Drotara the Hunter: For the Warchief. And by Warchief, I mean Thrall. I have a plethora of tabards to choose from but I choose my Orgrimmar tabard from the Argent Tournament over all of them. We’ll see what happens when Mr. Generic Rage takes over the reigns of the Horde. He’s a proud Orc.

Dratara the Warrior: I can see this guy totally being down with Garrosh’s line of thinking. You know what’s a great method of crowd control? Death. Pretty effective. I have no desire to do the honor grind on that character but he has enough honorable kills to show he has no issues punching folks in the face. Sure, he may have been Alliance for almost all of them but dang it, he always wanted to be Horde.

Arathos the Death Knight: He’s pretty apathetic it seems. Maybe my imagination hasn’t conjured up his attitude towards things like it has for the other two folks. He’ll come into his own eventually.

I love PvP. Battlegrounds, world PvP, and Arena. Each one is its own beast with its own nuances. I love battlegrounds on my Hunter. If there is one thing I am excited for in Cataclysm is the idea that I can play rated battlegrounds. Give me room to run and kite and there are not many classes I am worried about.

Stick me in a box and in most cases I prefer the Death Knight, at least in 2v2 right now. I haven’t tried finding any competitive teams for my Hunter this season. But you learn a lot. Such as Death Knight/Holy Paladin feels like a hard counter to Rogue/Mage. Frost Presence when the gate opens and we have lost maybe one game to that comp in 1000 rating or so.

Change that team to a Warlock/Druid and it feels like the only way we win is if we severely outplay them or the Druid over-extends and ends up screwing up. There is a lot to be learned from Arena about how abilities interact with each other, what works against what, and things. For example, most people miss all that Anti-Magic Shell is capable of. Not only does it absorb magic damage, it prevents harmful magic effects from being applies. This includes Polymorph and Cyclone if you use it pre-emptively.

We’ve played a couple 3v3 games as Holy Paladin/MM Hunter/Frost Mage. Not the ideal comp but it’s the first time for Arena for some folks and a lot can be learned about Arena even at the low brackets as you work your way up. As I’ve told some other real-life friends, the nuances and playstyles you will find in Arena are different than anything else in this game. You may go in thinking about certain classes in one light only to see them entirely different when you stick them in that box.

Season 8 will show a renewed Hunter effort in Arena. And while my Warrior is almost exalted with all the BGs, I swear if they implement the title “the Defiler” as the Arathi Basin exalted reward due to their adjustment of meta-achievements I will be in Arathi Basin non-stop until I can be known as “Drotara the Defiler.”

But that title may just be too cool for a BG reputation reward.

In other news, outside of it’s sometimes long load times and some wonky AI every now and then, Dragon Age is awesome. You should be able to see my recent accolades here.

My Summoner Profile

And it shows. Already League of Legends feels very polished and I’ve had a blast playing it the past couple days. Everything from the more intuitive shop interface that makes buying items a breeze, the recommended items to purchase for you chosen champion (as they call them), more user-friendly targeting mechanism while in-game, among other things all makes it feel exactly as it should. A more polished, refined version of Defense of the Ancients.

League of Legend Mastery Trees

In addition to familiar awesome gameplay, they introduced the idea of a persistent “summoner.” Each game you get to pick a new champion if you so desire. But your account can be leveled up in ways very familiar to WoW players. Talent trees, glyphs, etc. All adds up to a fairly complete package. It’s still in beta so things like the glyphs are still under development as well as the addition of multiple maps. But it does have a number of obviously required features such as a buddy list, win/loss stats, and how many times someone has left a game which I am sure many DotA players will appreciate.

League of Legend Champions

If you have the desire to try it out, hop over to their site and add Drotara to your friend’s list.

Almost All-In-One Aspects: Press whatever button you bind it to (I use ‘H’) and it casts Aspect of the Dragonhawk. Shift-Keybind casts Aspect of the Viper, and Ctrl-Keybind casts Aspect of the Cheetah. You could also add in Alt or something for Pack or Nature if you wanted. Since Aspects are on their own separate GCD, I added in the line to cast Trueshot Aura if it’s not turned on already (since I have it in my PVP spec). Works like a charm!

