Monday, July 27, 2009

WoW Profiles - Bofors at 78

Spec: Survival / BM
Profs: Mining/Engineering
Achievements: Tamed The Beast from UBRS at 76, exalted with Stormwind, Ironforge, Exodar, Gnomeregan and Darnassus, Magical Crawdad.
Pets: Core Hound ("Magma"), Hyena (“Red”), crab (“Vise”) and spider (“Slag”)
Themes: Alan Quatermain, tinker, red/orange, fire
Comments:
Years ago, having recently finished playing a 1-70 marathon session with Velocity the night elf and looking to start a new hunter, I decided this time I'd try a dwarf – I was looking forward to playing a hunter who even the youngest/shortest pet would look “large” next to!

I drew a lot of inspiration from the character of Hemet Nesingwary – the idea of a larger than life Big Game Hunter of Legend seemed to have a lot of potential; something with a vague 19th/early 20th century feel. Along those lines I named him “Bofors”, which was the name of the Swedish manufacturer of the famous “Bofors Gun” back in the WWI-WWII period.

For professions, I went with mining/engineering; being mostly a solo player, I wanted access to superior (or at least decent) firearms that didn't require quests, dungeons, PVP etc. I figured the dwarf’s extensive experience with field stripping firearms plus a somewhat eccentric nature would have produced an inclination to explore the mechanical mysteries and create contraptions that would aid him “on the hunt” or provide amusement and “lift morale at camp”.

Further in keeping with his image as a jungle explorer, I decided he should ride an elephant rather than the standard dwarven ram – by now I’d become determined to get my characters cross faction mounts, a precious source of motivation during the otherwise very bleak and repetitive old world areas (back when Bofors was leveling, you still needed to make lvl 40 just to attain regular riding skill).

So this shaped his itinerary up through level 40; I methodically went around doing every Alliance faction quest I could find, and finally by I think level 37 had reached exalted with everyone except Gnomeregan – this had made for a spectacularly dull run since most of the time it meant he was doing gray quests... but having a purple elekk mount to ride at lvl 40 was a bright spot at the end of the tunnel, and made for a nice pick-me-up when I finally "arrived" at lvl 40...

Then patch 3.0 came out; all of a sudden hunters and their pets received a sweeping upgrade, and there were new specs and pets to try, so I planned out a major revamp for Bofors; previously he'd been an uninteresting mish-mash of MM and SV, so after some thought I decided on a full survival spec, and some pets that would (hopefully) help keep enemies at range while I pounded them with explosive shot, steady, auto and whatever else I could throw at them; this looked like a setup that would capitalize on a good chunk of the new 3.0 goodies.

First off I tamed a Scarlet Hound at the Scarlet Monastery, who I named “Red” – for Bofors I wanted pet names that were simple, preferably monosyllabic. This was a gruff outdoorsman after all and not someone who'd be seen running about with a cat named "Silvermyst"! I'd always thought the red hyenas were cool looking but not enough to justify the bother of taming something that was just a stripped down wolf - but with the addition of Tendon Rip that became another story.

A crab seemed the perfect choice for a tenacity pet, with its new Pin ability combined with the innate toughness that would hopefully see it through a few applications of Misdirection - and next to a dwarf, it would still look respectably large. I took a trip to the shores of Durotar and tamed a red crab, which I named “Vise” (it was nice for once to watch a new tame grow instead of shrink).

I now had myself a tenacity and ferocity pet, and did some leveling with them – the new arrangement seemed to work pretty well, and I found myself enjoying this character once more, and before long I was high enough level to tame the last pet on my wishlist; a lava spider from Searing Gorge.

Like the scarlet hyena, the lava spider was an interesting looking beast that I hadn't quite been able to justify taming on account of its lack of special ability, and like the hyena, this creature became a much more attractive choice in 3.0, now that it had Web to tie enemies up. “Slag” proved to be a nice addition and to complete the ruddy colored theme I sent Bofors to the new barbershop to become a redhead...

