Community Round-Up: Newb Mistakes, Choosing a Pet and More
First, Big Red Kitty has a great article on WoWInsdier this week, What Kind of Hunter Are You?, in which he talks about all the newb mistakes that lay in wait to trap an unsuspecting young (or not so young) hunter. Now I admit, reading BRK sometimes (often!) leaves me feeling bad about my own abilities as a hunter, but this column made me feel better. :>
(As an aside, I think one of the bigger mistakes Blizzard made with the hunter class conceptually was to leave so much very important information outside the game. Sure, the advanced details and mathematical analysis of pets and skills belongs on external websites, but it would be nice if basic info about how important pets are and how to go about training a pet was being transmitted in-game where it belongs. *shrug* Personal rant.)
Warcry has another look at the upcoming Zul’Aman instance, but this one specifically mentions some of the beasts you will come across, including bears, dragonhawks, and lynxes. (I suppose that’s not a huge surprise, since the dungeon includes bosses for those creatures, but it’s nice to see a confirmation that the beasts themselves are present.) Whether or not those beasts are tameable is still unknown, but it seems likely that hunters will get another few level 70 pet choices out of this area, anyway.
Home of the Mystic has a nice little guide to Choosing the Right Pet. I like the logical way that Znodis highlights the factors that directly affect the hunter’s gameplay experience in this guide.
And finally, the Visual Pet Skill Calculator by Draketh of Moonglade EU that is hosted by Petopia was picked up by Blizzard for their Community Spotlight. Oddly, I found out about this via a thread on the WoW Hunter forum. I guess I never bother to scroll down to the Community Spotlight on WoW’s home page — although I may have to start. *grin*
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Aw, that’s a really sweet story on WoWInsider. I also often feel pretty incompetent reading the BRK blog (or Petopia), so it’s nice to know BRK once made newbie mistakes. Course it’s probably a lot easier playing hunter nowadays with resources like the above around. And that story made me glad I was extra-nice to the level-18 hunter whose pet abandoned her at the start of Wailing Caverns and who would not, for reasons that are unclear, let us help her train a nice new deviate pet. (We got through the entire instance and the Murloc of Doom event with the pet-less hunter).
Wow, reminds me of when I started out..*chuckling* I saved like thirty Silver and bought a port to darn, then realized I forgot to do the tame beast quest.
All those “choosing the right pet” guides make me so terribly sad… because it reminds me how the “top hunters” are trying to tell everyone “Blizzard’s said we should use 2-3 species of pets only, so throw away your old favorites and get something USEFUL.”
On the one hand, I guess it’s good for those people who are obsessed with maximizing every stat in the game and “beating” it (if you can say such a thing about an MMO) by becoming a legend in whatever their preferred field.
But on the other hand, I can imagine it sometimes makes young hunters feel like they’d better stay well away from that spider or crocolisk, because having the pet that you actually *want* is inferior to having the pet that is “the uber-leet best.”
I used a crab from level 40 to level 70, and I would never say I suffered for it. Not even in PvP, where people say you most need a Dashing/Charging/Warping/Diving pet. I didn’t top the charts. But is topping the charts the only point to playing the game?
I was lucky and had a friend explain “feed pet” and all that to me when I first started out. But she never told me about learning pet skills off of other beasts, and so I learned that ACCIDENTALLY when I first discovered Petopia. My first Hunter was in her 30s before she learned something higher than bite 1 or so. How embarrassing. I’m not sure how you are to discover something like that when there is nothing in game that even hints at it.
I actually discovered it myself due to my habit of indecision, hehe. Way back when I was a little ickle hunter in Durotar, I wanted to try out everything, and so I would tame random pets and abandon them soon after–and so I realized that different pets carried different skills that I could learn by making them fight.
Of course, until I found Petopia, I had no way of knowing *where* I would find those skills; it was just a case of wandering around, taming everything (or, once I finally had it, casting Beast Lore on everything.)
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