The Plans I Have For You.

I'm going to nerd out for a moment. Let me preface by saying that I play World of Warcraft. Let me follow that by saying that I'm not, by any means, addicted to the game. I have been playing for almost two years and my hunter is only level 72. When life gets hectic, WoW is the first thing to go. So, now that life has mellowed out a little bit for the summer, I can start playing again for a few months! However, a lot of stuff changes when you take a semester off. I not only have to reorient myself to the controls and gameplay all over again, but there were updates! And because I am thoroughly nerding myself out while the game itself is downloading (a process that takes two generations), I've been doing research and decided that I wanted to give my novice comments on some of them!

Since I do more questing than raiding right now, some of the updates aren't really applicable to me. Pets have been pretty overhauled, though, and one of the changes is that the Aggressive stance is gone and replaced with the Assist stance. This makes sense, because there was absolutely no point to Aggressive unless you really wanted to tick people off. Now, the three options are Assist (pet will attack what you attack), Defense (pet will attack whatever attacks you), and Passive (pet might as well not exist). Toggling between Assist and Defense will be  big help in raids. I haven't done one yet, but I know that they are different from dungeons in that tasks have to be delegated out, so sometimes you'll want the pet to attack the main mob and at other times, you'll want it sticking to just you. Another update that will help me in dungeons and what not is that you won't automatically change targets if your primary targets die mid-cast. I HATED the previous way because I would accidentally pull mobs because the first target died while I was casting. I felt like an idiot. And now, I won't! A-ha!

THIS IS FEROCITY.

Pets no longer have a happiness bar. You used to not only have to keep your pet healthy, but happy as well. I didn't mind this. Feeding my lion slabs of meat in order to make him happy made me happy too! But if I were being serious about my DPS, having that happiness meter randomly drop mid-fight would be extremely obnoxious. Now, those slabs of meat go toward making my lion healthy. So, I still get to feed him if I choose to go that route instead of mashing the Mend Pet button. And I do so choose. =) I think I also saw something about pets not leveling anymore? I can't find that supported anywhere other than a user comment, so maybe that's not true, and I hope it's not. I don't want ALL of the individuality that hunters have through their pets to go away for functionality's sake.

Something about Auto Shot has changed, but I can't quite understand what it is. That'll be something I'll have to mess with when playing. Auto Shot has always kind of annoyed me, because I want to be able to choose my first shot, not have it just through an arrow out there, so maybe this addresses that? Mutli-Shot got a giant buff, and then a small nerf in a hotfix, but it'll still be a much better shot. From what I can tell, my shot rotation hasn't really changed.

So... yeah! I'm excited to start playing again, if only for a few months. =D =D =D

SHUT UP.