I’ve been using the new dismiss-and-tame method of taming since it was discovered just after Patch 2.1.0. I’ve heard about a couple of hunters running into some trouble with it — and this doesn’t much surprise me, since Blizzard has yet to clarify whether or not it is supposed to work, and even if it is a new feature it seems like a buggy one, with some odd side effects.
But I haven’t had any trouble with it myself — until last night, anyway. Other than when I am testing the functionality, I’ve been pretty careful not to get my pets too tangled up: I only stack one pet at a time and I either abandon the new pet as soon as I learn the skill I wanted, or if I plan on keeping the new pet I head right back to the stable to straighten out which pet is where.
But last night I realized that I had never tamed the gorgeous blue-black Deviate Dreadfang that I wanted for my windserpent hunter. So I ran to Wailing Caverns to pick it up and start the long, slow leveling process. (Okay, not that long — I am only level 35.) And then I had to break for dinner. And then when I came back I decided I also wanted a green Venemous Cloud Serpent to go with my cape. (This Dranei character is a bit of a fashion hound.) And I forgot that I hadn’t hit the stable yet to deal with my stacked Dreadfang. So I ended up with three windserpents stacked (plus a crab in the stable).
Whether it was this forgetfulness or something else entirely — and I am guessing random bad luck, actually, since I have tested multiple stacking quite a bit before – I found that when I did get to the stable master, my pets were stuck. First I switched out the Venemous Cloud Serpent for the crab and abandoned the crab, and that worked normally. But after that I was unable to move any of the windserpents into the active slot. I could see two windserpent icons (although only one gave my pet info when I hovered the mouse over it), but I was unable to drag either icon into the empty active slot, and also unable to purchase the second stable slot. (I remembered later that I had already purchased the second slot, so I’m glad now that the game didn’t let me waste my money.)
I tried relogging and closing the client down entirely. I tried zoning to the other continent. I tried taming a new pet (which worked but didn’t uncork the others). Finally, I put in a ticket to get help from a GM. Then I got called away by the spouse. When I got back, I had e-mail from Blizzard (I swear they wait for you to log off to contact you!) telling me to reset my UI and contact them again if that didn’t help. I reset the UI, and of course it didn’t help, so I contacted them again. A couple hours later I logged out for the night.
When I got up this morning, I had another e-mail from Blizzard saying that I had had too many pets so they deleted one — the lowest level one without a name. (Unfortunately that was the Deviate Dreadfang, so now I have to go get another one.) But I logged in and indeed, my stable is unstuck! But I still wanted to talk to a GM to see if I could get any information on whether or not the dismiss-and-tame method is a bug. So I filed a third ticket asking what I need to do to avoid this situation in the future. Thankfully, this ticket was answered in less than five minutes. (A personal best — normally my tickets sit for at least an hour.)
The GM that responded was happy to answer my question. (He was somewhat cagey about me quoting him, so I am paraphrasing here.) He said that he’s seen this problem (having too many pets) several times and that it is caused by forgetting that you have an active pet before you tame another one. Normally the game prevents us from doing this, he said, but for some reason it currently does not. They will have this resolved as soon as they can, he continued. In the meantime, he urged me to always use ‘Call Pet’ before I try to tame in order to make absolutely certain that I do not have an active pet.
So there you have it: The dismiss-and-tame method is bug and it will be fixed soon. Using it could get you into a bad state that will require GM help to fix.
I am terribly disappointed. My only remaining hope is that perhaps the GMs are aware of the bug, but unaware of the development of a new skill training method that caused the bug and which will be finished when this bug is fixed. But that’s a long, thin straw, I admit. It’s more likely that dismiss-and-tame is just a simple bug.
For myself, I will continue to use it carefully, stacking only one pet at a time and only long enough to learn the skills I need. And we’ll see what happens with it, I guess.
With all the server hiccups they have had the last day or two, Taming more than your 3 (2 stabled, 1 active) became a a crap shoot. Huge lag spikes was making it tricky at best, and was even causeing the “You have to many pets” error, when I only had 2 pets and they were stabled.
