Watching enemy spawns that haven’t been moved to match the new landscape yet wander through lava, at the bottom of the ocean, and up vertical cliffs.

Being able to Track Beasts and Innkeepers at the same time. Even better? Tracking herbs and ores at the same time.

Mounting up and flying real quick to catch the Orgrimmar to Undercity zeppelin as it leaves the tower.

Lagging while on the zeppelin and getting past the zoning screen just as I arrive back in Tirisfal.

Getting lost in Orgrimmar, particularly visiting visiting old what’s-his-name — you know, that orc no one likes — every time I want to go to the bank.

Flapping on my Green Proto-Drake over the immense crack through the center of the Barrens. (And being dismounted and falling to my death.)

Walking on the bottom of the ocean, looking up in awe and terror as a whale shark passes above me.

Getting lost in the Kelp Forest and swimming into the wrong boat. Three times. (Two ships — or maybe the same one twice? — inhabited by giblins and and one by Alliance.) Hint: Look for the one with the big skulls on it. (Unless you’re Alliance.)

Riding my bony pony Sparkles across the seabed.

Swimming up and down, left and right in a futile effort to get close enough to a corpse to loot. (My 3D spatial sense is awful.)

Finally finding — and killing — a quest lobster and immediately getting booted back to character select with the dreaded world server down message.

From: Mania's Arcania

But because they’ve only added one for each major patch — and there have only been four major patches in the Lich King era — we only have four Spirit Beasts.

Now four beasts isn’t a lot to keep track of … but on the other hand, four also isn’t too hard to overlook. I get a decent amount of e-mail from newer or returning hunters asking me, “What’s up with the see-through bear?” Or, “Have you seen that weird blue wolf?”

(Often, these helpful souls are writing to let me know that I am missing a pet, because that weird blue wolf is nowhere to be seen on the Petopia wolf page …)

But I actually quite enjoy these e-mails. First off, they mean that when I am missing something, someone will probably let me know sooner or later. And secondly, it means I get to introduce someone to a new Spirit Beast!

So let’s take a moment to round up our four spirit beasties, shall we?

Loque’nahak

Loque’nahak, he of the ridiculously hard to pronounce name, is the original Spirit Beast. He’s been haunting the edges of Sholazar Basin since we players first set foot in Northrend.

Loque is also known as the Mate of Har’koa and shares an appearance with that leopard goddess. Calling them both cat-like is akin to calling a Lamborghini vehicle-like: technically accurate, but it doesn’t begin to capture their sleek beauty.

Loque is a man of mystery: We don’t know if he is also a loa of some sort, like Harkoa. We don’t know if he is Harkoa’s only mate or part of a harem. We don’t know how he became the mate of a goddess when he’s only level 76, or what he’s doing so far away from her home in Zul’Drak.

(And please, no questions about the logistics of their relationship! The disparity in their sizes is very much a private matter and none of our business.)

Gondria

Our second Spirit Beast is also cat-like, although in this case that description is extremely apt. Gondria, level 77, is a spectral version of the Frostsaber Pride Watcher. He appeared in Zul’Drak in Patch 3.1.

Gondria is sometimes known as the STD cat due to his unfortunate name. Personally I call him the vertigo cat because being able to see the stripes on both sides of his body at the same time makes me dizzy. (And by the way, it’s spelled gonorrhea.)

His most striking features are his brightly glowing aqua eyes, which shine through his spectral body from all angles.

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any lore concerning Gondria. One wonders why he, rather than Loque’nahak, is hanging out in Zul’Drak so close to Harkoa ….

Skoll

Next up on our grand tour of Spirit Beasts is Skoll, also known as the blue lightning wolf.

Skoll first appeared in the Storm Peaks in Patch 3.2. He was the first Spirit Beast that didn’t look anything like a cat, which caused some confusion since the secondary family skill of Spirit Beasts is Prowl — a traditional WoW cat skill.

He’s also naturally level 80, the highest level Spirit Beast. I tell you, if Skoll has Furious Howl instead of Prowl he’d be the undisputed belle of the ball right now.

