Well... that's that.

I left my guild today.

The one I've been in for a year, the one I co-led for months and eventually led myself for a few months as well. The one I leveled with since Zul'Farrak. The one I ran Karazhan with, for the first time. I mouse over all my gear in Armory and don't see loot as much as I see items obtained from heroics and raids that I ran with my guildies. Each item has a story to tell.

More and more of those people have left the guild and I don't know, these past few weeks I've logged on, looked around, and realized I simply didn't know anybody anymore. So it was with a deep breath and a final sigh that I one-by-one kicked my alts and then /gquit.

I don't really know where I'm going next. I am, I suppose, a freelancer now. I'm not particularly interested in another guild at the moment largely because I am essentially unable to raid with any regularity, so I wouldn't want to promise myself to a new guild. I've considered making a "Casualish Level 70 Hunter LF Guild, Willing to Transfer" post on this blog to see what sort of interest I'd garner, but I also have a hard time envisioning myself leaving Silver Hand and my friends there (though I'd never say never), and yeah, I think I might wanna fly solo for a while.

It was a good year.

But you know what they say about all good things.


Best of luck, Entelechy.

Letting Go

When I first took over guild-leadership of my guild from my boyfriend, I was relatively certain I could do it. Unfortunately, as time went on, I found that it was not to be. Being a Guild Leader requires a lot of time and energy to devote to the guild, and I had neither; my work schedule makes it near-impossible to be online during peak hours and even on my days off I am prone to hanging out on different servers, alt'ing around-- that's just how I am.

It got to the point where I would log on and people would ask me about guild ranks, the guild bank, or other important stuff and I would have to say "...I don't know." It was rather embarrassing. The guild leader doesn't know what's going on with her guild? It was true, though. It worried me a lot; I felt like I was doing a poor job as Guild Leader. And on top of that, I have never been much of a "Leader" type person. All that stress was making it hard for me to enjoy the game.

So, not too long ago, I made a thread on our guild forums stating that I was resigning from guild leadership. A good friend and long-time officer has taken over for me. I'm glad that it was able to work out that way, because I feel that a lot of pressure has been taken off of me, but it's also awkward to watch, at the same time.

The face of the guild has changed a lot in the past few months. People that defined the guild in the early days have left and new people have come. We have had an official "guild clear" of Karazhan now-- which I couldn't attend, because our raid times fall during my work hours-- and now that I think about it I don't think a single person who was in that recent "guild clear" was part of that initial group of us that started raiding way back in the beginning. It's kind of weird and very surreal to think about.

My officers basically took over for me a few months ago when I made it clear that I wouldn't be around very often, and now that I have stepped down, it has been made even more official: ranks have changed, guild policies have changed, this guild is no longer at least partially "my" guild the way it was back when my boyfriend and I were co-leading it. I'm not going to say it's a bad change, and I do think the officers are doing a solid job-- but it's very different, and somewhat awkward to deal with.

It's hard to say what Tawyn's future is at this point; what the guild's future is and whether the two of them will continue to coincide. A part of me would like to try to squeeze into more raids and at least get Epic'd out before WotLK hits, so I can say I did it; another part of me knows that will be hard to do with my schedule and sort of doesn't really care enough to work around it. We will just have to see.

Now I promise it's not all doom'n'gloom, in fact, mostly I've been having a blast. I still adore the game and my hunters and I am excited about the prospect of my second level 70. Thinking back on it, after the initial "Just-dinged-70-funk" wore off, the process of getting geared for Karazhan was one of my most enjoyable experiences in WoW and I'm looking forward to doing it again.

And in other news, I still don't have a Beta invite yet. Not that I'm dying for one-- in fact I feel like I have too much left to do in Burning Crusade to focus on Beta-- (not to mention a lot of awesome hunter blogs have been thoroughly covering it already; I like being one of the remaining non-Beta hunter blogs) but gosh, I'm starting to feel like the kid Blizz picked last in gym class! =P

The Roleplaying Raiders. Or the Raiding Roleplayers, mayhaps.

