Can We Talk Hunters for a Minute?

Milo is acting out my hunter frustrations

Out of all my toons, the patch changes to hunters are my least favorite. Go figure. The very first thing I did, even before transmog, was switch Maruka over to beast master from marksman. As a hunter, I feel that being able to have pets out is one of the most, if not the most, important aspect of my class. What's a hunter without a pet?

I've raided with her as bm twice and I've run all the lfrs with her for the last two weeks. My numbers are fine. I'm first in our raid and usually #1 or #2 in LFR. Whatever. Who cares? What bugs me is the rotation. Take out the legendary ring, my trinket proc, and a couple cds, and I have three buttons to push. Kill command, dire beast, and cobra shot. It's BORING! And what's more!! It's ANNOYING!! All the whistling with dire beast is freaking annoying. Amiright?? On top of only having three main abilities to use, it seems like they're always on cool down or I'm waiting for my focus to regen. Granted, my gear is specced more towards marksman than bm and as such, I'm light on haste, but still.

Everyone keeps telling me to be patient and wait until I get my artifact weapon. And I am. I still consider Maruka to be my main and as of right now, I plan on raiding with her in Legion. I have to wonder though, is it more sentimentality that has to do with keeping her as my main or because I actually believe she'll be more fun with her artifact weapon? Time will tell I guess.

Download Update Message in WoW

I tried launching the game today and received the following message:

An updated version of World of Warcraft is available. Please launch the Battle.net app to download the update.

At first, it seemed like everything was normal because as soon as I okay'd that message, a download started. It finished up, said the game was ready, and I tried launching again. Same message. I completely closed down the app and tried launching again. No go. Then I turned to Google and found the following suggestions:

1. From a Reddit post:  Im assuming you are on US server, go into your WTF folder (C: > Program Files(86) > World of Warcraft > WTF) Then open Config.wtf with notepad. Look for "SET portal "EU"" should be at the top. Change EU to US, save it and make sure to restart battle.net or it will just change it back.

I am on a U.S. server, but when I tried this fix, I was already set to US. This didn't work for me. 

2. This suggestion was from a forum post and I wish I had saved the link, but I didn't. Go into your World of Warcraft folder and delete the WTF and Cache folders. 

I tried that and it didn't work either. 

3. This is another suggestion from the WoW forums:  Run a scan and repair. In case you don't know how to do this:

• Open the Battle.net app
• Select the icon you want to fix. This was the World of Warcraft icon for me.
• Click on the "options" icon. This is a little blue cog located underneath the World of Warcraft:  Legion logo to the right of all the game icons. It took me a minute to find this because I kept trying the Bnet drop down menu icon at the very top of the screen.
• In the "Options" drop down menu, select "Scan and Repair" and let it do its thing. It's not a fast process either.

After about 20 minutes of scanning, I got a message from my computer asking permission to allow the app to make changes to my computer. Then another download ensued. Then I got the message that the game was playable. This solution finally worked for me. Not sure what it found and fixed, but the game launched as if new, with the startup movie and everything. 

Maybe either of the first two options might work for anyone else having this problem since they seemed to work for quite a few others but only the third worked for me. Try all three before resorting to anything extreme like uninstalling and reinstalling. Feel free to ask me any questions you might have, but I'm not tech support and only know what I know from Googling it myself. ;) 

Frost Mage Transmog

As I said in my last post, I decided to switch my frost mage to a fire mage for Legion. Frost is underperforming since the patch so it made more sense. Also, much to my delight, fire mage is FUN.

I tried both fire and arcane a few months back and just could not seem to get the hang of the rotation. My timing was always off and practice didn't seem to make it any better. I switched to the supposedly lesser Frost spec and my numbers went up. Just like they're supposed to do. Also, quick sidenote, whatever happened to playing specs you have fun with versus the top performing and/or must haves? Whatever.

Back to my main topic...

For my frost mage spec, I put together the following transmog (click the pics to embiggen):

Full on screenshot

Selfie. And she's lamenting the fact that this pic cost her 489 gold to take.

There you have it. I was really feeling this transmog. I wish I had remembered to take out her weapons, but I was unwilling to pay another 489 gold to switch out my transmog to take another pic. Uh uh. 

Whaddya think? Fire, vs. frost vs. arcane? Thoughts?

