Level 80 Recap for 2009

Last year, Dougal, Velocity and Khitsune all made level 80... but I never got around to posting an update, so here it is.

When I switched Dougal to BM, I originally had been thinking it would be neat to have a (solo PVE) hunter without a tenacity pet, I guess mainly to see if it could work. I tried speccing a silithid to fill the role of tank, and things went well enough until I started solo'ing Stratholme; I was repeating the 45 minute Baron run in hopes of getting Rivendare's Deathcharger, and so I wanted to be able to take down as many mobs as possible in one go... well, my silithid and SB were fine for maybe 5-10 mobs, but that was about it, unless I was being super careful. So I finally decided to give in to tradition and get myself a tenacity pet.

Enter Tremor the cthulhoid nightmare worm from Northrend - as an exotic he fit with the rest of Dougal's stable of uber-animals since I'd dropped Frenzy the purple hyena (SB, chimaera and silithid), and not having tried a worm before it was a nice opportunity to acquire one.

Returned to Strat for more grinding and sure enough, I was now able to solo twice as many mobs as before thanks to the worm's toughness and especially thanks to its thunderstomp... lesson learned! After that, the Baron runs went a lot faster, and within a few days I had myself a nice new skeletal nightmare steed to complete Dougal's Tim Burtonesque spook theme.

Velocity was upgraded to dual spec when patch 3.3 introduced the new spirit beast Arcturis, and I got him last month. Velocity has since leveled Cloud up to 80; I speced him to be as close to tenacity as a ferocity pet can get (charge and boar's swiftness are fine but I refuse to get him dash, just seems goofy to have it on something that big).

When trying to decide on a good lore backdrop for Cloud, I checked out Native American mythology and found an interesting bit pertaining to bears - in some NI cultures it was believed that when a bear hibernates, its spirit leaves its body to wander the woods during the winter months... so I decided Cloud was an unusually curious and precocious bear who lost track of time and wandered too far - by the time Spring came, he had forgotten where his body was, and it died before he could find his way back to it, leaving him stuck in spirit form, wandering mournfully until he was taken in by a kindly night elf with an affinity for spirit beings...

Velocity's other notable achievement was to acquire a pet voidwalker - during a hiatus in Dalaran she gradually located the various tomes of arcane magic tucked away in bookshelves around the city, and from their pages, pieced together the incantation that would teleport her to the study of Archmage Vargoth, who rewarded her with a Kirin Tor Familiar.

The Familiar is quite large for a noncombat pet, and IMO looks pretty cool alongside her frosty themed gorilla Wendigo...

Nowadays Velocity is staying at Brunnildar Village doing the daily for Reins of the White Polar Bear - after trying this for the better part of a year I have a lifetime supply of yeti cheese and snowballs but no reins. Try, try again...

Last but certainly not least we have Khitsune; I have spent more time on her than any other single character, and as a result she ended up with some pretty decent gear and achievements; after making exalted with Argent Crusade she received the epic chest gear, a pony for her Argent squire, and gained access to the heirloom vendor at the Argent Tournament, and after some rep grinding in Stratholme (having a portable bank came in handy there!) she pushed her rep with Argent dawn up to exalted as well, gaining her the Argent Champion title.

She also made exalted with Oracles, gaining herself an epic grinding trinket (she no longer runs out of mana unless I try really hard to make it happen), and as a final bonus she was lucky enough to get the Reins of the Green Proto-Drake on the second try!

Since then I have been continuing to do the Argent dailies with Khitsune when I can get around to it; my hope is to build up enough badges to equip a new generation of toons with self-scaling twink gear when Cataclysm comes out; currently I've reserved names for a goblin hunter and a tauren paladin. Continue reading

Taming The Beast

Early last month patch 3.3 hit, and with it came the latest spirit beast Arcturis. Since Worba, Khitsune and Dougal all had a spirit beast, I set up my two remaining high level hunters Bofors and Velocity with dual spec and sent them down to Grizzly Hills to camp the latest ghostly critter; this took just about every last copper on their respective servers, but as with the previous spirit beasts I didn't want to pass on the opportunity only to stumble across the thing when I was unprepared (e.g. forced to choose between abandoning a valued pet or taking the risk of popping over to the stables and back only to find another hunter taming it, or of discovering it on a non-hunter, etc etc - a lot of my decisions are motivated more by what I'm afraid of missing out on that by what I'm most keenly interested in accomplishing...).

As it happened, Velocity saw him first, and happily returned to her Storm Peaks dailies with her new pet druid... which left Bofors with dual SV/BM spec, but no beastmastery pets to show for it - something had to be done. Even though I'd originally done it this way just to maximize my odds, that second spec was burning a hole in my pocket... so I sat down and gave it some thought.

