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!

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Denise Amber Lee

I just finished watching Primetime on ABC, and I'm still reeling. Tonight's story was on the kidnapping and murder of Denise Lee. By itself this certainly qualifies as an act of sheer, subhuman evil, but isn't what has me stunned; if it was, I'd be reduced to a gibbering heap anytime I flipped through the news. Such things sadden me, but sooner or later you either go nuts or deaden your emotional nerve endings.

Not this time. This was not "just another" fatality, in the sense that police weren't even notified until long afterward, and had little to work with beyond some very old DNA traces and maybe a suspicious number on the victim's calls list - here the poor woman was taken from her home by Michael King, right in front of her two little boys and just a little before her husband was back from work, and yet within a short time she managed to quietly dial 911 on the kidnapper's own cell phone... and was then able to keep the line open for 6 minutes while she kept him distracted by pleading for her life.

Now, I'm no expert on tracing calls but just speaking as an average joe, I'd have thought 6 minutes would be enough time to trace a call; I can recall a company I used to work for where people would occasionally dial 911 while attempting to place outbound calls (the kind of phone network where you dial "9" ahead of the number to indicate that it's outside the company) - they would usually realize their mistake and hang up while the number was still dialing - and not more than a couple minutes later a cruiser would be out front. That's all it took.

In fact it got so prevalent that the local PD threatened to start billing the company for each accidental 911 call, which is how I first learned of it - through a company wide memo telling everyone they'd better be careful how they dial their calls or be prepared to pony up the $100 fine themself.

Needless to say the experience gave me the sense that dialing 911 was a serious act that got results - fast. So when I learned on Primetime that police were unable to get the phone's location during that time, I was kind of blown away. But, they at least managed to determine who the phone belonged to, so it wasn't a total loss - and maybe cell phones are much harder to trace, let's give the police the benefit of the doubt on that one.

Well, they checked the guy's house - recently gone, TV still on, pieces of duct tape lying around with Denise's hair on them, but the trail has gone cold.

Then apparently King's running low on gas but doesn't want to stop at a gas station with a screaming woman in his car, so instead he drives to his cousin Harold Muxlow's house and asks - with Denise in the car screaming and trying to get out - if he can borrow a can of gas and a shovel, because his mower is stuck in a ditch and is out of gas. Think it can't get more insane? Denise managed to get out of the car, at which point Muxton saw she was tied up, she says "call the police!" and King shoves her back in the car and drives away - with his shovel and fresh gas.

So, not having done anything to stop a self-evident atrocity in progress, can Muxlow manage to even pick up his phone and call 911?

Almost - he later picks up his phone but instead of calling 911, this waste of oxygen calls... his daughter. Who urges him to you know, call the police and stuff... but he still won't do it... so finally it is his DAUGHTER who makes the (latest) call to 911. By that time this call will only be useful after the fact when the DA is building a case against the murderer.

After this, Primetime reported that 2 different witnesses saw Denise crying, screaming and struggling in the back of King's green Camaro as the murderous dimwit drove around looking for a place to kill the girl. Did either of them call 911? Follow the car? Anything? Well, one guy said he thought it was a "domestic dispute" and "didn't want to get involved", and the other said he had dialed 911 and was about to click send but changed his mind because King drove off in a different direction.

Finally someone (whose head was not shoved up their ass, for a refreshing change) saw King and Denise, and called 911. They played the audio of that call on Primetime, and my jaw just slowly settled down into my lap; here is the caller Jane Kowalski telling them she's next to a blue Camaro with a screaming girl in the back seat... the driver is reaching back and pushing her down... the girl's hand is violently smashing against the window from below... there are patrol cars all over that very area looking for a Camaro with a screaming girl in it... but the operator keeps asking her to repeat herself and is then making Kowalski hold so she can repeat her words to someone offline; when Kowalski states the camaro is about to make a turn and should she follow it, the operator pauses to relay that too... and the opportunity is lost as the caller becomes separated from the kidnapper's car in the traffic while awaiting word whether she should follow or not.

A perfectly reasonable question for the caller to ask; after all she is speaking to a police dispatcher and should be able to expect some lawful instruction, but simple as the question is "should I follow him?", the operator makes her repeat the question and then has to consult, again, with whoever it is in the background.

That was the last chance these fools got - Denise's body was found a couple days later less than three miles from where the last witness saw her struggling, kicking, screaming and thrashing in the back of the killer's camaro.

You see, while every other last bit of the description was an exact match to the kidnapper and his victim that police were actively searching that very area for, Jane Kowalski said the camaro was "blue", and so the police wrote it off presumably as some other kidnapping-in-progress rather than the one they were looking for.

The dispatcher didn't even notify local officers of the call - because (get ready for it) she thought the "other dispatcher" had done it (this would eventually be admitted to be "a missed opportunity" by the police chief). If you were still capable of feeling surprise or shock by now, this should cinch it.

