awesome raiding video

the vast majority of the WoW population will never see the inside of places like SSC or BT. it's estimated that only about 6% of the player base progresses that far (we've only made it to KZ so far). that's a shame in many ways because some truly awesome design work has gone into these raid instances and the encounters look amazing.

fortunately, there are some pretty good PvE raiding videos that show off the instances. just like the gazillions of PvP videos out there, they range from horribly bad to really damn good. we just came across one of the better ones we've seen this afternoon. what really knocks our socks off is that it shows scenes from *all* the high-end raid instances; most videos tend to focus on just one. it's long (31+ minutes), but very worth watching:

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=61387

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bleh

at work until 3:15am last night and we're still not release-ready today. it's becoming an unfortunate, monthly trend for us. we hear talk about improving process and doing better "next time", but we haven't seen real improvement so far. this time around, lots of factors came together at once to make things tough: aggressive scheduling, new technologies that the engineering group isn't familiar with, some truly spectacular bugs introduced by 3rd party software updates and the usual Murphy's Law chaos. rough night, all in all.

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long night ahead

gearing up for another late-night (read: 14+ hour day) release at work. sadly, we're going to be sitting around for most of it as our stuff isn't the bottleneck for this release (silver lining there, I suppose). gotta love the software biz ;)

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On Changes

when we first started writing this blog, we thought it'd be a nice gimmick to always have post titles follow the format of "On {some subject}" (e.g., "On Changes"). as we continue adding posts, we're finding it harder and harder to come up with interesting titles so we're chucking the whole gimmick, thing. it was worth a try ;) oh, and we're probably also going to stick with this third-person voice or whatever the hell it is (for no better reason than that it's kinda fun).

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on 56

Zhered hit 56 last night.  not a huge milestone in and of itself, but we used the need to hit a capital city for training as an excuse to buy a port to shatt and then sprint over to hellfire (no deaths; yay us!) to pick up master tailoring and herbalism.  we mostly did it for herbalism because we're running around in zones that have yellow and orange difficulty herbs now and we hit 300 herbalism a few levels back.  no point in letting all those potential skill-ups go to waste!

we still need a fat pile of runecloth to continue working on tailoring (we're just now starting to kill mobs that actually drop it and AH prices are about double what they should be, so meh); stuck at 282, right now.  our goal is to hit 375 tailoring and have our frozen shadoweave set waiting for us by the time we hit 70.  we have our shadoweave tailor working on churning out [Shadowcloth] as often as her CD is up (one of the up-sides to having a chronic case of altoholism). Z will take up shadoweave tailoring as well once he gets high enough in skill & level and then we'll be churning out the equivalent of 1 shadowcloth per day.  we're also making all of the other specialty cloths as cooldowns permit; we can trade/sell them for yet more shadowcloth as needed or use them to offset the cost of some spellstrike goodies later on.

we're burning through primals like they're goin' outta style. each round of speciality cloth production takes a total of 1 [Primal Mana], 1 [Primal Water], 1 [Primal Life], 1 [Primal Shadow] and 2 [Primal Fire]s and we do that every four days (we'll be doing it every 2 days once Z learns how to make them all as well). we also have to horde 38 [Primal Water]s for crafting our frozen shadoweave set. some mote farming and mining on Harl have been providing enough primals to keep up with the cloth production so far, but the 38 primal waters is going to require some dedicated farming in the not-so-distant future. ugh.

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On New Pets

one of the defining characteristics of the hunter class is our pets. some hunters go through pets like kleenex, some stick with the very first pet they tamed, others only care about pet dps and for a few it's all about the looks - vanity pets.

perhaps the ultimate vanity pet was the ghost wolf from dustwallow marsh, but that's no longer tamable as of this month. even prior to taming being removed for them, ghost wolves were stupidly hard to tame. you had to have just the right gems, a 70 shaman in your group, as much spell haste as you could get your hands on and a good bit of luck to make it happen.

