At one time, he was my main. I’m talking about Feroz (whose name I now hate…I think that’s half the reason he’s not my main anymore!) by level 70 BM spec Hunter. He was the first character I rolled on my home realm of Whisperwind. Pre BC, he was my first and only level 60, and even ran MC a handful of times.

Back when BC was released, I was a little tired of the hunter. There were also about a million hunters in the guild. That’s when I rolled Pummra, my at-the-time feral druid, and I leveled him to 66 before I got insanely bored with Nagrand. I think what ultimately pushed me away from him at that time was those stupid Nesingwary mastery quests. Ugh.

Anyhow, I then jumped to my hunter and leveled him to 70. I ran a few instances to start working on my gear. I had a bad incident involving my [Beast Lord Helm] and the hurt feelings of a fellow guildy. At that point I swore off my hunter for awhile, and jumped back to the druid to finish him off.

When I hit 70, I ran a few instances and worked on my tanking gear. I found myself having a hard time finding guild groups for the instances I needed to run, as I was well behind the gear curve, and nobody wanted to run regular SL anymore. One thing everyone DID want was more healers. I respecced resto, had more group invites than I could count, and the rest is history. Now Pummra is nearly in full purple/Kara gear (other than the [Hallowed Crown] and a pair of Prayerbooks) and I’ve been spending my short gaming sessions on various alts.

Feroz, my buddy, sat around collecting dust. I played him for a few hours recently to farm [Primal Air], but other than that he’s been dormant for a good 9 months or so.

Last night I had a couple hours and jumped on my baby shadow priest. He’s up to 36 now and I’m itching to hit 40. Don’t you just love level 40? Anyway, there was a guild group trying to put together a Heroic Bot run, and they were short a DPS spot. I figured they’d surely have a quick taker. Well, a good 15 minutes go by, and I notice they are now asking in our alliance channel. Still nothing.

There are a couple important things to note, for emphasis:

1. I haven’t played him in earnest for 9 months or more.
2. His gear stinks, bad. Other than one or two blues, he’s seriously bad off for gear. We’re talking mostly greens, [The Gunblade], and Valanos’, though his bow skill isn’t even maxed.
3. I don’t even know if I got him to honored with Sha’atar.
4. I never ran a heroic with him. Ever.

Just for kicks, I log over to him to see where he stands. It’s just as bad as I thought, but he DOES have the Warpforged Key. He’s also been running around with both the gun and the bow, with ammo for both, though not great ammo by any stretch. So, I ask in guild chat: “Just how desperate are you guys for a DPS?” Not 2 seconds later, I get an invite followed by a summons.

Ok.

That desperate.

I’m already a little leery. I’ve messed with my UI a lot since then, so I have no idea how my bars are set up, etc. I take a few minutes to make sure the important stuff is there, and I get ready for my first real work with him in awhile.

Looking at the group, I’m not so worried anymore. If I was going to run a heroic with a character I hadn’t played in 9 months, this is the group I’d want to roll with. I don’t need to get into particulars, but other than me it was like a dream team. Well geared Warrior, Pally, Priest and Mage.

Then me. With Valanos. Without a scope. Blackflight arrows. 329 bow skill.

Of course I was iffy at first. I never used macros, so I couldn’t lean on any fancy shot rotations. My pet management was way off. He died probably 10 times for the whole run. Poor little dude. I also didn’t realize till halfway through that I had growl on…it didn’t seem to be a problem for our tank– but it may explain all those deaths.

Since the overall group was so strong, the Priest and Pally were both kind of running hybrid. Half DPS, half healing. They both out DPSed me, I’m sure, though I don’t run meters. Overall, it went ok. We only wiped once, on the trash leading up to Warp Splinter. I always seem to wipe there. I got a nice blue ring off of the boss before Warpsplinter, my first five badges, and the purple epic AP/Stam gem. The best thing, though, was I got the Nether I needed for my Engineering shades. Not bad! I also managed to get my bow skill up to 349.

I had a lot of fun, it was good to get back in the damage game a bit, and now I think I’ll start running five mans with him to get geared. Here I had been searching for a good complement class to my 70 Druid, and my 70 Hunter was just sitting out there. Sometimes you just can’t see the forest for the trees, ya know?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under Gear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.