The Classic Dungeon Experience

 So far Classic WoW has been pretty much exactly the way I remember it, i.e amazing. There has been one notable difference though, at least to me, and that is the dungeon experience.

While I do recall having fun with dungeoning back in the day, I struggle to remember why or how that was possible, because most of my memories are of it taking way too long and people both playing and behaving very badly. The playing badly part I don't mind so much as long as there is a level of effort put in, and I know for a fact I was far from great myself. And to be fair, it was to be expected. Back then the game was completely new to all of us and even those with previous MMO experience (unlike me) still didn't know anything about tactics, best gear or best talents.

Unrelated picture of a scared priest.

This time around though I rarely find a player who seems to be completely new to the game. Either they have played a lot of retail, Vanilla or both. And in either case they mostly know what needs to be done and I've had a blast going through dungeons so far. I don't need people to play perfectly and I don't need people to be social geniuses, as long as everything is done in good effort and politeness.

So I managed to play a year of Classic and umpteen low and mid-level instances before I ended up having one of those experiences. One of those that took me right back to all the memories I have of everything taking just too long and nothing ever really clicking. Like, I can't even point at any one person and say "this failed because of you" but the group effort failed all together.

Ok, in this particular case there were definitely some warning signs early on. The fact that it takes almost an hour to assemble a group is not one of them though. A lot of instances are literally half an hour of running away and without Dungeon Finder Tool you're left to having to wait for the right person to show up at the right time, that's just the way Classic works and I'm fine with that.

I found a group for SM Graveyard and Library on my alliance priest (whom I have a lot to say about by the way, but that is matters for another post) and had to run myself from Wetlands, through Arathi, Hillsbrad and Tirisfal to get to the instance. I was the last one there and everyone had patiently waited for me without complaining. Off to a good start. 

Unrelated picture of a priest in Darnassus.

Except that when we were going to start our hunter wasn't present. Well, that's fine. He had probably gone afk without telling us while waiting, that's understandable. We cleared the first boss in SM GY before the hunter finally shows back up, at this point we had waited at least 15 minutes for him so that's a pretty long afk, but ok, we had done fine without him.

It was going to turn out there was a reason for that as he was ending up to be more of a hassle than gain for the group. He would stand around just not doing anything for minutes at a time, often not going in to action until prompted by someone asking for his attention in party chat. "Bad lag" he says. With lag that bad it's a wonder you can play this game at all, I think. But then again, he was playing a hunter.

Fortunately SM GY is not a difficult instance and we get through it without trouble. Off to SM Library, and the first half is fine, except for the hunter still being mostly afk. He runs around with Aspect of the Cheetah until I tell him and has full mana after every fight he actually does engage in... but I choose to keep my mouth mostly shut, and so does everyone else. We're still doing fine, after all.

After the first boss problem starts to arise though. The hunter starts "lagging" in to extra mobs, pulling more than the tank can comfortably handle. We have our first wipe. No one is complaining, but we're telling each other to be careful not to pull extras. The warrior turns out to be one of those who doesn't bother corpse running but just waits for someone to res him instead. The mobs in SM Lib are fairly tricky actually, with a mana burn I try to hide from as much as possible and a nasty kick that will silence you if you're not careful.

Unrelated picture of a priest running.

That kick will be the cause of our next wipe, just before the final boss. No one is to blame really, it is one of those breakdowns of team effort I described earlier. Or maybe rather an accumulation of mistakes that breaks the camels back. Even though I use Fade I get aggro from mobs throughout the instance, and getting my spells silenced means the tank dies. The first problem might be that the tank doesn't pull the mobs in to a safe spot, but forces us to fight them where they can more easily aggro more mobs. This also means the hunter often stands in places where he more easily aggros more mobs. The paladin or warrior don't use their cooldowns to save us when shit hits the fan and I forget not to cast a heal when I have aggro from one of the kickers. So we wipe.

We all made mistakes, any one of them miniscule but all together too many to keep the group alive.

The second time we wipe we come back to the instance fully respawned. We had literally been about three mobs away from finishing it, and now we have to clear it all over again. But we decide to do it. And through everything we manage to somehow keep our calm and not start yelling things. I just get mildly annoyed when the tank druid starts needing on cloth caster gear. I mean come on dude, that's just not cool. But I also remind myself that this mid-level gear is a drop in the ocean and it doesn't matter. It really doesn't.

