Outland or Bust!
So at 56, I finally snapped and decided I needed a new ranged weapon.

(I am still using the Verdant Keeper's Aim, a quest reward from a short jaunt into Maraudon. I am not doing nearly the DPS I could be, even though the proc rate for the Keeper's Sting effect is ridiculous; it goes off several times even in short fights. ...but it's also only ~21 damage and can't crit, which is very small potatoes. I get beaten out on DPS by mages seven levels lower than me--although to be fair that's because I'm spending a lot of time in melee (bad hunter! bad! out of melee!) and the rest of the time keeping the high-DPSing mage and loot-ninja healers from getting eaten by mobs, rather than just DPSing away. (Seriously, why are most loot ninjas healers on my server? Is it because they know they can get away with it because if someone challenges them they can leave the party and strand us for hours waiting to find another heelz? Do they feel some kind of entitlement because being a healer is a thankless job? I tip my healers habitually, especially if they take care of my pet, but they don't know I'll do that going in... I don't know. We had a restodruid need three different things last night in ST without asking, one of which was a lockbox. A LOCKBOX. "Do you need on lockboxes? lol" said our shadow priest. "If you're a rogue who needs to level their lockpicking? idk." said I. "Oh, was that me? Whoops!" said the restodruid, completely unapologetic, and not even offering to let people reroll on it like I did when I goofed up on Feverfew and accidentally needed a belt when trying to pass on it. Given the fact he managed to "not be paying attention" leading to an almost-wipe I will talk about a little later, I'm not pugging with him again. Bad enough to not have a healer; worse to have an incompetent, greedy healer.

(Which is all just so much hot air to excuse my not being a DPS POWAH HAUS, but I like to think I bring a lot more to a pug than my ability to pyew-pyew. :x I told the sib I was considering respeccing survival because while I ♥ beastmastery to little tiny pieces, 90% of my work in groups nowadays boils down to "save the squishies" and "trap a mob only to have the idiot mage break my CC with an AE and be totally unapologetic about it". I apologize if I mistarget and break your sheep, buddy, and your CD is more forgiving than mine. The least you could do is say you're sorry.

(Oh, that, and, having my pet tank/tanking myself because our tanks are grossly incompetent or just not experienced enough to deal with gross incompetence in a mage repeatedly breaking CC, pulling adds, and yanking the aggro off the tank. I know liet has switched to survival (which is the melee hunter's spec, and I am so much a melee hunter right now--because I love my Ice Barbed Spear to pieces and delight in any opportunity to do as much white damage in melee as I do with my bow... which is yet another reason I need a new bow...) to try it out... but I think I may just keep Ansawa a beast master all the way to 70, and experiment with other builds on Maentwrog and my to-be Horde hunter on Feathermoon.)

AH browsing on Feathermoon for ranged weapons is extremely hit-or-miss--sometimes I see six or seven (massively expensive) bows/guns/crossbows I'd like, but these "sometimes" are vastly outnumbered by the times where I can't. Find. Anything. Period. This is especially difficult now that I've gotten a real taste for blue weapons--the extra DPS per level alone gets me drooling, and bonus stats are always a plus--but heck, I'd take a decent Wolf/Monkey/Falcon bow if there were any available, but there just never...were. BUT ANYWAY, this is all aside from the point, which is at 56 I paid a mage 5g to port me to Shattrath, set my hearth there, and then proceeded to ghost-run to Honor Hold to pick up the flight point and hang out grinding vultures until Redemption hit 56. (And I hit 57, hoorah.)

About that time I got a nibble in LFG for a group headed to Sunken Temple (which I just enjoy doing now, though I'm almost out of range for it--time to move on to Dire Maul, Scholomance, LBRS, and BRD.), so I popped home to the Aldor inn, vended the trash out of my inventory, reorganized my stacks of buzzard meat, and off I went. As usual we took maybe thirty minutes getting the group together alone (since we had a tank but needed a healer, then had a tank and a healer but lost our fury warrior and needed more DPS, and so on). Then we were off--a tanking warrior, a resto!druid, a shadow priest, a frost mage, and me. It went tolerably well, but since we were all 50+ and I was waaaay out of range for everything except the bosses, we didn't need much competence to keep alive. The resto!druid, despite my griping earlier, was actually okay as main-heelz (the priest spending most of his time in shadowform) for the most part and had the sense to switch to me when I ended up "tanking" trash pulls rather than feigning them onto the priest... Mostly the problem in ST, I've found, is that if your group leader isn't rigorously raid-marking groups and organizing the CC before each pull, they're just going to end up as extremely chaotic snarls of mobs with everyone pulling aggro from the imps. Oh, and and trigger-happy DPS doesn't help either; we had the mage starting pulls, opening up on mobs before the tank had even sundered anything, etc. I wasn't much better, but mostly because I was trying to chain-trap in a desultory fashion. And I had no real idea what the main DPS target was supposed to be, since the mage was sort of sheeping things at random even after I'd marked them and whatnot.

So all was well and good up until Eranikus. The room before Jammal'an posed no problem whatsoever (except for one part where the druid got eaten by the invincible ghosts; that was funny), Jammal himself went down like a two-dollar hooker easy, dropped some kind of cloth loot that we sharded, etc. The green dragons and dragonkin went down easy as well (despite the resto!druid saying he didn't need to skin anything, he'd almost saved up for his epic mount, etc., he'd begun skinning by this point and we settled on an uneasy truce where he'd get one, then I'd get one--still convinced he's a loot ninja, the bastard), and THEN we hit Eranikus.

