's raiding. I pretty much dismissed that idea because, powerful as a Shadow Priest can be, I hated solo-levelling one. They have neither the survivability or burst damage to take down powerful mobs solo, particularly if other mobs add. As with most casters, as soon as they run out of mana, they're dead.

I briefly considered another Druid, but I dismissed it for two reasons:

1. The Night Elf starting zone is one of the dullest and most isolated zones in the game. The only way to get to the other Alliance zones is a long run through a level 20+ zone which manages to combine the worst aspects of being dangerous and interminably dull.

2. I really wanted to try a different play style.

In the end, I settled on the one healing class I hadn't tried and rolled a Human Paladin called Greysun*. I started him last night and got him up to level six before Wulf was called in to take down the Brother/Sister team of Onyxia and Nefarian. Paladins seem to be pretty fun, at the moment, and in raids, their role is the polar opposite of the Hunter. Whilst the Hunter is a ranged damage class, all DPS and little utility, Paladins are a melee support class, all utility and little DPS. :)

*I originally wanted to call him "Grayson" in a tacet reference to Dick Grayson, one of my favourite comic book characters. Grayson was taken or forbidden however, so I settled for the phonetic equivalent. I am geek, hear me roar!

A Moo-ving Tale...

Ok, for this post I'm not going to talk about our titular hero and his adventures in Huntardom. Mainly because I've really scaled back my time playing Wulf recently. I'm recharging my enthusiasm for raiding before I launch myself back into it with hopefully renewed Gusto.

So instead, I've been taking the time to level Stormpaw, my Tauren Druid:



Since moving him to Moonglade, where I've had the pleasure of playing with some of my old friends from CD. I've also managed to get him up from a rather humble level 19 to his current level 38, which is a hitherto unprecedented feat for an alt of mine. Having friends to play with regularly helps, as I quickly tire of the solo game and normally give up on alts by their mid-20s at the latest.

The Druid playing style is pleasingly varied as well compared to the rather dull "send in your pet and hit autoshot" play of the Hunter. In his normal form, Storm can cast spells to damage opponents or heal himself and his friends. He can then shapechange into a Bear where he's able to absorb a lot of damage, and has abilities that allow him to hold off a large group of opponents for a while (assuming there's someone there to heal him). He can also change into a cat where he is able to sneak around and deal a lot of damage at close range, but he lacks some basic survivability. Most of the time when he's soloing, Stormpaw stays in Cat, sneaking up to his target, doing a lot of damage and then repeating. If he get's too badly hurt, he can quickly switch to caster form, heal himself and then move onto the next target.

When grouped with my friends (Shaman, Priest and Mage normally), I'm usually able to stay in Cat Form and help the group take down targets quickly. However, sometimes we get extra enemies adding and our priest's healing isn't sufficent to keep everyone alive. At that point, it's normally a good idea for Storm to switch to caster and help out. It normally works fine, but given that Storm's normal gear is focussed around his physical damage stats (Strength and Agility), it tends to leave him without much mana. To this end (and with the help of a couple of nice quest rewards), I've started putting together a hybrid set of gear. This sacrifices some of his damage-dealing ability for more Stamina (for Health), Intellect (for Mana) and Spirit (for faster Mana recovery). This second set of gear will probably be what I'll wear for most of Storm's group playing, since it gives him more versatility. The downside is that he has to wear what the game refers to as a "kilt":



Now I'm Scottish, and I know kilts, if only because I make a point of refusing to wear one. That, my friends, is a skirt, not a kilt!

Farm Status?

Well, yesterday we went to BWL and cleared from Ebonroc to Nefarian. What's more amazing is that we did it with only one wipe (a three-hunter Tranquilising Shot rotation on Flamegor is tighter than we're used to, and a druid aggroing him into the group at the start didn't help). Annoyingly Ebonroc dropped the trinket I was after, but I had nothing like enough DKP to win it. Ah well, next time!

The Chromaggus and Nefarian fights are still the most rewarding and fun fights in the game for me. And the fact we pulled them both off flawlessly on our fifth (Chromaggus) and third (Neffy) kills amazes me. It won't be much longer until we have BWL down to a one-night farm status. :D

I went to level Stormpaw for a bit after BWL, and tried to get back for AQ40 in the evening. Sadly, Earthen Ring had a 380+ queue that I couldn't be bothered wading through, so I went back to Moonglade and got him to lvl 29! :D

Of Balance and Restoration.

Well, given my recent burnout from endgame raiding, and the departure of yet another dear friend from Chaotic Divinity, I decided to take a break from Wulf. In his place I started work on one of my alt characters, a Tauren Druid called Stormpaw:



The Druid levelling experience is quite different to my experiences with Hunters. They don't have the damage output of a Hunter that knows what he's doing, so more often than not they end up having to outlast an opponent with healing, or, where possible, by taking on the form of a big bloody bear:



(Don't ask me why Stormpaw has only one horn, but his bear form has two, blame Blizzard's crappy modelling.)

It's a very different style of play, one that I'm still learning. Funnily enough, it feels kinda "lonely" not to have a pet at my side when I'm questing solo, but the class itself provides new challenges.

Healing's tricky for a Druid. Most of our powerful spells have a 2-3 second casting time on them (which becomes even longer if you're being hit), and that's a long time in a boss fight. If you're the only healer in the group, you're having to constantly guess who's likely to need healing and direct your heals around that. They're also pretty mana-intensive, and I'm usually running out of mana in an extended fight if I try and cross heal a group. That said, as long as I load up on the +Int gear, I should be fine.

The other side if the coin is tanking. In Bear form, Stormpaw can happily substitute for a warrior, but I'm still struggling to get to grips with handling multiple mobs and keeping them from attacking the casters.

PVP's pretty fun as well, got dragged into Warsong Gulch by a mate yesterday. Moonfire and Entangling Roots really help with taking out enemy flag carriers, and Storm's no slouch in melee range either. I managed 95 HKs in one game and got the winning flag cap.

I'm not about to give up Wulf right now, but I'm enjoying this break and seeing the game from a different perspective.