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.

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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.

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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.

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