By the time I made 60, I’d raised my Gnomeregan rep to exalted as well, and decided that his epic mount would be the culmination of his years as an engineer – the venerable elekk was put out to pasture (savannah?) and replaced with a clockwork ostrich, aka mechanostrider. Back then, mechanostriders could only be ridden by gnomes and dwarves, so it seemed a nice fit and helped keep things interesting as I zoomed around Outlands on my new whirring, clanking mount.

While the quest rewards in Outlands were certainly very nice (getting Hemet's Elekk Gun at lvl 65 was cool but shortly to be replaced by a Northrend green), it was the new skill 301-375 engineering recipes that really stood out for me, and I made sure to take periodic detours from my questing to farm engineering mats and keep his skills up; having engineering had pretty much always ensured I had a rifle that was at least adequate, but now I was getting access to some really nice stuff – the adamantite shell machine for one gave me a way of producing ammo whose DPS was just shy of the sort not normally available until level 75, but which I could use from level 62 thanks to engineering.

In addition there were the teleportation trinkets which let me hop back and forth more or less freely between Old World and Outland along with the occasional amusing side effect… I also got the epic chainmail goggles which he still uses a dozen levels later, and last but not least a turbo-gyrocopter.

At level 68 I moved Bofors over to Northrend; as with Outland, nice quest rewards, awesome engineering recipes – flexweave underlay lets you avoid having to keep a parachute cloak in your bags, the hand mounted pyro rocket in addition to having a cool looking effect actually does a decent amount of DPS and CD is (just) short enough to make it a factor in regular combat… but
the hands down coolest item (so far!) is the Mark S Boomstick, which I’ve been using from level 73 - engineer only, and slightly better than the rep reward firearms not available until lvl 78.

Long ago I’d gotten Bofors’ fishing skill up to 229 or so before giving up on it – back then a failed attempt simply resulted in the annoying “Your Fish Got Away” message… and no chance of skillup, e.g. you either stayed in the same low level fishing area from 1-375, or else you advanced as skill permitted, with frequent, wasted casts (i.e. a lot more time spent).

Recently however Blizzard had overhauled the fishing process to A) allow at least a minimal chance of success in any area even for skill 1 and B) failed casts now result in an 18 cp junk item – but remain eligible for skillup. So I decided to give this another try; I've wanted a Magical Crawdad for some time, and thinking one would look nice alongside Bofors’ red crab, I sent him back to Terrokar Forest to try his luck at the Highland Fishing Schools.

Having found a likely looking area, I settled in expecting a long wait for my number to come up; according to wowhead, you first had to get Mr. Pinchy, which was rare to begin with, but then once received you had to hope that one of his three wishes returned the vanity pet.

On the last cast of my first Highland school, the Mr Pinchy achievement suddenly flashed on my screen (!), and slightly dumbstruck I right clicked on the icon… to find a Magical Crawdad in my inventory (!!). Feeling a bit dizzy, I happily made my way back to Northrend… while I've certainly done plenty of long (sometimes fruitless) grinds, things like this definitely restore one's faith that the odds do tend to balance themselves out... sooner or later. Nice!

This now meant I had one very cool vanity pet to go with my crab, and a couple of comparatively boring ones to go with my hyena and spider. A trip to Blackrock Spire and a bit of puttering in the workshop fixed that - now I had a color changing worg pup to accompany Red, and a smoke belching robot to accent Slag's fiery nature (and his master's engineering skill); although I don't usually put this much work into getting vanity pets, I felt Bofors could use a little spicing up to offset his lack of flashy Northrend combat pets (and as with combat pets, vanity pets look bigger next to a dwarf as well - always a plus!).

But the most noteworthy outcome of Bofors' time in the Blackrock dungeons (if not his entire career...) was his new core hound, aka The Beast. Taming this creature was quite the adventure and which will be covered in a separate post, but suffice to say I couldn't be happier to have him - and it's always nice to have at least one "trophy pet" on your hunter!
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Saturday, July 25, 2009

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.
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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...
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Friday, July 24, 2009

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. ;)
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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

WoW Profiles - Velocity at 75

Worgen FTWLevel: 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…
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