But in the end everything took way longer than it needed to and some have been very much carried by the efforts of others. While it didn't leave me angry, sad or even particularly frustrated it definitely left me extremely mentally drained. And I don't know, was it even fun? In the end I probably feel like I could've been without that experience and that is probably a first in Wow Classic for me.

10 Signs You Should Leave The Raid

One of the many very good things about playing WoW was what a good source of blog material it turned out to be. I literally had notebooks filled with ideas to write about, based on pretty much anything that happened to me in the game. I'm not saying that life in general can't be a good source to write about if you just think about it, but to me WoW always worked like a charm. The fact that I don't play it anymore is a small reason to why I write blog posts so rarely nowadays, but turns out I've got a load of WoW posts actually lying around. The other day I was checking through an old notebook I found and I read through some of the ideas I had that never made it into a proper blog post for whatever reason. Most often I am guessing I didn't think it was much enough of an idea to become a post but sometimes it might've just been lack of time. This post is one of the latter I am guessing, as it was basically done in my notebook and just needed to be written down digitally to be bloggified. Since I haven't played WoW for over a year now I don't know how much any of these hold up, all of them aren't exactly laugh out loud material either, but it might at least put a smile of recognition on your faces. So here it goes;

1. The hunter says he's a melee hunter

People have been making fun of hunters throughout the history of WoW for many reasons. From "everything is a hunter weapon" to the fact that you could just sic your pet on an enemy and roll your thumbs to profit. Fact is that really early on in the game I could swear that Blizzard at least thought about making melee hunters a viable choice, the same way they sort of tried shaman tanks. So maybe we can cut some confused hunters out there some slack. To someone well versed in what WoW is all about, the mere idea to play your hunter without a ranged weapon sounds just about as ludicrous as playing a melee boomkin. Yet there were some rebels out there that thought exactly that would be a good idea. At least there is kudos on them for trying to up the difficulty on the hunter class.

Even Blizzard agreed it had to stop - nerfnow.com

2. Raid Leader only knows how to speak in /s

I encountered a lot of people who didn't seem to fully understand how to use the chat system properly, or more often how to turn off caps. In the early levels this is forgivable. But if you've made it all the way to raid level, it is time to learn. Especially if you hope to lead.

Or if this happens - reddit.com

3. Main Tank says "mom says dinner is ready"

It's easy to make fun of young kids parents that don't understand that WoW isn't pausable and what tremendous issues it can cause a lot of other people when their kid has to come to dinner right that second. But maybe the kid is at fault for not warning the parents about their commitments and keeping a dialogue on game time vs dinner time.

4. People try to lose aggro by running away from the tank

I find this funny because it's such a rooted reflex in human behaviour. To get away from danger you need to run from danger. Unfortunately this means also running away from the person that could possibly save you and when raiding this can be especially troublesome. This got frustrating enough for Thoryana to write a pretty good song about it. Yet I've done this myself many, many times.

5. The Raid Leader isn't part of a guild

I don't know if this is still true, but there was a time while I played where being part of a guild was the way to check if someone was morally ok or not. If someone wasn't part of a guild they probably didn't care about people! And if they don't care about people they will greedily ninja everything they see! Also if they were part of a guild they could be punished by that guild when they did something wrong, so obviously the fancier the guild the more trustworthy you'd be. Obviously this system didn't work too well since it's easy to just create your own guild to be in all by your lonesome and I came across plenty of huge guilds where everyone was basically a douche (Ye Olde Goone Squad, I am looking at you!).

6. Main Tank/Healer uses the Jenkins title

When titles were introduced, one of the easiest to get was the Jenkins title. So of course, having it up came to symbolize someone who didn't try very hard and/or didn't know much about the game. Then came the people who used it "ironically". And then we stopped caring I think.

Just one step closer to getting his own game - tannerhiggins.com

7. The paladin only uses minor blessings

Paladins have been changed so much I can't be completely sure what I meant when I wrote this one. It was probably when minor blessings were 5 minutes whereas major were 30 minutes. But then they changed it so that everyone of the same class shared major blessings which meant that some people needed to get minor once to get the right blessing, and that's totally legit of course. I have no idea how it works nowadays.

8. The Main Tank only uses BoA gear

I'm going to guess that LFR has become easy enough that this might not be much of an issue, but a couple of years ago or just after BoA had been introduced, you did not want to see any of that gear on the person who was going to take big hits from the big troll. This was especially true before BoA tank gear was even implemented.

