Four bells tolled. Four torches were lit.

Today, another member of the old guard of this game has left us. Howitzer has announced his leaving of WoW - he gave no reasons, but if he feels the same way as I do, it is owing to the fact that our class has been constantly weakened since practically the inception of The Burning Crusade and the spec that we both love (Marksmanship) has been constantly shit on and is no more than a worthless PVP spec in the eyes of most.

I, for one, do not blame him. There are only a very few things keeping me in this game, and I have only been back for a couple of months.

Mirshalak has it right, sadly. Kalgan is performing the same rites on WoW as he performed on UO. Arena is this MMO generation's Dungeon Doom. It is sucking everything about this game into its vortex and crushing the light and soul out of it. So many changes, nerfs, and shifts of paradgym are being made to support the Arena, and Hunters are becoming a very unfortunate victim of it.

Gone are the days that any spec could be forced to be raid-viable - one overarching talent, Serpent's Brokenness, is so powerful that it eclipses a full 21 or more points in another tree. Five points should not be more powerful than twenty, and yet the new blood in Blizzard seems to think that Beast Mastery should be the One True Path (tm) for raiding Hunters.

I will not bow to that mentality again. I will, however, take a fair deal of convincing to renew my WoW subscription once the three months I paid for initially are over.

So for the old guard that has already left us (Risen guild, Howitzer, and every other beta player who I don't know of), I feel your pain, and will join you soon, I think.

And may four bells toll for me, and four torches be lit when it happens. I will go to meet my friends in the beyond, and no aero-prism will find me where I am.