Soon enough an invite will come your way, hopefully from someone you know, or someone in a pvp guild.

You’ll join a raid.  Amidst the tumult of chatter, the signal to noise ration is very low.  But the signals are critical.

“Open” will be typed, probaby by half the raid.  This means you need to click on the AV battlemaster, which is a feat in and of itself, cause so many fools are standing directly on him.  You need to be smart, and position yourself in a nice spot so you can catch his hoof that’s sticking out, or something.

Once everyone is open, (and you can’t open without the premade av enabler mod, which used to be horde only by the by) you will have a couple of false starts, as people close, or get different bg’s.

Eventually you’ll drop in, and people begin spamming the afk macro.  This is a subtly made emote that makes people think they’ve been reported afk, and they have to type in /afk deny or they’ll be kicked.  So they type it… they type /afk and drop.  Then the ones that missed this premade enter.

When the gates open, the horde hit the ground running, frothing at the mouth and hungry for blood.

The common strat is groups 1-2-3 go AS-Rush, group 4 caps Stormpike grave and holds the bridge, 5-6 and any pugs rip balinda and fall back to recap the towers, 7-8 heavy D-Fens.  The groups get balanced on this strat, and the groups are *Before* the bg drops.  Once you’re in, the groups change.

Out 0f the past 14 or so premades, mostly puglings shouting in trade, we’ve won about 11, only losses were due to heavy lag, or superfast zerg rushes that get the allies less honor than us, even though they won.

about 5 hours, about 20k honor, and a new set of season one hunter shoulders and my plan is starting to tic tic tic.

 I picked up a Don Santos Famous hunting rifle for 550g, set me back on the flyer but its worth it.

 It was my b-day a few days ago, and to treat myself, I went and picked up 1.2 gigs of ram or so.

Until that ram, I was running on 512, shattrath on a high pop was a nightmare.  Now, with 1.8g of ram – smooth as butter.

 All of a sudden my dps, arena and pvp performance are all jacked through the roof.

 Playing a long time with heavy lag is akin to training with weights… once the weights come off so do the gloves.

 I finally xferred my priest and my warrior from the old server, so my self-sustaining ecosystem is back online.

 Life in wow is good

With my mage, just after TBC came out, it was a blast, and a new experience.  With my priest, spec’d shadow for leveling, the experience was very similar.  My warrior made it to zangermarsh, but stopped there (due to being left behind during an xfer)

Now my hunter is level 63, and I’m about halfway through zanger, and I have to say, the soloing capabilities of the hunter are unmatched by any of these classes I played previously.  He dies less, levels faster, and can easily handle 3-4 mobs without popping a sweat.

Things that overloaded my mage, or that my mage could only survive by redlining to the edge are childs play for my hunter.

All the quests sofar, to Zabra’jin I have solo’d.  Including the 2-3 man group quests.  At 62 I solo’d a level 63 elite.  Took a bit of planning and I sacrificed my pet, but I did it.

And unless I’m surprised hard by higher level characters, I tend to hold my own real well in world pvp.

My mining is up to 370, my engineering at 325.

My plan is as follows.  HFP -> Zanger (done) -> Terrokar -> Nagrand (take me into 65-66) to BEM (67-68), probably to finish off in Netherstorm.

At that skill level, you want to be tapping Mithril nodes to skill up.  I ran a circuit around the edge of Shimmering Flats and Tanaris, then when my skill got up to around 250, I headed west to Un’goro crater, and rode clockwise around the edge.

For a change of pace I headed to Thorium point, in Searing Gorge, and entered the caves by Dreadmaul rock, also good for thoriums if you don’t mind ogres.

As a consequence of all this mining, I was able to skill up engineering to 300, and I have plenty of steam tonks, widgets, bullets, ultra-safe-transporters, and all manner of hilarious and fun junk, with enough bars, huge emeralds and an azerothian diamond left over to make a nice profit on the AH.