What I get for Googling "boa" - reptileforum.co.uk

9. The Moonkin hasn't specced moonkin form

In line with the melee hunter, it always fascinated me how some people could misunderstand their class and their talents so tremendously (eventhough I've been there myself!). I'm not talking about nitpicky stat optimizing, but somehow not looking at your fellow players and seeing they are all doing it one way and you're not. Doesn't that make you wonder? I'm all for trying new things (and did occasionally), but unfortunately that is rarely rewarded in WoW.

A good reason not to spec moonkin - wow.joystiq.com

10. Tank Healer says "I have really bad lags"

This is just one of those famous last words kind of phrase that probably doesn't need much more explanation.

I knew it! - memegen.com

PvE Pet Buff/Debuff Guide (4.0)

I figured it was about time to collect all the new pets we're able, and even supposed, to handle nowadays. This isn't the first time Blizzard have completely revamped the pet system, and we've come a long way from how pets originally worked.
Remember when pets had different attack speeds making some pets vastly superior over others? Everyone wanted Broken Tooth, a rare spawn in Badlands, back then because he had the fastest attack speed and therefore was the best dps pet.
Remember when you had to level your pets from scratch? Whatever level your pet was when you caught it kept, and you had to level it all the way to max level manually. This meant taming lowbie pets was a real nuisance since your pet only got exp from mobs that you got exp from. So if you tamed a level 10 pet at level 60 you had to basically grind mobs all by yourself for the 50 levels your pet needed. Fortunately, pets never leveled as slowly as players.
Remember when they first introduced exotic pets in BC? They were overpowered and it seemed everyone used a Devilsaur back then, which for a time was the raiding pet to have.
Over the years they've normalized pet damage, introduced pet talents and varying pet skills, made it so that pets are only a maximum of 3 levels below you when tamed, made it so you could call a pet from the stables (without actually having to go there) and now finally given each pet a skill that corresponds to a buff or debuff given by a class.

Not all of these buffs are worth using in endgame pve of course, a few seem to be mainly aimed at pvp-utility. This will be a list on the pve-buffs/debuffs however. Some facts about the new skills;

• You need to be Beastmaster, aka be able to tame exotic pets, to be able to get all the buffs/debuffs.
• You don't need to fill your stables to get all the pve-buffs, as the PvE-buffs/debufs are only 12 (9 regular pets and 3 exotic pets), leaving 13 slots to fill with any pet you like!
• Ferocity Pets are still the ones dealing the most damage
• Apparently the Worms Burrow attack is the best aoe-damage for hunters right now (since Multi-shot was nerfed and Volley was removed)

I've listed the buffs worth having and what pet gives it, in some cases several, and also what player class can provide the buff. All the information is compiled from the ever-awesome pet site Petopia, so if you wish to find even more information in this matter (like where to find a certain pet) I suggest you check it out! Some information is taken from wowhead.com as well. This is just meant to be a quick check-list for the hunter on-the-go who wants to get his stables of pets up to date with 4.0 and Cataclysm. Like mentioned I haven't included the skills I think belong to pvping, like stuns, disarms, silences and movement slowing effects. Also there will be additional pets in Cataclysm which I will add to the list at that point. Some claim that pets now can bring all the debuffs/buffs as players can to a raid, but as far as I can tell this is far from true, there are plenty of buffs/debuffs still that only players can give.


PvE Pet Buffs/Debuffs

• 4% extra physical damage - Ravager/Worm - Combat Rogue/Frost Death Knight/Arms Warrior
• 20% armor reduction - Serpent/Raptor - Warrior/Feral Druid/Rogue (Apparently player armor debuff is weaker, only reducing armor by 12%).
• 25% reduced casting speed - Sporebat/Core Hound (Exotic) - Warlock/Arcane Mage/Rogue/Death Knight
• 8% increased magical damage - Wind Serpent/Dragonhawk - Warlock/Balance Druid/Unholy Death Knight/Assassination Rogue
• Strength/agility buff - Cat/Spirit Beast (Exotic) - Shaman/Warrior/Death Knight
• 30% increased bleed damage - Hyena/Boar/Rhino (Exotic) - Feral Druid/Sublety Rogue/Arms Warrior
• 20% reduced attackspeed - Tallstrider - Feral Druids/Death Knights/ Protection Paladins
• 5% crit - Wolf/Devilsaur (Exotic) - Feral Druid/Elemental Shaman/ Subtlety Rogue/Fury Warrior
• 10% reduced physical damage - Bear - Warrior/Feral Druid Bear/Warlock/Blood Death Knight/Protection Paladin
• Stamina - Silithid (Exotic) - Priest/Warrior/Warlock (Imp)
• Bloodlust (Heroism) - Core Hound (Exotic) - Shaman/Mage (Cataclysm)
• 25% reduced healing taken - Devilsaur (Exotic) - Rogue/Arms & Fury Warrior/Hunter/Shadow Priest/Demonology Warlock (Felguard)

