Dusting off an Old Character
Oh hey — I have a blog! *cough*
If you’ve been around here awhile, you may remember Kaet — my second character to 70 and my ‘Alliance main’. She’s a dwarf lass with a penchant for those tiny jewels of the hunter world: crabs. For reasons unknown, she has three of the little suckers: a red crab named Tibri, a blue crab named Frore, and a white crab named Niffis.
Unfortunately, my focus since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion launched has been primarily on Mania (my Horde main) and a series of alts on both sides. At some point I took Kaet out to Borean Tundra long enough to get half a level … but that’s it. She doesn’t even have a dual talent specs yet.
But my urge to play Mania on the live realms is low — I’m tired of logging in for dailies and most of my WoW energy is taken up with eagerly anticipating the Cataclysm beta. So in the meantime, out comes Kaet! But man oh man, there is so much to do before she’s ready to go anywhere …
First thing I noticed was that she’s still carrying a quiver. I stacked her ammo up, dumped the arrows into my main pack and grabbed an empty Netherweave Bag from my bank to fill the slot.
(By the way, one of the things I miss the most about quivers is the ability to see how much ammo I have left without checking my bags. Instead I sacrifice an Action Bar slot for ammo so I have a number right in front of my nose. Otherwise I forget. And running out of ammo is so embarrassing!)
My skills seemed to be in good shape, but my talents (and all my pets’ talents) were reset. I went for a straight Beast Mastery build — all 61 points in the BM tree. I probably shouldn’t have, but I forgot that I was level 70 instead of 80 and by the time I remembered that I was ‘short’ 10 points, I’d spent everything. Ah, well — we’ll see how it plays, anyway.
But that reminded me that I needed to set up my Interface options the way I prefer. In particular, I had to turn on Preview Talent Changes (a little late!), turn on the Equipment Manager, set the Aggro warning to Always, and turn on Auto Self Cast. (I’m sure there’s a good reason that Auto Self Cast doesn’t default to on, but I usually die once per character before I remember that I need to set it.) I also re-arranged my Action Bars to match Mania’s configuration. (I keep most of my characters pretty similar so I can find things.)
Then back to talents! With three crabs, spec’ing the pets was an interesting experiment. I aimed Tibri (red) more towards damage (within the Tenacity tree), Frore (blue) entirely at defense, and Niffis (white) somewhere in the middle. There’s not really a lot of room in the tree for differentiating three crabs, though. I really do wish we could assign pet talent trees at will. If we could, then Tibri would (of course) be Ferocity, Frore would stay Tenacity, and Niffis would go Cunning.
Unfortunately after all of that I was out of playing urge. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually get her our of town.
In the meantime, it was just fascinating to look back on all the things that have changed during the Wrath expansion.
15 Comments
lol Mania. I took my JC hunter Helga out recently and was pretty bummed at how it too so long to kill anything in Borean Tundra. She is, of course, specced BM and last I left her she was level 70 and entering Northend. She never even completed half of BC. Long story short, when I finally hit 73, I went to the trainer and realized I hadn’t trained her for about 5 levels! Talk about a gold drain! All her 500+ g went into training and a couple of upgrades. But she’s starting to be a little killing machine and is now 75. So nice to have Kill Shot.
Moral of the story, don’t forget to go to your trainer!
It will actually be interesting to see what they do with skill training in Cata. With ranks going away, they’ll likely need to redistribute the levels we gain abilities to give us reasons to head back to the trainer every few levels.
About seeing your ammo quantity. I suggest add-on TitanBar or FuBar. It’s narrow strip on top of your screen, where you can select allkind of info to show – ammo, money (active char and alts), XP to next level, gear damage etc etc. Very useful.
I agree with Phool on the Titan bar, very little in screen use but the info it has standard is a lifesaver. I have a few titanbar addons so I can check other stuff at a single glance. Easy to set up for alts, just tell it to copy over from any toon on any server and adjust as needed.
Now if only the WoW interface would have an option to make Interface changes for ALL toons at once or to copy them over from an existing toon, ah well… another one for the Cata wishlist I guess.
I got hit with daily burnout too, and levelled up a new alt who is now facing the same daily burnout. *sigh* WTB Cata-beta or Cata release date. ;)
As far as ammo goes – Nim’s an engineer, so I keep 4000 arrows on me these days, plus a full stack of saronite. I *have* actually run out on trash (once), but the stack of saronite meant I could immediately restock to a full 4000 (with another 6000 where that came from).
Although, looking at it, I’m thinking I’ll actually burn the gold and frost badges to become a gnomish engineer and learn to create Iceblade Arrows…
I actually dusted off my quiver and equipped it. That way it shows up when I’m firing my bow… And it’s purdy! :oD
I dumped all my points in BM too at that level; should be fine.
Also, if you splash out on a Logitech G15 keyboard, the LCD info panel actually shows ammo quantity when playing a hunter in WoW. (I usually forget to look at that panel, but the info is there).
Now that’s specialized!
The crabs remind me of a recent WoW comic contest submission.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/community/comics/gallery.html#336
OK, that just sends you to the most recent comic… http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/community/comics/gallery.html#327
Ah, I always have trouble readjusting to a character that I haven’t been on for a long time.
Since I have so many alts, I’ll usually go for long periods where I’ll play one and ignore the others, then swap. By the time I get back to some I’ve completely forgotten the class or what I was even doing in terms of quests, etc.
It can be very disorienting. xD
I’m reactivating after 16 months. Gonna be weird to return so I understand.
Interesting…on my hunter (who’s become my main these days), I choose to use a quiver, and it’s always full. I usually stock it half full of saronite razorheads and half full of iceblade arrows. I use Ammo-matique as an ammo management addon. There’s also usually a “letter” full of both types of arrow in my mailbox at any given time.
I’ve still got a dragonscale ammo pouch in my bank just in case a gun upgrade drops for me.
Though…I’m not looking forward to potentially having to change all my stock over to bullets should that happen!
I recently decided to play my mage again. I was bored of doing dailies and felt like i need a change of scene, so i got heirloom shoulders and sent ‘em to my mage and went into looking for random (Which usually takes for ages on my alts (My mage was 38 when i went back om him three days ago)). It actually found a group in around 5 minutes and it was Maraudon…I was so excited! This was the first time i had ever been into Maraudon and was finally getting my change of scene being able to explore a, in my eyes, brand new dungeon and thought i would never get bored. Four days later i’m at level 43 and getting bored of the purple crystal instance (The one with all the Satyr in it) and i went on LFR again after school and got my next wing of Maraudon.
Actually i told a lie, i was half way through 38 and those 10 needed bars for a ding i got through SM Cath and as a mage that i would frequently log into while leveling my hunter, i wasn’t bad at playing a mage…But after 6 months of gathering dust and getting into Cath in such a fast queue, i found myself just pressing randoms spells on the action bar…So i kind of understand that feeling of disorganisation on a character that hasn’t been used for a while.
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