Archive for October, 2005

Well, I managed to complete one quest tonight, at least.

A trip to Ambermill to collect stuff from corpses. Died five or six times, but got it done.

My idea for this evening was to get a new pet. I tried a couple, but they were rubbish, so I’m back with Pooh.

(I did want to tame a lion… but I still don’t want to talk about that.)

Up to level sixteen.

Pooh’s now on ‘Best Friend’ status and has been a very good pet. It helps that he eats almost anything. Been doing quests for the Undead. Trouble with them is that they don’t have hunters, so I have jump on an airship back home every time I want to get some new skills. Or, indeed, go to the auction house.

Finally, I’d just like to leave with you a screen shot of the Wicker Man Festival.

Goodnight.

More.

Just… more.

What is there to say, really?

Garak is now officially my faithful friend.

I’ve gone to the Undead area to get quests, because all the ones I get given in The Barrens are too hard for me.

I’m still soloing, I’ve still not grouped with anyone.

Almost up top level fourteen.

I got on a ship to go to the neutral area of Booty Bay, but got scared so jumped off and got killed by something nasty in the water trying to swim back to shore.

There’s a centaur north-west of The Crossroads who doesn’t quite exist.

There are so few actual stories coming out my play this week that I’m really struggling to understand the hold it’s got on me. When I look back, it all seems so routine. All the quests are ones I did earlier this year with my first character. All the areas are familiar to me. I don’t have to look for anything, I just have to remember. Playing a hunter is also exactly the same type of play as playing a warlock. Ranged attacks and pet control.

It’s very strange. And slightly worrying.

I thought it was early afternoon.

Maybe mid-afternoon, at a push.

It’s gone six o’clock.

I’m still level twelve. I’m trying to get myself up to level one hundred in engineering so I can make myself some goggles.

I’m trying to avoid asking myself why.

I’m really hoping I get bored of it again soon.

All about pets.

I’ve discovered what the problem was. I thought making new pets happy would be a long term problem. But it’s not. It’s a lot simpler than that. What you have to do is stuff them full of food when you first tame them. Keep feeding them until they’re happy. And then when ‘happy’ dips down and becomes ‘content’ a little bit of food will perk them right back up.

So, that’s good. I understand the pet thing now. I understand loyalty (which increases when they’re happy) and levelling up and training and everything. So I like my hunter again now. No desire to jump ship and go druid.

I abandoned Bob the raptor on the road between Ogrimmar and Thunderbluff. I wanted some variety. (On a side note, I wish the ‘abandon’ option was called ‘set free’ or ‘send to live on a big, happy farm’ or something. ‘Abandon’ just sounds so cruel.) I got a plainstrider called Orville, who was all right, but a bit unexciting. I let him go because I wanted a lion, but it turned out all the lions were too high level for me to tame. So I ran down the road without a pet until, close to Thunderbluff, I happened across a wolf.

Me orc, you wolf.

Perfect.

So now I have a wolf called Garak, who is superb. He’s fast and tough and he bites anything I tell him to. Good stuff. And he barks and helps and even sometimes howls for no reason. I love him.

And why was I running between Ogrimmar and Thunderbluff? Because I hadn’t been there before, so I couldn’t get public transport. And I needed to go to Thunderbluff to get gun training. I made a rough boomstick, you see, using my engineering skills. And I wanted to use it. Which meant running half-way across the continent because it turns out hunters can’t use guns by default. I thought they could, but it seems not. And the only way to learn to use them is to be taught bysome cow in Thunderbluff. But I levelled up along the way, learned about pets and found my wolf, so it was all okay in the end.

And my boomstick does, indeed, go boom. Excellent.