And as a bonus - buffs/debuffs not covered by pets

• 10% melee haste - Shaman/Frost Death Knight/Survival Hunter
• 10% Attack Power - Enhancement Shaman/Marksman Hunter/Blood Death Knight/Paladin
• 5% Spell Haste - Balance Druid/Shadow Priest/Shaman
• 10% Spell Power - Demonology Warlock/Elemental Shaman
• 6% Spell Power - Mage/Shaman
• 3% damage - Arcane Mage/Beast Master Hunter/Retribution Paladin
• 5% base stats - Paladin/Druid
• Intellect - Mage/Warlock (Felhunter)
• Armor - Shaman/Paladin
• Spell Resistance - Shaman/Paladin/Druid (priests and hunters brings specific non-stackable resistances as well)
• Replenish - Shadow Priest/Frost Mage/Destruction Warlock/Restoration Druid/Retribution Paladin
• Mp5 - Warlock (Felhunter)/Shaman/Paladin

Hope this was to some help and let me know if something is missing!

Adios Aoe?

So they decided to remove Volley from the game all together. When I first read about its removal I thought it was just one of many, many odd bugs in Beta. But then a blue post verified that Blizzard actually intended to remove the spell entirely as it wasn't especially hunterish to begin with and competed with Multi-Shot.

It of course started an outrage among hunters, no one wants to be the schmuck left without an aoe nowadays. I know that everytime I level a char that gets their proper aoe far into the game, like priests and rogues, I get annoyed since I just can't win damage done in instances no matter how well I play. When I recently discovered the change to Fire Nova they've made for shamans I was happier than I've been for along time (wow, that makes me sound like a sad person, but I was just really happy :P). I just started leveling a litte shaman (that's how I noticed) and I spam that spell everywhere I go. I even buy expensive mana potions of the AH just so I can use Fire Nova more when instancing, it is so much fun! Now I even win damage done over thunder clapping warriors and consecrating paladins! As a shaman! Who'd ever have known. Hunters also seem to have forgotten that they still have Explosive Trap, and with the Trap Launcher I've heard rumors about it might in combination with Multi-Shot replace Volley just nicely.

But it also made me think, what has AoE become? It didn't use to be so important, but has turned into this abomination. Everyone wants the best AoE spell. Yes it is fun being able to dish out 20k+ dps on trash, but is it really necessary? Will that make you or the raid have an easier time later on LK hc? No of course not. Well actually Lk is one of few raid boss fights where good aoe does become very handy at times, but overall aoe is for killing trash. It is really a very secondary spell, and yet we put so much into it. So what if you didn't win damage done on trash? who cares really? I am sure no RL with any competence would.

AoE can come in handy when leveling. Being able to pull together a bunch of mobs and then kill them all at the same time is of course very comfy. But is it necessary? As a rogue, killing mobs one after another is the way you have to do it (unless you're combat in which case you can pull maybe three mobs at once!). And you don't hear them complaining? Apparently questing and leveling can be done well even without a good AoE spells. Sure it's handy, but that's still a long way from necessary.

I've often complained about the fact that instancing today is about spamming one button, especially if you're dps. Just use your aoe and your set, there really isn't much else to do in heroics today. Is this how we want it to be? It is only in Wotlk that aoe has gotten this prominent role in our dps rotation, well it's not even a rotation is it? It is mind numbing spam. It has often annoyed me that people think they're so damn cool because they can win dps by spamming their aoe. It's not like it's difficult! The hunt for aoe has even made me invent my own aoe as subt rogue, by using Shadowdance and applying Garrote on every target I can to have my own, pretend-aoe.

And yes it is fun to see 30 crit-numbers flying over your screen and feel like an allmighty god. Looking at the trashpulls in ICC it's not really something you'd want to have to kill one at a time either. Blizzard seem to have put themselves and us in a kind of evil loop of aoe. They give us strong aoes, then packs big enough so that we have to aoe them and then more aoe so that we can aoe them. Looking at the raid instances we have today, few of them actually have trash that are aoe-friendly. Naxx perhaps, Ulduar doesn't really and ToC doesn't even have trash at all. So where does this aoe frenzy come from anyway? The answer is of course - heroics.

