DON'T PANIC! Keep calm and carry on.

It's a brave new world out there now. 4.0 is hitting (and breaking) the servers, and well, I dunno about you but I thought I had another week or so to prepare.

So, yup, I am NOT prepared. I know what pet I'm using (yay Dragonhawk), but I have no idea of hunter specs, rotations, or glyphs.  I know disc has two viable specs, smite and um, not smite, and there's this handy-dandy explanation and specs and stuff which I will be using. But shadow, yeah, shadow I have no clue. My current rotation was working in the Cat beta, so I may stick to that. As far as the pally and druid go, well, um, I know I have holy power on one and an eclipse bar on the other.

My current plans when the server comes back up are....
1) Cut and post every bold and bright cardinal ruby I can get my hands on. Lots of regemming will hopefully=good profit.
2) See what the glyph market looks like. Jump in. Again, hopefully yay profit. My gold reserves are low due to gearing Adowa, so I'm trying to get some saved back up before Cat.
3) Go get the corehound I want
4) Get Lyllea's shadow spec figured out.
5) Make a ton of mouseover macros for disc healing. I'm expecting Vuhdo to be borked. Actually I'm expecting my entire UI to be borked.

It was rather interesting seeing what people were doing last night. Many of my guildies were trying to get Explorer or Dungeon Hero achieves. Me, well, I spent 8ish hours getting this

 an item with a 1/1000 drop rate of elites in Winterspring. And why?

Because a) I knew I wouldn't be able to do it once 4.0 hit, b) it's a piece of WoW history, and c) it looks DAMN sexy. Yup, I got me the epic quiver from Vanilla WoW just before quivers turned into bags. I'm kinda hoping the appearance stays after it's changed, but I'm not expecting it. Oh, I really wouldn't recommend farming for something with a 1/1000 drop rate when you've only got hours left before it's gone forever. It's a BIT stressful. So go get those Azure Whelplings now folks! (I got one yesterday, but I'm going to try for at least one more so I can keep one and sell one for a ridiculous amount of gold).

Well, after over a week of no WoW, it's been good to be able to play again. Sadly, I may not end up getting Hallowed on Lyllea, due to lack of trick or treating, but I still have two days to get that stupid helm. All my hunter needs is GNERD rage, and I've just been procrastinating on that. Ick pvp.

I'm currently tinkering with a disc damage spec. Yes, I know, disc is for damage mitigation, but she does do decent damage. Really. Especially with the Glyph of Smite. Granted, shadow might do much more, and eventually I will try it, but for the moment, I love disc.

Other than that, I've mostly been working on my list of stuff to do before Cat and leveling professions. Loremaster's on hold till after the next patch, since I will be able to get an addon that tells me what I've done in old world. Yays.

And just a brief reminder, some pets may become unavailable with Cat. The Azure Whelpling, the Mechanical Chicken, the Ancoma Chicken, and the engineering pets from Gnomer are top of my list to get if you haven't already.
Azure Whelpling drops from elites in Azshara, and that zone's getting a complete revamp.
The Mechanical Chicken takes three quests (Feralis, Hinterlands, and Tanaris) and so if any of those zones is altered, it may go away.
The Ancoma chicken (and I may have that name wrong) is purchased at the racetrack in Thousand Needles, and with the flooding of that zone, the NPC may drown.
And with hints of Gnomer getting a revamp, the schematics for the two engineering pets may no longer be available.

Hellooo 3.1

Scanning the patch notes, a few things make me happy or grumble(besides the Argent Tournament and its shiny weapons).
Marksman Stuff...
1. Chimera Shot: Mana cost reduced from 16% to 12%. YAY! Maybe I won't go through over a quarter of my mana per pull now.
2. Efficiency: Increased to 3/6/9/12/15% up from 2/4/6/8/10%. Does this make this actually useful? I dunno, but it's a start.
3. Ranged Weapon Specialization: Points reduced from 5 to 3, 1/3/5%. Yay more talent points
4. Silencing Shot: No longer on the global cooldown. Yay I guess. More a pvp change than anything.
5. Wild Quiver: Chance increased to 4/8/12%, up from 4/7/10%. Damage increased from 50% of an Auto Shot to 80%. YAY!
6. Ammo stacking is a yay, but I'm not sure how I feel about the haste bonus only being applied to the autoshot.

