Updates. Hello again everyone.

I'm no longer a hunter. I'm no longer Horde. Things have changed.

I do still have my Hunter, however he is a PvP alt for now and the foreseeable future. Maybe if the guild I'm currently in has an opening for one, he'll make his comeback. For now I am a Gnome Warrior on Windrunner US.

Here's a brief explanation: About a month and a half ago at my work 5 or 6 people got fired for stealing. I work as a server in a restaurant, so its not a typical workplace. My hours went up by roughly 20-25 a week with more serious shifts thrown in, so my WoW time got cut back significantly. Things are turning back to normal now, with new hires finishing all their training and whatnot, so my playtime is coming back to normal. However it has shifted more to a late night playtime. Luckily the 2 friends I play WoW with are awesome, one of them living in L.A. and the other being a late nighter as well.

We find ourselves as Alliance on the US Windrunner realm. Awesome so far, however I'm a gnome and the novelty is wearing off. Race suggestions? I'm heavily leaning towards Dwarf Woman at the moment but we shall see.

I'll still be blogging about my Hunter, but from a PvP lite standpoint. Whatever my main happens to be will be front and center. Only time will tell...

Just a Quick One Today

Not much of an interest, just letting any of my readers know that the new guild project is officially under way! If you're at all interested check out our site!

http://nebuladb.guildlaunch.com/

It's plain for now, will be more of something in the near future!

Battlegrounds

I've never been a huge PvPer, I've dabbled in it here and there but nothing really too serious. My hunter has dual spec and in my old guild I was asked to use my offspec to be the bitch Hunter's Mark specced hunter, so I was. Now that I left my guild I had been wondering what I should do with my offspec. I didn't wanna have 2 MM PvE specs cause thats boring. What other options do I have?

I could go Survival. Survival is fun to play, but the only reason I would ever need to use it really is if by some chance there was no Replenishment present, and with the amount of classes that can do it these days the chances are pretty slim.

I could go Beast Mastery, it recently got a buff so it's not as bad as it was to play. Problem with BM is that its even easier to play than MM. Its seriously a 2 button rotation which doesn't really appeal to me at all. My other and much more likely option here is to go with BM for old content grinding. I've been working steadily at older titles/achievements (Loremaster currently and almost done Eastern Kingdoms!) and a BM spec would just be awesome for grinding out those TBC dungeon reps through heroics. To be honest this would be the biggest thing it'd be useful for alongside maybe a couple of Vanilla raid reps like Zandalar or Brood of Nozdormu. However once I finish with these I won't really need the spec anymore so it would only even be a temporary thing.

My last option and the one I am currently trying out is a PvP offspec. I'll probably do the BM thing that I mentioned but I'm not grinding those reps yet so theres no point of using it until then. I had never PvPed on my Hunter prior to 2 days ago, I chose to use Marks as my spec and let me tell you... it is a blast! I'm not all that good at it yet because there are so many keys for me to use and learn but I owned up a storm in a few Bgs and WG. Problem lies in that I have not a single piece of PvP gear but this is easily remedied and being worked on (I'm about 5k honor away from my 264 PvP trinket :D). I need a pet to PvP properly with but the thought of leveling a crab makes me want to /wrist.

Any of you PvP seriously or casually as a Hunter or another class? What do you think of Hunters in PvP?

Happy Hunting!

Guild Project Announcement

I had hinted at this a bit over the last couple of days over Twitter, but now it is official and in its very early stages. Myself and my close friend that I run around WoW with have decided to create our own guild as the focus of blogging and a bit of a community project as well. I'm having a hard time explaining exactly what we are planning to do, but I'll do my best to give the first rundown here. Be forewarned I will probably miss out on some info initially.

WoW is a different game now in WotLK than it ever has been in the past, I never played the raiding game in Vanilla so I can't speak from experience on that end. With all the new Cataclysm changes that have been announced it sounds a bit like they are trying to take it back a step to how things were in BC. Only certain things though, such as actually having to worry about Mana, a little more freedom with rotations etc. The game will probably be about as easy and casual as it is now. One of the biggest differences between expansions is the status of "old" content. In BC you had T6 guilds that still ran TK and SSC, Zul'aman, and even Karazhan which was the lowest tiered raid during the expansion. Nowadays the only way you go back and do old content is if it's the weekly and even then its not like you clear the place, you do one boss or maybe 2.

Our focus is to bring back that old mindset of there being lots of content with lots to accomplish. We want to create a guild made up of mostly strangers that come together to be an actual community and a team instead of a group that shows up 3 times for 3 hours to do ICC get loot and then vanish from the earth. Don't get me wrong, we will work on current content as well and progress very well through ICC, but we will also be farming mounts, titles, etc from places such as Naxx and Ulduar, hell even ToGC will be run.

