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Myth of Melee Hunter

January 17, 2014 by Belghast

Long Weekend

Most of this week I have been recovering from whatever flu like respiratory crap I managed to catch along side my wife’s flu. So now that it is Friday, I have to say I am more than ready for it. I have been crashing suspiciously early each night, or at least early for me. Last night it was around 10 pm, and the night before closer to 9. Granted some of that time was laying in bed watching Netflix, but resting nonetheless. So when I realized I was heading straight for a three day weekend, I was absolutely pumped. Not that we have any major plans, but just stringing three days in a row is a pretty glorious thing.

Yesterday during a back and forth on twitter with MMOGC, we both talked about our proclivity for playing melee characters. For me at least if there is a melee option, I will be playing whatever it is. My 90s to date… Blood/Frost Deathknight, Protection/Arms Warrior, Protection/Retribution Paladin, Enhancement Shaman (second spec doesn’t really matter here), Combat Rogue, and the icing on the cake… Feral/Guardian Druid. Hell I even consider my Discipline Priest to be “tanky”. Essentially if there is a tank option I will be doing that, and if there is not I will at least be doing melee in some form of another. I am woefully predictable in my likes and dislikes when it comes to games.

Myth of Melee Hunter

I have made this admission before in the past, but I was a melee hunter. Granted at the time I didn’t realize that survival was NOT a viable melee spec… since back in vanilla it did actually boost your melee damage. More than that however it was a thing I WANTED to work. Something about ranged dps just bores me, and on the converse something about standing toe to toe against the boss exhilarates me. The above is a picture of me playing Lodin, my first real main in World of Warcraft. My love of the WoW Hunter… initially started as my love of the D&D Ranger. In D&D I played two things the Dual Wield Melee Ranger, and the Mace and Board Melee Cleric. When I came into wow I tried to create both of these with limited success in the form of a Survival Hunter and a Protection Paladin.

I love the mechanics of the hunter when it comes to taming pets. This was the real thing that kept me playing the class for most of vanilla… that and I got sucked into a raid group that needed hunters. As some point I tired of standing back and firing at things, so midway through Vanilla I began transitioning to Belghast my tanky warrior. But I never really gave up hope that someday, somehow being a dual wield hunter would be a viable thing. While leveling and raiding… I was always far more interested in a nifty polearm or twohanded weapon dropping that could viably be identified as “for hunters” than any of the available ranged options. However I still count getting my Dragonbreath Hand Cannon as one of my greatest raiding moments. Thanks to getting this awesome drop… I never actually finished the hunter epic.

The Beastmaster

Funny thing is… there is a game that has a melee pet class that could in theory be termed the “melee hunter”. The Beastmaster soul in Rift for the Warrior class was essentially a pure melee dps class that also had a pet. It was one of those specs that I really used to enjoy dpsing in, when the pet was actually behaving. The problem is that Rift pets are boring. As a beastmaster you got a large cat… and despite them changing the graphic of it… it is still the same boring pet every single time. The piece of the hunter that I always found interesting was the ability to switch between pets depending on the situation and your present mood. If you got bored of a pet, you could run off into the world and tame a new favorite.

So static pet is a major strike against the Beastmaster soul, but in Storm Legion they took another big one. They essentially transitioned the spec from being a very soloable melee dps, to being pure support. If you have only played World of Warcraft, then you are used to the holy trinity Tank, DPS, and Healer. However several other games like City of Heroes, Everquest and Rift to name a few off the top of my head… had a fourth role of Support. These classes buffed the party in some way or provided some critical crowd control mechanic that overall made the fights go smoother. With Storm Legion they moved the Beastmaster into one of these roles, and while it is probably my favorite support class next to the Rogue’s Bard soul… it became something that you just really could not solo as.

