WoW Profiles - Khitsune at 76

Level: 76
Spec: (Spec 1) Marksman / (Spec 2) Beastmaster
Profs: Inscription/Herbalism
Achievements: Flame Keeper, Sea Turtle Mount, Exalted with Kalu'ak, Orgrimmar, Darkspear Trolls, Undercity, Silvermoon, and Thunderbluff, tamed Loque'nahak and Aotona.
Pets: Boar ("Tanuki"), spider ("Jorogumo"), wolf ("Kabuki"), spirit beast ("Raiju")
Theme: Shinto, trickster
Comments:
Khitsune has made the past 5 levels mostly in Howling Fjord and Grizzly Hills, those being zones I haven’t frequented as much previously – while I like Borean Tundra and Dragonblight, I have to say HF and GH seem to have a more uniform/distinctive feel to them, with all the focus on the native Vyrkul and related lore.

At level 74 she replaced her moth with a fiery Vargul Blighthound, named “Kabuki”, after the animal’s vague resemblance to the traditional costume worn in these performances; he is a trickster spirit who has befriended Khitsune and the others, finding them quite amusing. I’ve been planning on doing this ever since my moth’s “summoning animation” green glow was removed and leaving it a comparatively drab creature; going from a moth to a wolf actually isn’t a huge shift in tactics, since both are ferocity pets who use a combat buff; obviously the moth will be a bit more of a tank while the wolf is for DPS, but this is not a big deal given that I have a tenacity pet for the tough fights.

After that, the Midsummer Fire Festival got underway, and I decided to get Khit a Spirit of Summer to go with her new wolf… by the time I’d achieved that I’d gotten to thinking it might be nice to have the title, too… and so I went whole hog and did everything. Although I’ve dabbled in previous Midsummer events, this is the first time I “did it all”.

I made sure to keep up with the Midsummer dailies, finding that like riding a bicycle, torch juggling skills always come back…

The bonfires were time consuming but not difficult thanks to epic land mount + humanoid tracking + aspect of the beast + small amount of luck; I got the Outland bonfires out of the way first so as to avoid getting barnstormed by players on epic flyers, and then slowly worked my way through the Old World bonfires, stopping along the way to grab flames from the enemy capitals.

Darnassus and Stormwind went the smoothest with only one death each, while Exodar and Ironforge required a bit of “corpse hopping” to pull it off, due to their more difficult city layout/bonfire placement.

Stormwind was the only city where I encountered any real resistance from enemy players, and even there I was able to grab the flame before they and the guards took me out – after that, I returned to find 2-3 players camping my corpse, but I managed to “outfox” them by simply resurrecting at the bottom of the canal behind them, and used my turtle mount and Kalu’ak fishing pole to submarine my way out to the docks - a quick hop overland past a few guards and then from there along the coast to Westfall safely underwater once more – while I haven’t had many opportunities to use my turtle and fishing pole since I got them back at lvl 71, they came in very handy here.

Total gear repair bill from city deaths: a few silver, as I was wearing lvl 10 vendor chainmail…

The Dalaran juggling achievement was do-able with 15 torches and a hotkey, although it took a couple tries and left me feeling like a human jackhammer.

The hardest part of the Ahune event was simply finding a group; the actual fight proved to be a total breeze thanks to the level 80s (and I’m glad I did it this year because Blizzard has announced plans to bump Ahune up to 80 for next Summer), netting me an achievement, a Tabard of Summer Flames, and a bunch of burning blossoms.

And finally after three days’ work, I had my title! (I must say I think the fire theme and Midsummer outfit ties in pretty well with Khit’s supernatural/fey/fox nature but maybe that’s just me)

The event had netted me perhaps 300-400 gold and about a level of exp; after some more time in Grizzly Hills I made level 76 and started thinking about getting some new pets.

First off I traveled to the Argent Vanguard at Icecrown, and replaced my red spider with a Carrion Fleshstripper; this spider model is extremely cool looking and not commonly seen (can’t recall ever seeing another player with one in fact), so it was a sweet upgrade – gave it the same name of “Jorogumo” and it was ready to go; I figured this would represent “Jo Jo” maturing into a more demonic spider form…

Next up I decided to go after Loque’nahak; of all my hunters in the end game, Khit seemed like the best fit for this particular pet, and so I went about getting her dual spec and setting up a BM51 offspec – this kind of wreaked havoc on my macros and took some major getting used to, but after a little while I’d adjusted everything to work and was ready to head over to Scholazar Basin.

The thing I found about dual spec with BM51, is that you have to swap pets at a stablemaster immediately after switching specs – and reserving each pet for use with just one spec. Otherwise, your pet’s talents keep getting reset every time you switch specs, which gets old real fast.

Over in Scholazar, it took me some two days or so of herb gathering before I finally located the elusive prowler, during which time I kept a placeholder rhino pet and got Khit’s inscription raised by some 30-40 points or so (that place has a ton of resources); I’d also stumbled across Aotona and parked her in my stables – she should work well as a dedicated cunning pet for BM spec.

