Mend Pet

It’s been a few months since the latest overhaul of misdirect (v1 being the 2 min cooldown 3-charge style, v2 with 30 sec cd and 3-charge).  I was unsure how I’d feel about this new Tricks of the Trade version, and I’m still not completely used to it. On the surface, it almost feels just like the old MD, but there are a few small but noticeable things that I miss.  Allow me expatiate on them:

No cooldown. Ever since the cooldown went from 2 min to 30 seconds, I have become used to being able to pop MD while waiting for the tank to pull, and if it expired before he pulled I could just pop another right back up. Not anymore! While it seems like there’s still just a 30 second cooldown on MD, the 30 seconds doesn’t begin counting until your MD has expired (either through using it or through it falling off). This means if the tank takes 31 seconds to get ready to pull, I have to wait half a minute before I can put MD back up.

Selective MDing. This is a pretty specific case, but it still happens. An example is when we were working on Blood Princes. I was happy to help the shadow tank by MDing the purple balloons to him, but that would have been a lot easier with the old misdirect. Since it was 3 shots, I could take my time and target 3 different things with each shot and send them over to their target. But now I’ve only got 4 seconds, which really only lets me grab 1, maybe 2 if they’re close together.  Also used to do this when farming Gorillas with my Gorilla.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of benefits to make up for it – the most important being:

Volley! Need I say more?

Multiple MDs from multiple hunters. Boostah and I used to have a nasty habit of casting MD at the same time back in my 25-man days, which you might remember caused them to actually cancel each other out sometimes.  It was almost not noticeable (until one of the hunters gets aggro off the bat, of course).

What do you think?

When Blizzard added Achievements in patch 3.0, they also added a less noticed feature called “Statistics”.  It’s that fun little page that tells you how many times you’ve killed Hogger, and how many times you’ve died to falling damage (5 for me…)  Of course, it only records your statistics starting from patch 3.0, so all the stuff you did before then doesn’t matter, unfortunately.

Well, the other day while I was waiting in the Random Heroic queue, I decided to have a closer look at my statistics, and I found a few interesting things.

First, under the “Player vs. Player > World” tab:

No world honorable kills?  Hm, that’s odd.

But on the “Kills > Honorable Kills” tab:

Well, that’s a bit better.  I guess all but 6 of my kills are in Wintergrasp?  Because I clearly didn’t get 773 kills from Northrend any other way on a PvE server…

Alright, moving on… if you know anything about me, you know that I don’t do Arenas.  I’ve set my foot in their once, right after they were released in BC, and that was it.  But since it was so long ago, it shouldn’t be on my statistics page.

From the “Player vs Player > Rated Arenas” tab:

Woo!  They got one right this time!

From the “Kills > Honorable Kills” again:

Well, 1 out of 4 isn’t bad…. (did I mention the 1 time I did arenas, it was 5v5?)

Now, from under “Deaths > Arenas”:

I bet I’d have a pretty good arena rating if I’d really killed 25 but only died 3 times!

Now, time for a quick math lesson:

779 + 294 + 957 = 1792, right?  WRONG!  It equals 2030.  That means my “Total Honorable Kills” is off by 238.  It would have made more sense if it was 294, meaning the weren’t counting my imaginary arenas, but no:  238.

One last thing… I can’t really say whether this is true or not.  But either way, it makes me sad that almost 30% of my player deaths have been caused by MY OWN FACTION:

Allow me expatiate upon my ordeal this week.

Shortly before Monday’s raid, I realized I had only 1 Flask of Endless Rage.  Usually I get someone to craft some for me, but with the price of Frost Lotus at the time, it was cheaper to just pick up 2 on the Auction House for about 38 gold each.  So I hopped onto my bank alt, picked up some Flasks.

I logged into Brajana and proceeded to head out to Icecrown to fit in a few dailies before raid time, and then headed to the Citadel.  Monday was our night of Professor attempts, so I was pretty excited.

We mowed down the trash quickly, and found ourselves buffing at the Professor’s front door.  I looked at my hotbar, where I recently removed a few unused macros and placed some other more often used things (like my Flasks).  But what’s this?

Hmm, odd.

Now, if I had left them on my bank alt, Bagnon would have a little line saying something like “Tazdingo (Bags: 2)”.  But as far as Bagnon knew,  I didn’t have any Flasks anywhere, no alts, no banks.

Oh, I though to myself, I must have forgotten to get them out of the mail.

But there was no little “New Mail” icon on my map.

Oh, I must have opened the mail but not taken the flasks OUT of the mail.  Silly me!

So I apologized and quickly hearthed to Dalaran to get them… but my mailbox was completely empty.  What the heck?!

I must have left them in my bank alt’s mailbox!  What a dummy!

So I apologized again, and quickly logged over to Tazdingo to find… an empty mailbox.  Well, it’s clear I did buy them from looking at my gold reserves. Maybe I typed the name wrong when I sent them?  Maybe they’ve gotten lost in the mail system?  I opened a GM ticket and borrowed a Flask from another raider and went on with the raid night, confused and frustrated.