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:shift]Aspect of the Viper; [modifier:ctrl]Aspect of the Cheetah; [button:1]Aspect of the Dragonhawk(Rank 2);
/cast !Trueshot Aura

Misdirection: This one hasn’t changed in a while because it is still rock solid. Casts Misdirection on your target if friendly, your focus if friendly, then finally your pet, in that order of priority.

#showtooltip Misdirection
/cast [help] Misdirection; [target=focus, help] Misdirection; [target=pet, exists] Misdirection

Freezing Arrow/Trap: Simple in the idea is casts Freezing Trap if you press its key bind, or Freezing Arrow if you hold shift. The exclamation point makes sure you don’t accidentally turn off the targeting icon if you spam your key binding.

#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:shiftl]!Freezing Arrow; Freezing Trap

Deterrence: This one is simple and similar to what some Warriors use for Bladestorm. Sometimes after using Deterrence (or Bladestorm) you have a need to cancel the effect quickly. Whether the Warrior needs to pummel a critical heal or you need to Silencing Shot one, or any other number of reasons.

#showtooltip
/cancelaura Deterrence
/cast Deterrence

Steady Shot and Everything: Shot Rotation Macros are dead in the sense of them doing all our work for us. But we can still automate a few things here and there. hence this monster of a macro. Could I squeeze out just a tad more DPS by manually activating some of it? Sure. But that’s a lot more buttons.

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast [target=pettarget, exists][combat] Kill Command
/cast [combat] Blood Fury
/use [combat] Wrathstone
/cast !Auto Shot
/cast Steady Shot
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

My Death Knight has a few macros of his own. Going from Hunter to Death Knight made making pet macros pretty easy.

Pet Summoning: This macro does 3 things. It will summon my ghoul if he is not out, or if I hold shift and he is alive, it casts Death Pact, or if I have a dead ally targeted it casts Raise Ally.

#showtooltip
/cast  [modifier:shift][target=pet, exists] Death Pact; [help] Raise Ally; Raise Dead

Death Coil: The nifty thing about Death Coil for the DK is that it can be used to heal your pet (or if you have Lichborne, heal yourself).

#showtooltip Death Coil
/cast [modifier:shift,target=pet] Death Coil; Death Coil

So yeah, I just thought I would toss these macros out there again.  There are a couple other ones I use for PvP like some focus macros for Silencing Shot or Viper Sting. Any questions, leave ‘em in the comments!

Currently I am not in a “raiding guild” since I am teaching classes as an adjunct faculty member at a local community college. It ties up my evenings a couple nights a week. But considering that Illidan is now the number one PvE-progressed server in the United States, finding groups isn’t exactly difficult.

As you can see over on my Armory that my gear is nothing to scoff at. Although my gemming is ugly. But that is being remedied. I recently picked up the heroic version of the Sunreaver Ranger’s Helm and the fact it has 50 hit on it is letting me replace pretty much everything with good ‘ol Cardinal Rubies. Since it has a blue socket and a +8 Agility socket bonus, a Nightmare Tear was the perfect fit for it.

I am taking my time because I am waiting to regem everything until I transmute all the rubies myself. Overall I will lose the massive ArP found on my Dragonstalker’s Helm but end up gaining like 60 Agility. My funds have dropped to “dangerously low.” OK, not really. I am down to 25k gold, much lower than I would like to be. This is all attributed to me slacking off in the glyph world. My Priest is almost solely funding all my characters with glyphs and epic off-hands with Drotara chipping in a Cardinal Ruby pretty much every day.

All the Lotuses on the AH have sky-rocketed, making flasks non-profitable for the time being. But my sudden dip in gold can be attributed to a few things. Mainly, massive gearing on the part of my Death Knight and Hunter. My little ‘ol tank is rocking 36,300 HP without any buffs. And all that tanking gear requires enchants! And gems.

My Warrior is still rocking face in the 70-79 bracket. Check out that secksy beast. Warlocks still like to blow him up though. Sometimes. If they don’t get 2-shot. Which a lot do. I may not hit as hard as some, but he keeps on truckin’.