When I found Loque, I had to move pretty quick as I was being trailed by a swarm of angry giant wasps, and ended up wasting my freeze trap on one before I FD’ed… but happily after that the tame went pretty smoothly and I had my very own Ghostsaber 2.0 (he did take off a chunk of my HP, but fortunately his DPS seemed to taper off once I was down to 30-40%); while I subsequently tamed Gondria on my BM nelf hunter, I have to say that I think Loque looks cooler – among other things Loque has an (almost) unique look reserved just for himself and a cat goddess… whilst Gondria actually uses a “standard” cat model + ghost overlay effect (check out the undead gryphon riders in SE dragonblight and you’ll see what I mean).

After some research I named him “Raiju”, which is the name of the pet/sidekick belonging to the Shinto thunder god Raiden; the classic description of this creature fits spirit beasts to a “T” (“Its body is composed of either lightning or fire and may be in the shape of a cat, tanuki, monkey, or weasel”), and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was in fact part of the inspiration for spirit beasts. I decided that Raiju would have been sent as a reward for the “Faithful pursuit of good deeds beyond the terms of the heavenly sentence” and a general mark of favor from his master Raiden, who perhaps also felt his pet was spending too much time sleeping and needed some exercise. Continue reading

WoW Profiles - Dougal at 77

Level: 77
Spec: Beastmaster (“Shooty”)
Profs: Mining/Herbalism
Achievements: Exalted with Kurenai and Cenarion Expedition, Cenarion War Hippogryph, tamed Nuramoc and Gondria
Pets: Chimaera (“Nightmare”), silithid (“Lurk”), hyena (“Frenzy”), spirit beast ("Aurora")
Theme: Purple, creepy
Comments:
As planned, Dougal leveled from 74-77 mostly in Zul'Drak and so now he's about 1/3 of the way through honored with Argent Crusade, and on track for getting a Zombie Sweeper Shotgun by 80; in the meantime he has the K3 Pachyderm Prevention Device from Storm Peaks, which is just way-cool looking in addition to having respectable DPS (even if it looks a bit like a super soaker...).

To help with the firepower, at 77 Dougal finished off 3/3 Improved Arcane Shot, which works well with Ferocious Inspiration (combined total of +24% dmg with arcane shot) and helps to achieve my overall goal of making him more of a "shooty" BM spec; although I wanted to take it earlier, things like Careful Aim and Mortal Shots seemed to provide a more reliable DPS boost, so it had to be pushed back until now.

More notably though as of level 77 he gets access to Cold Weather Flying, and so finally he can ride that pretty Cenarion War Hippogryph I’d worked so hard on acquiring back in his early Northrend career. This makes him only my second character able to fly in Northrend, and the first to do so with an epic mount - after all this time immersed in WotLK lvl 68-76, I'd almost forgotten what it was like to jet around at top speed, bypassing pesky ground mobs and otherwise feeling like Snoopy on his flying doghouse... although sk 225 flying mounts will soon enjoy a very nice boost with upcoming patch 3.2 (60% to 150%), there's still no substitute for the 280% full monty (not counting the achievement or PVP mounts, anyway).

Then last but certainly not least there is Gondria...

I have to say, when the spirit beasts first came out I wasn't too crazy about taming them; I thought they were just a little "too hip" and anyways, I figured, once you're a 51 pt BM spec, doesn't every pet become a "super pet",for the most part? But over time I got to thinking "what if I ran across Loque or Gondria and actually had the opportunity to tame it - would I still feel so blase about it, and if not, would I be willing to dismiss my current pet… or what if I just ran into it on a non-hunter (d’oh)?" While the majority of my high level toons are still in the 67-75 bracket, sooner or later I knew I'd be spending more time in Zul'Drak and Scholazar, and it would be just my luck to skip those tames only to run into Loque on my warrior or something.

So I decided to make spirit beasts the new priority - after managing to get Loque for Khitsune, I now had to get Dougal up to 77 and then see if I could track down the other “glowie kitteh”...I thought Gondria would work pretty well on Dougal - being a BM spec he wouldn't need to worry about fancy dual spec arrangements like Khit did, and a spirit beast ought to fit in reasonably well with his travelling menagerie of purplish nightmare beasts, so off I went on my new epic flyer to see if I could pull it off...

Got her on my first run.

I complain about my luck sometimes but things like this remind me that I really have no right to - having just got done taming a "placeholder pet" and setting up a "Gondria macro", I was flying around at mach 1, enjoying my new epic mount and thinking "well, I'll probably get to know this area pretty well by the time I see that cat", and all of a sudden up comes the raid warning and my adrenaline pegs the gauges.

Now, while I think I did a not-terrible job of taming Loque (got him on first try, no deaths or retries), it was another story with Gondria - instead of say, using my placeholder bear to clear the nearby mobs, I hurriedly abandoned him and proceeded to try taming Gondria right on the spot, tunnel vision raging... well, as it happened the nearby mobs displayed truly amazing timing, appearing from nowhere to trip my freeze trap a millisecond or so before Gondria got around to putting her dainty paws on it (spirit beasts hit hard, fyi), and then breaking out to pop me below zero HP when my tame bar was down to 0.001% or 0.002%. If there had been another hunter there, the only thing preventing him from swiping the tame would be if he was laughing too hard to work his keyboard.

Finally on like my 3rd or so corpse run I cooled off enough to form a semi-coherent strategy, and this time dragged her over to a quiet corner where I was able to complete the tame with Gondria frozen and sans interruptions...

