Sunday, May 4, 2008

Soloing Ramparts

As part of taking a break from the gear gathering I had been doing in Arathi Basin, for the last couple of nights I've occupied myself with attempting to solo the Hellfire Ramparts.

Soloing Ramps in and of itself apparently isn't considered anything too special, but I anyway haven't heard of it being done with Survival before. I've done the first few BF pulls a few times before, and I'm actually finding Ramps harder than that was.

My initial attempts with Alu's hybrid spec in particular did not end well; so a day or so ago I spent half of my daily money on getting the more traditional 0/20/41, with Readiness.

I admit; it may surprise people, but I've honestly hardly ever used Readiness before, mainly because I simply haven't needed it. Even for three mob pulls, Wyvern on the third mob will usually give me time to kill the first.

I used Readiness on Rattlegore in Scholo, but actually for damage, not CC. A double Immolation Trap and Wyvern combo gives me something on the order of 4k damage over 15 seconds; I really don't understand these people who say that they think Readiness isn't useful, or the people who think Wyvern's DoT needs to be removed.

In that sense though, Readiness truly is Survival's answer to Bestial Wrath; especially considering that something else I've used it for before was using Serpent and Immolation Trap on a Warrior, then hitting Deterrence and going melee, and then hitting Readiness and being able to do those three again immediately.

Once I've got Ramps completely learned, I'm considering making my first video showing me going through it. One thing I will admit that I'm worried about with that though is that I might bore you, in the sense that soloing instances for me is like playing chess or billiards; I actually do them very slowly and ponderously.

The Pot Black tournament was actually the one type of sport which I used to like watching on television as a child, and it is also probably the main real-world sport that I see as being analogous to playing a Hunter in WoW.

I think that's also the reason why I can derive so much pleasure from soloing an instance when a lot of other people in this game are so fiercely competitive, and also why it potentially holds such a high level of replayability for me as well.

Mentally I compare the more difficult soloable instances with pool tables where the initial layout of the balls is different on each one. That also means that I need to use a different combination of methods to successfully sink all of the balls on each, as well.

I think that's also why I can have the attitude that it isn't always appropriate for me to simply blast away with as much damage as I can in every scenario, either. In billiard games, sometimes you do want to hit a ball fairly hard in order to pot it, but other times you actually only want to hit it very softly, because if you hit it too hard, it can bounce off one of the sides of the table at a different angle to what you wanted, and not go in.

Sometimes, hitting too hard will also rip the felt on the table.

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