Also a real-life friend of mine transferred over to Illidan (friggin’ finally) in the form of the Rogue Yaumer. I bought him the materials and the pattern for the Footpads of Silence for his birthday.

Another contributing factor was my wife wanted to borrow 3,000 gold for her third alts epic flying. While her Paladin was still over on Silver Hand rocking 12,000 she didn’t have quite so much on Illidan. And any of you married folks know that when she said borrow 3,000 gold she actually meant give me 3,000 gold.

So I did.

Two weeks ago me and 2 guys from Really Good At This Game put together a 10-man Trial of the Grand Crusader. Trade chat PUG, found a couple good folks from one guild and a few others and went to town. And by went to town I mean we finished with 49 attempts left after a heart-breaking wipe at 17% on Anub’arak. The following week was slightly less inspiring since we accomplished it with 44 attempts left. So close yet so far away. Not bad for a PUG though.

I haven’t been sucked into any of the “grass is greener” thinking that has been running rampant with so many people. I’ve talked with people I know in real-life who have tried “other games” recently and their opinions came back exactly as I had anticipated.

“Meh.”

In other video game related thoughts, holy crap there are a lot of awesome non-MMOs coming out however. I made a brief post about Dragon Age Origins the other day. Now I get emails from Gamespy and a couple other sites. Most of the time I look at the subject lines and delete them. But yesterday it said “Dragon Age Character Creator.” And that caught my interest.

I downloaded it and it was what I expected. A character creator. It contained the now standard slides and dials to tweak everything from how pointy your character’s nose is to how dark the tattoos on their face are. One night addition was the option to choose between 6 or 7 different voices. Which will be nice so when you play through a couple times which I undoubtedly will, I don’t have to hear the same voice hours on end.

So yeah. Dragon Age Origins. Left 4 Dead 2. Mass Effect 2. Holy awesomeness. And I just finished two of Fallout 3’s downloadable content, which was shorter than I expected but on par with the non-crappy Mass Effect DLC.

But yeah, that’s me at the moment. Trade chat all-star.

And from what I have seen, Dragon Age is really shaping up to be amazing. I love fantasy games over science-fiction games in general just because I enjoy that type of content more. But as I stated, I did play Mass Effect almost 6 times now.

Sten Rage- Dragon Age Origins

Now as a fantasy RPG goes, Dragon Age has some pretty big shoes to fill. I loved Elder Scrolls Oblivion. I played through that game twice as well. I enjoyed its leveling system, how gorgeous the game was, and a lot of the finer details that were included. Walking through cities and hearing NPCs talk about your latest endeavors as you walked past, having NPCs go through daily routines which included them *not* standing in the same spot for 24 hours a day.

But I know what I also liked about Mass Effect and KOTOR. I enjoyed the combat systems that they implemented and the squad controls, which I hear are being improved in Mass Effect 2.

And I know what I don’t like about Oblivion, ME, KOTOR, Fallout, and other games. Their terrible terrible inventory systems and certain UI elements. I realize some of them had to design something that would also work on a console controller. Having the ability to only keybind 2 abilities at a time was painful in Oblivion. Scrolling through a list of gear in Mass Effect was tedious.

But none of that stopped the games from being great. Dragon Age Origins comes out in a month or so and I am pretty excited. Who knows, maybe one day I will be special enough to actually get to preview games!

I love playing a Hunter. But you know what I think I love even more than that? Playing Orcs. To me they are always the right race selection. 5% more pet damage? My Death Knight and Hunter say yes please. Free attack power trinket? All 3 of them say yes please. 15% shorter stun duration? 5 more expertise with axes?

You get the idea. And as far as I am concerned they look the best in everything. No dog collars like the Tauren wear. No ankle wraps like the Trolls. No tattered holes like the Undead. I mean, what is even up with that? They find a new piece of armor and throw it under a bus before they wear it?

Blood Elves aren’t even worth mentioning. Buncha girls! I made a troll once. He’s my Shaman I was leveling. But he wasn’t nearly as cool as any of my Orcs, so he is stuck at level 72 until I am convinced he is worth getting to 80. One rare moment of weakness and now the poor Shaman pays the price.

And after all, where would the Horde be without the Orcs? We are the Horde!

