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...