The Huntress Raleena
I’m sure everyone remembers their first, magical steps into Azeroth. Fresh with the glow of rolling your first character and now-well, now what? I suppose that yellow exclamation mark might mean something… So, a few minutes later, you’re killing boars or something and you’re forever hooked, right? Right!?
Not everyone. The first MMORPG I played was Guild Wars. I love the look (and that there is no subscription fee) but the lack of depth to the game ended up killing it for me. Enter World of Warcraft. I had been playing the Warcraft games since the first one. I was familiar with the world and the high quality of Blizzard games, but I wasn’t too keen on a subscription based game. Because S. wanted to, I picked up a trial disc and installed it.
From the very beginning I was drawn to the night elves, even in Warcraft III, so, naturally, I rolled a Night Elf and chose druid. Entered the world of Shadowglen and WTF!?! Since when did Disney buy out Blizzard? I was… less than thrilled. After about ten minutes, I stop, turn to S. and say, “Go ahead and play if you want. This isn’t my kind of game at all.”
So, I don’t know, I go read a book or play something on my Xbox and later look over to see what she’s doing. Northshire Abbey is not quite so Disney as Shadowglen. And she’s not killing boars, but bandits! Perhaps I was a bit too quick to judge after all. I didn’t want to play that druid again, oh that was terrible!, but something else. Hmmm… if the rest of the world isn’t soo terribly cartoony, I can probably get through the first few levels as a Night Elf… what’s this hunter class all about? Okay, pets… dual wielding… let’s give it a shot! (Unintentional and unfunny pun, ignore it)
Another opening cinematic and Raleena is standing in the middle of Shadowglen and sent to kill boars and cats. I was mildly annoyed to find out I didn’t get a pet until level 10 (not that that takes long). While I tried a few of the beast mastery talents out, I was always interested in the Survival tree. Leveling with a mage, neither of us knowing much about the game, or agro, or kiting, or trapping, or sheeping, etc., having the melee survivability was quite nice. And Wyvern Sting was just a heck of a lot of fun.
I did the raid thing for a while (“/yell Tranquilizing Shot HIT! Next shot…”), but got a little bored with it. Did some alt leveling, switched to a shadow priest, did some more alt leveling, BC hit, switched to a shaman, did some more… you get the idea. Raleena has dinged 70, and I’ve been slowly working on clearing quests. I’ve got a white theme going (white hair, swift frostsaber, snowy griffon) that means I’m leveling a level 60 frostsaber stalker now. She is called Yuki, which is Japanese for Snow according to Wikimedia. I think I might get one of the winterfall owls because they’re white, too.
Gear is a constant issue. I’m specced Survival even though I don’t have the gear to make it really, really awesome in groups (only 530 agility). My personal DPS is not at all shabby (about 450 +pet), but it isn’t ready for much more than easy heroics or Karazhan. I’m not sure 
how much I’m going to be able to improve that. I’d finish out leatherworking and make the BoP set, but it is not survival gear (and is not pretty). Given the difficulties in winning AV I’ve found post-2.4, I won’t be getting much PVP gear on any of my characters. I’m certainly open to suggestions-good gear that looks good, no clown suits!
More so than any of my other characters, I’ve made gear choices for Raleena with a strong aesthetic influence, even sacrificing DPS for it (though not in raids). My favorite gear, pre-bc, 
was the Black Dragonscale set which I couple with the Ancient bone bow-wicked looking, wicked. I haven’t found much since that is awesome. I quite like the look of Lohn’Goran, but it isn’t a great bow past level 70 instances. If I’m remembering correctly, the red Dragonstalker set is shaman mail (at the very least, the shoulders are) which is sad, because that would be pretty awesome as well. Dragonstalker’s in black would be OMG TEH AWESOME but doesn’t exist. /pout
Despite the annoyance of having to level pets, playing a hunter is a whole lot of fun. Chain trapping, wyvern stinging, feigning death, scattershot (oh! how I love scattershot). I don’t recall which blogger said it, but someone said Survival spec hunters were about removing the ability of your enemies to follow their plans in battle. It’s a good spec if you enjoy the feeling of Schadenfreude. I like it because it is intricate: there are many, many tools to use, and weighing them out in the immediacy of combat is enjoyable. I also find a long run of a shot-rotation to be almost meditative, it is so easy to get into the zone where the twang of the bow becomes an instinctive trigger to a click or a button press and without paying any attention, things are dead. If I ever get to the point Lushere is done in Karazhan, I think Raleena might be choice number two. I’m very reluctant to do much grouping with my shadowpriest, which I suppose I can talk about when I introduce Serasong later on. Karazhan is a good raid for someone who brings MQoSRDPS (hat tip to BRK on that), and I can’t imagine I’d have a problem doing that (at the Kara level, at any rate).
Comments
Leave a Reply
