I missed this until I noticed it on WoWInsider, but on Friday Drsyc, the Blizzard Community Manager, took some time to answer some questions about the upcoming faster leveling. I’ve ranted before about what effect this might have on hunter pets, but Drysc had this to say:

[Quoted post from Drakkin of Eternal Core on Dragonblight]
If you get a 30% increase in exp for quests then you will get less rep because the quests will go grey before you can do them all. Hunters will really be messed up because they will level twice as fast as thier pets. So are they going to start giving full rep for all under 60 quests like they currently do for the starting zone quests?
[End quoted post.]

I don’t believe a percentage increase has been stated. Reputation has not been reduced relative to level difference since (I think) patch 2.0, and that applies to all reputation gains anywhere, not just starting areas. I don’t think hunter pets will be an issue either.

Leaving aside the minor inconsistencies (30% was a quote from Tigole at Leipzig, although perhaps the interviewer got it wrong; rep works as Drysc explained except in Draenei and Blood Elf starter areas), I have to admit that I am just a little annoyed about the dismissal of hunter pet concerns. I suppose it’s possible that he means hunter pets will not be an issue because they are naturally synched to the hunter’s XP to level and so it will all work out automatically, but …

Or maybe I am just blowing this issue out of proportion. I guess we’ll see. Eventually. If Patch 2.2 ever goes live …

We figured out where he went this morning — we could hear him chewing inside the wall of the kitchen cabinet — so my husband set up traps in the area for him: enticing boxes with ramps and stairs, and smelly but delicious food (like peach slices and cheese) on a plate inside. Tonight he quietly left his hidey-hole, surreptitiously clambered down to get at the food … and fell right into a box. As planned! Now he’s safely back in his cage, but he’s loading up his little cheeks with food and running for the door every time we walk by.

*sigh* Reptiles are so much easier. But at least he didn’t die in the wall or something — that would have upset my husband.

I’ve made some modifications to the way the Big List of Pet Skills works. It’s way too late tonight do a comprehensive rundown — for which I apologize, but between fighting with the Perl script for-freakin’-ever today and then pausing that to try (unsuccessfully) to hunt down my husband’s escaped hamster, I’m tired! — but give it a quick look and let me know what you think of it or if you see anything wonky or wrong. Although all the old info should still be available (in fact  left the Big List itself mostly intact for backwards-compatibility), I do plan on taking some time this weekend to add notes to the individual skill pages — which skills scale and how, which cooldown timers overlap, etc. So I wouldn’t exactly call this finished yet, but I wanted to get what I had up for feedback.

And I thought I was crazy!

Someone, the hunter from Wildhammer EU, has embarked on a new and exciting project — collecting extensive wild and tamed data on every pet in the game via an add-on he’s written. Check out what he’s done so far on his blog post Taming the Whole WoW (Part II). (You can check out Part I also, of course, but Part II has more updated info.)

As someone who has attempted to tame every creature in the game at least once (although I haven’t been 100% successful), I have to applaud this kind of project! And as someone who finds it annoying and tedious everytime Blizzard slightly adjusts some underlying number because it means I have to go out and tame 100+ creatures just to get valid base readings again, I am sincerely grateful that Someone doesn’t mind sharing his results with us.

I’m trying to squeeze in a lot of work on Petopia this week since next week and the week after will largely be taken up with a cross-country move. Last night I added a bunch more untameable creatures and extended the cross-through font to untameables in the database search results so that when you have untameables mixed in with tameables creatures in those results it’s easier to see which is which.

I also put the family damage, armor, and health modifiers back on the family and individual pet pages — no matter how much I think they aren’t useful anymore, too many people wanted to see them there. Petopia isn’t just for my private research, after all – it’s supposed to be useful for the readers!

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