Mania’s Arcania

One of the first things I’m going to do come Cataclysm is create an undead hunter. I’ve been waiting a long time to play an undead hunter.

(In fact, I will probably change Mania herself into an undead later. But I expect that I won’t have that option immediately.)

The most important question to answer regarding my undead hunter is, of course, what pets she will have.

Now there may be new pet families in the Cataclysm expansion, and there will certainly be new pets in the existing families, so I’m not writing anything in stone yet. But I did want to devote some blog space to thinking about the question.

The most obvious route for undead hunters to take is plagued pets. I know a lot of hunters are planning to pick up a Deathclaw the diseased bear from Bloodmyst, or a Diseased Wolf from Elwynn.

Later in life the plagued pet collector can continue the trend with a Diseased Black Bear from the Western Plaguelands, a Rabid Grizzly from Dragonblight, or a Plagued Swine from the Eastern Plaguelands.

There’s also a handful of other pets that, while not technically plagued, would make fine companions for an undead hunter. A Vargul Blighthound, for instance, would look wonderful next to your heroic corpse. So would Death Flayer, the rare black scorpid. Or you could go for a ghost, like the Ghost Saber or Disembodied Jormungar.

And if you are lucky enough to be the proud owner of a retired ghost wolf, ghostly crocolisk, ghostly hydro-croc or even a croco-slime, you may want to consider tranforming your previously-living hunter into an undead to match your pet!

Assuming that works, of course. And assuming Blizzard doesn’t remove these retired pets in the meantime.

Personally, I am strongly hoping (wishing! begging!) that Blizzard uses the advent of undead hunters to open up the taming of these retired pets, plus more. I’d love a black slime, for instance. Or an Ethereal Frostworg.

Another possibility: pet families that fit an undead theme. Bats are a classic here, as are spiders. Black widows seem especially apt, although most spiders will work will with an undead hunter. A festive tarantula like Rekk’tilac may feel a little out of place, however.

Or how about a drippy corehound? (Again, you may want to take a pass on the cute’n'furry Kurken.)

Other undead-ly pet families include: carrion birds (well-trained ones, anyway — don’t want him feasting on your eyes); ravagers (spiky!); worms (especially the ones that look like Flesh Eating Worms); and even hyenas.

And if nothing else inspires you, you can always make a strong case for Spirit Beasts!

Last night I spent some time playing my little troll hunter, Erinye, on the Nesingwary realm (where she hangs with the US branch of the Petopians guild).

And since I was puttering around in Durotar anyway, I decided to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: tame the sweetest little overlooked scorpid in the game.

Beige scorpids live only in Durotar. There are two species: Scorpid Workers are level 3 and are found inside the Valley of Trials newbie area; Clattering Scorpids are level 5-6 and can be found around and south of Razor Hill.

At those levels, even most orc and troll hunters don’t give these scorpids a second look — they are more interested in the level 10 raptors and boars in the area. Or at least the sexy level black and red Corrupted Scorpids …

And that’s the other problem with beige scorpids, of course: they’re beige.

Against the red soil of Durotar they are drab and grey. See them scrabbling over the hard ground from the front or from the side and they blend in, so bland you don’t even see them.

But that’s only from the front. The true beauty of these scorpids lives under their tough outer carapace. Their underscales, you see, are a delicate robin’s-egg blue.

This isn’t immediately obvious to other players, but it quickly become very apparent to the lucky hunter who tames a beige scorpid. As you run along beside your pet, as you send it before you into battle, your loyal scorpid is flashing its beautiful inner colors only at you.

And once you’ve seen that, you realize how much of the lovely blue tint is visible from all angles. It’s subtle, sure, but it’s there — and the more you hunt with your scorpid the more you notice the blue. And the more you love your hidden little gem.

If you can appreciate the subtlety of their inner beauty.

It’s been quiet around here lately for a whole bunch of reasons.

One of the reasons is that I’ve been sick a lot: repeated colds, sinus infections, and my first ever asthma attack. (Woo hoo? I’ve had allergies for awhile, especially to our two adorable pet rats, but I’ve mostly ignored it — which according to my doctor is why my symptoms have advanced from sniffles to raised welts to an inability to breathe. So let that be a lesson for you! Take your allergy meds before you get to the point where you can’t breathe!) I’ve also been struggling with my mental health. (My husband says I shouldn’t tell you that, and perhaps he’s right. But I like to explain why I sometimes disappear for weeks on end, and that’s a big part of it.) And lastly, I’ve been trying to drum up new contracts so my husband and I don’t go broke in a month or two. Anyway, I’m not looking for sympathy or making excuses; I just want to let you know where we are.

