WoW Profiles - Khitsune at 71

Level: 71
Spec: Marksman
Profs: Inscription/Herbalism
Achievements: Sea Turtle Mount, Exalted with Kalu’ak, Orgrimmar, Darkspear Trolls, Undercity, Silvermoon, and Thunderbluff.
Pets: Boar (“Tanuki”), spider (“Jorogumo”), moth (“Konpaku”)
Theme: Shinto, trickster
Comments:
Not having played a blood elf before, I decided to roll a hunter with an anime theme – originally this toon was named Kyuketsuki, which meant “vampire” in Japanese, and I’d planned on setting her up with a bat (Ressan), a spider (Zarakh), a zombie bear and a wolf mount… and I’d went with tailoring/enchanting.

Getting the rep for the wolf mount required doing a ton of Horde quests including many that were gray, and necessitated raising all of the horde factions since a good chunk of the rep needed to make exalted with any of them comes from the “spillover” rep you get for doing quests for the others, so by the time she reached level 40, she had made exalted with Org, and was already there with UC and well into revered with the others.

However by then I had realized that I just wasn’t that enthused about her pets or for that matter her theme; I’m not a roleplayer but I still like to have a nice, coherent mini-theme somewhere in the back of my head when playing a character – and this character just hadn’t gelled for me. So I decided she needed an overhaul; I knew I still wanted something anime-ish for her, so I went with a Shinto theme this time – instead of a vampire, she would be the closest thing the Japanese had to an elf; a fox spirit. Called Kitsune (“kits-NEH”), these beings were foxes that could assume other shapes, including a humanoid appearance, which they invariably would use for the purpose of playing tricks on humans… one paid name change and haircut later and she had her new identity – now to find some new pets to go with it.

I tried to think of a tenacity pet that would work well with a marksman build while also having some potential for a Shinto background, and the armored blue agamar from RFK seemed to fit the bill, so I tamed one of those. None of my hunters had a boar, and the initial aggro burst seemed to work well with an MM spec (a crab would’ve been even better but I already had one on my dwarf); I named him “Tanuki”, which is the Japanese word for a badger spirit. Also known for being shape changing tricksters as well as gluttons, I thought this would be a pretty good fit for the boar with his playful hops and wiggles.

Next I decided on a spider – in my experience their web is second to none for keeping a mob tied up while you unload burst dps, so I picked up the red spindly rare from Duskwood and named her “Jorogumo” (“Jo Jo” for short) – this was the word for (wait for it!) a spider spirit. In addition to being shape changers they tended to be evil and so while they too enjoyed playing tricks on people, their tricks tended to be more harmful if not fatal.

My last choice was a moth – from my research I’d learned the Japanese along with many other cultures considered moths and butterflies symbols of reincarnation and in particular to be the forms that restless spirits sometimes took when visiting the world of the living. I tamed a Vicious Teromoth from Terrokar Forest, which at the time still kept its summoning animation (it made a “splat!” sound whenever you called it, and had a creepy green glow), and called it “Konpaku”, which basically meant “soul” in Japanese; now I had a pet from each family, complete with RP backdrop.

To tie it all together I decided that Jorogumo had pushed Khitsune and Tanuki into playing a trick on a crazy old Shinto monk who thought he was on a quest to right 1000 wrongs… normally Khit and Tanuki would not have dared pester a holy man, but they did not want to be seen to back down from a challenge and so they went along with it – unfortunately the prank went wrong and resulted in the old monk’s death, and so the three were rounded up by angels and brought to trial before the goddess Amaterasu Omikami, who decided to send the monk back to complete his quest as a giant moth, and sentenced Khit, Jo Jo and Tanuki to accompany and aid him in this pursuit as his faithful servants – or face expulsion to hell. Furthermore she took away their powers of shape changing and thereby locking them into the forms they’d held during their last, ill-fated prank.

The tricksters chose the option that avoided eternal torment and did their best to serve their sentence. Omikami put Khit in charge, she being smarter than Tanuki and if not good, then at least not evil like Jo Jo.

Eventually the sentence was served out, and Konpaku returned to heaven (not incidentally this was right about the time when Blizzard removed pets’ summoning animation, including Konpaku’s cool greenish glow…); however over the course of their sometimes humorous journeys aiding the Don Quixote-like Konpaku, a curious thing had happened to the three spirits – they had each developed a conscience, and doing good deeds now seemed the natural thing, try as they might to return to their old ways (a particularly sad realization for Jo Jo), so they just continued on with helping those in need and doing the things adventurers do.