Fire Mage Transmog

I started out thinking I would keep my mage as frost, post-patch but holy bones! Her deeps just weren't up to snuff. I had tried both fire and arcane a few months back and didn't like either one. However, knowing what I know about how hunters changed, I figured now would be the time to learn a new mage spec. And I was right. I like the rotation and it doesn't feel boggy or slow at all. Feeling the change, I also needed to come up with an appropriate transmog. This is what I have so far:



(click to embiggen)

I definitely like the shoulders and my offhand. I'd like to get a flame-ier belt though. That's the best match I could get to my robes. As for the robes, they're okay but I can do better. I also wouldn't mind getting a flame-y helm too, which is weird for me because I usually opt to go helm-less. Howver, I think her goblin hair detracts.

What do you think?

World of Warcraft: Post Pre-Patch Ponderings

The post title? I couldn't resist.

 So, new patch! I don't know about you all, but I felt like this patch was a doozy. I logged in and had absolutely no idea wtf to do with my hunter. All her talents and abilities were different. It was like starting over from scratch. Logging in with my mage, monk, and warlock all caused similar feelings.

Then I started in on the new transmog system. First of all, LOVING my new closet. I should've kept track of how many hundreds of gold I've spent on changing my various toons' outfits. I also discovered that I have a mismash of items. Lots of chest pieces that don't have matching pants, etc. etc.

My raid team decided to go ahead and attempt raiding the same night the patch came out (our regular night). We ran HFC on normal Tuesday night and then on heroic Wednesday night. It was ok. Everybody's numbers were lower than normal and we were a bit sloppy but we still got some bosses down. That was with virtually no practice with our new(ish) toons. I think this week will be better.

I'm loving healing on my monk though. So. Much. Fun!! I even had fun with my lock on destro.

On a side note, I created a page for my guild. We're looking to boost our numbers with some active, fun, friendly, people. If you're looking to raid with nice people in a slow progression environment, then we might have a spot for you. When Legion finally drops, we'll most likely be looking to fill raid team spots then too. Either way, until we chat, I make no promises as far as raiding is concerned. However, if you're looking for a friendly place to hang, a guild to grow with and help grow, and a place where you'd actually have some input, gimme a buzz. Check out The Guild Page for more info. Any feedback, either here or on the page, would be most welcome.

Update: Guild Situation

Last time I discussed guild stuff, recruiting, and/or raid team stuff, I talked about guild drama and the bumps we've had with our raid team. I figure an update, seeing as how that was like a year ago, is in order.

Things have been quiet. Too quiet. My guild is down to 126 people and of those, only about ten individuals still log in (Individual players, not including all their many alts). Over the past few months, I've been kicking people out that have been inactive for 12+ months and demoting people to the lowest (and thus, the least access to guild stuff) rank for being inactive 6+ months. I wish I had numbers to give you here, but I can't login today cuz my computer is broke.

I, myself, have been less than actively active. I had a lot of stuff going on with grad school and then my dad passed away in March. Because of this, I didn't see the point in trying to get more people to join the guild. It seems like when I don't login every day, as the guild master, people leave the guild more often. It's as if, if people don't see the GM every day, they don't want to be in that guild. Maybe I'm imagining things or putting too much responsibility on my own head. I dunno. But I don't feel right bringing new people into the guild if I'm not there to interact with them and support them. Ya know?? As a result, my guild is really quiet.

As for the raid team...We can't seem to keep good, reliable healers. They come and go more than anything. It's frustrating. Is it because our team is too hard to heal? What is it? We have about 14, what I would call, regular team members. I like most of them for the most part. I think I've managed to rub a couple of them the wrong way, but that's life. My only complaint is that a couple of our people seem to refuse to learn and progress with their respective toons. We've been in HFC for over a year (is that right??) and these certain somebody's are still making the same mistakes. We've only gotten the 2nd boss down on heroic ONE time. ONCE! Usually, I'm okay with the speed of our progression, but that's just plain frustrating. My hunter main stands at an item level of 720 and there's absolutely no way to get her new/better gear on normal level. With Legion coming out next month, I really have no hope of furthering her along. This being my very first experience at raiding, I have to say that I'm somewhat disappointed with the end results. We've never even gotten Archi down on normal mode. We should've at the very least gotten that far.

Where to go from here?

Good question. Should I start trying to bump up my guild's numbers now? Wait until Legion comes out? Be happy with the people I have now because they're mostly awesome?