My other piece of evidence? The Wrathgate cinematic. If you seen the movie “300″ I like to think of it like that. If you haven’t, watch this short clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IReMfvamQ28 (The person who uploaded it disabled the embedding, sorry.)

It reminds of the Wrathgate. (In case  you want to refresh your memory: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/wrathgate.xml)  “Highlord Bolvar, thank the light!” Yadda yadda. Whatever.

And then as the Horde ride down the ramp, Saurfang the Younger yells “Lok’tar Ogar! For the Horde!” And then like the Spartans from the clip above, the following Orcs respond in unison “FOR THE HORDE!” It gives me the chills. Every time I watch it it reinforces why I want every character to be an Orc.

And with that being said, I took the time to make the following image. Enjoy!

Go Orc or go home!

Now I kinda wish I had made this a proper vector graphic image because I would totally wear this on a t-shirt.

I am still running 10 and 25 man Trial of the Crusader on both my Hunter and my Death Knight. In fact I just picked up my Dexterous Brightstone Ring the other day. If all goes well, we are looking at leggings or shoulders this week, depending if I get a trophy or not.

And after those raids are done, I’ve been gearing out my Death Knight to smash Alliance face. And the occasional Horde face if the queue makes it so. Despite having mediocre PvP gear, using an axe from a heroic and no real second trinket, Freshmaker (aka Warbull) and I climbed up to 1650 last night. And I’ve learned one thing.

I hate Resto Druids. I really do. I know Blizzard has stated that they are no longer going to balance PvP around the 2s bracket at all, which is fine. But man, when we see those gates open and the DPS has Mark of the Wild we both let out a collective shudder.

BEAST CLEAVE!

And yes, I do have an opinion about the Beast Mastery change. I know Beast Mastery DPS was low. Despite any personal anecdotes, mathematically it was inferior to MM and Survival. We all knew it. Blizzard knew it (we hoped) and hoped they fixed.

But you have to wonder was this the right fix? When an entire tree falls so far behind in DPS for a pure DPS class that a flat 10% increased damage buff is what they need to do to fix it, perhaps a deeper look at the tree might be warranted.

But its no secret that this was also in direct response to Beast Cleave. And it really looks like it killed Beast Mastery in the Arena again. Levidia over at Arena Junkies said it best:

Here is where one of many problems lie however… The 10 second duration and the FACT that a BM hunter is the WORST most ineffective arena spec in the game when the hunter/pet aren’t enraged. All the specs eggs are largely in one basket and if you aren’t able to take advantage of that IE forcing that ice block or forcing that pain suppression/BOP, etc you’re going to likely lose the fight during the counter offensive that happens when you’re no longer able to keep up that oppressive offensive damage.

A Disarm/Dismantle during BWrath now will leave the hunter with a mere 5 seconds of total wrath action to try and get something accomplished. This isn’t going to fly and anyone that knows anything about how the spec operates in the arena however face roll it may be will completely die off as an arena spec.

His entire post is really well thought out and I feel is quite accurate. Sure, people may call Beast Cleave faceroll and may argue that RMP takes the skill of a concert pianist to coordinate crowd-control. But regardless of whether or not that is true, not every class has the CC capabilities of that composition. Does that mean no other team should be allowed to be competitive?

I really do enjoy PvP. While a lot of folks generally avoid it for whatever their reasons may be, I frequently take part in it on all my characters (except my Priest, screw PvP healing!). My Level 76 Warrior still has more honorable kills than my Hunter though, which I still find awesome.

And since my beloved Hunter won’t stay viable for more than 2 weeks . . .  I have turned to my Death Knight to fulfill my PvP desires. Although I still love sitting in the back of AV or Isle of Conquest in PvE gear and unloading Explosive Shots into folks.

That just doesn’t get old.

Going over some of his achievements made me laugh however. It’s been so long since I’ve played him that he has the achievements for being exalted with Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley but doesn’t have credit for a single win. And he is sitting at 35,000 honorable kills, more than all my other characters combined. And the loot sitting in his bags? Priceless. I am still holding on to my Lifegiving Gem, Styleen’s Impeding Scarab, An AV battle standard, Quel’Serrar, Sulfuras, Teebu’s Blazing Longsword, and the Runeblade of Baron Rivendare.

