[WotLK Beta] The Man, The Myth, The Legend

So I decided to do something completely crazy in Beta and see if I could tame one o' them core hounds. From Molten Core. Solo. Hey, I'm a hunter, I can do that, right?

Got about halfway through Blackrock Mountain when I remembered I needed to be in a raid group to even get in the door.

Oh hey, some nice dwarf and his bear are gonna party with me! They even flew all the way over to help me out!



We had about a dozen different plans and they all failed to go through, thanks to evade glitches, threat glitches, and a variety of stuff refusing to work right. We were so close a couple of times that it was just frustrating. Lemme tell ya though, the bear is a beast. Never seen a hunter pet tank not just one, but two Molten Giants for so long. I am so gonna get one if I can tear myself away from my Rhino who I just solo'd most of Slave Pens with.

Anyways! The moral of the story is: If you are a Beta blogger you had better be on the lookout because I do periodic /whos and you might be the next person who gets roped into one of my crazy schemes, fo'shizzle.

Gettin' Philosophical

Recently, Bell over at 4 Haelz had a rather heartfelt post about why she can't get too excited over Wrath of the Lich King... one of her quotes is:

Perhaps some of it is the impermanence. I can’t get interested in anything that I know might be gone or changed or revamped or whatever in days or hours or minutes. Perhaps some of it is that it is possible my class (whichever class at that time I happen to be) could be much less important to the raids, and it’s a little hard to imagine that your niche is no longer your niche.

Now I guess what I want to say here is: I understand perfectly where you're coming from.

It's really hard for me to really seriously play poor Tawyn and Lunapike and "the gang" because it feels like I'm dancing on a cloud or something, and it's ready to dissolve at my feet.

But that last line there really hit home for me, "It's a little hard to imagine that your niche is no longer your niche."

Blizzard is taking my shot rotations away. Let me explain that. Shot rotations are one of my favorite aspects of the hunter class and one of the things that really, at the time, sort of set me apart from a lot of other hunters. It was always this intuitive thing for me. I got Tawyn to level 62, got Steady Shot, went out and killed a mob and after I'd killed that one mob I knew what a shot rotation was. It has always been instinctive and natural and a matter of pride that I knew what it meant to weave my shots in the correct order and timing, and that a few other hunters actually came up to me in game and asked me to explain the concept to them.

Blizz is taking it away, and while I fully understand their reasons for doing so, and it will certainly mean an increase in hunter DPS-- I sometimes feel like I'm sitting here clutching my security blanket tightly, knowing that any day now Blizz is gonna come and take it away for good.

But you can't have your blanket forever, or you'll wind up strung out on bedspreads.

So I decided that change was necessary, it happens and we gotta evolve with it. I've accepted it. Some stuff I like will be going away, it's true. I was on Beta the other day and spent about a half hour battering away at those training dummies, trying to figure out a way to salvage the shot rotation playstyle, but it's not there anymore, it's button spamming from here on out.

But you know what? There are a ton of fun new abilities to play with. I am madly in love with the new Disengage. It puts you back at range instantly. I love it with a passion and have this little "aww man" moment when I try to use it in Burning Crusade now and it doesn't do anything. I love the new pet stuff. I am digging the way the new Kill Command almost works like a backup Intimidation.

But most importantly... I still love "huntering".

Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand... I don't care, I'm still free, Blizz can't take my class from me.

I went out into the wilds of Northrend and it was just us. Tux and I. We've been together since he was level eight and I was level ten. Tux patiently taught me what it meant to be a hunter. Even when I didn't feed him at first because I didn't know I was supposed to. Even when I didn't teach him Growl because I didn't know about it. Even when I ran around Raptor-Striking stuff and letting him die. He has been there the whole time. And in the Beta the other day, for those fleeting fifteen minutes before the server crashed, it was just us running around experiencing the wonder of an all new world and all new stuff to learn. Just like the old days.



Huntering is alive and well.