I don't think Blizzard had planned, intended or even anticipated what heroics would turn into after giving us all the awesome gear that we have become. In the beginning there were very few heroics where people just aoe'd their way through. It's hard to believe but heroics used to be difficult once upon a time, they used to be heroic. Now a heroic instance is like a walk in the park for most people. The trouble is, you couldn't do anything else than aoe even if you wanted to nowadays. Try to get your rotation started on a mob and it'll be dead before you reach your third spell. Aoe is the simplest way to deal with mobs, because they're too easy to deal with in any other way. And somehow this spamming of aoe in our daily randoms have made us believe that we actually need our aoes. That they're among our best spells. That a class without an aoe is like banana split without bananas (I love tasty metaphores). Sure you'd have the ice cream and chocolate and all but there's no banana! It's not worth eating!

The truth is that aoe is no banana. It is not that important. A class without a proper aoe will do just fine. The single target damage is what has downed those difficult bosses and will most likely still be in Cata. The Aoe is an illusion. No wait, it's a lie.

What do you think AoE has become in Wotlk, and what changes would you like to see?

Wannabe tanks - Hunter

Thought I had forgot about this ey? Well I had actually. Ahem. Anyway, here is the final post on "wannabe tanks". The remaining classes (excluding the actual tank classes) are priest, rogue and mage, and as the games looks today I don't see a possibility for these classes to be actual lowbie tanks. This is simply because they have no sustained way to reduce their damage taken - shamans have shields (which I noted in my post about lowbie tank shamans will make all the difference), and warlock/hunters tank with their pets. But like I wrote in my first post, mages and rogues (can't think of any priest though) have tanked end-game material. A mage was generally used to tank one of the adds at Maulgar in Gruuls Lair, and rogues have avoidance tanked some raid bosses too. But that is under the right circumstances and against the right kind of mob. A "real" tank has to be ready to take on nearly whatever is thrown in his face, and the same goes with lowbie tanks. So let's look at how a hunter would go about tanking in lowbie instances.

Tankability: Approximately level 10-60ish

- Like the warlock, a hunter will tank with his pet. Unlike a warlock however, a hunter can choose more between different options to get as good a tank pet as possible. You could also throw a glance at what I wrote about pet tanking earlier. You'd might also want to see this post about pet flaws. There are two features of a tank pet to look out for - their ability to take alot of damage and their ability to generate alot (or at least sufficient) threat, just as with any tank really. There are plenty of pets out there that are better suited at tanking than others. On really low levels like below level 25 this doesn't matter much. But as you get higher in level this will be more and more important. Petopia has alot of info about pets, so that you can find one tailored to your liking, but in case you're one of the TLDR people, I'll give you the short version - turtles are great for taking damage and bears are great for generating threat.

The Tenacity pets have special talents to do some proper tanking, so try to look for one of these (turtles and bears belong to this group). They actually even have a real taunt, among other nice talents. Overall I strongly recommend a bear pet. Not only are they totally cool, but their easy in care since they eat just about any kind of food (turtles eat quite alot of different food too though). But the real reason you'd want a bear pet is because of their specialy - swipe. Turtles have Shell Shield which will reduce their damage taken by 50% for 12 seconds (1 min cd). Swipe is an instant attack that will swipe a number of mobs in a frontal cone (yes, it is still a frontal cone for pets although they changed it for druid bears). This skill was greatly inferior to Apes Thunderstomp, but then Blizzard made Thunderstomp a talent in the Tenacity tree and tadaa, you've got a pet that has swipe -and- thunderstomp! I've had my pet grab aggro of real tanks all the way up to level 80 (if that means that the tank sucked or not I don't know..) even without growl up. The swipe -thunderstomp combo is awesome.
EDIT 21/8-10: Another great tank pet is the Crocolisk. The Crocolisk has a skill called Bad Attitude which basically works like a Retaliation, in any direction. Whenever the Crocolisk gets hit, he retaliates for some damage, which is awesome for holding aggro on several mobs. Crocolisks can be found around level 10 in Barrens and around level 15 in Loch Modan.

Both turtles and bears can be found at level 15, the level where you can enter the lfg tool to do some tanking. However, bears can be found nearly everywhere, while a level 15 turtle only can be found in Ghostlands (they're actually level 12-13).

- Unlike warlocks and shamans, hunters don't tank well by themselves, since they have no way of reducing damage taken (warlocks have Sacrifice and shamans have shields). You'll get Feign Death at level 30, so after that getting threat on yourself shouldn't be that much of a problem. Also, the right hunter pet usually does alot more threat than the warlock voidwalker (and a shaman I'd say).