I anticipate stepping through the Dark Portal tonight, ready to tap Fel Iron.

Ideally you want at least 35-40 like minded people, a core of which are dependable.

You want to have a highly visible and fair loot system, so that the folks in your guild know who did what and why.

Your loot system, dkp or ep/gp is your carrot and your stick.  You reward the behaviour you approve of; you punish, impartially the behaviour you want to discourage.

You need to know the expectations of your players and meet them, or at least address them.

You need to know your players, their alts, their specs, what they are capable off and what they can’t do.

You need to take an interest in their welfare.

You need to be calm, impartial, and in control.

You also have to be good.  Good at your class, preferably good at others, and well-versed in game lore.

When peeps pipe up about what loot is better than what loot, you need to know the answer, and be able to justify it.

You need to be hardcore.  You need to raid-lead, step up and keep going, and you need to be going *especially* when the going is tough.

You need to reach, stretch.  When the raid is failing, when the sky is falling, you need to contact officers in other guilds ’cause you have a good rep on the server and are mutually respected.

You need to mojo, cajole, force majeure things to *happen*.

You need to schmooze.

Its a superhuman effort to get 25 men/women, prepped, repaired, ready and focus’d to FAIL and fail again as they *try* to learn new content.  You need to be ready to pay a large repair bill, guzzle down pots and stand up, rip, or heal your way through the wall.

When people make mistakes, you don’t point fingers, you dont break down you STEP UP, take note, have educated plans to improve and focus on improving.

Know that you *will* get there.  I have done it, when I was an officer on Anetheron.  I wanted our first shot at Gruuls to happen and I flexed my full mojo to *make* it happen.

I had to run roughshod over a few people, maybe push some people to far, but we got that fucker down!

We were on borrowed time.  We xferred and have been thrashing.

I myself have kept my mojo in check, eschewed officership and political power, and just play my alt mostly.  Its fun times.

And I feel the desire to take the reins, begin to cajole, mojo and apply a bit of gentle pressure here and there, get to know others, their specs, their aspirations, xfer my healer and work on my tank and be a drive-shaft in a well-oiled raiding machine again.

Then I remember that summer is approaching, what with its flowers blooming and pretty girls and sunshine and well… hold that thought.

Figuring that I had to go to Sunken Temple anyways, I decided to get all the ST quests available.  Had I known how much travel time was required to accomplish this simple sounding goal, I would have just stopped with the class trink.

Theres a Tanaris chain, a Ferelas chain, and a Hinterlands chain as well as the class quest in Azshara.  You have to travel between these zones a lot, and in retrospect, wasn’t really worth it, although the hinterlands quest gives a nice Hunter helmet.

Having finally gotten all the available quests, I got my close-to-level-fifty-three self on the LFG channel, and auto-joined a group.

After some false starts we got a group together.  There was at least one other person that headed straight for the stone when we started that we managed to get rolling.  So often each member expects someone else to run to the stone, often dooming the group to failure before starting.

When we were all together running to the gate, I noticed that our group composition was interesting, 3 hunters, a warrior and a priest.  I told the group that I was a survivalist, and the other 2 hunters piped up with MM and BM… So we had all 3 specs.

So I learned that hunters of different specs synergize really well.  It helped that we had different pets; the MM hunter was giving us all Trueshot Aura and his wolf gave us Furious Howl.  I gave us Expose Weakness and my owl debuffed mobs with Screech.  The BM gave Inspiration and our dps was very strong.

All told, about 3 hours of preparation, 1.5 hours of the run itself netted me about a level, as well as a new helm and my class trinket.

Now I’m going to head to Felwood with some loose ideas about grinding Timbermaw rep for the epic trinket that gives you a little healing minion.

So I logged in, jumped up, queue’d for AV, and then rode out on my fine riding turkey (being a belf and all) and amused myself looking for fools to gank.  I was halfway to Southshore when my AV popped, so off I went.

