People Who Aren't You Have Won The Game!

Sorry folks, been only holiday last week celebrating my 32nd Birthday. Back in the saddle now with some venom

So last night, I took part in a joint Naxx-25 run with a friendly guild (Smart Casual members ended up hoovering most of the loot, including two pieces of Tier 7.5 for yours truly.)

As we were finishing up, our new Hunter mentions in /guild his dissapointment that Ensidia (the guild formerly known as Nihilum/Curse) downed the 10-man version of Alganon The Observer this week, five weeks after Ulduar's launch on the live server.

In response, I've been quick to point the following out:

1. They're pro gamers. Beating content quickly is what they do.
2. They were taking on a boss that was designed for people who have cleared Ulduar 10 including some hard modes.
3. They've been clearing Ulduar 10 and 25-man since launch, including hard modes in both. They're geared beyond the stress level for the encounter.
4. They're not us.

And that last point is the thing that bugs me the most. People have been jumping up and down about Ulduar's difficulty not being all that high. Moaning about how groups like Ensidia et al cleared it in their first week. And most of the people who were moaning weren't actually in the guilds doing the clearing!

From the point of view of someone who was actually wearing 10-man gear for that first week, it certainly didn't feel easy. A lot of the bosses came down to the knife's edge and some unlikely raid compositions (a shadow priest switching to holy to give us four healers on Ignis for example). By the second and third weeks, they'd actually managed to tune it down a bit to the level it was supposed to be: challenging for a group in Naxx10 gear.

Ultimately I don't care who's beaten the content before me, I just care about when I get my turn! I'm on a backwater RP-PVE server and so far from the cutting edge it isn't funny. The upside is I can relax, let someone else worry about world firsts and just concentrate on having fun. That's why we play this game, right?

My New Hobby

I've started replying to tells/private messages from strangers in l337/txt speak with "I'm sorry, but I don't speak your language."

Am I an old fart attempting to hold back the (d)evolution of the English Language or just an asshole who likes to mock the hard-of-thinking? Or maybe I'm a classhole?

The decision, gentle reader, is yours.

I'm MT

So last night I pugged the Vault of Archavon 10-man with Ulu. I really wasn't that bothered about it, but hell, an ex-raidmate was looking for a tank and I figured I could give them 10 minutes.

So I arrive there and the Warrior says, "I'm MT, Ulu's OT, ok?", I say "'Spose" and then swap JoL and JoW on my action bar so my wacky JoL threat doesn't pull aggro. (Yes I use JoL, but mainly because I run with a Ret Paladin and it's better I use it than he does.)

So we pull the first trash mob. Admittedly I was reckless, dived in with Avenger's shield because I figure "It's trash, who's gonna care?" Obviously he doesn't get aggro back and afterwards I got the reminder "I'm MT!" (He was a man of few words.)

So I figure I'll behave. He goes in, I follow, Judge Wisdom, Shield of Righteousness, Hammer of the Righteous and then I have Aggro. after that there was a

"Don't use taunt Ulu, I'm MT"
"I didn't."

This behavior repeated itself on the next two trashmobs and we're standing at the boss. After reminding me for the umpteenth time "I'm MT" he went in.

And I kept pulling aggro. OK, I can maybe accept that whilst we had equivalent gear, I probably had a higher aggregate gear level with more invested in threat stats, but even so, I don't struggle this much with Smart Casual's Warrior MT.

And what's worse he was sadly clueless. He kept tanking the boss in the Choking Cloud. But hell, he was MT, right?

Six weeks into WotLK...

Oh hai all!

A combination of flu and the festive period have kept me away from this thing.

Well ok, that's not strictly true, flu, festivities and a growing sense of boredom with the game.

I had unreasonably high hopes for the 10-man game when the 10/25 man switch was announced. I hoped we'd get challenging, fun fights like later Karazhan was when you were still mainly in blues, or hell how Zul'Aman was to anyone not entirely geared in T6 epics.

Naxx10 is a joke. We've managed our second clear now and the only boss we didn't at least two-shot was Heigan the Unclean, and that's because it's a fight you can't bruteforce. That said, when you have 60% of your DPSers averaging under 2k DPS mark on a run, you can't really say your force was that brute.