- With some clever usage of traps you've got some extra crowdcontrol which can come in handy. Distracting Shot works like a real taunt nowadays, but only onto yourself (it does not work with misdirect unfortunately, not that it matters since you won't get misdirect until level 70).

Spec
There is really only one kind of spec to use if you want to be a proper hunter tank, and that is beast mastery. Simply because since your pet will do all the tanking you'd want your pet to be as good as possible, only the beast mastery talent tree will do this. The survival tree could offer some interesting talents for improving your own possibilities to tank, but since you wouldn't do it as good as your pet anyway I suggest you leave it at phantasies. I can't give you any recommendations really since most talents in the beast mastery tree are good to take, but of course mostly those that either improve your pet per se, or improve skills that involve your pet (like improved Mend Pet).

Gear
Just as with warlocks, hunters pets are affected by the gear you wear. Not all stats are affected, it seems only Stamina, Attack Power, Spell Power (useless) and armor are. Unfortunately I don't know the exact convertion numbers (but it seems to be high, around 50%), but that still means that any of these stats you put on yourself will to some part get to your pet as well. Since agility won't be transferred you'd want to go for stamina, stamina and more stamina.

All in all hunter tanks and warlock tanks are quite alike, although like mentioned a hunter pet is generally way better at keeping aggro than a warlock pet. On the other hand, tanking hard hitting elites is probably easier as a demo lock than a hunter. But you won't have to do that much!

Class Quests - Sunken Temple

One of my favorite instances is Sunken Temple actually, although it is huge and easy to get lost in if you don't know your way around. Few people also seem to know that each class (except Dk's of course) has a special quest for this instance. Most of the quests are quite alike and most of the quests also have some interesting rewards! All the rewards have gotten an overhaul (although that was some time ago too), so some of them are quite good nowadays. Here I thought I'd make an easy overview of each class' Sunken Temple quest and the rewards from it. Is it worth doing for your class or not (which depends somewhat on your current gear of course, always keep that in mind)? I'll do half the classes today, and the other half tomorrow!

Priest
Starts out with "Cenarion Aid" which you get from Ogtinc. After some prequests you get "Blood of Morphaz" which means you have to kill the dragon Morphaz. Easy enough, he's on the regular route to the last boss anyway. As rewards you get to choose between "Blessed Prayer Beads", "Woestave" and "Circle of Hope".
The Beads is a trinket which give 101 spellpower when used (20 sec dur, 2 min cd), and if you lack a trinket slot these could come in handy. If you're good enough to use it everytime it's off cooldown it has a decent use, which turns out to be slightly more than 15 spellpower overall. Nothing fancy, but if you already have a nice wand and rings, this isn't bad. You get a hit trinket in Hinterlands however which imo is better (Rune of the Guard Captain), because I love hit at low levels (eventhough it gives attackpower). In outlands you'll get a better spellpower trinket too (Vengeance of the Illidari), and at level 50 you're not far from Outlands.
The Woestave is a wand that gives some stamina (3) and spellpower (9). Overall better than the beads, considering how useful a good wand is to a priest. That is if you soloplay alot, if you mainly do instances a wand is less useful.
The Circle of Hope is a ring which gives some shadow resistance (meaningless stat at this level) and 14 crit rating, which at level 50 is more than 1% crit. At level 50 there are already plenty of other good rings out there though (like Golden Ring of Power), which means this isn't that good compared to its level.
Overall I'd probably recommend the wand.

Druid
Unlike the most of the other classes, druids get their Sunken Temple quest from Torwa Pathfinder at the entrance of Un'Goro. After some prequests you get "A Better Ingredient", which means you have to find a quest item from the guardian at the bottom of Sunken Temple. This is a little tricker than most other classes quests, because one doesn't usually do the basement part of Sunken Temple. It's alot of time for not so much reward. The guardian has to be summoned by activating stones in a special way which most puggers just can't be arsed to do. Unless you're very good at convincing people to do boring stuff, you'll probably have to ask a high leveled friend for help.
As rewards you get "Grizzled Pelt", "Forest's Embrace" or "Moonshadow Stave". It's clear that they've tried to do one reward for each spec, feral, boomkin and resto. Unless you're dressed in BoA gear, which has a better staff and chest already, these rewards are actually really great, all of them.
The Grizzled Pelt is awesomely itemized for a feral druid, whether you're tanking or dpsing.
The chest Forest's Embrace is really good for both resto and boomkin druids.
The staff Moonshadow Stave is quite nice too with all that crit (14 rating is slightly more than 1% crit at level 50). If you're horde there is a staff from a quest chain in Stranglethorn (starts with "Saving Yenniku" in Grom'gol) which is nearly as good, called Nimboya's Staff. That means you could have the chest and that staff together which would be the best option.
Overallt I'd say go for the chests.

