Week 4 - Hunter Appreciation

I have a strange relationship with the hunter class. It has always secretly been one of my favourites, but I only really like playing it solo. Me and my pet. It's always been the default choice I go to when I want to do stuff completely on my own without being bothered by people. I've had many hunters over the years. I daresay I probably have about 10 of them dotted about on different servers/factions.

Ellywick with Skitter the spider and the Bloodfang Widow mount. I love the black hat too! (Fine Pilgrim's Hat)

The hunter I play most frequently, however, is Ellywick. She is a Gnome, although at the time of last doing the alt appreciation posts she was a Pandaren. She was a Dwarf before that too.  I have a tendency to try to match mounts, pets and companion pets together with outfits on the hunter for some reason. I'll include some pictures of my favourites, although I won't include the turtle set as I did that last time!

Basil the Fox and the Llothien Prowler mount complete with a dancing fox kit in the background

I do find that when I play my hunter, I often find myself talking to my pet as I play. No, I have no idea why I do that either. I love the survivability and independence of being a hunter while questing. It's great for the days when the ME/CFS is too much and I can't focus well. My comfort characters! Lately, however, I was talked into taking my hunter along to our normal alt raids which turned out to be less traumatic than I'd expected. My guild leader bribed me with helpful macros so that I wouldn't get tired as easily and it worked! He's always helpful like that by trying to make things less tiring for me to be able to play.

My most common companions at the moment. I love the little baby Elderhorn pet as it has lovely idle animations, and yes, the moose is called Chocolate :D

So what did I do this week? Firstly, I sent Ellywick out to pick up a mechanical bunny pet as I've wanted one for ages and kept putting it off as I didn't want to camp for it. I know most Gnome hunters get one for free, but I didn't start as a Gnome! As it turned out, I managed to find Rabbot really quickly and that didn't take anywhere near as long as I had expected. I had already finished my class hall and Argus quest chains and have the class mount, so next I decided to let her farm for the Cross Gazer pet that I'd been putting off (again due to time constraints). This one totally took as long as I expected though. The grind didn't seem as bad on the hunter, which is a good thing. I'll have to remember that next time I have to grind stuff.

The only hunter pet I have that is actually called Erik! I love the braids so much that I had to get matching hair too!

So that's it for me and the hunter this week. See you next week for some Mage appreciation!

Alt Appreciation: Week 3, Hunter

This week turned out to be a terrible one for getting time to play on alts at all. Some recent tests at the hospital not related to M.E. came back with bad results, and my server's instance lockouts were all wiped by Blizzard in an attempt to correct s problem with the server. For me, this was a terrible blow as we had been extending our team's lockout on Garrosh heroic in the hopes of getting him down before the 6.0 patch. My health doesn't allow me to have vast amounts of time for things that require concentration such as raiding so having to go through bosses we haven't worked on in a week or two proved slow work.

Even my sea turtle likes to pose for pictures!

My hunter is named Ellywick, for no specific reason other than I liked the name. At the start of the week, she was at level 87 and I managed to push her to level 89 after a trek through Kun-Lai Summit. She is also a gatherer which is unusual for me (mostly as I don't often have a chance to send characters out just to collect resources), with skinning and herbalism professions.

Something about the Hunter class has always appealed to me. I find myself chatting away to my pet in my head and it almost feels like I am never quite alone in the game. I find hunters are rather easy to play to a level of at least average competence and require little thought to rush about in the world on their own. The pet adds a large margin of survivability that isn't present in some other classes.  That being said, I do feel that it takes at least as much work as other classes to play very well, especially in a group. Because of this, I feel it has had a lot of bad press over the years when people learn enough to solo and quest and then try to take that level of understanding straight into an instance. Personally, I play mine almost exclusively solo as that is the way I get the most fun out of the class.

Ellywick has a bit of a thing about turtles. She has several turtle mounts to choose from (the sea turtle is my favourite but as it is so slow I don't get to use it often), as well as a turtle hunter pet named Kevlar. She has several little turtle companion pets (all called Erik, I know you aren't surprised by now) and her transmogrified set is designed to look like small turtle shells on her shoulders and green scale elsewhere. I do have a bit of a soft spot for this outfit actually!