Watching these events unfold was beyond surreal - excluding the efforts of Jane Kowalski and Muxlow's daughter Sabrina, this was such a mind bending series of fuckups it was like something out of Monty Python, except with a horribly real outcome - seeing the reactions of Denise's husband and her father, and seeing the two small boys who now have no mother, made it all too real, and it has chilled me straight through.

In the couple hours I've been writing this, the source of that chill has finally become clear - it's from the combination not only of inhuman evil, but also of the fabulous stupidity that made it possible for this murder to even happen at all - here is an evil shitbag with no brains who nonetheless blunders his oafish way through a kidnapping and murder, even having to make a stop in broad daylight to borrow the shovel and flashlight, and gas just to keep his car running, and yet everything just still seems to somehow go his way; at every turn, people get a new chance to foil the crime in progress, and yet they somehow keep dropping the ball until finally poor Denise's chances run out.

Michael King was apprehended a few hours after if was too late for Denise, but hopefully the DA at least will possess the basic competence that seems to have eluded the police dispatchers - serving justice on this filth is the one thing the government can still do right by Denise and her family.

Well, they did also pass the Denise Amber Lee act which apparently requires police dispatchers to have an IQ in the triple digits before they are allowed to answer emergency calls... but of course that isn't mandatory yet, due to "budgetary constraints"... but it's something I guess.

The police dispatchers still have their jobs... and so does the police chief who stonewalled and played down their role. I'm not always a big fan of the Mainstream Media, but this is one of those times when I find myself very grateful for their coverage; I respect police officers a great deal, and always try to give them the benefit of the doubt when any questions arise in the news about their performance or integrity, but as far as I'm concerned the dispatchers involved (the last 2 anyway) are a public danger and should not - ever - be manning another emergency line. And the police chief just came off as an evasive, oily fuck with no sense of accountability (apparently he only even admitted to the "missed opportunity" thing after it blew up in the papers). Denise's husband is going to be suing that department and I hope he wins enough to make the state sit up and take notice in the very direct and personal way that a financial loss will do.

Well, I hope anyone reading this will consider going over to Denise's website-in-memoriam to learn more, and hopefully the Denise Lee act will get enough support to become mandatory - I don't know what sort of internal environments and policies made it possible for this to happen but I sure hope it gets looked at and fixed before someone else is allowed to fall through the cracks. Continue reading

Leveling Alts - Casual World Events

I’ve raised some 20 or so characters on various servers, and played pretty much all of the game’s solo content… over, and over. And over. 3 have made it to 70 so far, and the rest are now mostly idling at levels ranging from the teens to the sixties.

My primary motivation in trying to level this crowd of alts has so far been mainly to grow characters into talent specs that I thought would be interesting, and then find out how the character “handles”, with the best gear I can lay hands on.

However, this has lost a lot of its luster.

The fact is I am actually pretty easily amused; it used to be pretty easy to find motivation from things like…

New classes. I’ve played everything short of druids and priests at this point.

Special mounts. Plan on getting a cross-race mount for the alt by running around finishing entire regions’ worth of quests for rep gain, to add a bit of flare to the lvl 40+ experience.

Pokemon. More of my toons are hunters than any other single class, and it can be fun to “shop” for new/interesting beasts over at Petopia, and then level up the hunter alt to find and tame them.

Dustwallow Marsh content. The new quests in DW marsh help make the trip from L33-41 more interesting (although they don’t give much rep so if you’re working on a cross-race mount you may want to skip these).

Trade skills. Research trade skills really closely and plan an alt’s questing/farming/etc around that, to pick up cool new items I’de never bothered with previously (or hadn’t gotten around to learning early enough to benefit from).

Twinking. No description needed for this one – this has produced mixed results for me, helping with some alts (like tanks and shaman) while making others boring as hell.

Rep grinding. I’ve made it to anywhere from honored to exalted with most of the factions currently available, and am currently grinding SSO with my lvl 70s when I get around to it. This however only really becomes practical in the Outlands since the BC expansion, since the old lvl 50-60 factions just don’t increase fast enough to give you anything worthwhile by the time you are high enough for Outlands.

Outlands rewards. The fresh burst of high quality gear available at lvl 58 used to be a big incentive; by the time you finish the quests in Hellfire Peninsula most if not all of your old pre-BC gear (pretty much regardless of quality) will be replaced by sweet new upgrades.

Patch items. The new armor made available in patch 2.4 for level 70s is still kind of a nice incentive… once the character finally makes level 70.

All of the above got me a long ways – you can almost hear the jaws dropping into laps when other players ask me how many characters I play, and see my reply – but lately I’ve been finding there seems to be only one reliable draw for me, and that is world events.

Once upon a time, I used to loathe world events – patches always seemed to take longer when they were being loaded, world server restarts seemed a lot more prevalent, and they just seemed… silly. Back then of course we had 30-45 minute login queues, which made me a lot more irritable and prone to view things like this in a negative light.

