Please tell me you saw that!

Time for another long post where I talk way too much in order to make a minor point! Huzzah! (if anyone asks I'm trying to improve my writing skills - true story)

I'm not an extraordinary player, I'll comfortably admit that. I tend to have issues with severe tunnel vision, the occasional zone-out moment in the middle of fights, and a high chance of button mashing when under stress.

I have watched a lot of warcraft videos where hunters (and other classes as well) have pulled off astounding moves that I could have never comprehended, things which make me "I wish I could do something like that."

I have also had a few of those moments where I have managed to pull of one of those aforementioned astounding moves by pure coincidence and must live with the knowledge that I will never be able to do it again, and all I can do is hope that someone else saw me do it. The most memorable of these moments for me was back in Wrath of the Lich King, during the Anub'arak fight, of the Trial of the Crusader raid.

First, some background information. Basically the Anub'arak fight consisted of several phases (and I'm not trying to be very accurate or detailed here so some information might not be exactly as it was at the time). The 1st phase was effectively a tank and spank fight, however, one raid member was required to shoot down ice orbs which would leave icy patches on the ground. These icy patches were needed for the 2nd phase where Anub'arak would burrow underground, being replaced by adds. The adds needed to be tanked on top of the icy patches to prevent them from also burrowing underground and causing general chaos. Also during this phase, Anub would move around underground creating a large (and very painful) trail of spikes which would target and chase players, getting faster and faster each second. If he caught a player, they would take a large chunk of damage and get thrown in the air, landing once more on the spikes. Not a very nice way to go. The only way to stop him in this phase was the run over an icy patch, which would cause him to get stuck momentarily, then pick a new target and resume chasing. After about a minute this phase would end and you would go back to phase 1 and so on and so forth until his health was low enough to enter the last phase.

During raids with my guild I tend to be the all round handy-man sort of player and as a result often get picked to do the perhaps less exciting work. This is in part due to most of the people I raid with having roughly the same co-ordination and raid awareness as a blind, three-legged dog - the enthusiasm is there for sure, but things never quite go the way they're supposed to. My guild leader knew that I could both understand and follow instructions without him needing to repeat himself or remind me of what I was supposed to be doing each time. It was pretty much "Dali, do this" and I say "okay!" and do it.

During the Anub fight, I was mostly on ice patch duty. Shooting down the ice orbs in the appropriate places and monitoring them throughout the fight to ensure there are enough down in the right places at the right times. I quite enjoyed this - while I didn't get to take part in the bulk of the first phase fighting, I knew that the job needed to be done and I was someone who could do it well (and had a high enough single shot damage output to do it quickly as well).

During one of those fights, in the second phase, I found myself being the sudden target of Anub. The only problem with this being that Anub was between me and the ice patches I had just shot down and there were no orbs nearby to save myself. My only choice was the turn around and run back the other way and hope that I could find some way to save myself.

With Anub right on my tail I spot it, a single icy orb, but the chances of being able to shoot down an orb, have it fall to ground and then run across it (with the 80% speed reduction debuff that they gave you) before Anub caught me, were pretty slim. In a blind moment of panic I relied solely on my hunter instincts to guide the way.

I ran towards the orb,
I shot it down,
I spun on the spot,
and I disengaged - right over the icy patch, just before Anub caught me, landing safely on the other side and catching Anub in the patch, making him reset his target.

Now this may not seem all that extraordinary, but I could count the number of times I had used disengage on one hand, and most of those times it was in a panic or by accident and generally wound up with me disengaging off a cliff and meeting an unfortunate (yet slightly hilarious) end.

I remember standing on the other side of the icy patch watching him start chasing someone else, heart racing from my earlier panic thinking, "Did I actually just do that?" Next thing over vent I hear the raid leader, "I saw you do that, Dali, that was awesome." Once the boss was dead cue me running out of my room and into the lounge where my brother (also in the raid) was playing. "DID YOU SEE ME! DID YOU SEE ME DO THAT?! THAT WAS AMAZING! I AM THE GREATEST HUNTER ALIVE!!!" With a gratuitous amount of me telling him exactly what I did in great detail. (What can I say, I get easily excited about little things)

NEVER AGAIN have I been able to use disengage like that since. I have tried and tried, but alas to no avail. On the other hand, I have used disengage a lot more often ever since.

And I almost never disengage off of cliffs anymore.

Almost never.

If anyone has any similar stories I'd love to hear them, what is YOUR greatest accidental hunter (any any other class) move that you have never been able to repeat?

Happy Hunting!

Learning how to Hunter: Part One

When I hit level 70 and started taking part in more dungeons and raids, I quickly began to realise that my regular play style wasn't really suitable anymore, especially with the emphasis in BC dungeons being placed on Crowd Control.

When I took part in my first ever real dungeon group (fortunately with some guildies) I got asked to  trap something, and after a miserable attempt to manage this (I got the mob trapped... about 2 seconds before everything else was dead and the tank pulled it) I realised that I had quite a few vital things to learn about being a true hunter and I needed to learn them very quickly if I intended to continue to take part in these sort of things.

So I began looking at researching my class properly. Just having a glance around at a few resources for specific things wasn't good enough. I needed to really focus on making myself a better player all round. So I found myself turning to one of the pillars of hunter society, BigRedKitty.

BigRedKitty was one of THE hunter bloggers of the time. His blog was hilarious, informative and interesting. It was entirely thanks to him, that I became the hunter I am today, and it was a sad day when he announced he was leaving Warcraft, and blogging about Warcraft for the foreseeable future. He taught me about shot rotations, stat priorities, raiding and dungeoning, hunting for rare-spawns and all manner of other hunter skills and tricks.

One of the most important things I ever learnt from BigRedKitty, that I have never forgotten, was how to chain trap. (I also learnt that "hunters are the superior class, foshizzle"as he would say, but that's irrelevant for now)

Long before trap launcher (but after the dreaded feign-trapping skill that so many vanilla hunters had to learn) there was chain trapping. The art of taking your target away from the group and keeping it trapped for a long as you possibly could.

With BigRedKitty's guide to chain trapping at hand, I wandered around the lengths of Arathi Highlands slowly but surely, pulling raptor after raptor into freezing traps until I pull one raptor into at least 2-3 traps in a row. When the time came once more to enter a dungeon, and the announcement of "Dali, trap the square" came over party chat, I found myself putting my new found skills to the test.

There have been only a few times during my years of playing Warcraft where I have felt such a sense of achievement as when I managed to pull of a successful chain trap in a dungeon for the first time, and subsequent times as well. Chain trapping became of my favourite things to do as a hunter in a dungeon - I had a greater purpose then just dpsing. I was bringing something else, a skill that not everyone could do, which was highly valued in groups. I will admit I got incredibly jealous when we had a mage in the group cause they would often get CC priority over myself. But you win some, you lose some.

I was rather disheartened when Wrath came out and chain trapping (or indeed any CC) was not essential anymore. While some groups still asked for it, over time it became a dying skill, and by the time Cataclysm came out and the trap launcher was released it was rarely done anymore.

I feel that Chain Trapping was one of those skills which really defined being a hunter. Being able to go into a group and chain trap without hesitation was a great feeling, even more so when it was acknowledged by others in the group as a job well done. These days I sometimes feel like there are no more of these defining skills which made you take your class and their abilities seriously, where what you can bring to a group is an expectation and not something that you can take pride in, knowing that you poured time and effort into learning something, and you can see the result right there in front of you.

As corny as it may sound, the day I successfully chain trapped in a dungeon for the first time, was the day I strated to feel like a true hunter. 

Ah nostalgia :)

Happy Hunting!