Monday 6 July 2015

All Pugged Out...

Our intrepid huntress battled her way through another week of LFR in Highmaul.
 
Crafting some 640ilvl shoulders and completing the Apexis part of the legendary quest to get the 680ilvl ring took her to an agonising 634ilvl.

Boss after boss went down with no drops and I was preparing to spend my hard-earned gold on some form of upgrade just to meet the BRF ilvl requirement until, on the last boss, a glorious Bow dropped!  :-)

635 and on to Blackrock Foundry!
This is where her luck really kicked in! 

5 items in the first week catapulted her ilvl up to around 643 and opened up the next stage in the process... pugging!

Wow... it's a jungle out there!

I thought I would start off easy with some Highmaul normal, except Highmaul normal isn't the easiest instance if you are a hunter because you have 'jobs' to do.

Luckily, I've done those jobs before on my shaman during progress so it wasn't too much of an issue... the hardest part being on Butcher when I realised my UI wasn't set up properly to see the stacks on the other hunter.  We got through it anyway, just had to count the slices, and the amazing trinket dropped.  Off to a flier!

Then there is a difficult range of 650-655ilvl where pugs won't take you for BRF normal and there isn't much left for you in Highmaul normal. 

Again, I got a bit lucky here.  A Highmaul run completed 6/7 on normal and decided it would be easier to run through some on heroic rather than go for Imperator Mar'gok.
We only killed 2 heroic bosses before I had to leave but two more pieces dropped for me taking me out of that difficult range and into BRF pug territory.

655+ is generally what people want for BRF normal and I just scraped in.  I applied to join lots of pugs, being rejected almost instantly from many of them, but the odd one or two were letting me in.

This is where I have a big advantage over the new or returning player, I know these fights inside out!  Getting into the pug was the hard part, once in there I was confident of holding my place just by virtue of not making any mistakes or causing any wipes.

So, of course, Barrage on the first set of adds pulls the whole f*cking room.  Fearing the worst, I apologised, but the others just laughed it off and we moved on.

Only Gruul died on that run and, since then, I have had wildly varying success in pugs.
There are a lot of strange people out there, some complete arseholes and some fantastic groups with everything in between, you meet them all while pugging.

It has been quite a jump into the unknown for me to do so much pugging and I've really enjoyed pushing myself out of my comfort zone.  It's taken a lot of my fear of pugging away too and I'll be a lot more confident in future.

I finished the tier at a respectable 669ilvl, only weapon and trinkets holding me back (all 655ilvl).
As this experiment now draws to a close I definitely feel like I will continue with the hunter but how much time she will now get when there is new content for my shaman is anyone's guess.

It's been a while since I did Highmaul on my shaman but Blackrock Foundry is something else altogether and it was really interesting to compare how a hunter approaches these fights.

So much of the Shaman's focus in a fight is minimising the impact of movement on dps but that is a complete non-issue for the hunter, particularly as I hate using Focusing Shot (why take away the hunter's greatest strength?).

Anyway, that comparison is for another post...



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