Yet almost inevitably when a new world event launches now, I’m over at wowwiki doing my research and seeing what alt I want to send after which reward, what dungeon to make sure and visit for the special boss, etc.

It’s also helped a lot that the more recent world events have included some decent (i.e. combat-relevant) rewards, but honestly I’m so bored with everything else in WoW that even the chance of obtaining a “blue” non-combat pet is usually a big incentive for me.

Which brings me finally to the point of this post – why do world events have to always be tied to holidays? Does it really have to be a semi-monthly thing that is more about world travel than fighting? Fun as that is, how about something a bit more regular and integrated with existing areas/quests/factions?

There is a ton of game content in the pre-Outlands areas, but it’s all been played so many times that the thought of collecting 8 more boar tusks for some crappy piece of +spi gear just makes me bleak.

So, why not design an occasional event that is based in these areas but involves new NPCs involved in special, limited time activities? This should be a no-brainer – all over the world you have scheming factions like the Dark Iron Dwarves, Stranglethorn pirates, etc hoping to put a dent in the established world order – well, just build something out of those conflicts, with a few “hook” NPCs scattered around the capitals or whatever to alert players to the new quests/grinds.

It wouldn’t need to be anything too crazy; even perhaps a dozen events that repeat at random intervals would be a nice boost to flagging interest in leveling yet another alt. It's not even unprecedented - think of the Shattrath cooking daily quest as a mini-example.

I know this would not be “easy” to develop, but it needn’t be as sweeping as the holiday events either – all that’s really needed is enough exp to get you perhaps 2-3 levels of exp and some rewards – greens are fine so long as they have intelligently allocated stats (i.e. like they did with BC items and rewards in the new DW Marsh quests) and not garbage like most of the pre-BC rewards are (“w00t! Another reward with +2 stamina and +9 spirit! Yeah baby!!”) - if I wanted something that lame I could just buy it from weapon/armor vendors...

Of course, long before Blizzard even thinks about anything like this, they will roll out Wrath of the Lich King, and figure they’ve solved the alt-leveling problem by simply diverting players into unlocking heroic classes (which begin life at lvl 40).

Which won’t solve anything; all that will do is kick the can further down the road, unless they intend heroic classes to actually replace all of the pre-existing ones… otherwise, if you think leveling an alt from 1-70 sucks, just think how much fun it will be to do it from 1-80...

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0-400 In 3 Days (Midsummer Redux)

After a lot of trekking and juggling, I recently obtained a fire pet of one kind or another for two of my level 70s, and attempted to go back to my daily grinding and put the Midsummer Bonfires event out of my mind... but the more I tried, the more I got to thinking about the Midsummer cloth gear.

As I already have too much of that kind of thing cluttering up the bank vaults on my high level characters, I got to thinking about my fire mage – collecting dust at lvl 5 since he did the Halloween events, the Midsummer outfit seemed perfect for him.

So, off he went. I needed an intimidating 400 blossoms to purchase the robes, shoulders and boots, so I determined to complete every honor/desecration within reach; this resulted in yet more time spent running about the game world, interrupted by the occasional round of daily torch tossing and juggling…

By now I can do the tossing in my sleep, and the juggling is nearly as easy save for the occasional lag spike forcing me to restart (it also helps that there is usually no more than 1 other player trying the juggling at any given time). However, I discovered that for a lowbie, the damage from missing a torch is negligible, which was a nice bonus. So that netted me around 40-50 blossoms, counting the “intro” quests.

This time around I remembered to buy a handful of flowers early on with my spare 2 blossoms (good for nothing else), and held onto them while I ran about looking for bonfires to pee on.

By now, Horde PVPers finally were beginning to take notice of us flagged bonfire runners, and I actually had my one and only death due to enemy player when I blundered into a ?? level tauren druid who promptly rooted and zapped me after extinguishing their bonfires in Thousand Needles.

Later in Ratchet while flagged and returning from another desecration, I passed a blood elf couple. Remembering my midsummer flowers, I dumped them all over the girl and then ran to the flight master while her rogue boyfriend attempted to give chase – sadly for him, I hopped a flight to Stone Talon before he could get in a backstab. Ah, petty satisfactions…

By the time I’d finished all of the locations in Eastern Kingdoms, I had just enough for the robes and shoulders, and so I was able to do the Western Kingdoms “in style”; Kalimdor seemed to take for freakin’ ever, but finally I wrapped that up too, and the boots were mine.

By now, I had gone from lvl 5 to 12, and had every flight path unlocked save Winterspring and Thalanaar, which were just too far out of the way to bother with. I also had about 1g, which was enough for all of my training with plenty to spare… and of course now I can stand around and dance with my hands and feet on fire while wearing my “Lookit-me-I’m-special” midsummer outfit that is already subpar for lvl 12 gear...

It was fun though, and the flight paths should be a nice bonus with this toon’s future leveling (and with getting him a Spirit of Summer at next year’s Fire Festival!).

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