Hunter
Starts out at Ogtinc with "the Hunter's Charm". After some prequests you get "The Green Drake" in which you need to kill the dragon Morphaz (just as priests).
As reward you'll get to choose between "Hunting Spear", "Devilsaur Eye" or "Devilsaur Tooth".
Hunting Spear is a weapon and as a hunter you'll mainly use the stats. It gives mp5 for some reason I don't understand, and a bunch of stamina (I am assuming this is for survival hunters). Because it is so strangely itemized I wouldn't recommend going with this weapon.
Devilsaur Eye is a trinket that gives 150 attackpower and 20 hit rating when used (20 sec dur, 2 min cd).
Devilsaur Tooth is another trinket which gives 5 agility permanently and increases your pets attack power by 200 when used (20 sec dur, 2 min cd).
Both the trinkets are quite good. As with priest you can get a good trinket from hinterlands which gives hit and attackpower permanently, which makes it better than any of these two trinkets. You'll also get a better trinket in Outlands (Bladefist's Breadth), so you can choose whichever of these trinkets you like more at the moment, you probably won't keep it for long.

Mage
This quests also starts in Azshara, but from Archmage Xylem. He can be found along the northern mountain wall where you'll have to ask one of his disciples to teleport you up to his tower. It starts with "Magic Dust" and after some prequests you'll get "Destroy Morphaz" in which you need to kill the dragon Morphaz (hey, alot of people seem to have some sort of grudge against that poor dragon). As reward you'll get to choose between "Glacial Spike", "Arcane Crystal Pendant" or "Fire Ruby".
Glacial Spike is a dagger that gives a small amount of intellect (4) and an interesting (but not very good) proc equip. Your Frostbolt spells have a 6% chance to replenish 50 mana when cast. This means of course that this dagger would only be good for a frost mage.
Arcane Crystal Pendant is a neck that gives 6 intellect and 16 spellpower.
Fire Ruby is a trinket which restores 1 to 500 mana and gives your next fire spell 100 extra spellpower when used (1 min dur, 3 min cd). This means this trinket would be good mainly for fire mages. It does have a minute duration, but only works for one fire spell, so it isn't that good.
Now even if you happen to be a fire or frost mage I'd still say the neck is the best choice. One always tries to go for permanent stats over the "on use" or "on proc" stats, unless of course the on use and on proc stats simply are so good they're worth it (which is especially true for on proc stats). For trinkets I recommend the same ensemble as I recommended for priests a bit up (Rune of the Guard Captain and Vengeance of the Illidari). If you happen to be a fire mage, or just really like to have an extra pot every third minute, the Fire Ruby is a decent trinket though.

And that's it for this evening folks, I'll get to the other classes tomorrow!

Pets and why they annoy you

Pets can annoy you for varying reasons. A person who's a bad pet handler could easily wreck alot of havoc in any party and/or raid setting. Just the other day we had a hunter in my raid who accidentally pulled some trash in ICC with her pet. Luckily enough that particular pull didn't end in a wipe, but it easily could have! And I always forget to remove aggressive from my pet after having done Anub'Arak in AN, which always turns out funny (not). I know Love did a massive overpull on the Defias Ship in Deadmines on one of his hunters too. I still remember it although it was several years ago, just because it was so much fun seeing him play like a real noob. But this post won't be about pet handling, although that is a subject one could write quite much about. Instead I'd like to talk about pet AI, the things the pet do (and don't do) which the player who controls it (and everyone around) has little control over.

Anyone who ever plays a class which uses some sort of pet (i.e. lock, hunter or unholy dk's), will quickly notice that the sunday programmers over at Blizzard have reached new lows with some areas of the pet programming. I'm not counting the occasional pet summons, like treants or shadowfiend, but the more permanent ones. The others ones are usually not out and about long enough to get you into any real trouble.