In the new year, we're going to start on the Dragons. We're aiming to kill Magylos and possibly start with Satharion + 1 drake and see how it goes. After they're dead, then it's a long boring farm of the same old content until they release Uldar. Given the fact that Uldar isn't on the Public Test Realms and they normally like to have raid content sit on there for two months at least, I'm not expecting to see Uldar until mid-March at the earliest.

I'm torn. On the one hand, Blizz have made it easier than ever to take your first steps into raiding. Heroic drops are on a par with 10-man drops and Heroics can be completed by a group of lvl 80s who possess at least one functioning brain between them. Even if that's too much, you can get a bunch of nice level 80 drops from craftable items and a few quest chains alone.

On the other, for the proportion of people who have raided and know their way around a boss encounter, there's very little for them. Fifteen all-too-familiar bosses in Naxx, some unchallenging heroics and two stand-alone boss encounters. The big guilds can have the special privilege of clearing out the above content in both 10 and 25 man mode, so they can get sick of it in half the time.

I can appreciate why Blizz have made the choices they have, but I can't help but feel they've failed to learn the lesson from Warhammer Online and Age of Conan's launch this summer. They made the journey to 80 fun and rewarding, but they simply didn't leave enough content there to keep their rabid fanbase amused until they could release the next instance.

Q3 profits aside, I can't help but feel if they'd delayed release until January and brought Uldar out at launch it would feel more satisfying. As it is, it looks very much like we have at least 2-3 months of time-killing ahead of us before the first ray of new content.

A few words to Puggers.

If you're gonna whisper a prospective tank and ask how much Health they have, then you're only going to attract idiots who think all they have to do is stack stamina.

If you're going to say stuff like "In my experience a tank's HP is a good indication of his skill" then you're pretty much an idiot.

If you do both these things and then skirt around the 1.1k DPS mark on a heroic, don't expect that tank to want to tank stuff for you in the future.

I don't mind someone being a jerk if they've got the skills to back it up. But if you're both ignorant of how my class and role works, and barely able to play your own, then you're not worth my time.

I'd rather quest, hell, I'd rather a holy priest solely by mob grinding than tank for you.

Oh and one more thing, without a healer or tank, you're not "looking for two more", you're "three DPS looking for group".

On the "Difficulty Curve" (Or lack thereof)

I've already heard grumblings from the first couple of level 80s in my guild (a Prot Warrior and a Ret Paladin) about how "easy" the levelling process was. My response is "of course it is"!

The new level cap isn't just about giving players new abilities and more talents, it's about devaluing their current gear to the point where they can offer them reasonable upgrades. In that respect, it's a hill between the players and new content. People can charge up and over it if they have the time and energy, or they can leisurely walk over it and enjoy the view. I suspect most of us fall between those two camps.

I'm not going to comment on Heroics or Naxx10 until I've had a chance to do them, but if they're as straightforward as I've heard then it can only be a good thing. The one thing that The Burning Crusade lacked was a decent Molten core-type entry-level raid, womewhere where an entire guild can go in and gear up on, or that experienced/well-geared guilds can just sidestep completely and move onto the next content.

I know folks are going to disagree with me here, but I think Blizzard have got the balance right this time.

The Definition Of Insanity...

...Is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

- Benjamin Franklin

As I alluded to in my last post, I had another run last night with basically the same group who wrecked my spirit in Steam Vault the night before. This time it was Botanica, which is a long and gruelling instance at the best of times. With them, it proved torturous. We had:

*A Warlock who used to lead CD. Likes to be in charge, set pulls, and then steal one of the targets and kite them to death whilst the rest of the group kills the others.

*A Druid who's specced for a mixture of shapeshift combat and healing on main healing.

*Another Druid, similarly specced but slightly better-geared who didn't want to step on the other Druid's toes by asking to be main healer.

*A Rogue, who I have no real complaints about, save for the fact that a Rogue's Crowd Control and Paladin Tank's Pulling moves are pretty much mutually incompatible.

Most of the pulls were the same story. The Warlock would grab one mob and take it for a walk, I'd be forced to try and quickly get aggro on the remaining mobs before they ran to the healer who, by dint of having to keep me, the Warlock and the two meleers alive would be throwing out massive heals from the word go and generating massive threat. More often or not I failed, the healer died and the rest soon followed.