Should we kick the under-performers from the raid team for Legion? Wait and hope they improve with Legion? Like I said, this is my first experience raiding and it's my first experience running an open guild. Advice would be much appreciated.

The Shipyard

I have been mostly satisfied with the way the garrison functions in the game. When I heard about shipyards, I was only mildly interested to mostly ambivalent about them. More missions. Woohoo. Initially, I found that I liked building ships and being able to upgrade and name them and the missions were sort of fun since I needed to level my new fleet.

Recently, my fleet is mostly topped out, only having to level ships that were replacements for ones lost on missions. Having the majority of my fleet being purple, missions have very little point to them anymore. The main bulk of available missions are experience missions. Then, the requirements for those missions are insane.

I took this screenshot today:

Would you look at the requirements for the mission I highlight?? And the reward is only XP. In order to even come close to being able to do this mission, you'd have to have your TWO ships max level so that they'd have the extra two trait slots filled. If your ships are max level, why do you need to do this mission at all???

Also, if you look at my available missions, the rewards for all but one are xp and one of the missions that I already have a ship on is for Baleful gear.

The shipyard is flawed and a virtual waste of time and resources. That's my opinion though. I'll entertain opposing arguments. ;)

Timewalking Dungeons in 6.2

I have a confession. I was supposed to wait to run the new Timewalking Dungeon weekend event until our scheduled guild event last night. I may have taken a little sneak preview with my monk, Bellepanda, yesterday afternoon a few hours before our event.

I started playing WoW right at the end of the Burning Crusade expac. Because I was new and afraid to try dungeons and raids, I never got to experience the BC dungeons until much later with alts. So, while I have been in the BC dungeons via the dungeon queue, this was almost like a first time experience for me.

I had so much fun! With my monk, I queued into the Slave Pens. That time, the dungeon seemed to be adequately difficult. I died twice. Admittedly, with 6.2, my monk dies ALL THE FREAKING TIME now. (I'm thinking of healing with her instead of dps'ing, but that's a whole other post.) She got a piece of gear that she could use, so it was both fun and useful.

Then, last night, we had our guild group for the Timewalkers. We blazed through them. We were pulling entire rooms of trash and wiping the floor with them. My hubs agrees with me that it seemed too easy. For the guild group, I took my hunter main, Maruka, and we had a monk heals, paladin tank, and a priest and another dps (I'm drawing a blank as to who this is). My hunter is awesomesauce squared, but even so, our toons didn't seem to be scaled to a level 70 instance. Anyone else think they were easy?

All in all, I still would rate this feature a 5 out of 5. It was so much fun to run this old content with guildies. For some of them, it brought back a lot of memories. I'm really looking forward to July's Timewalking event.

Bumps & Bruises: Guild Drama

From what I've read, seen, and experienced for myself, my guild has very little drama comparatively. We've been active, officially, for six months now and I've only had one user, one bank abuser, two rage quitters, and one booted to the door. I'll explain.

The User

This person joined the guild, acted all enthusiastic about my raid project, and was generally a nice person for several weeks. However, once they got a few pieces of gear and an iLvl increase, they jumped ship. Not a big deal in the grand scheme, EXCEPT for the fact that they misrepresented themselves and used fellow guildies for gear upgrades. This is bad behavior in my book. Not only that, but they left us high and dry with no notice, lacking a 2nd healer.

Bank Abuser

This one should be pretty obvious. This person withdrew stuff from the guild bank that they couldn't possibly use. Hello!!!! I can see what your professions are and what level your character is. Then, when I asked them what they needed all that stuff for, they left the guild. Good riddance!

Rage Quitter

This is one that actually makes me a little bit sad. This person was, for the most part, a great guildie. They had been with the guild for a really long time. The problem was that they made a habit of no call/no show on raid nights. One or two times, while annoying and disrespectful to the team, is one thing. Several nights with absolutely no apologies is another. At least own up to what you're doing and apologize. When I finally called them on their shit, they got butt hurt and left the guild. Way to be an adult. I'm sad because I genuinely enjoyed playing the game with this person and miss their company. Their drama, however, I don't miss.

The 2nd quitter left because they took something personally that wasn't personal at all. After several in game mails where I tried to convince this person that I wasn't singling them out for anything, they left anyway. Can't keep everyone happy I guess.