It is still a really scary thought in many ways. For a while now, I have been a hunter teacher, and knowing that I have to become a student again is sort of a scary proposition. It will feel out of place. But then Boozsha said something interesting. He said, "Well when WoTLK these 70 blogger hunter masters will have to start leveling(most likely). It is going to be great to read these post about them leveling again."

Now euphoria from being mentioned in the same breath as BRK and Drotara aside, he has a really good point. We have a lot that we can teach to each other and learn from each other and it's exciting.

And that is why I am embracing Wrath of the Lich King. Is it gonna be scary? In many aspects, yes. Is it going to change a lot of things I was really comfortable with? Yes. I do admit that in a lot of ways these last few weeks before the 3.0 patch are gonna have me feeling like The Kiwi*, spent simply pewpew'ing stuff in casual Heroic and Karazhan jaunts and reveling in my last flight of the 2.0 hunterdom I finally feel like I have mastered after working on it for so long. But unlike the Kiwi, I have more flying left to do.

I'll see you in Northrend.


* If you can get through that movie without tearing up, you are a stronger hunter than I. /reaches for box of Kleenex

[WotLK Beta] He's back.

Conversation From a Few Months Ago...

Me: "So guess what, I heard that in Wrath of the Lich King, I'll be able to tame those big dinosaurs from Un'Goro."
Boyfriend: "Really?"
Me: "Yep!"
Boyfriend: "...can you do me a favor?"
Me: "What?"
Boyfriend: "Tame one of those... and name it Wash."

[WotLK Beta] Tawyn & Tux's Excellent Adventure

So it took some sleuthing, geekery and hackery, but the WotLK beta runs as smooth as butter under Linux with Wine.

Took me a good five or ten minutes to figure out how to use mounts.

Took me another five or ten minutes to distribute talent points (55 points in Beast Mastery is okay, right?)

Ten minutes of running around Shatt trying stuff out and using The Beast Within (Sade, was that you in front of Aldor bank? ;o I wasn't sure so I was kind of afraid to ask. I'm shy like that.)

Ten minutes of setting up my hotkeys again, training Tux, and pewpewing a couple things in Terokkar. Steady Shot feels... off. I'm sure I will adapt to it with more time.

Then I went to Stormwind, found the harbor, stood on a boat with a group of people, all of us asking "is this the boat to Northrend?"... realized the boat wasn't going anywhere and hopped on another boat...



It's huge you guys. I'm so excited. Too bad I have to go to work now >.>

Oh, what are some addons that work in Beta? Somebody in trade mentioned that X-Perl did so I will be looking into that. I hadn't realized until now how much I rely on stuff like Scrolling Combat Text and RatingsBuster.

If you are also in Beta and wish to say hello, you can find me on the Northrend realm, both Alliance and Horde; Tawyn on the former and Lunapike on the latter. ^_^

Linux Users Do It With Wine

(Warning: Techie-ish Post mostly for the benefit of people who may reach this via Google. Read at your own risk!)

So the Wrath of the Lich King Beta installer worked fine on Wine at the beginning-- no issues, nice smooth graphics on the pretty Installer screen... and then I had to read the EULA (where "read" is defined as "hit Page Down twenty times within a span of two seconds") and hit "I Agree". Pretty straightforward right?

Well no, because the Installer decided to keep the "I Agree" button grayed out and not let me click it. Bugger.

A quick Google search showed that this was indeed a Wine bug and could be fixed by one of two options; either updating Wine (which in all honesty is itself a bit of a chore simply because I am using an older version of my distro) or doing something crazy and hacky.

Obviously I chose the latter.

This is what I did:

1.) Installed "IEs4Linux", which sticks a Wine-version of Internet Explorer on your computer. (Yes I installed IE. This is the type of sacrifice I make for this game.)