 I always feel a bit embarrassed being lower than 37, 47, 57 etc, in this case 51.  I have the impression that others are looking at me, thinking ‘O gawd, who let that lowbie in here?’.

I had the impression that what I needed to do was go to the Wildpaw Cavern, and get the horde flag in there.  Now there are some tough pulls, and the mobs are 53-54, so its no joke doing a 4 mob pull of them.

Then I saw another hunter put his pet away, strip down, and run for it.  I thought, why not?  And tried my hand at the lemming technique.

 I was following bgchat, and keeping an eye on reinforcements (although I haven’t done the ‘new’ AV yet, so I wasn’t sure what that really meant) and continued to fling myself against the mobs in the cave.  I got close, but then got ressed and had to start over :/

The lemming technique was an excercise in fail.  But the horde were doing well for once, and someone summoned the Ice Lord (the big rock guy you summon with soldier flesh).

Then it happened.  In mid-lemming, a message flashed across my screen ‘Vann defeated 1/1′, and AV ended.  I was dissapointed cause I had not gotten my quest.  Or so I thought.

I handed in the quest I had just completed, which I though irrelevant, and lo and behold, the Ice Barb Spear!

So no more AV till 57 I think…

I made amazing noobish mistakes, like spending gold on the auction house to get a blue healing coif because I thought it looked nice, or rolling need on an archaedic stone ring of strength because, well it was a minor upgrade.

Then there was the time I jumped on a zeppelin to STV, whispered my other nooby buddy that I was ‘on an airboat omg!’, and fell off, to be subsequently eaten by a crocolisk.

Our casual guild, <Lazy Good for Nothing> eventually capped at 60, and we began looking into raiding.

We were absorbed by the <Necromongers>, and managed to wipe on the first boss in Molten Core a few times, before finally downing him.

We decided that queues to log in and the massive node hoggage on our high pop server, Crushridge, were FTL, and mass xferred to medium pop anetheron, to join <Incinerate> (which didnt work well for us), so we joined <Perdition>.

Perdition took us pretty far into pre-bc endgame.  I still have my T2 pants from Ragnaros, they’re a trophy that I’ll never vendor trash.

Soon we got to Vaelstrasz.  And not to be too cliche, he killed our Guild.

Done with raiding for the most part, we cooled our heals in a guild of no consequence till BC arrived.  I spent the time leveling a shadowpriest, at the time one of the kings/queens of pvp.

Then BC arrived, and we charged through the Dark Portal and had all kinds of fun leveling and rediscovering our mains.

We reformed ourselves into a raiding guild by the name of <Danse Macabre>.

During its initial formation, I piped up w/ some good suggestions at one point, and was summarily sentenced to be an officer.

We proceeded to arduously struggle our way through Karazhan.  When we finally had it on farm, I dusted off my priest, specced holy, and picked up the slack for end game healing, while simultaneously pushing forward into endgame w/ my mage.

My mage ran Karazhan so much he had King’s defender and Malchazeen, and both characters were exalted w/ Violet Eye.

The proverbial $h1+ hit the fan soon enough (carrying a guild of 30+ peeps for months trying to break into 25-man raiding got very tiresome) and some people began xferring off Anetheron (now critically low-pop) to Smolderthorn.

So I rerolled a hunter.  I had always wanted to play one, and it sounded fun.  Plus, I liked the idea of having a pet hanging around all the time, either being cute or being utterly deadly.

In this new paradigm of hunterhood, I’ve eschewed all responsibility – its nice to no longer be an officer and have people depend on me for stuffs…

Nice to just log on and just play the game for fun, even pretend to be a complete noob (pretend?!)

The intention of this blog is to document my adventures, as I slog my way back up to 70… and perhaps beyond.

Our story begins as my hunter hits level 51, and begins his quest for his Ice Barbed Spear… please stay tuned!