Mania’s Arcania

Update: Niio took up the challenge and succeeded. Way to go, Niio!

I have a taming challenge for any enterprising Horde hunter in the beta. (Sorry, PTR testers, but you can’t help with this one.) I’d like you to try taming Snorts, the slumbering boar of Frosthold in the Storm Peaks.

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Final Name: Sage

Today on Name That Pet we have a young blood elf named Raelian who has recently tamed a raptor (and who tells a very good story).

Raelian writes:

Maybe your forum of dedicated readers can help me out with naming my raptor. I play on Steamwheedle Cartel as a Hordie. When I’m not chewing glass on M’uru with my guildmates, I’m often leveling alts and rping.

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While checking out pet stats (at least the ones that display on the pet panel) in the current beta build, I noticed something unfortunate: my warp stalker was missing about 3% of his damage. His armor and health was exactly what I expected, compared to other Tenacity pets, but his white DPS was only 97% of the expected value.

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I have finally managed to get the pet talents updated on Petopia for the last couple of builds, and I thought I’d do another quick round-up of the changes I saw. Again, if you’ve been keeping up then you probably know all this already, but I’m still catching up myself so humor me. :>

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Final Name: IronHead

Today’s episode of Name That Pet comes to us from Agrima, an orc hunter from Coilfang. Agrima has a pet boar and is looking for help choosing an appropriate name.

Agrima writes:

I decided that I would roll an orc female Hunter. Her name is Agrima. She is one of my characters on Coilfang (US) PvP server. Her pet is a Boar.

Now, I am a role player by nature so I came up with a back story for her.

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At about 11 pm on Friday, September 27 — about a week after we started this move — we unloaded the last box from the old apartment into the new place. The old apartment is completely cleaned out and my husband is going by tomorrow to arrange for a walk-through and drop off the keys.

Of course, the new place is currently decorated in the classic ‘precarious towers of cardboard boxes’ style, but there’s no real time limit on unpacking. Indeed, we have some boxes we never unpacked from the last move. So the urgency is off and I can get back to WoW. This is especially good news for those readers who are thoroughly sick of my whining. *grin*

We now return you to your regularly scheduled pet blog already in progress.

I haven’t really been keeping up with Blizzard statements about beta or our pets for the past few weeks, so it’s time to catch up. A couple notes:

• Some of this may be old news that doesn’t apply anymore. I’ll try to weed any of that out if I can, but I may miss something. You can always click through to the original post to see exactly when it was posted.
• If you have been keeping up, you probably know this stuff. In fact, you may well be one of the kind souls who e-mailed me a link to let me know. (If so, thanks!) But I feel better if I get it all in one place, and some readers may have missed some of this.
• It isn’t just Ghostcrawler, but GC gives me a handy code word for the title.

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Over the past few beta builds, pet skills have seen some really nice changes. Many of you know all about this stuff already, but others don’t, so I thought it might be handy to round up those changes in a reference table.

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Petopia has been updated for build 8982 — at least as far as pet families and skills go. (And I updated the FAQ yesterday for build 8970, and it should still be accurate.)

Note that the talent pages (including stat modifiers) still need to be updated, and I have a whole bunch of beasts (including some new skins) yet to add. That should happen tomorrow. (Well, later today.)

I spent the afternoon moving boxes, one carload at a time. And I get home, shower, and sit down to finish updating the pet skills and … new beta build! Damnit, Blizzard! How can I catch up if you keep updating?!

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