Moral of story: if you're trying to tame a rare, do yourself the favor of taking the extra 10-20 seconds to scope out the local situation and make a plan, rather than allowing panic to set the agenda ("oh noes the competition must be RIGHT. ON. MY. HEELS"), because honestly you are going to be wasting much more time on corpse runs if you don't - this much I know.

Still - got her. After some research I decided to name her “Aurora”; since I’d been unable to come up with a decent name that fit with the theme of his other pets, and this seemed appropriate for a glowing spirit creature from an arctic land.

So, yay - now I can get back to playing all my toons with no worries of spirit beasts and bad timing... at least until they add the electrified wolf in 3.2... Continue reading

Mend Pet SPCA Charity Drive

I sometimes get so caught up in the phenomenon of World of Warcraft that I miss the things that actually... matter.

I'm referring to the place called "Real Life", whose troubles seem so far away when we're off slaying gnolls, doing dailies and otherwise running about with our virtual beast companions (well if you're a hunter fan like myself anyway - it's one of the 3 most popular classes in the game, about even with paladins and behind death knights).

But what makes hunters so popular? For some it's the mechanics of the class; which shots are best for what situation and in what order... but for myself and I suspect plenty others, it's the animals - virtual, yes, and rather too big, spikey and all around deadly to want to encounter IRL under any circumstances... but even as virtual animals, hunter pets do resonate somewhat with a love for animals in the world at large.

It doesn't matter if you're on an RP server or not; personally my interest in roleplaying extends no farther than dreaming up a character background (which never gets shared except here!) - I play PVE servers all the way, and while I try not to sound unintelligent I am guilty of occasionally using things like "lol j/k :)" etc, sorry to say. Nonetheless, I still feel attached to my hunter pets on some level.

And that's because I love animals IRL - my personal weapon of choice is the cat, but pretty much anything that A) won't eat me and B) can show happiness and affection is cool in my book. Always have, always will - and that's why it burns me up when I hear about animal abuse or neglect.

So, when I found out about Brajana's Mend Pet SPCA Charity Drive, I decided I had to get off my tail and help out somehow. Having recently already committed to $18/mo over at www.aspca.org, I didn't have the means to make a financial contribution so I decided to do the next best thing and try to help get the word out. Took me a couple weeks to get around to doing this (sorry!), but there's still a week or so before 7/31 to head over to Mend Pet; please check out Brajana's charity drive and help in any way you can.

Also a big thank you to Mania at Petopia for making us aware of this - and sorry it took me so long to get on the ball. ;) Continue reading

WoW Profiles - Velocity at 75

Level: 75
Spec: SV/MM Hybrid
Profs: Mining/Skinning
Achievements: Exalted with Netherwing, Sha'tari Skyguard, Ogri'la, Darnassus and Ironforge, tamed Garwal and Aotona.
Pets: Cat ("Boo"), gorilla ("Wendigo"), bird of prey ("Voodoo")
Theme: Ghostly, cold, pale
Comments:
Originally hailing from the Nordrassil server and named Nightbreeze, I rolled Velocity back in the early days of the BC expansion when I'd just discovered the ghost saber and really really wanted a hunter that would "look good" with a ghostly cat - for those who joined the game more recently, back in those days something like a transparent snow leopard was a big deal, and was the first time I had a pet that felt "special".

When I created Velocity, I decided this character would actually be "part ghost", with ragged white hair and far away demeanor being partly connected to the ethereal realms; how she came to be this way is unknown as her earlier memories are obscured by amnesia - all she knows is that she was awoken in a graveyard by the murmurs of the dead below, and that ever since she has had a connection to the other side. It was for this reason ghostly creatures relate to her more strongly and thus she was able to befriend a ghost saber who I named "Boo".

I pretty much played her exclusively from lvl 1-70, psyched to have such a "cool" pet. Her spec wasn't very good - for the sake of trying something different I set her up with a "kiting spec", which is to say a muddle of talents from all 3 trees, basically whatever seemed like it would help a hunter to kite effectively (Improved Concussive Shot, Improved Aspect of Cheetah, Trap Mastery etc); that was way back when I was first learning about kiting and thought it actually merited a whole spec (hint: it doesn't). But, having a neat looking pet and a way of taking down super-tough mobs was all the excitement I needed at the time.

Back then, the Ahn-Qiraj event timer had been accidentally reset by the launch of the Burning Crusade release; this meant you could do the repeatable Ahn-Qiraj War Effort quests, which was a nice focus for a new hunter and also a good way of getting rep for a riding ram; by that time I had gotten tired of default racial mounts and was looking for something a little more individualized. By doing my leather, ore and cooking turn-ins exclusively at Ironforge, and doing as many Ironforge quests as possible, I had the rep for a riding ram well before level 40... my RP backdrop was that the dwarves accorded her a great respect for being part ghost, being a culture practicing ancestor worship.

Shortly afterward she tamed Uhk'loc in Ungoro crater - again back in those days a white furred/blue skinned gorilla was almost unheard of, and I would get a lot of questions about him. I named him "Wendigo", for the northern beast spirit; I decided he would actually have come from the icy steeps of Dun Morogh, responding to her ghostly nature and establishing himself as her protector.

