I don’t celebrate Christmas but I suspect that a majority of you, my readers, do.
So allow me to take this opportunity to wish you a wonderful winter season – or summer for those in the southern hemisphere – filled with joy and pets.
Many, many pets.
I decided when Cataclysm launched that leveling Mania to 85 would be my first priority. Today I finished that goal. I didn’t push myself, but I did happen to have more time to play than usual. Plus, the levels in Cataclysm go pretty quickly.
So what do I get for hitting level 85? Not a whole lot – except the ability to tame these fine unusual beasts.
The intrepid members of the Petopia Community forums spent some major brain cycles recently figuring out how to tame a pet in such a way that pre-tame effects would stay on the pet.
For example, I posted before about taming the oily coated wolf. That tame relied on the fact that the beast despawns because of the quest. Time the tame and the despawn just right and the Oily Coat effect wasn’t cleared when the tame completed.
From that and other similar situations, and a lot of testing, the forum community worked out a way to preserve visual effects on a whole bunch of pets. In some cases, the effects that persisted past the tame weren’t just visual – in some cases they included damage buffs, for example.
I was deadly serious the other day when I said that the Shattering really was the expansion for me.
But there are a number of neat pets that will only be available to hunters who purchase the expansion proper. For example:
And more! You can find a complete list on the Cataclysm page on Petopia.
A hunter note in the December 2 WoW hotfix reads: Silithid Swarmers are now tamable by hunters.
Silithid Swarmers used to be one of the two types of green scorpids in the Barrens. In the Shattering, however, they changed into the tan ‘ant’ silithid – in both look and family.
Hunters who had tamed a Silithid Swarmer before the Shattering ended up with an ant silithid. Hunters who hadn’t ended up with nothing because the new Silithid Swarmer could not be tamed.
Well, until this hotfix.