It's sad, because they're people who I consider friends, and ones whose company I reasonably enjoy, but I'm getting to the stage where I never want to group with either of them again. It'll take a better tank than me to hold them together.

Ah well on the plus side, I got Ulu a couple of shineys; new shoulders and a belt, so his tanking gear's pretty much state of the art now.

And tonight sees the dawning of Patch 2.1.0, which introduces some new high end content I won't see for months if at all, a few changes in the way raiding works that might make it easier to get to said content and some changes to the Paladin Tanking toolset.

I'll comment on the latter tomorrow, probably.

Crushing The Soul

Last night, I went into a raid preparation frenzy. I went and got Ulu's tanking chestpiece, bracers and boots all enchanted with the best possible enchants so that I could squeeze the maximum stamina out of his set-up. In the end, he managed 11217 health unbuffed. Not as good as a tanking Warrior or Druid but pretty respectable for a Pally tank.

In the end, Karazhan run didn't happen, so i did two five man runs in it's place.

The first was to Mechanaar, which I undertook with a Priest and 2 Warlocks from CD and a Mage friend of one of the 'locks. It was an incredibly smooth run, with only one wipe before the last boss, which we recovered from quickly. Ulu even got an upgrade to his current tanking chest (which I predicted would drop after I'd just paid to get the old one enchanted).

After that, I went to Steamvault with an entirely CD party (two druids, a mage and a lock), and it was horrid. The kitty druid kept going bear and taking my aggro, the warlock seemed to be going out the way to take aggro from me and I kept on failing to save the druid healer from death. Runs like that really sap my spirit when it comes to tanking. Whislt I can intellectualise that they were trying to have fun and I was probably taking it too seriously, the end result is that I honestly didn't enjoy myself.

Death to n00b Nukers!

Tanking has proven to be a fun change of pace in the endgame. Having spent two years as a ranged DPSer, it's been challenging to try something completely different. As a tank, you're pretty much the focus of attention, keeping the mob at arm's length of the rest of the group and focussed on you. Anyone who knows me will know I have no trouble pissing people off, so I guess that's stood me in good stead as well.

(Admittedly, half the bosses I've killed as a tank have proceeded to extract revenge on me by dropping Hunter loot, but I've taken that in good humor. For the most part.)

It has, however sharpened my intolerance for sloppiness on the part of damage dealers. I feel hypocritical in part for this, since I can't always claim to have been the most focussed nuker out there, but the difference between good DPS and bad DPS is noticable.

Take last night's Shadow Labyrinth run. As with the week before, it was me tanking, a Druid healing, a Shadow Priest nuking/offhealing a Mage and a Warlock. It was functionally identical to the group from the week before which had had so many problems, with the substitution of a mage in place of a hunter. However, with the exception of myself and the Druid, all the players were different. That difference however was noticeable in their discipline, skill and damage output. In the other group we wiped about a dozen times before calling it quits on the second boss. Last night we killed all bosses first time and wiped only once to a bad pull on the way to the last boss.

It's not surprising. Damage dealers have historically had the easiest role in parties and are one of the easiest classes to level. As long as the tanks and healers are on their game, any amount of bad habits can be masked.

I can heartily reccomend that any damage dealer try playing a healer or a tank for a while. It sharpens your skills and makes you more sensitive to the effect your own role has on the group's performance.

Karazhan the Group-breaker

CD's starting to make some decent progression in Karazhan, having killed the first five bosses. As it stands though, we're in a frustrating situation, since ideally we need people in the following roles to do a Kara run:

3 Healers
2 Tanks (ideally at least one is a Tanking hybrid able to take on another role in single-mob enccounters)
5 Damage Dealers

Given the large amount of undead in the instance, then it's preferrable that at least one priest is amongst either the healers or damage dealers.

Currently, CD has the following attuned and willing to go to Kara:

8 Healers
5 Tanks
23 Damage dealers

Allowing for people to have night offs or unforseen circumstances, we barely have enough tanks and healers for two runs, whilst we have more than enough damage dealers for four. If Karazhan was on a 3-day reset timer (like the old 20-man instances) then we might get away with running two groups. Given that it's currently on a 7-day timer, it means that anyone who goes to the instance gets tied there for the rest of the week and can't enter another version.

It all smacks of Blizzard trying desperately to eke out raid content until it could finish the later 25-man encounters. But it's playing merry hell with our group at present.