From there it was a fairly uneventful trek to lvl 70, at which point I settled in to work on the Skyguard and Ogri'la dailies; after a bunch of that plus the cap level gold reward from finishing pretty much every non-instance quest in Outland, I had enough for an epic flying mount and added Netherwing dailies to my schedule... finally after maybe 2-3 weeks all told I had my epic crossbow, epic trinket, and netherwing drake mount.

After that, she went on hiatus until WotLK came out, at which time I dusted her off and did the Argent Crusade events until she had a full set of epic chainmail, Argent War Horn, tabard, and a haunted memento, leaving her in pretty good shape to start questing in Northrend - the memento was an especially nice fit with Velocity's ghostly RP background.

It was also around that time that I decided to move her from Nordrassil to the new Latin server Quel'Thalas, as part of a merge with my Alliance toons from the overcrowded Uther server; during the server transfer I was forced to change her name as Nightbreeze was already taken on the new location, so after a very long and frustrating process of trial and error I finally went with "Velocity"; about the only cool sounding hunter name I could find that wasn't already taken - apparently either the new Hispanic players were very creative or else a lot of other people'd had the same idea as me about jumping on the free transfer. Still, not such a bad deal - I find I like the new name just as much if not more, and anyway after the transfer I was able to roll a nelf druid back on Nordrassil named Nightbreeze, which made for some amusing conversations with my friends there... I actually do intend to go back and level that toon someday, if I can find the time.

The new quests in Northrend proved to be pretty cool, although sadly the epic Crystalline Crossbow I'd worked so hard to obtain back in Outland was replaced almost immediately by a Northrend green quest item; DPS and armor points receiving the traditional "new expansion" boost that we saw with the BC expansion...

I've also changed her talent spec a number of times; since I already have "purist" hunters devoted primarily to each of the different talent trees, I knew I wanted some kind of hybrid, but it seemed nothing was working very well for her... finally I found something that seemed promising - 0/25/41 with Concussive Barrage 2/2 (I try to time Multi-shot to go off right around when my pet is about to lose aggro, for the auto-daze effect), Black Arrow and as much +dmg% talents as I could fit. Still making last minute tweaks but so far, so good.

Next thing to do was try and find a third pet; Velocity had "just" two pets, and I try to have at least 3 on all hunters, preferably 1 from each family; for Velocity it's been tough finding pets that fit her theme - and so I had to spend some time window shopping at Petopia before I finally decided on Aotona; here was a cunning family pet, of a species I hadn't tamed before (bird of prey), with both unique looks and sounds... and his coloration was at least kinda sorta compatible with a white haired night elf, so I spent a long time gathering ore in Scholazar Basin - but after a week or so of fruitless effort I gave up...

But then I was lucky enough to catch wind of the Garwal tame bug over at Petopia's; Mania has the full scoop if you haven't heard of it already, but basically there is a wolf boss at the end of a Howling Fjord quest chain who morphs into a werewolf once you get him down to 50% hp, and it just so happens that if you are taming him, and your tame completes right at the exact instant he makes that change, then instead of a tamed wolf - you have a tamed worgen. The trick was to get him down to like 55% or so HP, hit him with Wyvern Sting and time your tame so that he wakes up and starts taking DoT damage as the tame is finishing.

Having focused on Borean Tundra with Velocity, the Garwal quest chain happily remained available to her, and having 41 pts in SV she had wyvern sting, so I headed over to try my hand at this very tricky tame; although it took me some 30-40 tries I finally managed to nail the tame-timer just right, and voila I had myself a tamed worgen - how cool is that?? Of course, seeing this as a "bit too much of a good thing", Blizzard nerfed it the next day - no more taming Garwal, and existing tames lost their pet spells and talents and otherwise became somewhat buggy, so I opted to leave mine in the stable as a collector's item - recently however Blizzard replaced tamed worgen with the generic lvl 68 Northrend wolf and so I finally released Maul back to the wild.

While I was initially kind of mad about Blizzard's decision along with many, many others, this was largely down to the way they held off making any comments or updates until the player community had been begging all day for a blue post, at which time some rather flimsy justifications were tepidly offered up (among other things they never adequately explained why tamed spirit guides were allowed to be kept or how a worgen was any less appropriate for a hunter pet than the slime-a-dile aka "Spirit of Koosu" - I especially liked the one about how they set its pet family to null because they "didn't think a werewolf belonged to any pet family - nope, just can't find a plausible fit"); but that aside I recognized in the end it's their decision to make and did my best to let it go and move on; I was still glad to have been able to participate in the "event", and I'm certainly not going to harbor any bad feelings toward players who tamed ghost wolves, slimes, hydras etc.

Feeling sort of "blah" and trying to get back into the mood, I decided to head back to Scholazar Basin and give Aotona one more try... and lo and behold, there he was! The tame went quite smoothly; apparently he has a fear ability but luckily he wasted that on my placeholder croc pet before I abandoned it and got my freeze trap off - getting feared across the Wild Growth Mangal would not have been fun... and getting him at 75 was nice, as he'll be an active part of my quests and grinds for that many more levels than if I'd waited to do this as a bored level 80...