Hmm, what exotic pet A) do I not yet have on any toon, and B) would look good standing next to a red themed dwarf... and I realized nothing made so much sense as a red core hound. On any other race, the core hound is shorter than its master and loses the full impact of its original looming perspective... but on a dwarf, now that's another matter!

That being decided I started researching how the heck I was going to get one of these bad boys - I already knew they were found only in dungeons, but that was about it; some time later I determined they could be found in 1) Molten Core, an old world raid instance and 2) UBRS as a dungeon boss. The green version of course was super easy to obtain out in Shadowmoon Valley, but I just wasn't able to get that interested in the green look, when the red one would go with Bofors so much better... same deal with the fluffy white "Omen" version.

Having already spent a good chunk of time aimlessly wandering around the various Blackrock instances picking up vanity pets, doing odd achievements and quests, I was already pretty familiar with the area, and at level 75 was able to solo it without any trouble - and best of all I didn't need to be grouped with anyone to get in, like I did for MC (of course, it takes about 30-40m to get to The Beast in UBRS, whereas the core hounds in MC can be reached in perhaps a couple minutes from the videos I've seen, but for me being able to do it totally solo is preferable).

Now began about two weeks of fumbling, stumbling and armor repairs as I repeatedly tried and failed - I quickly discovered that solo killing The Beast with a placeholder pet is quite a lot different than trying to make it all the way through a 15-20 second tame (uninterrupted) with him. I knew to keep my back to a wall so as to avoid the big knockbacks, and I knew to hop the line of bonfires if my FD got resisted, and I only ever saw him cast fear once... but no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get more than halfway through the tame before being interrupted.

At one point in sheer desperation, I got a paladin to help me with heals... unfortunately that did more harm than good - his heals would aggro the monster and break the tame as surely as a knockdown... and for some reason crossing the bonfire line did not pry it off my unfortunate helper either... I paid the fellow 50 gold for his time and armor repairs, and decided to take a break from the tame attempts. I realized that building up aggro first with a placeholder pet would have enabled me to hold aggro through a few heals, but the larger problem of how to make it through the full tame cast without interruption remained, and I didn't want to make another person wait while I tried to figure it out with trial and error.

A few days later after making lvl 76, I decided to have another try - but this time I had an idea. From reading Krush tame posts I saw it was possible to use The Beast Within to fend off interrupts during a tame, and I was itchin' to try it in UBRS. I knew it required careful macro setup, and would still be no piece of cake - The Beast seems to have 2 different attacks with knockback effects, each (seemingly) on its own 10 sec CD... and with Bestial Wrath/TBW now on a 10 second duration instead of the old 15 second, the margin for error would be nill, but still - better than nothing. I am nothing if not persistent...

I loaded up once more on Imperial Manta Steak, scrolls of Stamina, speed potions and all the +haste/+sta gear in my bank (one of the rare times it pays to be a packrat!), a stack of crystal restores from Ye Olde Ungoro Crator, and headed out. I had a little over 15k health, and about 10-11% haste, both of which were a little below recommended minimums on Thottbot/Wowhead/etc, but were the best I could do after nearly bankrupting myself on that dual spec...

Finally, the day before Christmas, with The Better Half angrily waiting for me to finish my gift wrapping and head out for the evening church service, I made my way back to the The Beast's lair with my placeholder pet... fail. FD'd, ran back out, tamed a scorpid, back in before the instance timer reset and tried again... closer but was still fumbling with the new macro, and failed again - my new approach was to wait for a knockdown, and then trigger my macro - with haste gear, buffs, potion and trinket I had my total tame cast down to about 15 seconds, which meant I had to time it so that those last 5 seconds after TBW ended, fell somewhere between The Beast's knockbacks.

Ran outside, grabbed a red worg, back in and tried one more time... pulled with scorpid sting... waited for the first knockdown... slammed down my macro button, and crossed my fingers... at about second 8 he tried the next knockdown, but that sweet, sweet talent kept my channel bar going even though poor Bofors was being smacked around like a well loved chewtoy... TBW ended and now the home stretch... never has 5 seconds seemed so long... finally, with my HP bar all but empty and my toon lit up with fire DoTs like a BBQ chicken leg sauteed in cheap vodka and the next knockback probably 1 second away, came that wonderful blue flash of completion - SUCCESS!

Never having tried King Krush, this was the only tame that I really had to work for - in the past, the only difficulty I encountered during tames was self inflicted e.g. not bothering to clear nearby trash before blindly attempting to tame some rare spawn... and now that I've got him, I have to say I value Magma even above my spirit beasts. It's without a doubt one of my biggest solo achievements - nice to know that some rewards still require major effort!

When Cataclysm comes out, I'm sure red core hounds will become available out in the wild, to every level 60 Tom, Dick and Harry... but for now at least, Bofors has one very cool "trophy" pet to take into battle... and even when Cataclysm hits, how many red core hounds will display "(BOSS)/skull" on mouseover? :) Continue reading