The most interesting things that the mess-ups were doing to me was that I would wind up with “ghost pets”; a pet I had already abandoned would appear whenever I tried to pull another pet out of my stable. The oddest thing was that I had never used the dismiss-and-tame trick, as I presumed from the beginning that it was a serious bug that could cause some serious havoc–Blizzard is always far more likely to screw a class up than add something so convenient as that, after all.
The more I read about this, particularly Blizzard’s conspicuous lack of comment on it, led me to think it was a bug. Since one of my pets is for all intents and purposes irreplaceable at lvl 70(my scarlet tracking hound), I decided not to tempt fate and utilize this bug/feature anymore. Since the majority of my adventuring is done with my raptor these days, and I’ve already trained every skill a pet of mine could ever use, I’m content with the way things are.
As a tangent, I really keenly wish they would add in a minimum level for new tamed pets based on the hunter level. For example, say you only recently have learned about the ghost saber, or the deviate dreadfang. Beautiful pets, but you’re level 70, and they’re pet jailbait (under 21). Currently, the process of leveling one of these pets is so punishing and prohibitive that very, very few people would consider it.
Mechanically speaking (as I understand it), when a pet is tamed, the creature that was there is destroyed and a new “pet” creature is created for you. This new creature is the same level as the previous mob creature. When a high-level hunter tames a low-level creature, he gets a low-level pet, which requires many weeks of leveling before it can even survive (let alone be useful). But what if your newly tamed pet was created at a level that would make it possible to train it up relatively quickly, like creating a level 65 pet for a level 70 player, or a level 50 pet for a level 60 player?
I’d like to see Blizzard implement a feature that measures the new pet’s level against the hunter’s, and if the difference is greater than 10 levels (or five levels at 70), then the newly tamed pet is created with a ten (or five) level difference. This would not break the world by any stretch, and would allow veteran hunters to acquire and train new companions much more easily than is currently possible. I’m sure this idea would go to their very bottom of the list of things to do, but I think it’s worth considering.
I hadn’t considered the effect of server instability on this. That could explain why pets don’t seem to get stuck all that often, and why there’s no obvious rhyme or reason when they do.
Nifty idea Branan, but, I rather enjoy leveling a little one from a baby. Just keeping the little tykes alive can be a challenge, especially when wacking on a mob at the same time. If you are going to go for a new pet, I dont think it should be as easy as 5 or 10 levels your junior. To me, the leveling process makes that pet that much more…… mine.
As an addendum to my above post, I would rather see Blizz give us more pet slots, than monkey anymore with the way we tame pets.
More pet slots would be wonderful. The dismiss-and-tame “bug” so far has not backfired on me *knocks on wood*. Fortunately, my lvl 30 hunter now has the 3 pets that I enjoy: Humar, Echeyakee, and Ghost Saber. I’m somewhat scared that I may lose Humar (of whom I actually lucked up and logged in near him with no one else around) if I attempt this bug again, so for safety of my sanity, I won’t be trying it again… at least on that character.
I was gleefully using the bug to tame lots of things that I hadn’t gotten around to taming before, to pick up new levels of various pet abilities that I just hadn’t gotten around to picking up before. I had an active pet, a single stable slot (I’m a cheapskate) and at one point, FIVE dismiss-bug pets floating in limbo. This was working great until, like you, all of my pets became stuck. Luckily, my 2nd-favorite pet was active, so I was able to keep using him. I eventually sent in a GM ticket, which they didn’t handle until I was logged out, and they deleted ALL MY PETS except for my active one. I was pretty frustrated, but at least I’d picked up all the pet skills that I’d gone out with the intention of getting. Is it worth sending a complaint in about this? It seems like they overdid it, and feels a little unfair. I miss my gorilla.
I probably personally would complain — that does seem like overkill to me too! — but in all honesty I doubt it will do any good. I’m sorry for your loss.
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