“Finishing” a character.

26 January 2010

First let be be a little off topic and mention that anyone trying out and/or leveling a hunter should read this post by Pike and commit it to memory. If you have a bad memory print it out and tape it to the side of your monitor. The number of hunters I’ve seen that ran out of ammo so they used melee weapons for the rest of the instance (or never bothered to use ranged attacks in the first place while rolling “Need” on cloth for the Stamina it had) is staggering.

I provide this link not because I think there’s anyone reading this blog who isn’t already reading Aspect of the Hare, but because it will give that post a little more Google Juice and maybe, just maybe, a new hunter will find it just a little bit faster.

</Public Service Announcement>

A while back I did a race change and turned Elume into a male human named Splatter. My reasons for doing so are worthy of a separate post, so I’ll give them one … eventually.

Splatter has come a long way, having been my main not once but on two separate occasions. He managed to be holy, disc, and shadow before this crazy thing called Dual Speccing existed.

And yesterday, as I bought/enchanted/gemmed some nifty new shoulders for him (Yes I know those are the DPS shoulders I chose them because they have better crit), that there really isn’t any more gear I can get for Triumph badges.

Oh sure, I still have an iLevel 200 item here or there that I might replace in a new Icecrown heroic, and there’s still Frost gear, but at 2/day that’s an incredibly long grind for a casual non-raider such as myself.

And I’m happy with his gear the way it is now, to be honest. I can heal my way through any heroic with varying levels of difficulty, but the bosses still die and wipes are quite uncommon even when grouped with “undergeared” or underskilled players. (It’s obviously harder in those cases, but hard does not equal impossible.) I can count the times I’ve gone OOM with NO way to get more mana back on one hand, and that’s with the usual go-go-go-chain-pull-everything attitude that’s often seen in PUGs these days.

I’ve reached this level before, most memorably on Splat – my namesake and amusingly enough another healer. I was raiding Kara at the time, and was more or less doing tank AND raid heals while our official raid healer (and raid leader, and tree tank extraordinaire) was bored and DPSing in her resto spec and gear.

Then Wrath hit, and a lot of things changed.

Splat is currently out to pasture. I’ll log onto her to do enchanting, but that’s more or less it for her. Heck, I moved Disenchant to the number 1 spot of her action bar just to speed things up!

I’m not sure if the same thing will happen with Splatter. He’s not retired, especially since I have several friends (and a wife) on Trollbane who can use a dependable healer now and then but will usually put up with me instead.

But I’m comfortable with where he is now.

And I have some alts that I enjoy leveling.

And frankly, the road to 80 looks a lot more fun than the gear grind that endgame has thrown me into.

Editorial