Wednesday comes around and we’re raiding again.  I’d received a response from the GM telling me they couldn’t find my missing mail.  After giving up and hoping “Brajan” or whoever I must have accidentally sent the mail to is enjoying their free flasks, I picked up FIVE new flasks and made sure I got them, had them in my bags and was ready to go at raid time.  We did a quick Sarth 3D zerg (it was the weekly) and started heading to Icecrown.

That’s when I happened to notice I’ve got the Flask of Endless Rage (52 minutes remaining) buff.  Confused (as I didn’t bother to Flask for Sarth), I look at my hotbar again.

…

BUT THERE WERE FIVE OF THEM!!!

And then it begins to click.

Although there clearly is no indicator of it, maybe that hotbar location is bound to something.  So I put something else in that spot (a Red Rose) so that I would KNOW if I somehow hit that button (when it tells me “I can’t equip that with a 2H weapon!”).

Low and behold, we rushed into battle, I sent my pet in and… “I can’t equip that with a 2H weapon!”

Turns out that was the old location of my Hunter’s Mark + petattack macro.  However, since that keybinding was set before I installed Bartender, it had no label on it.

Every time I tried to send my pet in to attack something for the last 2 raid nights, I burned a Flask.

/facepalm

I might also add that I took that macro off of my bar because in last week’s raid, I confused it for my just Hunter’s Mark button and sent my pet in to pull Rotface all by himself while we were buffing.

That macro is cursed!

You meet all kinds.

Since they released the Dungeon Finder tool, I’ve been taking advantage of it like a {insert off-colour reference}.  Most notably, with my Paladin.  No, not that one… my OTHER paladin.  She hit 20 and spec’d prot just in time for the Dungeon Finder, and has leveled almost exclusively using it.

It’s amazing the kind of people you run into in these old world, low level dungeon runs.  While I know it can’t be true, it feels like 90% of the people I group with have never played the game before.  Kaeira just hit level 30, and rather than expatiating upon each adventure in its own post, I’ve collected the tales of the last 10 levels and condensed them all here into one for your enjoyment.

These are mostly paraphrased as I rarely think to take screenshots of these things.  But you’ll get the general idea, minus most of the bad grammar.

Also, I would like to mention how sad I am that so many of these are Hunters.  :(

Deadmines:

My very first foray into my Dungeon Finder journey:

Hunter: “I’m new to this game.  How do I get on my mount?”
Me: “That’s not a mount.  That’s your pet.”
Hunter: “Ohhh.”

Shadowfang Keep:

You know that room with Commander Spingvale which can be dangerous for pulling the entire room?  Not to mention, many of those mobs like to silence.  While I’m carefully trying to pull groups of 1 or 2, the hunter gets too close, aggroes the entire room (including the boss) and causes a wipe.  She then says: ”I’m gonna be lazy.  Rez me when you get back lol.” and does just that – waits til we run back to res her.

In the same run, just before Fenrir (a bit more than halfway through the instance), the warlock says, “Gotta go to work guys, I’m going to put myself on follow for the rest of the dungeon.  Bye!”  I sure am thankful for the “Vote to Kick” feature.

Blackfathom Deeps:

I think a quick recount is all that’s really needed to tell you the story about this Hunter.

No wait, that’s not all that’s needed.  He also asked if we would wait so he could tame one of the demons.

During the same run, the prot paladin forgot to put Righteous Fury up after a wipe until reminded by someone at the next boss.  (oops, that was me…)

The really sad thing?  Remember the bad hunter?  He still came in second for DPS (just behind me, the tank).

Stormwind Stockades:

I actually got into an instance as DPS instead of tank!  While I was still spec’d prot, I managed to nonetheless beat out the rest of the dps… including a hunter two levels above me.

Gnomeragan:

I ran Gnomer about a dozen times.  The worst story is from the one time is from the only time I disliked someone enough to actually leave group myself.  I got brought in part way through the instance, as the first tank had left… and I soon found out why.  This rogue wanted to tank it – one of those “I know how to do this better than you” types.  After he continued to pull mobs while we still hadn’t killed the ones we were on, I finally told the group that if they didn’t need a tank, I’d leave and let the rogue do it.  When the rogue said he could handle it, I left.  I wonder if they ever made it the rest of the way!

My best story from Gnomer is when I’d finally run it enough times to actually know my way around.  I never ever wanted to know my way around that wretched place!  Anyway, why was it the best?  Because the Dungeon Finder set us up with this group, and it actually went very smoothly:

Talk about PallyPower!

expatiate

\ek-SPAY-shee-ayt\, verb:

To speak or write at length or in considerable detail.

Example: You are not a true WoW blogger if you can’t expatiate upon the most mundane patch notes!

WoW Word of the Week is my weekly Sunday post to encourage the expansion of the average WoW player’s vocabulary beyond “noob”, “pwnd” and “FAIL”. I’m going to try to use the WWotW in my other posts this week, and I urge you to use it as well!