having missed the ghost wolf boat (not that we were seriously thinking about it anyway), we wanted a new pet that was both nifty looking and rare. it also had to be a high dps pet, since we're a BM hunter and that's our bag. for us, high dps pets = cats; we're not big fans of ravagers.


as it happens, we already have a fairly nifty cat that we picked up in winterspring back when we were level 60. Icyhot's been with us throughout our entire outlands career and retiring him for a new pet is not something we take lightly. not just any kitty will do.

there are 19 tamable flavors of cats in the game right now. only one of them was unique enough to make it worthwhile, though; the ghost saber.

what makes the ghost saber so special? it's translucent! you can see some better screenshots here.

we tamed our new kitty a couple weeks ago (still trying to come up with a good name). it's obviously a sexy cat, so why don't you see more of them? two reasons: first, a lot of people don't even know these cats exist. they are a sometimes summoned when you loot [Cat Figurines] that spawn in northern darkshire. some people report having to loot 20+ figurines before a ghost saber spawns; I got mine on the third try. the second reason (more applicable to level 70 hunters) is the cat's level; 19-20. if you happen to tame this cat when your level 20, perfect. if you tame this cat at level 70 like we did you have a long and painful pet leveling road before you. we'd call it a labor of love, but honestly it's mostly labor.

fortunately for us, our timing was good and we tamed our ghost saber after patch 2.3.2 went live. patch 2.3.2 introduced a change to pet leveling speed, making them level faster from 20-60, to help keep pets in sync with the new character leveling speed changes that were introduced in patch 2.3 (prior to 2.3.2, hunters were sometimes out-leveling their pets due to increases in quest xp, which pets don't get).

so, how painful is leveling a new pet post-patch 2.3.2? it's pretty damn painful. in order for your pet to earn xp you have to kill mobs that are at least green to you. for a level 70 hunter, than means you have to be killing mobs that are at least level 63. what makes it rough, especially for BM hunters, is that until your pet reaches about level 60 it's almost useless in combat; can't take much damage, growl is resisted because it's too low a rank, misses a lot and all hits are glancing blows for maybe 1-2 points of damage each. that means that you're going to spend a lot of time either kiting mobs around the countryside or *shudder* in melee combat.

the first several pet levels go pretty fast. my new cat went from level 20 to level 40 after about 3 hours of perforating ogres in nagrand. once into the 40's things slow down noticeably. the amount of xp required for a pet to level goes up in much the same way that player xp requirements do, so this wasn't a huge surprise (just a lot more work). it took a few nights of grinding ogres in nagrand (money and cloth), buzzards in terokkar (meat for [Kibler's Bits] for raid nights) and demons in netherstorm (money, cloth and aldor rep) to get up to level 60. then it *really* slows down because the pet leveling bonus that came with patch 2.3.2 only applies up to level 60. on the bright side, though, grinding becomes slightly easier from 60 on up because your pet can actually hold agro if you're careful (only use stings and auto-shot) and it starts to do some real damage of it's own. note that I said easier, not faster. going from 60 to 61 took a couple nights of farming bog lords (helping out one of our guild alchs) and our new cat is about half-way through 61 as we write this.

we've read that taking your pet along to instances post-60 is a faster way to level it then simply grinding. we think it's bad form to show up for an instance with an under-leveled pet and expect everyone else to carry you through, though, so we'd only recommend doing this on guild runs or with close friends. if you do bring a low-level pet along, we feel it's only fair to warn the party because it *will* impact your overall dps. it shouldn't cause any unusual agro issues, though. we brought our ghost saber along on a slabs run the other night and things went fine. unfortunately, we didn't pay close attention to how much xp our pet was getting in slabs so we can't really say if instance-leveling your pet is faster than solo grinding or not.

now... who's got name ideas?

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On Playstyles

Ego has a really great post (the reply to the second email) up about end-game playstyles. if you're new to raiding or thinking about starting to raid, you should give this a read.

while we're on the subject of Ego posts and raiding, she's also got a nice guest post up about raid etiquette. another must-read for fresh-faced raiders (and those old-hands who've picked up bad habits over the years).

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