(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.)

Okay! Time to jump back into the swing of things! As I started this session, I was sitting in Westfall at level 18 with a level 15 white crab named Niffis and a number of quests still to do in Westfall and Redridge. The Westfall quests all involved the lighthouse keeper at the Westfall Lighthouse, so I headed towards the coast to deal with the pesky murlocs.

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My apologies to anyone who has tried to access this blog over the past day. We had a hardware failure on the box that hosts Mania’s Arcania and we were offline for a bit over 24 hours. (Thankfully, Petopia is hosted elsewhere so that site wasn’t affected.) The problem has been resolved now and we should be fine, but if you notice anything odd — broken links or missing comments or posts or what have you — please let me know.

I’ve leveled an awful lot of hunters to 10 – almost 20 of them at last count! (Sadly, many of these characters don’t make it past level 10. I am easily distracted.) Generally speaking, I really enjoy the very directed feel of the first nine levels: at this point, the game is very clear about what you should be doing at every step of the way. But I also find these levels somewhat … challenging, because you don’t yet have a pet. And pets make a huge, huge difference in the playstyle of a hunter.

So while I was thinking about this, I wrote up a little guide of tips and tricks that I use during my first nine levels. As always, feedback is very welcome!

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Bulldazhor was kind enough to let us know that this latest update to the PTR has also included some changes to the scorpid skill Scorpid Poison:

1. Scorpid Poison Rank 5 now does 55 damage over 10 seconds (instead of 44 damage over 8 seconds). This will make it easier to keep Scorpid Poison stacked when using Rank 5.
2. However, fewer hunters will be interested in keeping Scorpid Poison stacked since its damage no longer seems to scale with hunter RAP to the same extent that it did before.

In other words, it looks like the days of using the Scorpid Poison stacking trick to inflict massive amounts of damage in a long fight are over … or will be when Patch 2.2 goes live, anyway.

Related article: PTR 2.2.0: Scorpid Poison Scaling Data

When I was checking out my lists of untameable pets recently, I ran across a mention of the Gore-Scythe Ravager. These guys apparently spawn right where the Rip-Blade Ravagers do in Blade’s Edge — which made it very odd that I had never seen one. So I wandered down there to take another look and see if I had missed something.

At first I found nothing out of the ordinary — Rip-Blade Ravagers everywhere and not a Gore-Scythe to be seen. But then, just as I was turning to leave, a horde of Gore-Scythe’s spawned and started attacking Toshley Station!

I quickly verified that these ravagers cannot be tamed (probably because they are heavily scripted to attack the Station). But that leaves me with the question — why do they spawn? Is it part of some Alliance quest? A timed event? Does anyone know what the lore is here?