03/02/2020

More Nelf Huntering

I continue to work on my nelf hunter because playing Alliance again makes for a nice change of pace. She's up to level 24 now.

I spent a lot of time doing pretty much every single quest in Darkshore. Now there's a zone where I'll fully admit that I'm blinded by nostalgia, because I always remember it so fondly from my early days in the game... yet on redoing it I can't get over the stupendous amount of running up and down the road you have to do. I swear it's worse than the Barrens.

I guess I didn't mind so much back in the day because I was too utterly enchanted by the world to worry about things like efficiency, and I had friends levelling with me that I could chat with during our time on the road. Nowadays it's just tiring.

I also made the trip to Stormwind to do the Deadmines. Doing the pre-quests for that was an interesting reminder of all the little details that private servers get wrong: When I got to the step where I had to hunt down the Defias Messenger, I found him right away, but unlike the last time I met him on a private server, the little bugger was actually running and I couldn't catch him!

Eventually he dived into a whole cave full of Defias, including the notorious Pillagers, and I had to hit the brakes to clear out some room for myself. Then I waited until he had finished his business inside the cave and foolishly came strolling out again, thinking he was safe. That felt like a little mini-adventure of its own.

The actual Deadmines run after that was relatively uneventful, though I think it's noteworthy that our tank was a retribution paladin and that setup actually worked surprisingly well. Of course it helped that she was the highest level in the group and we were all very well-behaved, always letting her pull and giving her a chance to get aggro.

At 19 my hunter was actually the highest level damage dealer at the time, what with the other two being casters who were only level... 16? 17? I forget exactly, but I was definitely worried that we'd struggle to kill the last boss. Struggle we did, by wiping once, but we did get him down in the end. Things did get very slow towards the boat though, as the casters faced a lot of resists and it basically came down to me slowly shooting things to death by myself.

This meant that despite of having started with a full quiver, I noticed that I was almost out of arrows by the end, and decided to start preserving ammo by meleeing things on the easier trash pulls, to make sure I wouldn't suddenly run out at a point where it actually mattered. Being the seemingly dumb hunter meleeing things felt very old-school.

One interesting note related to grouping in general is that I've found the LFG channel on Hydraxian Waterlords to be pretty whack. On Pyrewood Village it's rare that people try to hold off-topic conversations in there, and if it happens it usually doesn't last long, not least because the channel is always very busy with actual LFG requests that would make it hard to have an unrelated chat.

On HW though, people are almost always chattering away about some nonsense in LFG, as if there weren't enough other channels for that. Last night they were on politics when I joined and talked about the taste of human flesh by the time I left for the evening. And here I thought people on roleplaying servers were supposed to be the sensible ones.

Finally, another piece of hunter-specific news: I couldn't quite get the idea of getting a unique cat skin for my pet out of my head, and became somewhat infatuated with the idea of taming Humar the Pridelord, who has a distinctive look that literally isn't shared by a single other mob in the game.

Undeterred by the many Wowhead comments about how he only spawns every eight hours or so and tends to be camped to hell and back, I jogged down to Ratchet to check under his special tree, and what do you know: He was right there, the very first time I looked.

So now I have two cats. I didn't plan to level two pets on this character, particularly two pets of the same family, but I'm feeling strangely attached to Spotty the saber and am not sure I'll be able to part with her. Then again, this is an RP server - maybe I can be a crazy cat lady?

1 comment:

  1. GO CAT LADY!!!

    Seriously, LookingForGroup is the same way on Myzrael. Drives some people nuts, but I tolerate it. We do have a few religious nuts who love to randomly post Biblical quotes in Trade Chat, however, which usually draws responses of "Why are you talking about Thrall on an Alliance chat channel?"

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