I named the huge, colorful bird "Voodoo", to at least give it a modicum of tie-in with the other pets - this, I decided, was the familiar and soul vessel of the scheming pirate captain "Fast Jack” - a man of minor magical skill but of great cunning and ambition, who tricked the dark god Davey Jones into granting him much greater magical ability in exchange for his soul... which was already safely stashed away in another body. Said creditor sent his be-tentacled agents after the doublecrossing captain, but Jack managed to stay one step ahead... for a while. When Davey's "boys" caught up, his body was taken down to the dark place beneath the waves... but his parrot got away and while Davey knows Jack’s soul remains up there, somewhere... he's still not quite sure where exactly.

Velocity was able to suss out Voodoo's true nature with her ghostly affinities, and as a condition of her silence, the giant magical parrot has agreed to accompany her on her adventures... and has come to appreciate the "safety in numbers" of being with her - or perhaps he just thinks Velocity could make a handy soul vessel someday… Continue reading

WoW Profiles - Khitsune at 71

Level: 71
Spec: Marksman
Profs: Inscription/Herbalism
Achievements: Sea Turtle Mount, Exalted with Kalu’ak, Orgrimmar, Darkspear Trolls, Undercity, Silvermoon, and Thunderbluff.
Pets: Boar (“Tanuki”), spider (“Jorogumo”), moth (“Konpaku”)
Theme: Shinto, trickster
Comments:
Not having played a blood elf before, I decided to roll a hunter with an anime theme – originally this toon was named Kyuketsuki, which meant “vampire” in Japanese, and I’d planned on setting her up with a bat (Ressan), a spider (Zarakh), a zombie bear and a wolf mount… and I’d went with tailoring/enchanting.

Getting the rep for the wolf mount required doing a ton of Horde quests including many that were gray, and necessitated raising all of the horde factions since a good chunk of the rep needed to make exalted with any of them comes from the “spillover” rep you get for doing quests for the others, so by the time she reached level 40, she had made exalted with Org, and was already there with UC and well into revered with the others.

However by then I had realized that I just wasn’t that enthused about her pets or for that matter her theme; I’m not a roleplayer but I still like to have a nice, coherent mini-theme somewhere in the back of my head when playing a character – and this character just hadn’t gelled for me. So I decided she needed an overhaul; I knew I still wanted something anime-ish for her, so I went with a Shinto theme this time – instead of a vampire, she would be the closest thing the Japanese had to an elf; a fox spirit. Called Kitsune (“kits-NEH”), these beings were foxes that could assume other shapes, including a humanoid appearance, which they invariably would use for the purpose of playing tricks on humans… one paid name change and haircut later and she had her new identity – now to find some new pets to go with it.

I tried to think of a tenacity pet that would work well with a marksman build while also having some potential for a Shinto background, and the armored blue agamar from RFK seemed to fit the bill, so I tamed one of those. None of my hunters had a boar, and the initial aggro burst seemed to work well with an MM spec (a crab would’ve been even better but I already had one on my dwarf); I named him “Tanuki”, which is the Japanese word for a badger spirit. Also known for being shape changing tricksters as well as gluttons, I thought this would be a pretty good fit for the boar with his playful hops and wiggles.

Next I decided on a spider – in my experience their web is second to none for keeping a mob tied up while you unload burst dps, so I picked up the red spindly rare from Duskwood and named her “Jorogumo” (“Jo Jo” for short) – this was the word for (wait for it!) a spider spirit. In addition to being shape changers they tended to be evil and so while they too enjoyed playing tricks on people, their tricks tended to be more harmful if not fatal.

My last choice was a moth – from my research I’d learned the Japanese along with many other cultures considered moths and butterflies symbols of reincarnation and in particular to be the forms that restless spirits sometimes took when visiting the world of the living. I tamed a Vicious Teromoth from Terrokar Forest, which at the time still kept its summoning animation (it made a “splat!” sound whenever you called it, and had a creepy green glow), and called it “Konpaku”, which basically meant “soul” in Japanese; now I had a pet from each family, complete with RP backdrop.

To tie it all together I decided that Jorogumo had pushed Khitsune and Tanuki into playing a trick on a crazy old Shinto monk who thought he was on a quest to right 1000 wrongs… normally Khit and Tanuki would not have dared pester a holy man, but they did not want to be seen to back down from a challenge and so they went along with it – unfortunately the prank went wrong and resulted in the old monk’s death, and so the three were rounded up by angels and brought to trial before the goddess Amaterasu Omikami, who decided to send the monk back to complete his quest as a giant moth, and sentenced Khit, Jo Jo and Tanuki to accompany and aid him in this pursuit as his faithful servants – or face expulsion to hell. Furthermore she took away their powers of shape changing and thereby locking them into the forms they’d held during their last, ill-fated prank.

The tricksters chose the option that avoided eternal torment and did their best to serve their sentence. Omikami put Khit in charge, she being smarter than Tanuki and if not good, then at least not evil like Jo Jo.

Eventually the sentence was served out, and Konpaku returned to heaven (not incidentally this was right about the time when Blizzard removed pets’ summoning animation, including Konpaku’s cool greenish glow…); however over the course of their sometimes humorous journeys aiding the Don Quixote-like Konpaku, a curious thing had happened to the three spirits – they had each developed a conscience, and doing good deeds now seemed the natural thing, try as they might to return to their old ways (a particularly sad realization for Jo Jo), so they just continued on with helping those in need and doing the things adventurers do.