2.) An attempt to run the installer via IEs4Linux's Wine told me I needed to have Burning Crusade installed. So, I went over to my Burning Crusade folder, opened the terminal inside the folder, and typed the following:

pikestaff@pintsize:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/World of Warcraft$ WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6 wine wow.exe

Which created the registry files for the original WoW/BC, then I hopped over to the WotLK folder and...

pikestaff@pintsize:~/Desktop/WotLK-Beta-3.0.1-enUS$ WINEPREFIX=~/.ies4linux/ie6 wine Installer.exe

And I was able to start up the installer, click the "I Agree" button, and...



All set!

Of course, now comes the dreaded patch downloads, and my computer tends to download patches at a horrifically slow rate, so I'm off to bed while it does that. My characters haven't copied over yet anyway (I am copying both Tawyn, my level 70 Alliance hunter, and Lunapike, my level 68 Horde hunter, to Northrend, the PvE beta server. When I'm all set up you fellow beta-people can say hello!) so, I'm okay with waiting.

I will continue to bring you updates of a Linuxy nature and a huntery nature as they come. I will also continue to bring non-Beta news to those of you who would like to keep WotLK a surprise-- in all honesty I don't plan on spending as much time in Beta as a lot of other people are cause I'd sorta like to be mostly surprised too. I just gotta get in on the new hunteryness for a bit. Anyways, I think I might mark my Beta posts with [WotLK] or [Beta] or something in the title as a spoiler alert.

I figure, lotsa bloggers are showing you the nuts and bolts of Beta, I will give you vintage Pike thoughts on Beta =3

Congratulations...

Wrath of the Lich King™ Beta Test

You have been selected to participate in the beta test of World of Warcraft®: Wrath of the Lich King™. Welcome!

In the beta test you’ll get an opportunity to test the first zones of the new Northrend continent, and the new levels above 70. We look forward to your feedback on the overall experience, including quests, monsters, zones, aesthetics, and more. We would also appreciate reports on any bugs you may encounter. These can be logged using the /bug command explained below.

I am off to work now, which is actually fine because the downloader tells me there are at least six hours remaining. I come to you all with a question, though. I know many of you frequent my site in part because I am one of the hunter blogs out there that is still dealing primarily with the non-WotLK content. I sort of don't want to change that. Plus, so many other bloggers out there are already covering the Beta.

But is there anything in particular that you would like me to cover or not cover, aside from "How well this all runs in Linux with Wine" which is probably the first thing I will be reporting?

And which is "so far so good" by the way:



I honestly mostly just want to mess around and get some ideas of new huntering for myself I think-- if current content is what you all want, then that is what you will get, because I still love the current stuff. And I don't want to spoil WotLK too much for myself!

The Future

Edit: Good news for my non-BM hunter friends, it appears WoWHead was wrong and it has now been fixed... all hunters can get the "final tier" talents now.

WoWHead has the WotLK pet talents up.

See all those lovely talents along the bottom there?

Can't get 'em unless you've got 51 points in Beast Mastery.

I think spec'ing anything OTHER than BM in the expansion would drive my OCD-ness up the wall. "You mean I can't get those bottom talents for Tux? *claws at desk*"

But on the other hand, I keep looking at the WotLK hunter talent tree and thinking about all the new hybrid possibilities now. I'm talkin' about the potential to have Serpent's Swiftness and the Super Trap talents from Survival. Or heck, Serpent's Swiftness and Trueshot Aura in an unholy union. Or Expose Weakness, Trueshot Aura, Ranged Weapon Specialization, Improved Barrage, and some points in Master Marksman.

Of course, the big question is whether these potential hybrid builds will ever outclass the new talents. But I find it so very, very interesting to think about...

Anyways! I'm sure many of you are sick of hearing about WotLK, and I do find all the news kind of overwhelming myself. So! I will go back to concentrating on playing my current characters and writing about them (as best as I can anyway; I've been thinking about the ramifications of having a bunch of out-dated guides on my blog... the good news, though, is that there will always be new hunters who always need Hunter Kindergarten posts. At least, I hope so, between all the Death Knights.)

