I Live in a Church . . .

And I don't sleep with voodoo dolls. I'm building a priestess. I know, I know, hunter going priest... wth right? But, Kes did it, and some how managed to succeed at it! However, unlike Kes, this character will not become a main. I'm rolling this priestess to play with my guy and a friend of ours... the same one from /facepalm. We want a little RP questing group. For said group, I will be DPS. That means one build, and only one build will work: Shadow.

RP Storyline
Some would call her a Shadow Priestess and claim she was evil and twisted. I prefer a Night Priestess, still serving Elune, just carrying out her duties in a way that does not follow Her Silver Light. A Night Priestess works during the Dark Moon, severing wandering spirits' anchor to this world and setting them onto the path to the Goddess. So that the Lady can set worthy spirits as stars in the sky. This is the main focus of the Order, with a few other duties sometimes called for when needed: such as divination, mediums, and occasionally forcibly bringing the peace back to Azeroth. No, this is NOT your mother's Priestess of Elune.

This is what my Night Priestess will be doing while grouped with a Druid and a Dwarf Warrior. All characters reside in the Moon Guard Dimension of the Warcraft Universe. The warrior has graciously (my words not his) granted us the use of his sword arm and sheild. The druid has consented to become a tree from which I can hang pretty ornaments and allow any one's pet cat or bear shade... and for the cats a convenient scratching post. ^_^

This group will eventually get underway... when The Guy and I are not doing alternate shifts at work that is. So far every time we've tried to set something up either he or I are working at an odd time for the other, or our third party member has college classes. We will get this worked out eventually... I know we will.

/facepalm sums it up nicely

Oh believe me, it does. One of my long time friends from Chens Champions has joined me over on Moon Guard, playing alliance no less. He was debating on rollinge either a paladin or a priest... I told him to go with paladin, as the armor would provide a bit more protection against everything except magical and the bubble would handle magic... he went paladin, a draenei to be specific.

I first rolled a human warrior to keep him company, then remember that draenei can be warrior, so deleted the human, rolled a draenei, then The Guy suggested shaman, so I deleted the draenei warrior and rolled a draenei shaman. So far its pretty fun. We are waiting on my guy to catch up with a druid.

Anyway, before The Guy got into our little playing group, Mr. Paladin and I were talking in party chat about making cash quickly and he started in on how he was picking up mining with the gold average price for a stack of copper at about a gold each.

Just read what followed:


Right after that was taken I threatened to post it to the blog. Unfortunately I don't have time stamp on my chats... if I did, you would have seen a time lag between the comment about mount cost and the paladin statement... it was at least 30 seconds. I didn't have time to type out the obligatory, "Um, hon, you are a PALLY." before he caught his mistake.

I'm being nice and blanking out the name... if he wants to comment, he's more than welcome to. And yes, my shaman is named Ember. Seemed fitting.

Gorillidan Crutch

This is yet another Spark Post off something over at Aspect of the Hare today... and its not even a regular post! No, its something from the comments section on this post. And I couldn't agree with Pike more. I tested out a gorilla for three levels. Its just not to my liking, I felt that it was actually too easy to play.

I mean the AoE grind is fun, I will admit that... but um, that's why I have a paladin. No joke. Di is an AoE Prot Paladin because I like to drag her out and go AoE things. It also is a nice break from dealing with three hard hitting things at once on a cat because the hunter accidentally got in a little over her head - it happens more frequently than you'd think with Tzia and Ruka.

When that happens I have to carefully de-tangle the mess before the fourth and fifth adds jump in. Ruka can handle three, even four if we manage to lock it down in a trap, but five will end up getting the kitty killed even if we've dropped three already. I know that's her limit if I don't have a heal ticking on her from the start... and pulls like the one I describe are not planned a lot of the time, usually because I misjudged the social aggro radius of the mobs and got more than what I wanted.

Threat management without killing pet... its something every hunter learns and at times hunters will really push the limits and see just how far one pet can go before you know you are at your skill breaking point. And it can be different for each pet. Back before boars lost the ability to hold threat against a kara geared 70 hunter, I could go up to seven or eight if I really pushed it on the pig. But I built that and learned it over time.

Those with gorillas throw the pet at seven or eight to start off, and it works. It works really, really well. However, I fear we may see so many new hunters using a crutch called gorilladin that when it comes time to try and raid and the like they will have a harder time understanding aggro management. Aggro management from a pet that really can dish out a ton of threat versus a tank who may not be able to generate as much (for reasons of bad rotation, or just not understanding his/her role very well yet) will get the hunter in trouble.

In my experience, it was damn near impossible to pull mobs off the gorilla after a little bit of aggro was gained. This is not the case in longer fights in raids or bad pulls in instances where the hunter jumps up the meter in leaps and bounds and is forced to FD just to keep from yanking the boss or heavy hitting trash onto them. I learned that very early on when I was working with a cat. Sometimes I would get ahead of Ruka or Lilith and I would have to scale back a bit to keep it from coming to me. I quickly learned the same thing in most groups if I had a tank that couldn't quite maintain what the pet could for aggro while I was soloing.

Some hunters in the past, prior to the introduction of gorillidans didn't learn that concept. I remember arguing with one hunter that supposedly had a 70 warrior, who said that a pet or a hunter could not pull threat off a tank. I almost died laughing. I flat out told him his hunters were bad, sucked at their jobs, and if they couldn't pull threat off a tank, they weren't playing right. Hunters definitely can pull threat. A large chunk of the time we are working to maintain steady DPS without pulling aggro.

Gorillas are hard to pull aggro off. Most tanks aren't. If new hunters never really learn that, things could get very messy very quickly. And since hunters already deal with a giant mess called huntard, I can see a few hunters screwing up royally (who am I kidding - a lot of hunters) which would make it harder on the rest of us to actually be accepted in groups, and we already have a hard enough time as it is.