The Petless Hunter Challenge - Food for Thought - AKA to which extent is limiting your claracter for a challenge considered griefing?
" Hunter, where pet" - my paladin tank about to pull Princess Theredras after a full mara run
"Why don't you have a pet?
(I ate it)
Understandable, have a nice day"
-exchange between me and a random gnome mage in arathi highlands
"The growl pet can off tank a bit if one happens to get loose"
-the raid coms in UBRS, where I was the only hunter, the room outside The Beast
I really liked the part of HC where there were a ton of people playing it their own way, with SF, SSF, and other challenge runs ranging from having to use an off meta spec to going full naked warrior and everything in between. That said, it's still a multiplayer game, so at what point when you go activities involving other people is it considered griefing to be limiting yourself in these challenge runs?
Yeah, the reason i ask this aloud is I looked at how many people were doing challenge runs such SF - had one time where I was a druid healer and I had a SSF tank for Deadmines.... He had 407 HP. Yeah, we cleared VC and I gained a few wrinkles but it was fun. This inspired me a while back to make my own challenge run with a class I had more experience with to spice it up - Hunter.
I already knew Hunter inside and out and figured it would be boring without some self imposed challenges:
No guns allowed - had to use bows/crossbows only. Was a dwarf to start as well.
No pet allowed
For my run, I never did the quest to get a pet. It was ton of fun, and I did ding 60 and have near full Pre-Bis complete. I ran deep survival tree with finishing talents in marksman. I got really good at melee weaving since Hunter has seperate swing timers for shots and melee strikes, and survival giving 30% stronger traps often made me top the meters on AOE pulls. The experience was akin to playing a boomkin - you come in blasting hard and OOM fast since you're always clicking a button to either slow a mob, melee weave, use ranged skills or to trap weave. Lots of kitting. Not having a pet made my rotation clean by being my only focus and trap weaving was super consistent when you don't have a pet to keep you in combat sometimes on feign death weaving, but I had no illusions though, not having a pet is not a super hidden ultimate build that is better than BM or Survival with a pet at the end of the day.
Overall I consider my journey was a success (I dinged 60 and did every dungeon after all) - I had some people very vocally critique this and call it straight griefing, but what are your thoughts? Is it griefing to do a challenge run and join groups with a limited character?