Lunch Break

There is nothing more amusing than being in the breakroom at work, eating lunch and minding your own business, and suddenly hearing the girl next to you screech over the phone "I WAS IN THE MOST EPIC ALTERAC VALLEY EVER!"

Ahem.

So the new WotLK hunter talents are supposedly up on WoWHead, if you haven't heard already. Yeah, I looked at 'em and messed with 'em a little, but you know what? Not only am I still taking the talents with a grain of salt for various reasons, but I have way too much stuff I want to do before the expansion hits to spend too much time worrying about new talents.

I want Tawyn to at least see some Tier 5 content, other than that failed attempt at Hydross, before the expansion hits. Heck, I want Tawyn to see something other than Karazhan. I always feel kind of like a newbie when I'm trying to write about raiding and I've never even been to Gruuls/Mags (in all fairness, I've tried about a million times, but I seriously jinx Gruuls/Mags and they always fill up or are canceled.)

I want Lunapike to get to level 70 and start tearing up the battlegrounds.

I want Tamaryn to get to level 70 and start Tree'ing it up (I hit 40, by the way, and respec'd Boomkin. WTB Mana Battery, PST.)

Now we get to the secondary projects, which are that I'd like Althalor to tame Humar--been camping out for days now, with no luck thusfar-- and start working his way further up the leveling tree, I'd like Songlark to either start leveling seriously or at least hit 19 and become a semi-twink (my definition of a semi-twink: buy decent enough greens at the AH and put cheap enchants on them), and I'd like my dwarfyhuntergirl to start leveling as well.

But as my House-loving boyfriend likes to say, "You can't always get what you want", and with my time limited, it's time to prioritize. Sooo tough to pick from my characters though... I love them all. I do think that Tawyn, Tamaryn, and Lunapike are going to become my primary projects, though.

What do you guys want to accomplish before Wrath of the Lich King?

Mixed Reviews

From the Class Panel at the Blizzard Invitational...

The shot clipping will be removed from Steady Shot, you'll be able to use it without "interrupting" your autoshot. Hunters will be able to just smash their button.

I... really can't tell you how I feel about this. Is it nice? Well yeah, and I bet a lot of hunters will be very happy about this. It will be a huge DPS increase, afterall. But for me, this was always one of my very favorite parts of the hunter class. Hearing that it's going to be replaced with "hunters will be able to just smash their button", which sounds very macro-like... I dunno. It's almost as though they said they were going to take away pets or something. Not quite as bad, but, still. I took a certain pride in being able to manually weave and time my rotations. I guess for me, it's not "all about the DPS" like it is to so many other people.

I will have to think on this one, and hope that there is still some way to "feel the rhythm" in WotLK. For example, maybe we'll get a new fun shot or new abilities or something so we don't just have to sit there and hit one button. I hope so, at least!

(And hey, there are still at least fifteen non-shot rotation things that I like about hunters. My love for the class is going nowhere unless Blizz really botches stuff up, I think.)

That said, pets are getting a bunch of super nifty exciting stuff:

All kind of pets will have their own talent tree. A tanking talent tree, a DPS talent tree, and an utility talent tree. Each kind of pet family will have its own talent tree and its own unique ability.

There are going to be new pets in WotLK.

The skill points for each pets are being changed to the new "Pet talents" and will disappear.

I'm really excited for all that stuff. Tanking talent tree? Like... one that focuses on threat generation and stuff? So I can finally have a true soloing/grinding pet? Yes please! And "pet utility", you can't help but wonder what that is. I'm definitely looking forward to that.

And does this mean you won't have to tame new pets for new skills anymore? So I can keep my current three?? /happydance

Blizz's Final Score from Pike: One thumb up, one thumb down. I'll be sad to see my beloved shot rotation mechanics go byebye, but the pet stuff is super epic.