Pet Stuff...
1. Thunderstomp is no longer a gorilla-specific family ability and is now available to all Tenacity pets. It has been reduced to one rank. Boo is viable again! Oh happy day!
2. New Talent: Wild Hunt: This new 2-rank talent is available to all 3 pet trees. Increases the contribution your pets get from your stamina by 20/40% and attack power by 10/20%. Hopefully this will make cunning pets a bit more attractive.

Pally Stuff
Exorcism: Now can be used on any target and has a 100% chance to be a critical strike when used on Undead and Demons. YAY RANGED ATTACK!

Warlock
1. Curse of Recklessness has been removed. - Yay one less curse (and one I never used) to worry about.
2. Drain Soul stuff. I'm not sure how I feel about the drain soul changes, and I probably need to play the warlock to get a sense of them.
3. Voidwalker: The health bonus on this pet has been reduced from 60% to 10%. - NOOO! Don't weaken my blueberry!

Professions
Fishing- Yay new dailies and mount. Yay time reduction.
Cooking- Finally a use for Man o'war. Guess I've got some fishing to do.
Herbalism- Find Herbs no longer tracks Glowcaps. *grumble*
And there's a ton of alchemy changes, but I need to fiddle with them to decide how I feel about them.

Random Stuff
Pack of Endless Pockets can now be mailed. Yay. I can actually send this bag to the toon who's supposed to have it.
Tiny Emerald Whelplings: May now (very rarely) drop from Adolescent Whelps in the Swamp of Sorrows. HUZZAH!

Glyphs
Yay Chimera shot glyph.
Yay Aimed Shot glyph with cooldown reduction
Yay Kill shot glyph cooldown reduction

I now have glyphs choices. Now I just need to figure out who in the guild is a scribe and offer them herbs for glyphs.

Obviously dual spec is a huge deal, and yay for that. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to figure out new specs for 10 different classes. This could take a while...

I Haz a Whelpling!

And that would be it. After 110 kills, two green drops, and one blue. The white serpent is my new pet. He's a rare spawn in Feralis. I've figured out why I feel this need to have rare pets.

Night Elf hunters are a dime a dozen, and having an unusual pet, whether it's Siberius above or Eriador below differentiates me a bit. (I threw in a screenshot of my much-neglected kitty, Llofios, so you could see all my pets). And the screenshot is from just after I got him, before I named him, apparently.

The Amusement of Farming

I want a crimson whelping. I randomly farm for them now and again, and today I had something interesting happen...

I try to farm early server time, about 9 am or so. This generally means that no one's around. Today I started, discovered that track dragonkin is awesome, and then two lvl 80s showed up, a druid and a warrior. We were all competing for the same drops, and they could kill faster and had epic mounts. So how did I outfarm them?
1. Track Dragonkin. I saw the respawns first.
2. Ranged attacks. The warrior had to get right up to the spawn. I just needed to get 35 yrds away, fire once, then run onto the next one. THen either my pet would kill it, or it'd run after me. I'd get four or five at a time, with Aspect of the CHeetah up. (note: this does not work so well with the ones with ranged attacks bc of stunning)
3. I knew what I was going for. I know what whelpings in the area have the 1/1000 drop chance and what ones don't, as well as their general areas. The other two were spending extra energy killing what I left behind, the lost whelps.

At one point the dwarf even tried to shoo me off. Pissed me off for a moment, and then I realized that he wanted me to leave because I was getting more than he was. Ha! Like that's going to happen!