As you may have noticed, I’ve moved most of the ‘newsy’ stuff off of this blog and over to the new WoW Petopia Community forums. This way, when I am unavoidably detained, community members who are more on the ball than I am can post any news that happens, and my loyal staff of moderator (hi, Vephriel!) can make sure it shows up in the news feed. I’ve added a display of the most recent news items from the community to the top of the front page here, or you can subscribe to the news feed and cut out the … err … middle-blog.

So what’s going to go here, on Arcania? Well hopefully I’ll get back to some more sort-of-in-depth-but-not-necessarily-literature-for-the-ages type posts, like (and these are just examples): “How Many Spirit Beasts Do We Have Now Anyway?”, “Best-Looking Pets for a Goblin”, and “15 Unusual Pet Choices”. I’d also still like to highlight interesting stuff from other hunter blogs … if I ever get caught up with the 1000+ unread posts I have on Google Reader. (Amusingly, I first typed that as ‘undead posts’, which is also appropriate.) And if I ever get back to actually playing WoW, I’d like to talk about that as well.

(I have been futzing around in WoW a bit, via the US branch of the forum-based Petopians guild. Of course, being the difficult person I am, I had to start a druid for this hunter-oriented guild. But on the good side, my druid appears to be stuck at level 7. I also started some new hunters there but so far haven’t progressed beyond level 10. And Mania (the main character, not the writer of this post) hasn’t been any further than the auction house in weeks. Once Blizzard gets the armory-based auction house functuionality out, I won’t need to log her in at all! *sigh*)

And of course Cataclysm is coming up — sooner or later! — and what is Arcania without incoherent, stream-of-conscious live-blogging? (In fact, I’m somewhat glad that I’m not playing too much right now. I just hope that my disinterested phase lasts until I can get into the beta so I don’t wear myself out too early.)

So that’s Mania’s State of the Blog address and Five Year Plan all rolled up in one.

[update] We’re back up! And earlier than I expected — turns out Jon’s really good. :>

I’ve just learned from our hosting system administrator (also known as our friend Jon) that he needs to do some emergency maintenance on our server boxes later today.

Basically this means that all my sites — Mania’s Arcania, the new WoW Petopia Community forums, Petopia, and Warcraft Mounts — will be down for a couple of hours this evening.

Unfortunately, because of the type of maintenance he needs to do, I won’t be able to have any sort of useful message up while this is happening, so anyone who wanders in during the maintenance will only see that the sites are down. So if you see someone freaking out, please let then know that we’ll be back up in an hour or two.

The sites will be going down around 5pm EST and should be back up by 8pm EST. Thanks for bearing with us through this!

Rumor has it that the Friends & Family alpha for Cataclysm, the next expansion to World of Warcraft, is about to begin.

A Friends & Family alpha is, as the name implies, a very early mostly private build of the game that is shared with friends and family of the development team only. For most MMO products, this is the first time a build will be available outside the company, and in fact for some companies this will be the first time that company employees who aren’t directly involved with the new product will see it.

In other words, you and I aren’t getting in. *grin*

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You can now find a fairly full-featured forum for the discussion of WoW hunter pets on Petopia! Just visit forums.wow-petopia.com.

My plans: I originally started the Arcania forums attached to this blog so that you guys would have somewhere to chat when I wasn’t posting. That worked out pretty well, except that I choose my forum software poorly^* and the location was a bit off the beaten path — hard to find for the average Petopia user who just wanted to know what was going on with pets. The new Petopia forums should fix both problems.

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Patch 3.3 is going live today. The big news for most players is probably Icecrown Citadel, which seems to have something to do with the Lich King. But there’s lots more of interest, from the long-awaited built-in quest mapper to a new fishing tournament.

Most exciting for high level Beast Mastery hunters is the new Spirit Beast Arcturis, who happens to look like a ghostly druid bear but is, in every way, a proper Spirit Beast. (That’s him to the right.)

We are also seeing what is perhaps the first impact of the upcoming Cataclysm on the creatures of Azeroth as diseased wolves invade Elwynn Forest and the Thistle Boars of Teldrassil shed their pretty orange fur for a new grey look.

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We know that the upcoming Cataclysm expansion is going to literally tear our virtual world apart. What we don’t know yet — and what many of us are worried about — is how the changes to the world will affect the existing wildlife, namely the beasts that we can tame.

But I thought it might be fun to speculate a bit. In this post I’ll make some guesses about what pets may be in peril in Kalimdor. Later I’ll take a poke at the Eastern Kingdoms as well.

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As I was showering today, I got thinking about the current problems with the hunter class in WoW. This is a perennial topic for any class, of course, even when there aren’t any major problems.

And as you know, I am not much of a power player, so my notion of problems is rather more limited in scope than many hunters, despite the frequent attempts by my loyal commenters here to enlighten me.

At any rate, I decided that I am personally pretty satisfied with hunters right now — as I usually am — with one exception. And that exception is the Spirit Beast family.

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