As a result, our healers and tanks are tied into going most of the time and burning out as a result. Also, a lot of our DPS are being left out of the runs and are similarly getting burnt out and left to feel useless. If this coming summer's anything like last one, then we'll have a lot of folks away/on holiday/enjoying the weather, and those of us left will have to try and muddle through regardless.

Y'know what really grinds my gears?

There is one downside to playing a Paladin, and that is the amount of people who whisper you asking if you want to be a healer in instances.

I have no problem with healing, in fact I used to love healing with my Druid. That said, the sad fact is that whilst I can cast healing spells, they're not that powerful, and I don't have the mana pool to cast that many. Plate itemisation before level 60 seems to be focussed around the physical stats and therefore Protection and Retribution seem to be the most viable talent trees for a Paladin. I wouldn't mind going to an instance as an off-tank or emergency healer, but there's no way Ulushnar can main heal.

If anyone out there actually levelled as Holy spec, you have my undying admiration as the most masochistic bastard I've ever met!

Replies to "Professional Opinion" comments.

If there's one frustration I have about Blogspot's software is there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do threaded replies to comments on it. Or possibly there is and I'm being dumber than normal.

As it happens, yesterday's post has elicited replies from a couple of folks in Chaotic Divinty, which I'm going to reply to here and now:

Bluebottle wrote:

"My leatherworking is around 340 somewhere but have just dinged skinning to 375."

I have the same problem, I got my skinning to 375 in 2-3 days and my Leatherworking to 330-ish in the first week. I'm now at 342 and running out of useable patterns.

Peter wrote:

May be cheaper to grind cash and buy the primals from people like miners and engineers who get them more easily (miners get fire and stone from nodes, engineers get life and shadow using a crafted Mote Extractor). Blizzard seem to be emphasising cross-trade requirements, meading you trade for your reagents rather than grinding your own. Maybe an anti-bot measure, at least in part.

That's a possibility, but given the prices in the Auction House atm (anywhere from 30-60 Gold for a Primal?), it's not one I'm going to follow unless I get particularly desperate, or the market starts to get more reasonable (I figure it will in a few months, seeing the way the prices for BoE green items have dropped). I've put feelers out on the forums and in guild chat for folks with spare Primals to give/trade, but I think most folks need them themselves for their own professions.

Professional Opinion

Today, I want to talk about Professions. For most of Wulf's life, he's been a skinner/leatherworker. It's a great combination for a Hunter since the resources you need to skin to make your leather goods are the very beasts you're killing. In fact, if you're lucky, you can actually end up skinning beasts that other people have killed. It's free money!

The armor a leatherworker can make is usually decent, if slightly underpowered compared to dungeon drops, but often easier to get. Wulf used to spend many idle hours on the Burning Steppes killing Dragonkin by the Hundred in order to get scales to make armor for him and his fellow Hunters in CD.

In the Burning Crusade however, Leatherworking's changed. Leatherworking, like every other profession, is hard work now.

When you start, it's simple enough and the first 30-or-so points fly by in a frenzy of slaughtering and skinning mobs. After that, it get's very expensive in terms of leather and by the time you hit the mid-340's leather alone won't do it anymore. The patterns past that point require increasing amounts of Primals. Primals are made by collecting 10 motes of the required element (such as Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Shadow, Mana, Life, etc). If I go all out on the grind, and am exceptionally lucky, I can collect one primal's worth of motes ever 30-45 minutes. Since this guide suggests I'll need something in the region of 145 Primals to reach Leatherworking 375, then that equates to over three whole days of grinding to collect the necessary Primals, which is to say nothing of the other materials.

And once I get to 375? Well then I can grind even more Primals (another 72 by my count) to make this armor, which I'll admit is pretty awesome. But it's a lot of work to fit around the act of playing with my friends. Still, I'll get there eventually, I guess.

To Peter's option...

In answer to Peter's Comment:

Paid Character Transfer would have been the first thing I'dve considered, if Storm wasn't a Hordie. The day they bring out a Paid Faction Transfer, I'm there!

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.

CD RIP.

Well, Chaotic Divinity's been caught in something of a spiral for months now. Folks leave so we can't raid. Because we can't raid, more folks leave. Worse still, some of the old-timers start eyeing the door, but don't want to be seen as turning their back on their friends here.