Or rather, he hit us.

Ouch.

By his own admission, the druid "wasn't paying attention" when the tank started the pull, so the tank got snapped up really fast and Eranikus defaulted to my pet (since I'd toggled Growl back on, being used to the fact by now nothing was really getting tanked by this tank except the first mob he charged). I actually managed to keep up (with mend pet + gift of the Naaru) for a little bit with Eranikus's damage, but then he put Redemption to sleep and went off on the rest of the party. I think the mage bit it next, which left us without enough DPS to down him, and then the druid attempted to tank him as a bear and died, and then he got the Shadow priest. So here I am, and my pet is, with a level 55 elite dragon boss at about half of his 12k health, me close to OOM, with all of my CDs currently used up. What did I do?

Why, sent Rem in to intimidate (BW was still cooling down) the bastard, renewed hunter's mark, and kept shooting.

Sadly, this does not end with me heroically soloing Eranikus. He munched Rem and at that point I started running until Feign Death cooled down again. I was 90% certain I was dead, especially when I hit the wall and had him coming at me faster than I could get away. And then the funniest thing happened--he backed me into a corner, put me to sleep, and... proceeded to whiff repeatedly? I have no idea exactly what happened, but while I was afflicted with his sleep debuff, he could not hit me. It was like a mob evade-bugging, except I was immunity-bugging--I saw ten or twelve hits fly by (while I was frantically smashing feign death and waiting for the sleep to wear off), all of them popping up with 'immune' 'immune' 'immune'. It was probably the sweetest thing I have yet seen, closely followed by the lack of a 'Resisted' under my feign death timer when I finally got it off. Eranikus stomps back and resets, I wait a little bit, then get back up and rez Rem while waiting for everyone to finish running back. (My only other thought than that having been a bug was that the extra nature resistance I have stacked thanks to the Albino Crocscale Boots might have done something, but that makes noooo sense.)

The second time went much more smoothly and we downed him. The druid died AGAIN, but thankfully we had the shadow priest there to pick him up. More useless blue loot (mail helm with Int and Spi? wtf?), another shard I lost the roll on, the end.

I have yet to down Eranikus without large parts of the party dying, I realize now. Last time, we failed to clear the entire room of dragonkin and they came rushing in just as he went down, wiping most of the party and leaving me and the (incompetent tank) fury warrior to get rid of them. Thankfully, his tanking improved 100% when I reset my aggro. :) That run we had two purples drop, neither of which made it into my inventory (the goldwhore in me grumbles, though neither was a HUNTAR WEAPAN and we did have two warriors who could use them)--Dragon's Call and THEN Bloodrazor, which is a world drop. Both of the warriors went home extremely happy from that one, and I got useless greens to auction. hooray.

ANYWAY. After all that, I headed back to Shattrath, emptied my inventory, repaired, then ambled leisurely-like back to Darnassus to buy the recipe for Buzzard Bites (I can't get the quest until 58 and my cooking was already at 313 with no recipes higher than green, and I had 40 buzzard meat stacked--YES I am impatient!), then skipped to Felwood to turn in a quest, actually finally pick up the Talonbranch Glade FP (yes, I leveled most of the way to 56 in Felwood and never got the Talonbranch FP; i r smrt), and headed to Winterspring to tame an owl for the next ranks of Claw and Screech. That down, it was back to Hellfire to level Nemesis, who is now halfway to 57 and should be all the way there tonight. And then I can go do quests in Winterspring and Un'Goro and Felwood until I level (more than halfway now, just from the ST run and grinding buzzards), pick up the final rank of Dash and the next rank of Bite in Winterspring (which I could do now if I wanted to wait for Rak'Shiri to spawn, but I don't, and soloing into LBRS to get one of the worgs there is about as appealing as soloing into Jintha'Alor to get one of the wolves THERE was) AND THEN.......... Do the quest for the Ironstar Repeater, get my new crossbow (HOORAY), and tame a two-headed red buzzard.

I've calculated that I'll be okay with all three slots taken up until level 64, when I need to get new ranks of Bite and Claw. If I decide I want to release a pet, though, it may be Redemption--as much as I love her, she's not going to be good for soloing in Outland if I'm challenging anything significantly over my level (which I plan to do). The spell resist alone is a killer, and it's clear now that while she out-DPSes Nemesis on anything where armor's a big factor, she falls waaaaaaaaay behind when nature resistance (or immunity!) comes into play. Can't even hold aggro with Bestial Wrath up when that's going on. Contrast this with Screech, which is a) spammable, b) 20 focus to LB's 50, and c) an area-effect WITH a debuff. Now that I have access to carrion birds that don't make me cringe just looking at them, it may be time for me to get one to be my all-purpose/tanking pet, while Neme can remain my DPS sweetheart.

Sigh. At the end of the day, I am still a cat hunter. I guess I'll make it up by taming Hayoc on Maentwrog or my belf hunter.

Yes, I did just say belf hunter. What's it to ya?

EDIT: Also, blogfu.

Outland Bound is great because she's an adult (gasp!) playing the game with the same kind of expectations about politeness/grammar/whatnot I have. Very pleasant to read.

I shall add more as I find more I want to read.