[UPDATE: As of 01/14/2008, Blizzard has announced that this creature can no longer be tamed. This reverses their previous comments on the matter.]

According to a post by Issuntril, a Blizzard Poster, on the European In-Game Customer Support forum, the Ghost Wolf is here to stay:

While this feature of the Grimtotem Spirit Guide wasn’t exactly intended, it was agreed by the development team that this is a fun use of in-game mechanics, and we therefore have no plans to address this issue – it will still be possible in future for everyone who wishes to tame this NPC to do so. :)

I hope this alleviates your concerns!

I haven’t seen anything on the US forums yet, but I don’t believe that it’s even feasible to leave this is Europe and fix it in the US. So yes, that alleviates many of my concerns! Now I just have to find time today to get the wolf added to Petopia.

My thanks to the legions of people who immediately let me know about this, here and in e-mail.

I played Kaet just a bit after Patch 2.3 came out — she picked up a few levels and learned Claw 6 — but now I’ve put her on ice temporarily. The problem: with the increased quest XP for mid-levels, she’s outpacing her pets much too quickly. Oh, I can keep one pet more or less even with me — except that in the past few levels I let them drop behind as I learned new skills and whatnot. But even concentrating on just one crab I can’t catch it up even with me. And the other two are falling further and further behind.

The next minor patch, 2.3.2, will fix this problem by requiring less experience for pets per level. But in the meantime it’s better if I don’t exacerbate the situation by playing. So what have I been doing instead?

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For a variety of reasons, I have a list of posts I wanted to highlight from as far back as Halloween that I just never got around to mentioning. Since it looks like this week is going to be unfortunately quite busy and stressful for me, I’m going to dig back into my old list and use them as cheap filler content. *grin*

Lassirra at The Hunter’s Mark posted Part 2 of her article on Hunter Gear Enhancements, which includes enchants and faction inscriptions.

Faeldray at Petoholics Anonymous added to her work on A Newbie’s Life with Levels 6-10.

Brehm from Bremm’s Musings posted a whole bunch of useful lists — enough to bump him up into my short list of really useful blogs. Much of his advice is general or touches on multiple classes: for instance, a post on glyphs, or a checlist for well-prepared raiders. Some posts are more hunter-centric, however, such as a short list of how blogging is like playing a hunter.

Pike at Aspect of the Hare posted a two-part series on A Newbie’s Guide to Battlegrounds.

Unfortunately that doesn’t even begin to clear out my backlog of cool posts I wanted to highlight. On the other hand, I have another four days of stress and pain to get through, so you may see more of these posts this week!

Final name: Precious

Kat from Liquid Silver was the first person to take up the Name That Pet challenge and send me info about a pet that needs a name!

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I spent some time this evening on the PTR checking out the new increased pet leveling speed. This is a summary of what I found, in case you don’t want to read the long liveblogged post about it. :>

• The XP that pets need to level has been reduced — from 25% to 16.75% of the XP that a player of the same level requires. In other words, pets require 33% less XP to level on the PTR.
• Pets still do not earn XP when the hunter completes a quest.
• Pets still do not earn XP from kills that are grey to the hunter.
• The XP-per-kill that a pet receives shows no changes between the PTR and the live realms.