With a little more work I was able to get her to exalted with the rest of the Horde factions, bought an epic skeletal warhorse, kodo and raptor, and went about setting up a macro to /castrandom a colorful mount whenever she needed to travel – I decided these creatures would either be mythical Shinto fauna (kodo), things she had a spiritual commonality with (warhorse) or simply just something that looked cool and let her ride it on account of her smelling more like an animal than a humanoid (raptor).

In addition to the new pets and mounts, I decided to get new professions as she couldn’t use 90% of the stuff she made with tailoring and enchanting was taking forever to go up (in addition to not seeming very useful to a mid-lvl hunter); both skills have worked out well for me on various other chars, but they just didn’t seem a good fit for this one, so I dropped them and went with herbalism/inscription.

Perhaps even more than providing raw mats for inscription, herbalism proved a boon in that it gave Khit Lifeblood, which was great for helping her to survive while channeling a point blank volley from the middle of a crowd of angry mobs; otherwise I can’t say the new profs have been terribly exciting – inscription costs a fortune in vellum, way more than just plunking down the occasional 5-10 gold for a new glyph (I’ve somewhat offset her costs with sale of practice glyphs but only partially, as glyphs appear to be a buyer’s market on her server)… it’s too bad they don’t have a selection of “BoP” glyphs that only inscriptionists can use – something like that would certainly make the profession a more attractive choice…

And last but not least I went with a new spec as well – previously she had used a nondescript BM spec, and despite a lot of misgivings about holding agro, decided to switch to the marksman tree – however with some careful planning and macro setup the new spec proved quite effective; I spent the rest of the time up to 68 in Nagrand looking for tough bosses to fight (she was able to solo the Windroc Matriarch, Cho’war the Pillager, Gurok the Usurper, the Master Planner, Banthar, Bach’lor and Tusker at level 66-67). Her dps is really head and shoulders over most of my other hunters, all else being equal, and while she inevitably will pull agro off her pet, they normally are able to keep the target tied up long enough for Khit to burn it down before it gets to her.

I also had been working on her fishing skill – previously I hadn’t been able to muster the patience to get this past 300 or so on any of my characters, but with a recent patch they replaced the “Your fish got away” message with a successful cast that returned a 6 cp junk item; now every cast counts as a potential skill up in any area, so no more “doing time” in Org, TB or SW trying to raise fishing skill enough to qualify for the areas you’d prefer to be casting in, and so by the time I made 68 and went to Northrend, she had 350 fishing and it made sense to work on Kalu’ak rep.

After a few quick upgrades, I spent the next few levels doing Kalu’ak dailies until finally Khit had attained exalted, and started using the epic +30 skill fishing pole; once that was done I settled in for a long grind fishing Northrend pools, and after 30 skillups or so was lucky enough to fish a sea turtle mount from one of the pools in Dragonblight, thus enabling her (with the Mastercraft Kalu’ak Fishing Pole equipped) to zip around at +60% speed underwater with unlimited water breathing – and thanks to the accessibility of the Kalu’ak dailies, Khit can use this from level 71-80 instead of just sitting on her turtle’s back like a fixture outside the AH (as tends to happen with people who wait till 80 to go after it) – nice!

Being exalted with the Kalu’ak also got her some other benefits – right off she picked up the vanity pet Pengu, who looks cool and fits right in with her Shinto-y entourage, and once she makes it up to the lvl 76-78 area she’ll have access to some nice blue chainmail and weapons.

At 74 I plan to fill Konpaku’s spot with a Vargul Blighthound named “Kabuki”, which will give me back a ferocity pet – it was kind of disappointing when Blizzard took away her moth’s glow effect but I’ll be just as happy with her new fiery wolf spirit, and then at 76 I’m hoping to replace Jo Jo’s red model with a bonespider from IceCrown; same name just a different look. After that I’m thinking about maybe picking up dual spec and spending time in Scholazar basin, where I might try to tame Loque (since none of my other hunters have him and he would seem a good fit for her spiritual/ghostly theme) and perhaps a white gorilla (who look somewhat like the white monkeys indigenous to the mountains of Japan, and which would give her another spell interrupt). Continue reading

WoW Profiles - Dougal at 74

Level: 74
Spec: Beastmaster (“Shooty”)
Profs: Mining/Herbalism
Achievements: Exalted with Kurenai and Cenarion Expedition, tamed Nuramoc
Pets: Chimaera (“Nightmare”), silithid (“Lurk”), hyena (“Frenzy”)
Theme: Purple, creepy
Comments:
For most of his career, Dougal was the hunter I played when I was either tired of playing all of my other hunters or when I wanted to try out some new idea re: places to level, or some new spec or pet or other idea I got from browsing Petopia… prior to WotLK I’d gone with a spec that I call the windserpent build, e.g. (lots of +crit) + (gftt) + (efficient pet focus dump), but it hadn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped; despite frequent lightning breaths his flying serpent just couldn’t seem to hold aggro long enough to let me enjoy all of the flashy proc icons lighting up my screen.

Then along came patch 3.0 which changed my pet’s lightning breath from a very-efficient focus dump, to a bite with special effects, and I finally had to send it back to the wild and go back to the drawing board… I’d had some good results from my other survival hunter re: using what I call “slowing pets”, and didn’t currently have anyone using a chimaera or silithid, so I decided to see what I could do with the beastmaster tree – and doing as much as I could to keep the emphasis on shooting over tanking.