With a little more work I was able to get her to exalted with the rest of the Horde factions, bought an epic skeletal warhorse, kodo and raptor, and went about setting up a macro to /castrandom a colorful mount whenever she needed to travel – I decided these creatures would either be mythical Shinto fauna (kodo), things she had a spiritual commonality with (warhorse) or simply just something that looked cool and let her ride it on account of her smelling more like an animal than a humanoid (raptor).

In addition to the new pets and mounts, I decided to get new professions as she couldn’t use 90% of the stuff she made with tailoring and enchanting was taking forever to go up (in addition to not seeming very useful to a mid-lvl hunter); both skills have worked out well for me on various other chars, but they just didn’t seem a good fit for this one, so I dropped them and went with herbalism/inscription.

Perhaps even more than providing raw mats for inscription, herbalism proved a boon in that it gave Khit Lifeblood, which was great for helping her to survive while channeling a point blank volley from the middle of a crowd of angry mobs; otherwise I can’t say the new profs have been terribly exciting – inscription costs a fortune in vellum, way more than just plunking down the occasional 5-10 gold for a new glyph (I’ve somewhat offset her costs with sale of practice glyphs but only partially, as glyphs appear to be a buyer’s market on her server)… it’s too bad they don’t have a selection of “BoP” glyphs that only inscriptionists can use – something like that would certainly make the profession a more attractive choice…

And last but not least I went with a new spec as well – previously she had used a nondescript BM spec, and despite a lot of misgivings about holding agro, decided to switch to the marksman tree – however with some careful planning and macro setup the new spec proved quite effective; I spent the rest of the time up to 68 in Nagrand looking for tough bosses to fight (she was able to solo the Windroc Matriarch, Cho’war the Pillager, Gurok the Usurper, the Master Planner, Banthar, Bach’lor and Tusker at level 66-67). Her dps is really head and shoulders over most of my other hunters, all else being equal, and while she inevitably will pull agro off her pet, they normally are able to keep the target tied up long enough for Khit to burn it down before it gets to her.

I also had been working on her fishing skill – previously I hadn’t been able to muster the patience to get this past 300 or so on any of my characters, but with a recent patch they replaced the “Your fish got away” message with a successful cast that returned a 6 cp junk item; now every cast counts as a potential skill up in any area, so no more “doing time” in Org, TB or SW trying to raise fishing skill enough to qualify for the areas you’d prefer to be casting in, and so by the time I made 68 and went to Northrend, she had 350 fishing and it made sense to work on Kalu’ak rep.

After a few quick upgrades, I spent the next few levels doing Kalu’ak dailies until finally Khit had attained exalted, and started using the epic +30 skill fishing pole; once that was done I settled in for a long grind fishing Northrend pools, and after 30 skillups or so was lucky enough to fish a sea turtle mount from one of the pools in Dragonblight, thus enabling her (with the Mastercraft Kalu’ak Fishing Pole equipped) to zip around at +60% speed underwater with unlimited water breathing – and thanks to the accessibility of the Kalu’ak dailies, Khit can use this from level 71-80 instead of just sitting on her turtle’s back like a fixture outside the AH (as tends to happen with people who wait till 80 to go after it) – nice!

Being exalted with the Kalu’ak also got her some other benefits – right off she picked up the vanity pet Pengu, who looks cool and fits right in with her Shinto-y entourage, and once she makes it up to the lvl 76-78 area she’ll have access to some nice blue chainmail and weapons.

At 74 I plan to fill Konpaku’s spot with a Vargul Blighthound named “Kabuki”, which will give me back a ferocity pet – it was kind of disappointing when Blizzard took away her moth’s glow effect but I’ll be just as happy with her new fiery wolf spirit, and then at 76 I’m hoping to replace Jo Jo’s red model with a bonespider from IceCrown; same name just a different look. After that I’m thinking about maybe picking up dual spec and spending time in Scholazar basin, where I might try to tame Loque (since none of my other hunters have him and he would seem a good fit for her spiritual/ghostly theme) and perhaps a white gorilla (who look somewhat like the white monkeys indigenous to the mountains of Japan, and which would give her another spell interrupt). Continue reading

