Hunteriffic
The first toon I ever made was my old Night Elf Hunter. I remember poring through the WoW manual as the game was installing, and reading through the lore of each class and race. My computer was super slow back then (I think it took over an hour and a half for the game to install and for everything to download), so I had a good bit of time to read.
(As a sidenote, I have to mention how terribly outdated the manual was. Does anyone else remember this? My manual said that Tauren couldn’t ride mounts - they had Plainstriding instead - and that First Aid was a primary profession. I guess it must have been printed when the public Beta was still going on.)
Anyway, I remember having a difficult time deciding which class I wanted to try first. I finally narrowed it down to a Hunter or a Paladin, I think. I chose the Hunter because being able to train a pet just sounded awesome. I chose Alliance because I thought the Horde was evil and then selected a female Night Elf. I don’t really remember what made me choose Night Elf over Dwarf. It was probably due to the fact that, after reading far too many Terry Pratchett books, I picture Dwarves more as Warriors than Hunters.
I named my Hunter Mielikki, after the Norse goddess of nature, which I thought fit in well with the lore of the Hunter class. After playing her for a while, I found out that Mielikki is also the name of a character in a fantasy series by R. A. Salvatore. After the ninth or tenth person said, “Hey, great name. I love those books!”, I got tired of explaining. So, I just transferred her to Shandris, and changed her name as well. She’s now “Arinelle”. She’s level 64, Beast Mastery spec, and completely naked as well, but McGraken has got almost a complete set of armor for her to put on.
Just after BC came out, and before I knew I was going to quit WoW for a bit, I dropped her Engineering and power-leveled Jewelcrafting, thinking that a high level JC would be more helpful than an Engineer. And it was at the time. Engineering was pretty much useless at that point - the repair bot and jumper cables were pretty much the only useful things - and I was able to gem her and McGraken for free, plus the gems I made sold like hotcakes laced with crack.
The irony of the situation is that now I’d rather have Engineering on her. Blizzard really did a great job of fixing Engineering, and I would take it just to be able to make the Gyrocopter, not to mention the awesome Epic helms that you can craft. On top of that, Jewelcrafting is not nearly as good of a money maker as it used to be - the Green gems are dirt cheap now, the Blue recipes are either rare drops or super expensive to get, and, IIRC, all of the BoP gems you can craft don’t come till the Black Temple or later. So I may be power-leveling Engineering in the near future. (I’m not terribly excited about that prospect, so it may not happen, but it is a possibility.)
I’m unsure right now which of my Alliance toons is going to be my main. I think I would prefer to play McG more, but Hunters are a lot of fun as well. Also, the Alliance guild I just joined actually does not have an active 70 Hunter, making it a first in the World of Warcraft, so I may have a good opportunity to fit in well there. Probably a lot will depend on how quickly the leveling to 70 goes.
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Engineering is pretty awesome now and I have it on my paladin (along with blacksmithing) but would a gyrocopter really fit with your Norse Goddess of Nature? Just a thought. they are pretty cool
That’s a good point, and I’ve never thought about it like that. I did have Engineering on her for a long time though, and it never seemed weird to me the way that guns do.