Mania’s Arcania

In case you can’t tell, I am frantically trying to catch up with the most important news from Patch 2.3 after being away from home for 9 of the last 13 days. Therefore you should expect randomly-timed posts for the next few days as I stumble across interesting tidbits.

The patch notes can be found in the regular place, of course. But I’m sure you’ve read them by now.

First, let’s talk about the odd and largely undocumented hunter changes that have everyone stirred up. Actually .. on second, thought, let’s not. Big Red Kitty has an excellent round up first of some of the undocumented hunter changes in Patch 2.3, and secondly of Blizzard comments about these issues. Since he’s done a better job than I would have getting that all together, I think I’ll just leave it to him.

There are plenty of other little changes on the pet side, though. For example, pets seem to be automatically dismissed when you cross between continents. Not a big deal for us, although it might be an issue for warlocks.

More interesting is a new special behavior for some cats. It seems that the ‘riding’ model cats are no longer the only pet cats with their own special noises — Duroniel and Vanyalosswen of Runetotem both wrote to let me know that Humar and Sian-Rotam (and possibly the other lions?) now have a roar idle emote. [Edit: Actually, Blackhunter from Daggerspine told me about this while it was still on the PTR. I told you I was behind!] (And as I mentioned in the last post, both Sian-Rotam and Shy-Rotam can apparently now be summoned by Alliance as well as Horde players.)

In addition, a number of creatures in mid-level dungeons were releveled to match the new dungeon levels. For example, one hunter let me know that Blind Hunter, the white bat in Razorfen Kraul, is now level 27 and has new skills. Similarly, as I mentioned in a comment, it looks like I missed a bunch of formerly-elite-but-now-just-normal creatures that exist in dungeon areas but outside of the dungeons proper. All the deviate critters outside the Wailing Caverns instance portal are now non-elite, for instance. And Hypnotic and another hunter (who didn’t give a name) wrote to tell me that the Scythetooth Raptors in Netherstorm can now be tamed.

It’s going to take me forever to round up all the changes, so if you run across something please let me know! An e-mail is easiest for me to keep track of. Thanks!