WoW Profiles - Dougal at 74

Level: 74
Spec: Beastmaster (“Shooty”)
Profs: Mining/Herbalism
Achievements: Exalted with Kurenai and Cenarion Expedition, tamed Nuramoc
Pets: Chimaera (“Nightmare”), silithid (“Lurk”), hyena (“Frenzy”)
Theme: Purple, creepy
Comments:
For most of his career, Dougal was the hunter I played when I was either tired of playing all of my other hunters or when I wanted to try out some new idea re: places to level, or some new spec or pet or other idea I got from browsing Petopia… prior to WotLK I’d gone with a spec that I call the windserpent build, e.g. (lots of +crit) + (gftt) + (efficient pet focus dump), but it hadn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped; despite frequent lightning breaths his flying serpent just couldn’t seem to hold aggro long enough to let me enjoy all of the flashy proc icons lighting up my screen.

Then along came patch 3.0 which changed my pet’s lightning breath from a very-efficient focus dump, to a bite with special effects, and I finally had to send it back to the wild and go back to the drawing board… I’d had some good results from my other survival hunter re: using what I call “slowing pets”, and didn’t currently have anyone using a chimaera or silithid, so I decided to see what I could do with the beastmaster tree – and doing as much as I could to keep the emphasis on shooting over tanking.

First off I figured if I was going to pick up a chimaera that I might as well have a go at taming the coolest model out there – Nuramoc, of course. After some research and a lot of ore gathering in Netherstorm with my other night elf hunter (who had an epic flying mount, happily), I was able to track down the elusive flying purple chitinous two headed gribbly – hooray! It also likely helped that most of the other hunters had either tamed this beast by now or were too busy checking out Northrend to care…

Now that Nuramoc was a definite, purple would be the new unifying color for this hunter, and so I went ahead and tamed a purple hyena and a red/purple silithid, and completed the theme with a trip to the barbershop – Dougal’s race proving to be a nice bonus here as night elves are the only hunter race able to get purple hair!

Next thing to do was concoct some sort of RP mini-story for Dougal and his new pets. At one time it seems Dougal collected some debts for a merchant on the Goblin Market, who sold creatures he had extracted from people’s dreams and nightmares via magical dream catcher, and by way of reward for his efforts Dougal was allowed to choose three creatures from the merchant’s cages, which he of course tamed and took adventuring.

So now what to do? Since my new pets were a combined 11 levels behind me, it made sense to focus on kills over quests – unfortunately most of the rep grinds in Northrend entail doing daily quests and dungeons – you don’t have nearly the range of options for kill rep that you did back in the Old World or Outlands, especially in the lower levels… however, I did notice that the Cenarion Expedition had made a reappearance in Borean Tundra, and even had an old style kill rep repeatable with a buff, so I decided that faction would be his new goal.

The first step was to do the last few unfinished Cenarion Expedition quest chains back in Outlands, and then I got going with their quests in Borean Tundra – by the time those were done I had just managed to break revered and could now use Warden’s Arrows, which had 5 more dps than the standard ammo available from Northrend vendors, as well as a nifty arcanum for his helm; then it was time to settle in for the long trip to exalted.

After a few weeks of harvesting “Hemingwary Lackey Ears”, I finally got there – by now I was lvl 74 and my pets were caught up to me. I then drained my savings on that server to get Dougal epic riding skill and a coveted Cenarion War Hippogryph; he wouldn’t be able to use it in Northrend for another 3 levels of course, but in the meantime he can harvest ore and herbs in style back in Outland…

The new spec has been working out well – although sinking 51 pts into BM inevitably forces you to pass up a lot of the more shooty talents in the other trees, there are still a few handy bits to be had such as serpent’s swiftness (+20% increased rate of fire), improved aspect of the hawk (for another +21% increased rate of fire with glyph, that is proc-based), aspect mastery (+ap), and some dmg bonuses (+9% with arcane shot and another +5% overall dmg bonus thanks to focused fire and ferocious inspiration), and you can get very good value for spending the remaining points on the early MM talents – I’ve found with this spec that instead of holding back on my DPS to allow the pet to retain aggro, it works much better to actively try to grab aggro away from it – hard to do with a BM pet (another plus of the BM tree), but worthwhile as my pets’ slowing spells give me the time to burn the mob down before it reaches me and in turn saving me from having to spend the extra mana on heals.

Going forward I’m thinking of moving Dougal to Zul’Drak and focusing on Argent Crusade rep, since he is now the minimum level for that area, and they appear to have the best (?) ranged rep reward weapon (and if I’m very luck and persistent I might even run across Gondria…). Continue reading