Booter

I think I tolerate a lot. Unless you're a GM, you really can't appreciate the behind the scenes stuff that happens in a guild. The Booter had been an ongoing problem for a few months. Inappropriate conversation and giving off a creeper vibe. Seeing as how I was the sole recipient of this behavior, I tried giving the person the benefit of the doubt. However, their bad behavior escalated into constant bitching and whining, bashing the raid team, bragging about how they were the end all, be all of raiders, and then sexually harassing another guildie. Time to go. I felt weird actually removing someone from the guild, but several lines had been crossed.

I don't think five problem members is all that bad in the grand scheme. That's not even one per month. I hate to say it, but other than the 2nd rage quitter, the others brought me a lot of drama and it was a relief to have it be over. At the end of the night with the Booter drama, I had a huge headache and my hands and feet were so swollen with stress and tension, they were painful. I wish people could realize the impact their words and actions have on others, even in an online game setting. I may be the GM, but I am still trying to have fun here. 

Casual vs Hard Core vs Free for All

Recruiting, as I said in my last post, is an ongoing endeavor. Once I started getting people to join the guild, I had to look forward to building a raid team. Once again, I had some pretty idealistic goals for what I wanted in my raid team. I wanted:

• Players who were new to raiding and anxious to learn.
• Players who were familiar with raiding, possessing of loads of patience, and willing to teach.
• Players who recognized that boss encounters require some preparation like gearing up and watching videos to learn mechanics.
• Players who wanted to progress through bosses but were willing to be patient through the learning and preparation process. 
• Players who didn't live and breathe numbers and statistics.
• Players who took responsibility for their mistakes and learned from them.
• Players who didn't point fingers and get bitchy when we wiped.

I was, and still am, asking for a lot. For the  most part, I found just the people I was looking for too. There's been some bumps in the road and progression is slower than I had anticipated, but we're moving along, bouncing around in High Maul and BRF as we like. When we can't get a boss down and get frustrated, we stop and try a different one. I'm sure there has been talk that has occurred outside of my hearing, so to speak, but I think most of my team are happy with the way things are going. I've actually had some tell me that they've been in hard core raiding guilds before and much prefer it the way we do things. They like the fun and friendly atmosphere versus raiding in a high stress environment.

I'm painting a pretty picture here, right? Well, there have been some bumps, like I said. As the weeks have progressed and we've been learning how to work as a raid team, I've had to reassess and make some adjustments. I'll tell you all about that in my next post.

Guild Recruiting: It NEVER Ends!!!!

Fast forward again to December 2014. The husband and I decided that we were finally ready to start inviting people to join the guild. Fleas on Rats was going live! Just a little FYI, side note here:  While I consider my husband to be co-owner of the guild, he is more of a sounding board for me than an actual manager. He prefers it that way and this is fine by me.

How to Begin the Recruiting Process

I had done the bare-bones minimum in research on how to recruit. I figured, how hard can it be??? Sometimes my naivete and complete dumbassery astounds me. Recruiting is H-A-R-D. I could have made it easier on myself by choosing a lemming-type, conformist-type, typical guild name like Fluffy Bunnies or Lemonade Kids (I should say, "no offense" here, but would I really mean it?), but I chose something that actually means something and, in the end, I think is representative of what it means to be a killer horde. What's more killer, harder to escape, creeps up on you with no notice, than the plague??? A PLAGUE ON YOUR HOUSE!!! Nobody wants to hear that. 

Anyway, back to recruiting. I chose the traditional route of spamming trade and general chat with recruiting messages. I say "spam" here because that's the general term for it, but I don't think what I did fit the definition. I didn't repeatedly post my message until I was locked out. I posted about once every ten minutes or so. And let's be honest here. What's more annoying, the occasional guild recruitment message or the anal spams or the blessed thunder fury spams or the general douchebaggery that is par for the course on trade chat??? Maybe your server chat is different than mine, but personally, I'd rather see guild recruitment posts. 

Besides, it worked. I started recruiting some great people to my guild, but it wasn't going as fast I would have liked. So, I posted a message to the guild recruitment forums. Over the months, I've gotten a handful of hits from these posts. Right now, I have three active posts on three different boards, on two different websites. Compared to the amount of people I got from in game posts, the forums are more work with fewer results, but still, a necessary evil.

