I’m off to Comic-Con today. I missed it last year and we theoretically won’t be in the area next year, so my husband and I made it a priority to go this year. I’m not a huge comics person, but I wouldn’t mind meeting Neil Gaiman (although I think he’s talking tomorrow, not today) or the Penny-Arcade folks, or a handful of others.
Anyway, I’ll catch up with the comments and e-mail when I get home this evening.
(You can read all of Kaet’s adventures, starting with why I’m doing things this way, by checking out the series Table of Contents at the end of this post. Alternatively, if you are here primarily for juicy pet-related news, feel free to skip these bits — they’re optional.)
I had started writing these posts about my new Dwarven hunter, Kaet, in her own voice — in character. But although I enjoy that sort of thing once in a while, I just can’t keep it up for very long. Anyway, her limited knowledge of game systems design gets in the way of the things I’d like to say. *grin* And so I am spared that indignity — as are you!
I got an interesting e-mail today from a reader who let me know that my standard response about how pets with “caster” stats are just all-around inferior is no longer correct. If you hover your mouse over the Intellect stat on the pet panel, he said, you will see that caster pets get extra Spell Critical Hit out of their higher Intellect. And indeed, this seems to be the case. Hovering over the Intellect of various creatures (with their actual Intellect shown in parens) gave me these results:
The dragonhawk and the nether ray have caster stats; the raptor does not. But it doesn’t look look like more Intellect benefits the casters so much as their status as casters does — the actual Intellect score seems to be immaterial.
That title sounds … odd … but in fact I wanted to call attention to the interesting work being done by a hunter named Someone over at his blog, Someone: Hunter on Wildhammer WoW Realm. In particular, check out this post On Bestial Discipline, Go for the Throat, Focus, Byte and Claw…, as well as his work on the special ability spreadsheet itself.
I’ve been playing modern graphical MMO games for something like 8 years, and in that time I have learned a lot about what drives me as a player. I like having good solid direction — which often means that I enjoy the low levels better than the high levels. I like to have a goal outside the game as well — a personal project that I am working towards, like leveling a hunter with each pet family or taming every pet in the game. I like to make alts and start on new servers — I like the feeling of starting clean with no baggage or commitments.
But on the flip side, I get distracted easily — and once I have been distracted I find it hard to pick up where I left off. This becomes a particlar problem when I have too many characters, too many goals, all hung up on some minor snag that encourages me to leave this one for a bit and try something else and then I forget what I was doing and when I come back I’m all confused and now I don’t want to try to remember or deal with it so I think I’ll make another alt on a new server …
You see the problem. :>
I just got a very exciting e-mail from Jezpalimu, a level 70 Hunter on the Kilrogg server.
I play a non-premade 70 Hunter in the 2.2 WoW PTR,on the PvE server. While playing, I had the sudden urge to tame one of the Raptors from Blade’s Edge Mountains in Outland.
So I tamed one.
When I hearthed back to Orgrimmar, I went to check what skills he could learn from Training. Amongst the Bite, Claw, Growl, Cower, and passive skills, I discovered something amazing…
My raptor was eligible to learn Dash!! I thought this was incredible news!
Incredible news indeed! I logged in to check myself, and yes — it looks like come Patch 2.2.0, the raptor family will finally be able to learn the pet ability Dash. It’s about time!
I have a Grand Plan to level a character with each pet family to get a solid feel for how each family plays. I’ve already talked about the families that I plan to level with Taurens and Trolls & Orcs, and today we’re going to talk about my plans for Blood Elves.
Thrallito, a hunter from the Uldum server, and his pet SpecialNeeds wrote in to me this morning to ask about creatures that are already pets of NPCs:
If a Grishna Raven is examined with Beast Lore, it is listed as tamable. The problem is that even if the Grishna Falconwing that keeps it as a pet is killed, the ownership persists, preventing the tame. … Are there other humanoid/animal pairs that can be broken up and tamed? How is it done? Could this be applied to the Grishna Raven? I’m hoping that the store of knowledge that exists amongst you and your readers will help to answer these questions.
I mentioned a few days ago that Blizzard has opened up pre-made characters on the Public Test Realm, so you can copy over one of their well-equipped level 70s of any class and play around with it. I already copied my level 70 main to the PTR, of course, but I went ahead and copied the two hunter characters they made available: a male Dwarf and a male Tauren. Mostly, I admit, I wanted to see what pretty armor they had. *grin*
But I was also pleased to note that both pre-made hunters come with a level 70, loyalty 6 pet — and pets that you don’t often see at level 70. The Dwarf has a red worg and the Tauren has a brown bear. These may not be the pets you’d expect on a well-equipped level 70 hunter, but they do give us all a unique chance to check out these families at level 70.
If you have a chance to try out these pre-made pets, drop me a line and let me know you think!
So I’ve been thinking about updating the navigation menu for Petopia just a tad to make it a little more useful. The first question I had, of course, was how people use the site now. For that, I turned to Google Analytics, which records and analyzes website traffic patterns. For instance, it can tell you which pages your users enter your site through and where they go from there.
The data I got from Google Analytics was just fascinating, although some of it was a little unexpected. It looked like people were going directly to the pets and skins they wanted, and very few were passing through the family pages (which I had tended to think of as the traffic hub of the site). But hey, if that’s what people do, then that’s what they do! I took the info I had and started working on what would theoretically be a much more useful navigation bar for Petopia.