I apologize for the lack of updates these past few days. I have a semi-valid reason, I promise:

It all started a week or two back. I think I've mentioned before that our guild is interesting in that it is a newer guild with quite a few people who are all in the same level range-- currently mostly mid-60s (and now 70).

We have also discovered that we like instancing together, a lot. We make a very good little team.

Anyways. A week or two back somebody mentioned something about Serpentshrine Cavern. Someone else said "Yeah, it'll be a loooong time before we get to that." "Wait, isn't that like... a 25-main raid?" "Yep."

...

And then somebody said it. "You know... we should become a raiding/roleplaying combo guild."

And everybody liked that idea.

So here we are, Entelechy, a guild full of roleplayers who have never done end-game before (or even hit 70 before), slowly keying up for Karazhan a year behind everybody else, and thinking we should do raids.

Crazy? Maybe. Awesome? Yes. We're gonna try it.

Now to why I haven't made any posts for a few days. Basically it was decided that if we're going to be a raiding guild, we need a Ventrilo server. (We have also wanted one for a while just to mess around and have fun with each other.) So we got one set up a few days ago. Problem: Pike runs Linux. Ventrilo does not play well with Linux.

Cue a few-day-long geekathon where Pike desperately tries to get Ventrilo and Linux playing nicely. Hardly any WoW. Just a lot of Dr. Pepper and keyboard pounding inbetween work shifts.

The sad news is that the whole attempt was pretty futile; it turns out there is some weird problem going on in my computer where microphones are not registered. I was able to get Ventrilo up and running, simultaneously with WoW with no slowdown, even... but it was pretty pointless if nobody could hear me talk, even if I could hear them. And the problem was complicated enough that I think it's beyond my meager abilities, at least for now. In the meantime, I still wanted a way to get on Vent so we could start practicing instancing while voice-chatting.

...so, I took a deep breath, sucked it up, and stuck a little Windows XP partition on my hard drive. I copied the WoW folder over, installed Vent, and... there ya go. I now have two different WoW installations, one on Linux and one on Windows. As much as it pains me to say it... I logged into Tawyn on Windows today. My initial impression was that it was pretty much exactly the same as on Linux with Wine. My second impression was that something was off somehow, which I couldn't quite put my foot on... the mouse was moving differently, or something. But, I'm dealing with it.

I'm on Linux now and it will remain my main operating system. I'll hop over to Windows when I'm instancing or get bored and want to dork around with the guildies for a little bit. But the rest of my WoW'ing and computer'ing in general will remain on Linux. And hopefully I can figure out the microphone problem at some point, and come back to "pure" Linux.

So that is why I haven't been around much.

I have one more story to tell. There is a level 70 hunter in my guild who is... maybe just a little less geared than I am, and his spec is similar to mine (though not the same-- there are a few notable and interesting differences). We both have the same ranged and melee weapons, except I've got Savagery on my axe and he doesn't. He's got a windserpent and I've got a cat.

We dueled today about... six times. And he won four of them. Rather resoundingly, too, a few times.

We had a good chat afterwards about the results and how we thought they may have come about. Because the duels really seemed to be going either way. To be completely honest he is a very good hunter and it caught me off guard. I'd never really seen him play his hunter before, usually he's tanking for us on his warrior. So I really wasn't sure what to expect. Anyways we compared specs and gear and strategies and had a chat. Here are my thoughts:

-Windserpents seriously do this thing where they pop up next to you and take you by surprise and throw you off, that's what they seemed to do to me anyway. His strategy is to dump as much focus onto his Windserpent as he can so it can spam Lightning Breath, so I was on the receiving end of that, too. Oh, and the thing about the big wings... yeah. So hard to target the other guy when something's flapping in your face. Definitely time to bring Tux to 70 (he's halfway through 67, currently) and make him the Official PvP Pet.

