Thanks to safrienaer, we now have a lot more information on the ‘spectral bear‘ — the potential new Spirit Beast that showed up in the Patch 3.3 data files a few builds back.
His name is Arcturius. He is, indeed, a Spirit Beast — complete with all the Spirit Beast skill, including Prowl. Like other Spirit Beasts, he is a non-aggressive rare elite. Unlike them, he’s only level 74.
Ranshiin, in a post on the Arcania forums, brought an interesting thread on the MMO Champion forums to our attention: the wolves in Northshire Valley — the little walled human starter area in Elwynn Forest — are becoming diseased!
As you can see from this shot of Aisna with her new diseased wolf, these guys do indeed use the diseased wolf skin — which was previously unavailable before level 47, in Felwood.
Blizzard pushed a new build (10676) to the 3.3 PTR today and updated the patch notes to match.
There’s nothing particularly interesting to hunters in the patch notes, but MMO Champion did notice a new skin in the data: the Spectral Bear.
Is this the newest Spirit Beast? Stay tuned … and let me know if you see him on the PTR!
I am fascinated by Cataclysm, the upcoming WoW expansion, because it represents a very different sort of expansion. Most MMO expansions change the world by adding new content to the edges of the world. Sure, some of that new content may be for low levels (especially new races), some may be meant to fill in holes in the middle levels, but the majority of it is usually intended for the upper levels. That division helps separate the old and new content in very obvious ways.
But Cataclysm will be restructuring the oldest part of WoW enormously. That clean division of old and new content … not so clean anymore. Now I’m an old hand at MMOs, but I’m not entirely sure what to expect from this one. And that goes double for how and where new pet families may be introduced.
Some time ago I posted about my intention to create an elite cadre of test hunters — hunters with their XP turned off, starting at level 10 and going up 6 levels at a time so that, at any time, I can check out the stats of any level of tamed beast.
I haven’t forgotten that goal. In fact, I’ve been working on my little project off and on ever since. I now have a guild with 8 characters — 7 hunters and 1 death knight banker — called, of course, “Elite Test Cadre”.