Yes I Know I’m Crazy

Yup the sub heading says it all… I realize that this request is crazy. I realize that Blizzard will never give me a melee hunter. All that said it doesn’t make me want it any less. While I am not going to go to the lengths that some players have gone… when I play Lodin I still want to get up close and melee things down. Initially I think I thought it was just my way of keeping from paying for bullets, but now that bullets are a thing of the past… I realize I just wanted to get up close and person with the mobs. For the most part I know that each and every one of my ranged characters will be something I did just to say I had one at 90. Once I have finished with my Discipline Priest I will likely cycle back around to Lodin and finish leveling him to 90. However it won’t ever be a beloved character until I can bash stuff in the face with a mighty hunter polearm.

Why Have PVP Gear?

January 16, 2014 by Belghast

A Farewell to Gear

I have to say that still, months after the announcement of Warlords of Draenor, the most surprising and interesting change that has been announced still relates to the gear. During Blizzcon they made an announcement that gear would change its primary stat based on the spec you are currently equipping it under. This means no more healer plate that no one wants, but instead multifunctional items that can be equipped in theory by any plate class. The catch however is that secondary stats will not change, meaning we will have a situation similar to the Timeless Isle. On the isle you can get tokens for 496 epic gear, but the stat assortment is random, meaning you will end up with several items that are less than optimal… but still functional for your current spec.

That said, having gear that transforms for you should at least in theory cut down on the sheer number of items that you need to carry around in your bags. Since the advent of dual specs, this has meant that pretty much every player carries with them two full sets of gear, which doesn’t take into account any weird situational fight based items (yes I have a few of these). In a game with as small of bag sizes as World of Warcraft, this quickly becomes painful. Yes I consider 28 slots to be small especially when you consider I am used to having 6 44 slot bags in EQ2 with another 20 44 slot bags in my bank.

Why Have PVP Gear?

One of the big disappointments from the announcement however is that they seem to have stopped short of making this strategy work for the whole PVE vs PVP gear divide. One of the odd things about coming back to WoW and playing it seriously after spending several years playing other games, is it gives you a unique perspective that many devoted WoW players simply do not have. Quite frankly other games do a lot of the same functionality that World of Warcraft has, far better. I have noticed a big trend in these games to jettison the concept of PVP only gear, and in most cases I have to say the games are far better off for doing this. My question is… if they have this wonderful new tech that changes out the primary stats on gear based on the spec in which you are equipping it… why not carry these changes to whether or not you are in player vs player combat?

I don’t know for certain the specifics of the gear change, and honestly at this point I think the only people that do are knee deep in the bowels of Blizzard actively coding on it. However I have to assume that most of this functions based on the Item Level of an item. There has to be a direct correlation between ilvl X equates to X Strength or X Intellect. Why not carry this same logic forward to PVP gear in general. At a certain ilevel every single item tends to have the same resilience and pvp power etc. Why not make these latent stats on every single piece of gear in the game? There will always be players who only care about PVP and always be players that only care about PVE. However without really meaning to you are asking players to choose which game they want to play.

What about Dabblers?

In both raiding and pvp you have drawn lines in the sand based on gear determining at what point someone actually becomes effective. In order to be anything but canon fodder in on a PVP battleground you need a certain level of the PVP focused stats. This makes breaking into PVP a horrendously frustrating experience for most players. Sure there is a crafted set of PVP gear, and anyone with enough cash or tradeskill expertise can knock this set out and be relatively competitive. However this is a pretty huge chasm to cross going from the PVE world to the PVP one. The same is not really the case going from PVP to PVE, since the majority of PVP gear is functionally effective to start raiding without being too much of a drain on the raid group that is hosting you.

Additionally since Blizzard seems to relish forcing PVE centric players to PVP… I am looking at you legendary cloak quest line. It seems only fair to simply do away with the stark difference between PVP and PVE gear at this point. I am sure there are PVPers out there that can make the same frustrated argument that they hate being forced to PVE. Making all gear function in both situations seems like a win across the board to me. Gear should be gear, regardless of how you got it… and so long as the “effort” requirements are the same… either through weeks spent learning PVE content or weeks spent gaining honor… the end result should provide similar rewards.

