Farewell, Old Friend. A Retrospective on My Melee Weapons.

With the release of the pre-expansion patch tomorrow, there will be many, many changes. You can read up on them here, since I'll be musing on the changes to my hunter. First off, the general change that I'm looking forward to is the AoE looting. Which means lots more skinning! One can only hope that AoE skinning will be implemented one day for those of us who kill everything that drops leather JUST so we can clear an area, loot and skin, and move on. Saves time, speeds up farming. And all the account-wide stuff is just really nice. Means that as a mount-whore, my hunter will finally have the mounts I managed to rep-grind for on my druid that I never did for her (I had never set foot in an instance prior to level 30 or so on Hecubah), and vice versa for all the mounts my hunter won/went through hellgrinds.

But the heart and soul of this post lies with my hunter and my melee weapon. Nowadays, it's just a stat-stick. But I've been told that Survival hunters were actually able to competently melee fight back in the day. I won't mourn the loss of my relic on my DK, shaman, or druid, since those were just to give us something to fill a slot with with free stats. But I will miss my melee weapon on my hunter. We've gone through good times and bad times together, like when I was a complete noob at the game and thought I could slash and hack at the bears in Darkshore. And I will forever miss my disengage/wing clip macro for pvp. True, having no "Dead Zone" where I lose the ability to shoot things will be nice. But there's just something so...fun about bashing the brains out of the DK or Rogue trying to kill me with a beatstick so I can shoot them from a safe distance. Plus now I actually have to worry about Expertise? I have no idea what that is or what it does for me. I've only even done ranged dps, tanking, and healing.

Currently, my Staff of Coagulated Globules is transmoged to look like the Stanchion of Primal Instinct off of the Eredar Twins in Sunwell. It goes very well with my "Green Sentinel" look on my hunter.

Then there were the Dreambinder days. Oh, how I'll miss that look as well.

(Yay for whale shark kill shots!)



Of course, not all were good times. Like the time my only pve pieces were my weapons and slowly had to build up my set piece by piece (accidentally sold my agi mail instead of the int mail drops on my hunter). I still think that polearm is pretty and I regret selling it because I NEVER run Lost City of the Tol'Vir anymore.

And for the record, Val'kyr are bitches.




Then was my most Huntardy moment in the game. Even more huntard than trying to kill bears at melee range with only raptor strike and no pet (I said I was a noob back then). I'm talking about single-wielding a one handed weapon.

Yeah...that I have no excuse for. But it all got fixed in the end. And thank god that the staff from the Well of Eternity dungeon dropped for me.

Farewell, melee weapons. Stat-stick or not, you were a vital part of my game plan for a long time, and it'll be interesting to learn how to function without you.