- He's a draenei and would use Gift of the Naaru on himself right when the duel began. He also has Spirit Bond. So he was regen'ing health the whole time.

- I kept trying to use my attack-power-boosting trinket without realizing I'd forgotten to equip it. Whoopsie... *shifty eyes*

- Also, he somehow has a different strategy than most hunters I go up against in PvP, but I've still got to figure out exactly what it is (clearly more research is required!)

Anywho, why am I telling you all this? Because if you play a draenei hunter and/or you have a windserpent these are awesome new PvP tips for you! I'm sort of jealous of the Gift of the Naaru thing. Granted, he told me a new tip about Shadowmelding at the beginning of the duel to annoy people while your pet eats them (haha) so it's a fair tradeoff.

After the duels though, I was feeling the urge to hone my skills because he'd won more times than I'd won and it was inspiring me to PvP and get better. So I went to AV.


Hey look, Alliance on Bloodlust actually won a "New AV" game and it was the daily too... yes I know, don't go into shock... but aside from that, I've got 239 honorable kills. And that's with the omnipresent Valanos's Longbow. I can't wait for an upgrade. That's what I'm saving up Honor for next, that ridiculous Crossbow. I can't help myself. I'm in love.

Hmm. Sorry that this post sort of rambled on and on and covered at least three different subjects. That's what happens when I put off making a post for too long. In summary: I like my guild, I like my Linux (honest!) and, when it's not frustrating the heck out of me, I like PvP.

And two more quick things: Armory is working again! My unbuffed crit is so very very close to 20%.

And a HUGE SHOUTOUT to Moonglo for coming to visit me on Silver Hand. You guys are all great.

Instances and Groups

The other day I wound up in a partial-PuG and partial-guildies group for Steamvaults. This was probably not a wise idea for many reasons, including the fact that it's a level 70 instance and we were all hovering around level 68, and as it turned out... the PuG members were rather... less than ideal.

I went into it really wanting to do a good job, because the healer whispered me and begged me to be a good hunter, he told me that the last five or so hunters he'd grouped with had been horrible. So of course, this is where Pike's HUNTER-PRIDE ACTIVATED! And I told him not to worry. But it just wasn't meant to be. We were wiping on every other pull, we were having issues with the PuG'd people, gigantic annoying plants kept blocking everybody's vision, and overall it just wasn't working. So we scrapped the run.

We still wanted to do an instance, though, so we said goodbye to the PuG-players and picked up people from our guild to flesh out our little party. This particular party now was one that we had all been in many times before-- our usual tank, our usual healer, and I as the usual CC, etc. We decided to do Escape from Durnholde Keep.

How was the instance run? Well, by most standards, I think, it went pretty well. We had a couple problems and a couple wipes (one of which was entirely my fault, by the way; it involved me not paying attention and running blindly around a corner straight into a bunch of mobs) and a couple near-wipes, but overall the run went well; all the group members were fulfilling their role's function to above-satisfactory levels and for the most part, everything went smoothly.

However, we all left the instance feeling sort of less-than-satisfied and thinking we could have done a lot better.

It was kind of odd, but then I thought about it and I started thinking: maybe it's just the fact that our group has worked together so many times before. We've grown a sort of synergy with each other, and developed high expectations of each other, and acknowledge that there are high expectations on us as individual group members; so when a run isn't 100% flawless, we sort of beat ourselves up over it. That's my guess over why we felt so unsatisfied.

I'm still trying to decide if those high-expectations are a good thing for a guild or group to have, or if it might cause issues down the road if everyone is striving for "that perfect run" and it is always a little bit out of our reach. We are a very laid-back social and light-roleplaying guild, but we also have a core group of higher-level instance-running members and our expectations for instance-running people are pretty high. I hope that's the right attitude to have and that it doesn't cause problems later on. I can't say, because this is my first time around, so I can really just hope.

Anyways, I hit level 69 last night. It's very surreal how close I am to 70...

