What great fun the PvP portion of WoW is!

I’ve only played the “capture the flag” PvP battlefield called Warsong Gulch, I have put myself into the queue for Arathi Basin but never got invited into there, so I’m guessing it’s not very popular with players on my Realm.

Yesterday I took final advantage of level 29 by playing about 8 rounds of WSG with my fellow Hordelings. This morning I advanced to level 30 so the days of glory are over for a bit, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop playing WSG.

I don’t know how many honorable kills I got yesterday, but for the first three rounds, Horde was quite a bit more powerful than our Alliance opponents and I was regularly in the top 3 of the results for Horde in terms of number of kills, without many deaths of my own. Later in the evening, however, the Alliance got packed with a bunch of level 29’s and Horde wasn’t as fortunate, losing round after round. I still did pretty well, but with all the 29’s around it was hard to stay alive long enough to get those extra kills.

With the update this morning, I’m hoping I will have been promoted to ‘Grunt’, which is the second Horde PvP ranking level after ‘Scout’ and before ‘Sargeant’. I’ll have two stripes next to my name in the battleground, and when Alliance folk kill me, they’ll get more honor for their effort. I will be able to log in in about an hour or so to see the results.

I haven’t seen any Hordelings that are higher rank than Sargeant in the 20-29 range, I wonder if that’s a real restriction, or just the way it works as folks progress through their levels? I guess I’ll find out with my secondary character in Sen’jin which has recently qualified to play in the 10-19 WSG range for the Alliance. I didn’t play my Zul’jin character in the battlefields until level 21, after all.

At any rate, I’m a Hunter so my PvP strategies very much involve other people - I’m not a tank, can’t be the one that draws the fire so the others can attack… I’m one of the distance-attackers depending on the warriors and the others to take the hits while I range from afar.

Hunters are definitely strong members of the team when protected and kept alive, being able to hit so rapidly and regularly. And of course, since I have almost 1000 hit points now, and 1200 spell points, I have a lot of special arrows to send out (including concussive ones advanced to the max in my Talents section) and can stand around and take some beats by a defender while putting the finishing blows on my opponent.

One thing I haven’t gotten good at is using my bandages when the immediate battle is over and it’s time to progress to the next one or to the next spot. Sometimes I come out of a skirmish with under 100 hit points and really should be taking a wee break to buff up my HPs again before engaging in battle. I’ve set up my keyboard macros to make it easier, now I just have to remember to do it.

It’ll be interesting to enter the 30-39 WSG range and see if I get any kills at all or if I’m flattened every time before I get a chance. Tune in to see updates in a few days!

New Guild… Already!

Well, I sure didn’t stay in my second guild very long. Long enough to party up and kill my guildmates over and over in a dungeon instance (SFK I believe), and then the next time I logged in, my buddy Jkoll had switched to a “new and great” guild which he invited me to as soon as I dropped the old one.

So, now I’m in a guild called The H E R D. Instead of saying “hello” when guildies log in, we moo. It’s kinda fun actually.

I like this guild much better than either of the others I was in, and I have only been in this one for a few days now. I find that there is more friendly banter between guildies and less inane stuff like mouthy 11 year olds and people who like to give the play-by-play of a football game on their TV IRL.

Also, the regular guildies that are on when I’m on “get” my sense of humor. I’m weird, I like to come out with stuff that is attached to what is being said only in the strangest way. I don’t have any direct examples right now but there were a few instances where I made my silly strange comments in all the guilds I’ve been in and this one is the only one that had someone respond intelligently - all the rest of the guilds, my humor was met with complete and utter guild line silence.

I’m happy to say that I was promoted from New to Herdsman within 48 hours of joining the guild. That was cool too, I feel more connected to the group even though I haven’t even partied with any of them.

Cooking, First Aid, Fishing

A big thing I had clarified recently through this new guild and my new guildmates was that some of the Professions are skills that ALL players are able to train, and therefore I have three new professions to work on building. I had read through the Professions information on the World of Warcraft website before joining the game but I didn’t seem to “get” that Cooking, Fishing and First Aid are professions that everyone is able to train by default, before they even worry about selecting their other professions.

So, I’ve been getting caught up with my cooking and fishing skills mostly - having to venture all the way back to beginning areas to find the Chunk of Boar Meat and Stringy Wolf Meat for the first recipes, and doing most of my fishing right in Thunder Bluff (mid bluff). I find that fishing is a great time-spender while I’m in the queue for WSG, and the higher my cooking gets the more fish I can cook, and my pet likes fish… so it all works together.

Wailing Caverns

I ventured into WC dungeon last night with my lvl 28 hunter and its lvl 28 pet, with a fellow hunter (lvl 30, lvl 30 pet) who I had done some killing with before. He invited me to join him so I headed over and we tried to finish one of the quests there. We didn’t get it done, we’re going to go back in tonight to try to finish it off, but BOY did I come out with a lot of goodies from that dungeon.

My party partner apparently didn’t clear out his inventory before heading into the dungeon, and therefore he only had enough slots free for the gems we were picking up for the quest itself. I didn’t know this until he had passed on three or four Uncommon items and let me win the rolls as a result… I suggested that even if he couldn’t personally use the items he could auction them and get some cash for them, and that was when he let me know he didn’t have any open slots.

Okay! Fine by me! I was getting rid of anything that wasn’t worth as much as those uncommon items (all greens, no blues) and taking all the Uncommon items. Then this morning I put everything up for auction and I’ll see when I get home from work how many of the items sold.

Tonight we’re going to go back into the dungeon to try to finish off the quest, and this morning I spent a bunch of time clearing out my inventory as much as possible again because with how many uncommon items we were finding last night and how little of the quest we got done, I know there’s a lot more loot we’ll be coming out with tonight. I like loot, it sells well and lets me buy cool equipment I wouldn’t otherwise run into.

But at any rate, that’s what I’ve been doing lately. :)

Okay, wow.

I went on my first instance run with my new guildmates last night, and wow was it a rough time. I got us killed twice because of my pet, then still managed to get us killed AGAIN when I left the pet behind and just went in with myself. My guildmates were understandably frustrated at the deaths.

It even looked like we had a gold farmer in our guild and on our instance team (he kept rolling “need” on things he likely didn’t need and wouldn’t respond at all or talk at all when asked questions or talked to), and because I kept on KILLING US ALL, the focus went totally away from what to do when there’s an individual like that in the group or guild.

I hope my guildmates won’t be branded with my name as a bad thing, thinking I was purposely doing this. I tried to keep communicative and admitted this was my second party with more than 3 players in it, but we’ll see what the future brings I guess ;)