The first problem with pets, and one of the most annoying, is when they grab a mob and run away with it like they're some love couple fleeing from justice. You really don't want to send your pet in for some tanking, and see him just keep on running, probably aggroing alot of other nasty stuff while doing it. I've actually died because of this, because when you're in a camp of mobs you don't have much maneuvering ground for that kind of behavior. Death Knights won't encounter this issue as much, since they don't use their ghouls for tanking very often.

So why does this occur and what can you do about it? Well, I can't say I know much about programming so I can't answer as to why it happens in terms of code. I have noticed however that the issue mostly arises whenever the pet has to attack a target that is already moving. So if you pull something and your pet rushes off to attack it because you've got him on defensive stance, he will engage the mob while it is on its way towards you. It seems that when the game has to calculate the pets positioning towards a moving target, which then in turn has to calculate its positioning towards the moving pet, could turn into (and mostly will turn into) this chain of running off and not stopping. There are two solutions to this problem. Either you have your pet engage the mob first, which might ease the games calculating of positions and make them stand still. This solution takes alot of waiting around for your pet to engage the mob however. Or you can bind your pet "follow" action to a key (it has a default key binding already, but I prefer to rebind it to something more available) and press it whenever he is on his way off somewhere. Just press it and then have him resume attack again almost immediately and those two should stop the running around. It's about breaking the cycle of "move" commands the server is sending those two.

The second issue is one that arises for anyone that has a summoned pet up. That is whenever a quest asks you to take control over something. That something will then count as your new pet, and this could "clash" with your current pet. I did some questing in Zul'drak on my lock and noticed that if I let a quest summon a "quest pet" for me while still having my regular pet up, I couldn't use the new pet. I had to dismiss the quest pet, resummon my pet, dismiss that one and then resummon the quest pet to make it work. Apparently the game just didn't know which pet I was using anymore!

A third issue I've noticed has only happened to my DK so far. Since I am frost specced I don't have a permanent ghoul, but one with a 3 minute cooldown. It happens, quite often I might add, that the game thinks I've got a ghoul summoned, but I clearly don't. The only way to make the game realize it's wrong so I can summon my ghoul is to relogg. Sigh...

And a fourth issue, which happens to all three pet classes but is the most annoying for a lock; whenever you get into a random instance while in the air, your pet will be desummoned when you get out of the instance again. This isn't much of an issue for a hunter or unholy DK who can just easily summon their pets again. But a lock usually has a 10 second cast time on their pets and having to do this over and over again becomes tedious. The alternative is to land and dismount from your flying mount before ever entering a random pug. Also tedious.

All this aside...since pets really own and having a pet is such a huge benefit in most areas of the game we all know hunters, locks and dk's really deserve these pet issues. Can't let them have it too easy, can we? ;)

Welcome new hunter!

Yes, the day after my druid dinged 80 I managed to ding my hunter 80. They've been really close in level all the way so it was really just a mere chance by choice of random instance that the druid got first (since some instances are longer and thus give more exp).

Leveling the hunter through pure instancing (70-80 like the druid) was way harder than with the druid. Not only the fact that I had to wait 20 minutes plus in queue for a group instead of 30 sec, being dps of a group is usually tougher than being the tank. Because if you're the tank or healer, you'll at least have some sort of control. But if you're dps and the tank and healer don't know their rear from their faces, things are going to take a while, and there isn't much you can do about it. I've managed to collect awesome amounts of eternal fires and waters and herbs and frost lotuses while waiting in queue though, just flying around scholazar sucking up steam clouds (by being an engineer) and herbing like there was no tomorrow.

I leveled as BM, and it worked really well. My bear pet Bjärven had to double as substitute tank at times, which actually was one of the reasons I had a bear at all. The BM spec is a really easy spec to play and I recommend it for instancing (and solo play of course) up to 80. Having a pet that's able to help out with some emergency tanking at times has really proven useful for me.

Now at 80 I've specced Survival and gotten me a black wolf, named Luke after my late cat. The survival spec is some of the tougher spec I've tried with a dozen different skills and some that enhance other that has to be used first and so on. As a BM you basically just spam steady shot, arcane shot and Aimed shot if you've specced that. I never used Serpent Sting and things like that. As a Survival hunter you've got serpent sting, black arrow, explosive shot, aimed shot and steady shot to keep track off. I really should get a cooldown and dot tracking addon for this... I had one but it broke.

So far I like the hunter dpsing, it's complex but rewarding (unlike enhancement shaman which is complex but unrewarding and retri paladin which isn't complex at all and therefore boring). Unfortunetaly, getting groups still takes ages on level 80, so she'll probably gear up way slower than my druid. Ah well!