Oh, and before I forget: Escape from Durnholde Keep is the coolest instance idea ever. I ran around Old Hillsbrad for about a half hour after the instance was done, geeking out over the lore.

The People of WoW

One of the neat things about our guild is that it has a very large number of people that are in their 50s and 60s, level-wise. These are all people who are either playing for the first time, like myself, or have largely abandoned previous high-level characters and are now leveling alts almost exclusively. It's quite handy because you almost always have some people to quest with or run instances with, and I'm excited because so many of us are coming up on 70 now so it's like we're already going to be pretty much set for doing all those big 70 instances that are coming up (including our little guild's pipe dream... it starts with a K and ends with an -arazhan.)

The other day, our guild's current main tank, a 64 prot warrior who is fantastic to work with, whispered me and told me that I had to meet him in Blasted Lands, and that it was urgent. I was mystified, but quite intrigued, and hightailed it out of Nagrand and back to the old world so I could meet him there. Once we met up, he had me unequip my bow and quiver, toss all my arrows, and then he opened trade and gave me a present: [The Gunblade], complete with a +10 damage scope, a 16-slot ammo pouch and the bullets to go with it. It turns out he and my boyfriend had both pooled their extra gold and bought this present just for me. I was informed in a sort of semi-roleplaying-fashion (I love RP servers) that the gift was a thank-you to me for providing quality DPS and CC in instances, and in general "being good at your class".

Then... you know those guys in Blasted Lands whose HP falls down to about 1% and then they don't die? Yeah, best guys to grind your weapon skill on ever (because I've actually never used a gun before, even though I had the skill trained).

Anyways, the reason that I'm sharing this story isn't just to show off my new weapon (even though it is very shiny), but because it really showed me that even though WoW "is just a game"... it also "isn't just a game". The reason it isn't just a game is because of the people that you meet. These are people that you might not have met otherwise if you hadn't played the game, and yes they might be people that you never do get to meet in person. But just because you don't get to see them in person, doesn't mean that they are any less important or any less capable of doing kind deeds or being good friends. I was really touched by the present that I got and what it meant, and I hope that I, too, can perform similar acts of kindness and gratitude to the people that I hang out with in-game.

I've met a lot of great people in this game and I can't wait to meet others. And that's my little feel-good story of the day. ^^

I Am Apparently Doing a Lot More DPS...

At least, I am according to my boyfriend, who posted the following in guild chat after him and I had quested together for about an hour:


(Apologizes on the small size, click on it to enlarge.)

Hmm... maybe I'll stick with this spec for a while.

Guild Stuff

My guild has taken to calling me "The [Insert Synonym for "Strong" Here] Hunter." So I am now commonly greeted with stuff like "How is The Mighty Hunter today?", "Well if it isn't The Fierce Hunter", and "What is The Ferocious Hunter up to?" And these names are only used to refer to me and not any of the other hunters in the guild, at least as far as I am aware. Granted, we are a somewhat small guild right now, but still... I am amused.

Considerably more unusual, however, is the fact that I have apparently become the de facto "hunter expert" in our guild. The other hunters in the guild come to me asking for advice regarding spec, gear, pets, and basically anything and everything pertaining to hunters. I feel rather not-up-to-task for this job. I'm the WoW-nublet who hasn't even hit level 60 yet and these people who are working on their fourth or fifth character, some of whom have had hunters in the past, are coming to me for advice. Don't get me wrong, I'm enormously flattered by it, but I can only hope that the guidance I am giving is actually good guidance.

Fortunately I feel that I have learned a huge deal myself from regularly partaking of the wisdom of blogs such as Big Red Kitty and The Hunter's Mark, and many others (which I will link to at a later date), so even if I would refrain from calling myself a true hunter expert for a while yet, I think I can do an adequate job filling the role for the time being. I hope I can anyway.

And I suppose the above stories only go to show that other people can sense my enthusiasm for my class! I'm not surprised. =P