They're giving away my Scatter Shot

There’s lots of talk in Hunter circles in the last couple of days about Beta changes. Key points are:

• Aimed Shot - This shot will now be instant cast, its damage/effect/cooldown will remain unchanged.
• Scatter shot - This will now be an 11-point Survival talent.
• Readiness - This will now be the 21-point Marksmanship talent.
• Trap Mastery - This will now be the 41-point Survival talent.
• Surefooted is swapping places with T.N.T. (so Surefooted is now in tier 2)

… and everyone appears to be happy. However, there is a (silent) group who won’t be. That’s the MM brigade and the decision over scatter shot is - well it stinks.

For a long time now we’ve been packaged off as a PvP group and the BM/SV have been hailed as the hunter kings. We’re just a quirky bunch that ‘can’t cut it in raids and instances.’

I’m going to come back to that attitude in a later post because someone around here needs to redress the balance.

We have a couple of tricks up our sleeves for group runs that the BM/SV brigade would die for – and now they’re licking their lips at being handed one of them on a plate. Instead of it being an unreachable 21 points into MM they can now pick up this candy in the SV tree to where it’s been moved.

Let me give you a quick scenario: The team is facing Moroes. He goes down third after say Lady Berrybuck and Dreuger. Daris is kept on ice by the hunter and Catriona is shackled to wrap the action.

Chain trapping is an art form. You have to keep Daris out of the action (so no FD) while everything is cracking off. Trap ends, cd is still not up – so what do you do? Scatter shot, wing clip, kite and trap. A great combination and my record has been to keep him going for six traps in one rather prolonged fight. At the same time I’m pumping out a significant amount of damage on the relevant targets.

Our only other ace up the sleeve is silencing shot. Don’t you just love to watch a BM hunter sweat when he’s given a caster to trap.

Scatter shot is one of the tricks that sets MM hunters apart from the rest and now Blizz want to give it away. The reason for the lack of outcry about this is that MM has been driven so hard into PvP that everyone and his uncle who wants a hunter is rolling BM.

Come on Blizz – instead of firing a scatter shot in to the hunter talent tree give a bit more thought to those MM hunters that still like to raid and run instances and have the skills to hold down a place.

Care home for Nightelves

So that's where all those deleted elf chars go to.

Me and Mrs Draigg took ourselves off to America for two weeks in the summer and I snapped this picture between San Diego and Phoenix while passing a snowbirds site (where all the Americans from the north go to escape the cold winter).

A passing vehicle did me a nice favour!

Just a bit of weekend fun while I get my head round the latest hunter bluepost which says Beta is taking Scatter Shot out of MM and putting it in survival.

My views will follow once my anger cooldown is up.

Magical Noob Moments

We’ve all had them. The queston is: what do we learn?

While rep questing in Winterspring I’m currently spending some quest downtime in Darnassus and while lugging bags full of rugged leather to the AH I was whispered by a level 10 hunter who was frantic with worry.

“How do I feed my pet?”

“You give him some meat.”

“How do you do that?”

“Click on the food and click on the Feed Pet symbol. It’s in your spellbook.”

“My what?”

And so followed a short lesson on some very basic basics for the guy.

However, my seriously off-the-wall Noob Moment came late in life. At level 70 in fact. Honestly. No I still can’t believe it either. So there we are gathered in Gruuls facing the handsome four.

Raid leader: “Draigg, MD Blindeye to Roth please.”

Me (in my brain): “MD? What’s that?”

Everything goes off and my MD target is causing carnage in places where he shouldn’t be. A frantic whisper to a hunter buddy on the raid and I realised I’d never come across misdirect let alone learn it from my trainer.

Raid leader: "Draigg?”

Me: “Sorry, got a problem with that just now.”

I know, I know - economical with the truth there, but the raid leader can get a tad tetchy sometimes and I was having enough trouble coming to terms with such a screw-up, let alone allowing him to join in the castigation.

Another hunter picked up the role and guess where I took my highly embarrassed self off to as soon as we had finished? Yup, the trainer.

It's almost as good as - but not quite - when I first got flight form on my druid. Jumping off high places and then hitting the flight form button during the 'death dive' is a way of celebrating (apparently). Unfortunately I hit the cat shape shift button. Very messy and someone in our guild then created a char called Splatcat. It's still on the rosta. Hmm.

So back to my original question: what do we learn? Well hopefully to treat others caught in Magical Noob Moments with a little understanding because we've all had them - haven't we?

Waiting for the King

So we in Wowland have hit the Great Lull.

As I trawl through some of the blog world and chat to others online it seems we’re all waiting - breath held - for the arrival of the Lich King.

Of course the Beta-boomers are busy thrashing away on our behalf, continually getting bounced off line (BigRedKitty has some eye-watering anecdotes on this front) and helping iron out all the glitches

/bow to them

Personally though I’d rather wait until it comes online for real and I can then dash off to play in a bright, new shiny world.

Meanwhile what to do? Our guild has cleared Kara several times now and poked our nose into ZA, but it seems everyone’s got the fidgets and can’t really get stuck into anything.

So I’ve taken off on a rep chase to pass away some time. After all, if we’re going off to the chill of Northrend in November what better mount to have than a Wintersaber. Especially since we can’t use our flying mounts for seven levels.

Of course the quest chain for this is arduous and, frankly, not very entertaining. You kill bears and chillwinds for their meat, blast Winterfall Ursas and Shamans into next year and finish off on the giant Frostmaul elites (if you’ve managed to get honoured and grabbed that quest as well).

Then it’s just grinding out these three quests for 32xp. Still the rugged leather and green items make it worthwhile at the AH and I even had a ‘purple’ axe drop which will eventually do very nicely for my Shaman, Santanna, currently bobbling along at lvl 25.

However, I try not to ruin things for the level 50s questing in the area and will make myself scarce if necessary – though one Draeni was more than happy for my intervention. He was being chased across the snowy wastes by six frostsaber huntresses snapping at his tail.

To take the tedium out of it, I’ve worked out that about a thousand rep a day is enough to grab the mount in time for WotLK and then I can enter Northrend in majestic style.

Occupying our time in the Great Lull is certainly calling for some lateral thinking.

Meanwhile a picture of me and Bukowski taking a breather in Winterspring

Just looking

At the moment I'm poking my head out of the den to see just how all this works.
Brave new world? Hmm. Maybe - but lets finish getting the graphics and links done first.
Then perhaps we'll come out of our hideaway.