And having epic flying and a Netherwing Drake while floating around Northrend in the low 70s makes questing the easiest thing ever. For leveling though, he is busting out the BoA Axe my paladin has been using and his Lionheart Executioner.

My favorite part? Every single one of my characters now have the achievement for Murky. Rockin’ Blizzcon 1 minipets. I got a lot of tells as those achievements kept popping up as I mailed that little blue egg around.

And while I am no longer Aratar, the 4th level 60 Warrior on Deathwing and the server first Armorsmith (I totally was Matimel), my Warrior can join my proud Orcish family. Who knows, maybe in the future my level 70 Warlock and 63 Rogue can become Orcs as well.

Anyone else taking advantage of this service to bring an old character back to the limelight?

First thing first: Finishing 10-man Trial of the Crusader. While the Anub’arak fight on 10-man is still as easy as the first 4 fights, we then went and tried 25-man and had him as low as 30.3%. The reason 30.5%? After his 4th submerge he will come back up and enrage. well it was a learning experience. We also had some bad DPS so no worries.

The group (well, some of us anyways) are going back tomorrow to finish him off. As the night went on we had to replace some folks with less than ideal candidates. Expect a video of it once we kill him.

I then and went and tackles the new Vault boss. As a Hunter, the fight is pretty much tunnel-vision your feet watching for fire while your fingers dance along your keyboard for your shots. While it’s easy to see how healing intensive this fight is compared to the other Vault bosses it wasn’t that big a deal, as expected.

But I was rewarded with my 9.5 gloves which go nicely with my 9.5 chestpiece. Rock that 2-piece.

On another note, Mass Effect finally got a friggin’ patch. Mass Effect is probably one of my favorite games. I played through it 4 times and plan on playing at least once more on Insane. But it was plagued with an error that caused a game crash in a significant portion of the game-playing population. Well, I did an Nvidia driver update again and patched and I was able to play for 3 hours last night without so much as a hiccup. While the new downloadable content is of questionable depth, it puts in a number of record-keeping competitions. And to me that rocks. Gotta own those scoreboards now.

If you enjoy RPGs and haven’t tried Mass Effect, I highly recommend it. Oh, I am also uploading the Anub’arak intro sequence (although it recorded without sound) for those who don’t mind spoilers and haven’t seen it themselves.

Thoughts, comments, tips on Anub’arak, leave ‘em here! :)

But I have been playing as much as ever. I had this grand scheme of making narrated videos for all of Trial of the Crusader but as luck would have it, while the PUG my Death Knight ran went great, last night when I was hoping to record the run my Hunter was in I was plagued my last nights login problems with Battle.net accounts.

So unless I find a group Monday night the whole video plan will have to wait till next week with the addition of Anub’arak, which isn’t a bad thing.

So while I have been slacking on the daily heroic on Drotara, since I did get a Trophy last week and I am holding out for 75 Triumph badges for the chestpiece, my alts are rocking the house. My Shaman hit 60 (he is actually hovering over Zeth’gor at the moment) and I have a Paladin and Rogue who are ripping up the 20-29 WSG bracket with their BoA goodness. My Death Knight was able to buy his regular Tier 9 shoulder and got a pair of iLevel 245 tank boots from 25 man this week, so he gained like 1000 HP.

Blizzcon has come and gone and unfortunately I missed it in-person, I caught some of the streams and the Arena matches. I don’t think I can provide any insight that hasn’t been reiterated a bajillion times on other sites. At the initial information I am excited on a nostalgic level. I have found memories of vanilla and whenever I joked about heroic lowbie dungeons it was always Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep. I look forward to Mr. Smite yelling “You landlubbers are tougher than I thought! I’ll have to improvise!” and then smack our tank around.

I am still exploring some options to help this site pay for itself. With the economy the way it is I’ve been required to do a lot more freelance work than usual which is one of the reasons posting has been so scarce lately. My free time has been used to actually play WoW. :)

Well that’s it for now. Expect videos soon. I am going to make them! All of 25 man Trial of the Crusader.