The strength of World of Warcraft is that it is the total package. Like I said before, there are many games on the market that do this or that aspect of the game better, but no product offering has as many high points for as many different play styles as WoW does. It is because of this that the line in the sand between PVP and PVE feels all the more arbitrary. Let players play the game however they like and reap similar rewards from whatever activity they choose to do. Then again my whole multiple paths of progression diatribe is another topic for another day. I feel like WoW should embrace the “Wal-mart of MMOs” moniker, because it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There will always be niche games that do certain things far better, but it stands alone as the best complete package.

Date with Dragons

January 15, 2014 by Belghast

Feeding Tradeskills

Last night was a prime night for faffing. I started the evening by doing my semi-regular ghost iron farming run to feed my daily cooldowns on my blacksmith, engineer and transmuter. I have figured out that it is just simply easier to farm up a bunch of ghost iron and then turn around the transmute it to trillium than trying to play the mining lottery to get equal amounts of black and white trillium. In about 15-20 minutes I can farm up a big stack of ore and then funnel that off to each of the professions so I can do my daily crafts. Right now I am funneling all these resources towards two things. Firstly I am stockpiling materials so that I can make myself a Sky Golem, which when I saw it I knew I had to have one.

Secondly I am stockpiling the rare smithing material in order to make the tanky belt… the only problem is I have yet to unlock the tanky belt through the daily crafts. As a result I have more than enough Balanced Trillium Ingot’s to make one, but I figure I can use items for all of my melee characters. So this becomes a daily disappointment as I log in and craft an ingot only to see that I did not yet learn the Protector’s Trillium Waistguard. I could craft the legs, but that would currently break up my four piece set bonus… so that is not a thing I am willing to do just yet.

Date with Dragons

Once I finished with my tradeskills I worked my way through the daily Netherwing quests. Curently I am a good way into revered so here is hoping by the end of the week I will be zipping around on a new flight of Netherwing drakes. Honestly I am mostly doing this for the fact that it adds 6 mounts to my grand total, and less that I actually think I will use one of the drakes. Back in the day I never did the quest chain because I thought they looked goofy. For whatever reason I cannot look at a Netherwing drake without thinking of a shark because of the way their nose is shaped. Right now my absolute favorite dragon seems to be the one I picked up from Stonecore. To be honest farming up the Vitreous Stone Drake was far easier than I could have imagined, since it drops on normal mode.

I finished off the night running Onyxia a few times, with no luck on getting that mount, and then popped into Blackwing Lair with a friend. While I really like the blue judgment set that came from the opening of Wrath of the Lich King event… I would still like to own a full set of the original Judgment. As a result I have been clearing Blackwing Lair weekly trying for the various visual pieces. So far I only have the chest and shoulders, but that doesn’t leave that many visual pieces left, one of which I will hopefully get from Onyxia. Mostly since my paladin is now a Dranei, and boots no longer show up… I am mostly trying for the gloves. While I got no judgment, I did manage to get my mage friend robes and shoulders for his set.

Zoning Out

I am guessing that I did not get a very good nights sleep last night, because as I sit here writing this mornings post I find myself constantly zoning out. I can seem to only manage a paragraph before my mind starts wandering again. As a result I think I am going to cut this off here a bit abruptly. I am still feeling a bit under the weather and yesterday it felt like maybe I pushed myself a little too far. I went through a flurry of activity when I got home, and crashed in my recliner shortly after and was pretty much useless the rest of the night. I was offered spots on two different raids last night, and I ended up turning both down because I just didn’t feel like I could give vaguely close to my normal effort. I feel like I made the right choice, but hopefully I did not put off the people who offered me a spot from future offerings.

Goodbye Cataclysm

January 14, 2014 by Belghast

Feeling Human

This morning is the first day in a long while that I have felt pretty decent. I went to bed around 9:30, but had to get right back up shortly after and deal with one of our ferrets. Our “old man” had made a horrendous mess of himself and as a result we decided there was more there than could be cleaned up with wet wipes. As a result we gave him an impromptu bath and then made sure to get some nutrients down him. We really need to talk to the vet about him, because at this point I am not really sure how good of quality of life he is really having. One of his two back legs just simply doesn’t work right most of the time. He will be just fine one moment, and then the next he will be tripping all over himself. Which is something we went through with his brother bandit when he got insulinoma… for which there really is no course of treatment in a ferret that old.

