I QUIT

Yes, I decided last night to hang up my crossbow until after the expansion. Like most I am just burned out. Since i transfered in March, we progressed through Kara (my previous guild couldn't clear Kara in 20 hour raiding weeks, this guild did it in 3 hours), through Gruul and Mag, on to Serpentshire Cavern, through Tempest Keep, Mount Hyjal, and finally Black Temple. We are currently knocking on the door of the Betrayer himself, but I am not sure the guild will survive long enough to take him down.

Anyway, we did alot of progression, and i think it's natural that I look back and say hey we did great. But anyway this is why I am leaving.

1) Too late. With raid starts at 8:30 now, I'm raiding until 12:30 usually. Not good when I need to get up and go to work.

2) Too much like a job. In the end it's just a job. You log in, you show up, get yelled by your boss routinely, demoralized, etc. If you get your bosses down, ho hum, that's your job, no big deal. The thrill is def. gone.

3) Too much work. In addition to 3 nights a week raiding, I figured out my mats requirements. Most of this you can buy at AH.

2 x Flask of Relentless Assault - you can farm for an hour or so to get these, or buy them, 60g or so of mats each. 120g.
20 x stat food - can easily buy, 20g. Or fish it or whatever.
40 x pet food - buy it from vendor
28 stacks of ammo. about 2g each (1.8g).
25 x fel mana pot - need to get mats from AH, extremely expensive. Probably 100g for those 25, and I'm the guy who makes the pot. If you buy the pot in AH, its..about 30g a stack.
Repair costs for a night of wipes. This isn't bad any more because each boss drops 10g. But if you are doing progression, expect at least 50g in costs.

So total for a typical raid night is 370g. Multiply by 3. That's easily 1000g a week in consumables. You can do dailies every day (another 5 hours of work), and thats 700g. I'll typically have to gather mats for another 2 hours. So if I am raiding 3x a week, I'm easily spending 20 hours, actually playing the char. Then there is the strategy learning, etc.

4) Too many bosses. I get so confused now that we've go through 20 or so bosses, and will face 14 on a given week. It's very hard to remember all the strats.

5) Lack of skill. I just don't have it in me to be one of the best players on the server, which is basically demanded to raid the top instances. Its humbling, but there you go. As it is, I'm in very elite company, maybe 100 people on the server have ever seen Illidan. So...we've come a long way, but now I'm ready to do other things. I look forward to playing on my Horde side guild more esp w the expansion coming up.

Seriously bored

I guess like everyone else I'm waiting on Wraith. This game has tons to offer, but eventually the content ends. At this point I have:

1) A Black Temple raiding hunter. Unfortunately I'm overgeared for just about everything in the game at this point. For example, I ran Mechinar (normal), with 3 others, a druid, warrior tank, priest healer. Warrior said he was T5, I didn't check, probably true. The others were fresh 70s. We cleaned house, I did my usual damage which ended up being 4x more than the others (which isn't ego boasting, since the others were a tank and feral druid). Point being even with one person missing and the others not well geared I overgeared the instance. I'd like to raid more, and am starting to, but for ex. today i was put on alternate because we have more than 25 people signing up, and Sunday we did MH, not black temple, due to people not showing up. Typical raid BS.

2) A 70 druid. I love this char, or should. She's resto, and respecing seriously sucks. And there isn't much of a point grabbing gear or doing instances that don't lead to anything. I can't do quests or really anything with this char b/c of the very low dps.

3) 61 lock (horde). I'm bored w/ this char, i can't get past hellfire. It's pretty sad, admittedly.

4) 55 hunter (horde). I play this char with my wife.

Anyway to me WoW is a) raiding b) questing c) PVP.

Well, I did a and c on my hunter and b with everything. So... maybe its time to do something else.

Insanely busy

Since I'm moving in a week (gah), its hard to find time to do much stuff. But anyway i managed to powerlevel Adenosine up to 59.5 now, and Gibster at 51. I swear that 40-58 grind is so insanely painful. Adeno first hit outlands at 58, and got spanked and told to go back to playing in the kiddy pool, so she went back to Silithus for a level. Now she's got a few AH greens and an extra level, she'll come back and finish what she started.

On the third run through I'm actually somewhat impressed about the quest reward tuning. The mobs at 58 are significantly harder than those at 55, and you need to step up your gear quickly. Even the boars will take me out. That said if I can make it through to 60 I'll be in better shape gearwise once i finish those quests and my spells stop resisting so much.

But otherwise, besides Adeno, not much going on. I healed norm. bot on my druid (Gibear), that was fun and very easy for me (the tank had 15k HP, which is hugely helpful). Its somewhat ironic that by the time I'm able to do the instance I don't need the gear from it. I actually look forward to level 80 instances with T4/T5/T6 gear and getting upgrades from a similiarly geared group. Now everyone wants to be overgeared to run the instance, and it's almost not a challenge.

Tameable Devilsaurs

Oh My. This just increased the Wraith hunter population a million-fold. This is just... I'm so excited, the very first thing i will do when I get Wraith is to get my devilsaur (if it makes it live, but it should I think, its not OP).

Wraith Hunter talents

Well I kept thinking, what type of Hunter blogger would I be without mention of the talents?

Anyway they are here:

http://wotlkwiki.info/index.php/Hunter

Also see here:

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/07/18/wrath-beta-patch-notes-hunter/

The end talents look very interesting, with the ability to tame an exotic pet at 51 points in BM tree. I dont like the steady shot costing ammo now, since as it is we routinely blow through a bag of arrows per raid. Now we'll need either large arrow stacks or larger bags or both. Plus the cost of arrows will double (for MH arrows they are 2g a stack, that's not cheap when you are buying 24 stacks). Since we're still not in the release portion of the game its somewaht silly to comment too much about talents that may or may not make it, but the hunter changes make me excited about playing a hunter.

The most significant change isn't on the talent tree, but is here:

Hunter pets no longer use skill points to learn abilities, they have been replaced by three Pet talent trees (DPS, Tanking, Utility). (WWI)


So essentially you will have a pet that can either do dps, tank, or utility, or some combo of the 3. So pigs may eventually become good tanks again, and hopefully cats will fall by the wayside.

Update: The new pet trees have been revealed, they are here.

Wow, initial reaction is that i'm disappointed you cant mix and match. Apparently pet families will be in one of three trees, dps, utility, tanking. For example cats are in dps and boars are in tanking. The talents look great, there are alot of tank-like aggro grabbing abilities now. However, there isn't much of a armor/health buff on the pet, so they are still going to be quite squishy. And I don't see much to help for PVP (except one talent in the utility tree that allows the pet to break CC).

Grid for Druids!

Resto4life has it covered!

Divorce!

From my starter guild/server anyway. The time finally came last week when I realized I could transfer my druid and have my hunter run dailies in half the time it would take my druid, I wouldn't have to continually respec, I could use the synergy from the druid/hunter (druid has enchant, so can make mana oil and DE stuff for the hunter, hunter can provide alchemy pots for druid), and more importantly tag along to a guild kara run and grab loot.

So I did transfer, leaving my wife, 4 toons, and my long standing association with the Ancient Ones (who never did anything and can't seem to down Gruul despite 100 70s (or more). I'm much happier as far as WoW time, I really consolidated alot, and now I have a goal for running instances/kara again. I'm also not doing serious raiding regularly, so that helps, especially when I'm so busy. Anyway, sad to leave Blackwater Raiders behind, but most of my friends have stopped playing on the server, so it's a moot point.