It all came to a head last night, when it was decided that our days as a 40-man raid group were over. We'll still do ad-hoc runs to 20-mans, but no more Molten Core, Blackwing Lair or AQ40. Folks are welcome to go try out for other raid groups for the last two months, and hopefully, we'll all reconvene when The Burning Crusade's out and we can start levelling and exploring the new content together.

I'm deeply saddened by this. After fourteen months with the group, they are, in a very real sense, my home on Azeroth. As it stands now, I have the option of either trying to find another raid group for the last couple of months, or just giving up Wulf until TBC hits. There's really not much out there for a well-geared, raid-specced Hunter other than more reputation grinding or running countless battlegrounds. Neither option is particularly appealing to me.

I could attempt to level an alt, but outside of Stormpaw, I really haven't had much success on that one. Solo-levelling is a bore and if it wasn't for my CD mates pushing me on, I probably would have abandoned Stormy a while ago. So I guess all that's left to me is spend the next two months on Moonglade levelling my Horde alt away from most of the CD folks.

More on the cancellation of Christmas.

Well certain friends like to say "I told you so", but I genuinely (if foolishly) belived that Blizzard would make The Burning Crusade available before Christmas.

What they have said is that there'll be a Content Patch before Christmas which will essentially make most of the changes to the game that will ensure compatability with the Expansion. So we get the new talents, changes to the UI and also to the way hit/crit/defense and other abilities of that nature are calculated, but we can't level past 60 or access the new content in Outland.

What this means for Hunters, essentially, is that we'll be smacked hard with the nerf bat. There will be substantial changes in the class that will only be balanced properly when we attain levels beyond 60. Aimed Shot will be changed so that it can only serve as an oppener, but we won't get skills to boost our normal damage rotation like Kill Command and Steady Shot until level 62 and 66 respectively.

That said, I'm wondering which way to go with my talents. When it looked like I'd respec at the launch of the expansion, then I was going to go for a Beastmastery Spec for levelling and five-man instances. That said, given I'll still be raiding for a month or two now before I start levelling to 70, then I wonder if a Marksmanship build might be more appropriate.

It's a tough choice, my heart says "Beastmastery" but my head tells me "Marksmanship".

Bah, and quite possibly, Humbug!

Blizzard cancelled Christmas.

Ah well, if we can pull our collective fingers out, I might still have a chance at my full T2 set before the expansion hits. :)

What am I grinding for again?

Wa-hey, another rant. This time it's about armour, and more specifically the sets of armour a Hunter can obtain going through the various raid instances.

We'll start with my favourite: Giantstalker. Giantstalker armour peices were some of the first pieces of Epic-level gear Wulf ever got, and they were a massive upgrade to the armour Wulf wore up to that point. The set bonuses were kinda questionable, however. If you wore three peices, you could heal your pet better. Not that big a deal, but hey, I'm getting nice stats from all this stuff anyway, so who cares. Then at five pieces, we get a buff to your pet's stamina and resistances. OK, once again, not that big a deal since my pet's normally out of harms way, but like the three-piece, it helps me when I'm grinding. Finally, we get to the eight-piece, and we get the real money shot: +15% damage to my Multi-Shot and Volley skills. Finally, a bonus that actually buffs my damage, and it only took me eight months of grinding the place to get it.

Meanwhile, I've started collecting Dragonstalker armour as well, since that's the next big upgrade. But wait, the stats aren't that much better than Giantstalker, ah well, the bonuses might compensate. Three piece is +20% Ranged Attack Power to my Aspect of The Hawk buff. Doesn't sound bad, but it only really equates to 1 extra Damage Per Second, as opposed to the approximately 7 DPS buff my 8pc Gianstalker gives me. Wonder which one I'll be wearing? Then the five-piece bonus which is a buffed version of the Giantstalker five-piece, nice, but once again, not enough to break up my five-piece. Finally we get to the eight piece and again, we get the good buff: A chance to boost the Ranged Attack Power of the entire group by 450 (32 DPS) for 7 seconds. Shame I have to get a drop from Ragnaros, one from Onyxia and then six from Blackwing Lair to get it. Given the fact that we've had five sets of the leggings drop in six months of Ragnaros kills makes it unlikely I'll ever complete that set.