Even with the last minute excitement last night, I did still manage to make it to bed before 10 and slept through the entire night. I woke up a few minutes before the alarm was set to go off this morning, so I got a wee bit of a head start on the day. Right now I am feeling rather chipper, but I am sure that will be quelled as I actually get to work and see whatever stacked up yesterday while I was gone. I am looking forward to feeling human again, so here is hoping it lasts. Since I’ve gone over 48 hours without developing a fever, I am assuming that I am not contagious. My wife went to work yesterday and came home completely drained, so I am figuring that will also be the case for me. As a result I really don’t have much plans for doing anything when I get home but crashing.

Goodbye Cataclysm

I really did not do much of any consequence last night. It came time for our Monday night flex raid and I just was not capable of concentrating. Instead I continued to piddle around on Belglorian my Discipline Priest. I have decided that the thing I enjoy about Discipline is that they are kind of the “tanks” of cloth wearers. So long as I keep my shield up on myself, I can survive damned near anything and eventually win the fight…. albeit extremely slowly. The thing I did not realize however was just how much splash healing I was throwing around. One of the early Pandaria quests involves reviving a bunch of pilots that crashed landed in amongst a bunch of orcs. As I was working on killing the orcs I kept noticing that I was getting credit for reviving pilots.

I thought that maybe the quest was bugged and I was getting credit for another player reviving them in the vicinity. As I got closer to one and started nuking away with smite I noticed that I kept healing the NPCs. I am sure this will sound insane to most people but you have to understand… my priest was my free level 80 character I made when I accepted a scroll of resurrection. I am the future of our game… a high level player with no real clues about how the class works. Initially I had planned on leveling as shadow, but when a friend told me about the sheer survive of Discipline I made the switch without much effort put into researching the spec. It was one of those things that just worked, and the gameplay seemed extremely simple.

The problem with being handed all of these tools is I have no clue what half of them do, especially the passives. Sure I see pretty little icons proc at the top of my screen but I am far too busy killing things to actually hover over them and see what just happened. Now I had the common sense to at least research spell rotation and things like that before sitting down and building my hotbars, you can guarantee that not every instant 90 will do the same. Anyways enough of that old soap box, but I am the prime example of what happens when you hand someone a nearly fully leveled character.

Imperial Silk

I will admit that I had no real plans to ever level a priest, and since I got a free level 80… I decided to make it a priest since that was the least likely for me to ever level. One of the gaps that I decided to fill with this instant 80… was a Tailor. So for while some time I was a level 80 priest sitting in Stormwind with capped out tailoring, and no real way to make the ever so spiffy imperial silk. Sure I could have had someone summon me over to the Silken Fields, but that just seemed too cheesy even for me. As a result I decided to level the priest so I could legitimately start making bags for my army of alts. Funny thing is that somewhere along the way I actually started enjoying playing the class… even though I am probably playing it wrong. I like smiting things down while laughing off the damage I am taking with my shields.

Speaking of army of alts… I have to say having one of every crafting profession comes in really damned handy. The moment I dinged 85… I went through a flurry of activity logging in and out various characters. When I finished I had a complete set of Pandaria level armor, a new staff, and a new cloak… and as soon as I get to 87 I will make a new trinket. I’ve decided to level up alchemy on this guy as well, so at some point I will feed him a bunch of herbs which should allow him to equip the alchemy trinket as well. Mostly I am doing this so that I can have an elixir master as well as my transmute master. I technically have a third alchemist, but I am not sure if it is worth having a potion master as well. The only thing I can see myself making a lot of that might be worth it is Luck Potions. Depending on how I feel tonight, I might farm up materials for a push through alchemy at all levels.