First off I figured if I was going to pick up a chimaera that I might as well have a go at taming the coolest model out there – Nuramoc, of course. After some research and a lot of ore gathering in Netherstorm with my other night elf hunter (who had an epic flying mount, happily), I was able to track down the elusive flying purple chitinous two headed gribbly – hooray! It also likely helped that most of the other hunters had either tamed this beast by now or were too busy checking out Northrend to care…

Now that Nuramoc was a definite, purple would be the new unifying color for this hunter, and so I went ahead and tamed a purple hyena and a red/purple silithid, and completed the theme with a trip to the barbershop – Dougal’s race proving to be a nice bonus here as night elves are the only hunter race able to get purple hair!

Next thing to do was concoct some sort of RP mini-story for Dougal and his new pets. At one time it seems Dougal collected some debts for a merchant on the Goblin Market, who sold creatures he had extracted from people’s dreams and nightmares via magical dream catcher, and by way of reward for his efforts Dougal was allowed to choose three creatures from the merchant’s cages, which he of course tamed and took adventuring.

So now what to do? Since my new pets were a combined 11 levels behind me, it made sense to focus on kills over quests – unfortunately most of the rep grinds in Northrend entail doing daily quests and dungeons – you don’t have nearly the range of options for kill rep that you did back in the Old World or Outlands, especially in the lower levels… however, I did notice that the Cenarion Expedition had made a reappearance in Borean Tundra, and even had an old style kill rep repeatable with a buff, so I decided that faction would be his new goal.

The first step was to do the last few unfinished Cenarion Expedition quest chains back in Outlands, and then I got going with their quests in Borean Tundra – by the time those were done I had just managed to break revered and could now use Warden’s Arrows, which had 5 more dps than the standard ammo available from Northrend vendors, as well as a nifty arcanum for his helm; then it was time to settle in for the long trip to exalted.

After a few weeks of harvesting “Hemingwary Lackey Ears”, I finally got there – by now I was lvl 74 and my pets were caught up to me. I then drained my savings on that server to get Dougal epic riding skill and a coveted Cenarion War Hippogryph; he wouldn’t be able to use it in Northrend for another 3 levels of course, but in the meantime he can harvest ore and herbs in style back in Outland…

The new spec has been working out well – although sinking 51 pts into BM inevitably forces you to pass up a lot of the more shooty talents in the other trees, there are still a few handy bits to be had such as serpent’s swiftness (+20% increased rate of fire), improved aspect of the hawk (for another +21% increased rate of fire with glyph, that is proc-based), aspect mastery (+ap), and some dmg bonuses (+9% with arcane shot and another +5% overall dmg bonus thanks to focused fire and ferocious inspiration), and you can get very good value for spending the remaining points on the early MM talents – I’ve found with this spec that instead of holding back on my DPS to allow the pet to retain aggro, it works much better to actively try to grab aggro away from it – hard to do with a BM pet (another plus of the BM tree), but worthwhile as my pets’ slowing spells give me the time to burn the mob down before it reaches me and in turn saving me from having to spend the extra mana on heals.

Going forward I’m thinking of moving Dougal to Zul’Drak and focusing on Argent Crusade rep, since he is now the minimum level for that area, and they appear to have the best (?) ranged rep reward weapon (and if I’m very luck and persistent I might even run across Gondria…). Continue reading

Hunters – WotLK Pets

I’ve been meaning to post something about hunters, but despite it being my favorite class in WoW, I couldn’t really think of an angle that interested me enough to actually do it. Then the other day I noticed the Wrath of the Lich King hunter pets preview over at Petopia, and realized I’d found something to talk about – hunter pets are going to be revolutionized in a few months.

So, what will happen to our pets in November? I highly recommend going to the source for the full details (especially since they are regularly posting new updates as changes occur in beta), but if you want a quick preview, here are the essentials that I’ve been able to glean from the excellent research done by Mania and friends:

• Pet families. Pets are now grouped into 3 distinct families according to basic function – cunning, ferocious and tenacious. The cunning family seems to be more about having PVP utility skills, while the ferocious and tenacious families contain the DPS and tank pets respectively. Stats are now based off of family rather than pet species, and a pet’s family will also determine which talents it is eligible for (“caster” pets apparently still have lower stats but this is supposed to be fixed soon).
• Pet talents. These are accumulated at the rate of 1 every 4 levels beginning at level 20, and the pet can only choose from the tree assigned to its family. Talents are how your pet will “grow into” his family’s role; although a Beast Master spec’s pets will remain superior as you’d expect, it will no longer be necessary for a hunter to take the BM spec just to have a pet that is capable of pulling its own weight.
• Implications. This is huge: no more pet trainer (well that’s not quite true – they are still available if you want to respec your pet), no more taming pets just to learn their new skill, no more spending ridiculous amounts of time raising your pets’ loyalty levels… and your third stable slot pet can now be a “keeper”. Apparently the basic pet feeding/loyalty mechanism will remain but only for the purpose of retaining the “happy” damage bonus and preventing it from eventually running away due to neglect.
• Pet skills – Blizzard finally will be delivering on their promise to assign a unique ability to every species, so folks who stuck it out with their spider or croc will finally be rewarded for their perseverance. In general pets who already had a special skill will keep it as-is; this is mainly for the pets who previously had been ignored.