The we get onto Ahn'Qiraj and take a look at the set there. It's only a five-piece this time, so you can keep that oh-so-uber three-piece set bonus from Dragonstalker if you wish. Stats are nice as well, no +hit but I've got that covered. Shame about the dodgy spell damage on it. The we get to the set bonuses. The three piece reduces the cost of my Arcane Shot (which only gets used in kiting or PVP) by 10% (around 20 mana saved, woo!), and again the full set bonus is utterly uber (Rapid Fire every 3 minutes rather than 5, gimme!).

And this is my problem. The only truly worthwhile/useful set bonuses from the Hunter sets from MC-AQ40 are the end bonuses. I don't expect the lower tier bonuses to be as useful, but it would be nice if there was a genuine advantage to wearing anything less than the full set.

Amusingly enough though, the set from Naxxramas reverses this trend. In the Naxx set, the two,four, and six-piece bonuses are all pretty respectable, but the eight-piece one's a joke.

What's prompted this post is CD's retiral of MC from our regular raids to focus on AQ40. With that gone, I'll never manage to get my 8-pc Dragonstalker set (although I might just get the shoulders for coolness and wear five pieces of DS). As for the AQ set, it's a sad joke before the 5-pc bonus. So it looks like I'll be sticking with 8/8 GS until the expansion comes and we kiss goodbye to BWL and Naxx in favour of what the lvl 70 raidholes have to offer. If Blizzard can be bothered to fix the Hunter class by then.

Of chips and yellow water...

A curious phenomenon I've become aware of over the last few days is the curious need people on the internet need to metaphorically "piss in the chips" of their peers. I was first struck by this when, after putting up my last post to thank Cd for helping me acquire an item, a Hunter from a guild further into Ahn'Qiraj left the following comment:

"Not to rain on your parade, but Hunters should NEVER be wearing NR for Huhuran. There are only 15 people that need to have huge NR number in this fight, usually the rogues, warriors, shamans i believe. Hunters main part in this fight is to tranq, and then once she hits 30%, go absolute BALLS OUT dps. You don't want to be wearing NR when 30% hits, as you will never kill her due to lack of DPS.

Truthfully, 75% of the huhuran fights, you will never take damage in."

Now to answer him here and now. First of all, as should be evident by my many screen shots, Wulf is a Night Elf, and is therefore part of an Alliance raidgroup. This means that we don't have Shamans to fall back on, and our Paladins will most likely be doing a little thing called "Cleansing" throughout the fight. Therefore, assuming a "balanced" raid with five of each class, then the fifteen should be made up of Warriors, Rogues and Hunters (who can wear a large variety of armour types and therefore have an easier time maxing out their Nature Resistance).

Secondly, whilst I appreciate you've found a tactic that works for you, it's not nessesarily a road we'll go down with that fight. From a raid perspective, I'd rather take the hit to my own DPS and let the Mages and Warlocks (who have abilities that actually help boost each others DPS) worry about the massive burst damage needed at 20%.

The bigger issue however, is why do we (and I've been guilty of this myself on occasion) feel the need to belittle the achievements of others simply because it's not the route we ourselves would have chosen? Are we genuinely that insecure in our knowledge that we can't envisage any way other than our own?

Now, before you believe I'm picking unnecessarily on you Aeigelus, this isn't something I see restricted to your input. To Hunters claiming constantly we're useless in Naxx, to people sniping about gear. A new Hunter can't even ask for advice on what to do with their newly-ground Fire Resistance enchant or for advice on what to do on their first Molten Core run without the veterans getting into an off-topic discussion about how much Fire Resistance gear is actually needed in Blackwing Lair. Drives me to distraction sometimes, it really does. :) (I should point out that most of the time, TKAsomething.com's a brilliant site for any Hunter player, and these examples are isolated incidents.)

In other news, CD's made some progress into Ahn'Qiraj. We've got the first boss down now and we've made about half-a-dozen attempts at Battleguard Satura, but it's proving a difficult fight to get under control. Then again, it wasn't that long ago, I said the same thing about Nefarian and we got him in the end.

The hardest thing for me is keeping up interest in the place. I love Molten Core and Blackwing Lair to bits, and I can't wait to start Naxx, but Ahn'Qiraj just bugs me (pun unintentional). The look and design of the place just doesn't compell me or capture my imagination in the same way as the other instances.