Words of Wisdom

I wish I had a brilliant suggestion for recruitment. In the grand scheme, I haven't put in a lot of time recruiting. I've been at it steadily for four months now, but compared to some guilds, this time is nothing. It is, like I said, a lot of work. You have to find the right tone for your forum postings. I try to go with a more professional sounding tone with some sarcasm and more casual language. My goal is to recruit adults who have the same philosophy as I do about raiding (which I'll go into later). I'd prefer that they are social and friendly with a sense of humor. While I try to keep my posts on par with people who have at least an 8th grade reading level, I also try to keep a bit of levity so that prospects know I'm not a stick in the mud. This type of writing is difficult, believe it or not. Also, I continue to post in game, on trade, general, and now that it's back, looking for group. I absolutely never post on all three channels at the same time. I stagger my messages so that I'm posting about once every five minutes. This equals about once every 15 minutes per channel. This is not, by my definition, spam-like behavior. FYI, creating a macro for each channel is very handy. 

Aside from the above, I also would recommend:

• That you leave in game recruiting message posting to one guild member. If you have more than one person posting at a time, you risk overlaps and spam. 
• Change your message(s) up every once in a while. 
• Keep your forum postings up to date. If you've changed your recruiting goals, then post a new message. Try and delete the old ones if the forum allows it.
• Be diplomatic. Don't stoop to other player's level of immaturity when you get a negative response to one of your messages. 
• Be patient. Unless you're extremely lucky, be prepared for recruiting to be an ongoing GM activity. It takes time to find the right players. Even if you currently have your guild pop where you want it and your raid roles filled, players come and go all the time. It's almost a guarantee that you'll have to recruit again at some point. 

The Fear and Having Unrealistic Expectations

 The transition from the Quel'dorei server to Zul'jin was eye-opening. I had never had any toons on a high population server, always choosing a medium pop server so that I would never have to deal with login queues. (In retrospect, this is a completely dumb reason to choose a low-med pop server.) I remember my first visit to Orgrimmar and being dumbfounded at the amount of players hanging out there. 

This server change involved moving my main plus about two alts. My husband also made the transition with his main and I don't remember how many alts he had at the time. (This was a while ago and I'm old and my memory sucks.) The first order of business was to decide on a guild name and go through the process of starting a guild. We knew that, at the beginning, the purpose of the guild would be to use it as a way to support our leveling our alts. I didn't want to immediately begin inviting people to join. We had an empty bank and a very limited amount of gold. Who would join this guild and then stay once they saw that?

My vision for a guild was, and still is if I'm honest about it, idealistic. Let me bullet point it for you and you'll see what I mean.

My Must-Haves for a Guild

• Small community - no more than 150 players.
• People that behave like adults
• Limited to no drama
• Talkative, active, social, friendly players
• A guild bank that supports leveling up that people actually use
• Planned events that people actually want to attend

This is just what I wanted, in general, for a guild. This doesn't even being to cover raiding. So, the husband and I began stocking the guild bank. By this time, Cataclysm was out. We also worked on getting at least one toon each to max level. I figured, a GM should be at max level. Jump forward in time...

All through the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria expacs, we didn't put forth any real effort to start inviting people to the guild. Why? We made two cross country moves. We were both nearing the completion of our undergrad degrees so school work really ramped up. I had a snarly teenager on my hands. The husband deployed to Afghanistan. These, on paper, are all really good reasons to not have the time to devote to running a guild and putting together a raid team. I could get away with leaving it at that, but I'll be honest with you in the spirit of transparency. The ultimate reason was fear. I was afraid that I didn't have the follow through to make this successful. I didn't think I'd be able to find any other like-minded players out there that would want to join the guild. I go through times with the game where I don't login for a few weeks at a time. What would happen to the guild if I experienced one of those slumps? Yes. This is "just" a game, but in my mind, once you decide to become a GM, you have a certain responsibility to the players in your guild to be there and to make sure the guild is a place they want to be. If you don't believe that, what's the point of starting a guild at all? 

Talking with other GMs didn't help. They confirmed that I had unrealistic expectations. Most happened to like my vision for a guild but all had no faith at all that I'd be able to make it happen. They all told me that running a guild is a lot of work with little positive feedback. They said that you put in hours of behind the scene work on a guild that, unless you are or have been a GM, players won't appreciate. Basically, being a GM is a thankless job that sucks the fun out of playing. What in the holy hell was I thinking???