Some other bits

• New species – They’ve moved owls over into a species called birds of prey, which also includes hawks and eagles. These birds can disarm an enemy and belong to the cunning family, so it looks like they may be handy vs uber geared pvp meleers. Also and more dramatically they have made moths tameable – these are ferocity pets with a pretty cool looking turbo boost/recovery skill and I will definitely be taming one or two of these for my hunters.
• Exotic pets – level 60 BM spec hunters will be able to tame “special” pets available to noone else. So far Mania has confirmed that devilsaurs belong to this group, and I have heard that chimaera may also be tameable … this is very cool and I can’t wait to learn more about this.

New roles (IMO)

• AOE pets – for the solo hunters out there, there will be 7 pets with AOE type abilities, with pretty even representation from all families (recommend taking BM spec for the cunning/ferocity pets though);
• Cunning – dragonhawks and sporebats
• Ferocity – carrion birds and tallstriders
• Tenacity – bears, gorillas and crocolisks
• Tank pets – these pets have the toughness for heavy solo’ing but lack AOE and so their main value lies in their ability to offtank in groups (just be aware that when the tank is holding aggro, the guys with cats and scorpids are going to be laughing at you);
• Tenacity – crabs, boars, turtles and warpstalkers
• PVP pets – for those who prefer the arena and want something relevant to that environment, there will be 7 pets with PVP type abilities; most are from the cunning family but the other families do make a brief appearance;
• Cunning – bats, birds of prey, ravagers, spiders and nether rays*
• Ferocity – hyenas*
• Tenacity – crabs*

*Some of these pets are equally useful for PVP and solo play – PVE’ers take note.

• Raid pets – not much has changed here, although as the list of known “exotic” pets expands this may change (note that raid pets are also fine for solo’ing and share the popularity of DPS pets within groups);
• Ferocity – devilsaurs and wolves
• Tenacity – scorpids
• DPS pets – these pets are best for getting into groups who are “LF1M DPS”, and are also nice for casual solo’ing (the single target DPS is great vs 1-2 mob fights, but they won’t do as well as AOE pets in the larger rumbles);
• Cunning – serpents and wind serpents
• Ferocity – cats, moths and raptors

Other thoughts

Charge. The charge skill is being moved from boars over to the pets in the ferocity family. Initially I was kind of annoyed at that, because after all it is the boar’s trademark move; when you see it you think of something big and heavy coming in like a meteor and stunning its target with the impact – not something light and agile like a kitty or buzzard (plus I went to all that trouble to tame a blue agamar – how could they do this to me!)…

However, on further reflection I think there is a good justification for giving it to ferocity pets; charge is one of- if not the best- skill for a MM spec’s pet, and so they wanted to give it to more species so that MM spec hunters could have something with both the opening threat spike of a boar and the longterm DPS to continue holding aggro through a long fight.

It will be nice to be able to change some of my hunters from BM to MM, but I’m going to miss having it on my dwarf’s boar – currently my only MM spec hunter. I still don’t think it should have been taken away from boars (why can’t they just share it with the ferocity pets? There’s no good reason why it can’t be a pet skill for one and a talent for the other), but at least they did give them a damage bonus to gore while dashing, which is better than nothing I guess.

Dash/dive. This is the only bit that I still have an issue with; apparently this can now be purchased with the pet’s first talent point (i.e. at lvl 20), at the current rank 3 strength – not only is this overpowered for a level 20 pet IMO (there’s a reason why it currently isn’t available until lvl 30-36), it will now be available to every species. That’s right, come November we will be seeing giant galapagos turtles, kodiak bears and other extremely ponderous things zipping around the battlefield at the same speed as hawks and cheetahs (faster even than a lvl 30 mount). It’s going to look ridiculous, and detract from the “feel” of the tenacity pets. Why not give them cybernetic jet boosters and gun pods while they’re at it? Maybe the ability to polymorph into humanoids for covert operations, like a terminator? The possibilities become endless when you ignore game atmosphere. Seriously though I could possibly see giving tenacity pets dash rank 1, at a higher level (like say 40 or 50), just to reflect the general uberness of the high level creature, but rank 3? I gotta say this one just seems dumb (and I’m saying this as one of the prime “beneficiaries”).

Know what they could have done that would keep it balanced and preserve the pets’ feel? A) Limit tenacity pets to dash rank 1 as above but also B) give them a high level version of barding that actually shows up on the model itself. That I think would make everyone happy, or as close to it as can be accomplished. But it’s something they would have to do now if ever, because if they wait and do it after every last Tom Dick and Harry have their superfast bears, turtles etc, the screams of dismay from players who prefer things that look goofy and contrary to the feel of the game will be deafening and unending. Sadly I have a feeling this brainless change is going to sail all the way to the end zone without challenge… and you just know that either they extend it to lock pets or provoke a lot of complaining from that class (and rightly so)… and then next thing you know warriors will be angrily wondering why they aren’t getting turbo movement too…

All in all though I’m psyched about the new pet changes, and plan to follow this closely at Petopia.

Acknowledgment

Once again I’d like to thank everyone at Petopia for providing such a huge wealth of information on the upcoming pet changes to us hunter addicts!

Continue reading