Part of the whole gimmick to this is... well you're reading it now. It won't be a requirement but we will be recruiting people that hopefully would care to blog about their experience in the guild. I will be blogging about what its like to put together, lead, deal with problems what arise. Hopefully this can live into Cataclysm as it would be really neat to blog about the new systems Blizzard has in store for us; mostly the Guild Leveling one. Blogs will be a way to express things you like/dislike about the guild and will be encouraged to be open and honest.

There is no recruitment up quite yet, but there will be in a few days so stay tuned for that. What do you all think, potentially a good or interesting idea? Let me know!

Happy Hunting!

Mage Change

I'm going to keep this one brief. The source of one of the biggest Rain of Tears I've ever seen on the WoW forums.

Time Warp (level 83): Grants a passive Haste effect much like Bloodlust or Heroism to party or raid members. It also temporarily increases the mage's own movement speed. Time Warp will be exclusive with Bloodlust and Heroism, meaning you can’t benefit from both if you’ve got the Exhaustion debuff, though the movement-speed increase will still work even when under the effects of Exhaustion.

So here we go. Time warp. People think this is going to be a Bloodlust, and while I can see this... the wording is a bit weird. But I will leave you with 2 things. Every time I raid from here on out this is all I will be singing:

And #2 remember! Shamans your tears will be used as the rain in your Healing Rain.

Happy Hunting, it's just a jump to the left!

Cataclysm Class Change Review pt1

I put this one off as I was going to do a seperate blog post for every class, I just decided to wait and do them all in one fel swoop. I know that the changes aren't final or anything close to that but I'll take them as they are now. I also know that Paladin changes haven't been released, so I'll give them their own post next week. I will be scoring each class with a score out of 5 without using too much bias... here we go!

Shaman

Ah yes, the first of our class change posts from Blizzard... I wasn't expecting anything like this! First off it's very nice that they are attempting to make certain specs/classes able to play how they should be, in this case adding a melee attack for low levels so that you don't feel like some sort of elemental shaman caught in role limbo. At low levels as well you'll be getting another middle ground single target heal... I don't really see why this is needed but alright, more buttons to press can be a good thing. The changes to fire totems as well is a bit overdue, and a very nice perk.

Into the new stuff.... badass sums it up. Walking and casting? Awesome. Big damage AoE AND Big healing AoE? Awesome! The dynamic of actually having to watch your mana again is a massive step in the right direction, and the high mastery bonus that makes your heals heal more on low health targets is just cool as well.

Overall this one is my favorite one, they had the coolest changes by a pretty good margin at least in my opinion. I played a resto shaman through All of my BC raiding days and into late ulduar as well. I lost interest in it when WoTLK came around but maintained the char because my guild needed a healer. This makes me want to play it again (but not right now. The biggest downside to this class change preview is that its the best one and also the first one, it got me really excited to see the rest of them but I was subsequently disappoint with almost all others. 5/5

Warlock

Hey guess what? You got green fire and your hellfire doesn't hurt you anymore! Warlocks rejoice, the years long source of your tears has been answered! I haven't played a lock in a bit of time but I know enough to know that the soul shard overhaul is LONG overdue... I am a little confused by the new system still, but this is a step up regardless. All dots crit/haste, banes instead of curses, drain soul refreshing dots are all amazing upgrades on your already existing mechanics.

The 3 new abilities all seem awesome, especially Fel Flame. Refreshing dots on an instant cast is so nice, and it'll be a nice nuke (hopefully) for Aff locks to spam when needed. The other 2 are self buffing spells that are always a welcome change. Cooldowns are awesome.

This one was good too, not as great as Shaman, but there was definitely a lot of stuff that needed addressing and was addressed. 4/5

Priest

I was totally pumped for this one as I stopped playing my lovely priest only about a month or so ago. Yet another heal to use, just like Shaman I don't see the point but I'll go with it anyway. Removing spirit buffs seems a little weird but I suppose I understand it... I just want to know if Wisdom and Mana totem are being removed... no? I didn't think so thus I don't understand why our mana regen buff is. No more +Hit from Misery.... nooooo. I get it, but it still sucks :(

Now that all of the QQ is out of the way. ALL HOTS AND DOTS HASTED! Yes! The hasting of a couple of DoTs last patch was an amazing upgrade, this will just be the icing on the cake. Shadow Word: Death as a potential execute is awesome. A nuke... finally. This Mind Spike is so long overdue its not even funny. And yay for a bit of help regarding spell lockout! Inner Will is alright, but I'd use Inner Focus still every time. They mentioned making Holy more dynamic to play... this doesn't make sense to me as its already the most dynamic healing class to play (imo).

This part gets its own rant. Life Grip. What are they thinking? I can see the good intentions and it sounds like a lot of fun but this one should NOT make it live. Griefers inc! Or just idiots who "oops pressed the wrong button" are going to kill us all. A scenario for you all, if you don't mind. Bob the priest is healing an Onyxia run, hes Disc and his raid has him healing the tank. Bob accidentally hits Life grip and pulls the tank where he is standing, Onyxia being pissed off at Jim the tank follows him and cleaves everyone she runs through and tail swipes the rest. Jim tries to reposition her but most of the raid already died. I'll wait and see how this one plays out on live to see if there are safety measures but so far I'm dreading this one. 3.5/5

I'm going to eat lunch and take a break from this, part 1 complete. Stay tuned for day 2... DK Warrior Rogue!

What Server do you Play on?

If I say anything unsatisfactory about your realm I am sorry, I'm merely observing what it was like while I was there, it may be different now.

This one has interested me for nearly the past year. I started out on my little backwater realm called Trollbane US for the first 2 years of my WoW career (I left last may) pretty much until my 2nd guild on the server eventually split up. I started playing WoW with about 5 other people that I've known online for 6 or 7 years now, coming from another online game called Ragnarok Online. We rolled on Trollbane simply because it was suggested to us, we had absolutely no idea on the game or how realms really varied all that much so we never questioned it. I'm going to Yadda Yadda over my playing history as its irrelevant at this point, but it ended up with myself, one of the online friends I mentioned and an IRL friend of mine leaving the shores of Trollbane to wash up on Thrall US.

Thrall was fun, but quickly went down the drain when the top guild on the server left, Ascent. For some reason this often hits a server hard as random other people that have NOTHING to do with said guild decide if the top guild is leaving, they better leave too. We lost my irl friend but gained a new friend on this realm and decided to leave. I know I just mentioned about random people leaving being dumb, but we at least waited nearly 2 months but the realm never really came back around.

From there we went to Area 52. The goal of this transfer was in part that we wanted to leave Thrall, but we also had another idea coming into view. A few people we knew from Trollbane (including my sister) wanted off of that realm as well, so we had this idea to make a 10 man guild of a bunch of people that were just friends (and great players) that would just breeze through ICC 10 and into hardmodes. It started off well but died on the table... around the start of January every single person except myself and the one other guy that had been with me the whole time either quit or went on hiatus. Great, what do we do now?

Well I have another online friend that I've known for almost ten years. He played WoW with us initially but somewhere along the way parted directions with us. Anyway, after a couple of years we finally decided it was time to play together with him again, just the 3 of us. However he was slightly opposed to coming to Area 52, so we had agreed on yet ANOTHER transfer to Cho'Gall US. My first PvP server... if you can call it that.

Cho'Gall... from the moment I got there I did not like this place in the slightest. All of my prior servers were pretty high pop with a big Horde ratio (except trollbane) and very active for pugging. Cho'Gall takes this to the extreme and then takes a big shit all over it. I mentioned it being PvP, I did not mention that it has THOUSANDS of level 80 Hordes... and less than 300 80 Alliance, oh boy. Essentially its a glorified PvE realm with Alliance -always- having 20 stacks of Tenacity, having 1 ranked (#50 or so) PvE guild, and all that fun stuff. On top of this, while being very active for pugging, totally unreasonable. Heres a fine example I have, literally no exaggeration: LFM ToGC 10 must have 5800+ GS and 5/5 ToGC 25 Achievement Don't be bad no Mages! This is the part where I tell you that this fine gent is a Mage with 1/5 Togc 10 achievement and about 4700 GS. While I don't follow the whole GS thing, 5800 is pretty much full ICC 25 gear... for last tiers 10 man content... right.

My friend that had been with me since the start had some irl thing come up and quit on the spur of the moment. My old friend that had just started playing with me again also despised this realm and preferred backwaters, just like me. So guess what we did? We moved to our home now, Dawnbringer. We've been here for over a month now and it is absolutely perfect. No complaints, good realm, good guild... all is well.

I did not mean to go on that long, I was planning for this to be some sort of "how to find a good realm guide" but now my fingers are sore. I will however leave you with the example I had in mind. Never underestimate the forums... always check and make one of those "is this a good realm" topics or look for another. You never know what you might find. The following is a comparison of how people may take to outsiders transferring over:

Disclaimer: Ignore trolls.

Trollbane: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24038458832&sid=1

Cho'Gall: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24038609307&sid=1

If the choice were given (assuming you are horde) which sounds nicer? Thanks for reading, have a great day :)