Although Skoll is apparently a spectral beast — the internal name of his model is ‘spectralsaberworg’ — he appears quite solid to the eyes. But blue isn’t exactly a normal color for saber worg, even if he shares his basic shape with those wolves. And most wolves aren’t covered with flickering lightning …

Skoll is actually the only Spirit Beast I’ve ever tamed on Mania — largely because he’s the only Spirit Beast I’ve ever seen on Mania.

Arcturis

And finally we come to Arcturis, the see-through bear introduced in Patch 3.3. Arcturis is the lowest level Spirit Beast at level 74. He is well-suited to his home in Grizzly Hills, a zone he shares with five other colors of bear.

Arcturis is unique among them, however, not just because he is a Spirit Beast (and see-through) but also because he is a maned bear, similar to the druid bear form. (Thankfully he doesn’t sport either the horns or those silly ears …)

Like Gondria, Arcturis has striking, glowing eyes. Unlike Gondria, much of his spectral light is concentrated in his head and neck so his eyes are not nearly so eerie. On the other hand, that means that his rump is almost entirely transparent.

The name Arcturis may be related to that of the star Arcturus, which in Greek mythology guarded the nearby constellations Ursa major and Ursa minor — humans transformed by Zeus first into bears and then into constellations in order to protect them from tragedies that were his fault to begin with. Zeus was like that.

Spirit Beast Notes

A couple of completely random tidbits about Spirit Beasts …

Despite the fact that all four Spirit Beasts look rather different, they all share the same family skills: Spirit Strike and Prowl. Spirit Strike is akin to the druid spell Moonfire, and quite appropriate for a Spirit Beast. But Prowl, which is shared with the cat family, is probably an artifact of the fact that Loque’nahak and Gondria, the first of the Spirit Beasts, look pretty cat-like.

All four Spirit Beasts are rare and elite, although none of them pose a particular challenge to tame once you find them. All four are also non-aggressive — they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. It’s unknown at this time if they are also more afraid of you than you are of them.

Killing Loque’nahak counts towards the achievements Northern Exposure and Frostbitten. Thankfully the other three Spirit Beasts do not count towards these achievements — which makes them just a tad easier to find since you generally aren’t competing with camping non-hunters who want to kill them. But none of the Spirit Beasts are exactly easy to locate.

And finally, a word of advice: Any of the four Spirit Beasts can make an excellent and rewarding pet for a high-level hunter. But if you go hunting them … make absolutely certain that you have the 51-point Beast Mastery talent required to tame exotic pets — or that you can swap specs to get it quickly – or you will be very, very sad when you eventually find your Spirit Beast.

From: Mania's Arcania

Patch 3.3.5 also has, hidden in its innards, the two pre-Cataclysm events: Operation Gnomeregan for the Alliance and Zalazane’s Fall for the Horde. These events won’t be activated until some time much closer to the launch of the Cataclysm expansion, of course, but we had a chance to check them out on the Public Test Realm over the past couple of weeks.

And that left me with a bit of a problem …

My Alliance Main is Too Low!

Zalazane’s Fall was a lot of fun, although there were so many people in the final assault on Zalazane that I never actually saw him. Or anything else, in fact, since my screen froze up. But apparently we won! And I got a Feat of Strength and a nice cloak. I am really looking forward to doing this event when it is eventually activated on the live realms.

Operation Gnomeregan, on the other hand, started out with some fun quests for all levels, but then I hit a wall. The final assault event, it turns out, requires level 75 — and Kaet, my highest Alliance character, was only level 71!

I could have copied a pre-made character on the PTR, but that’s hardly the point; the real problem was that I wanted to be able to participate on the live realms when the time comes. And that means that I needed an Alliance character that was at least level 75.

The solution, of course, was easy: get Kaet another four levels. But that lead to another problem …

Kaet’s Not A Good Main

Don’t get me wrong — I love my little dwarf lass. But I’ve come to realize lately that there is a reason that I haven’t finished leveling Kaet to 80. I like Kaet, but she just doesn’t feel like a good main character for me.

Kaet started out as a project character: a (rare) female dwarf  with three (unpopular) crabs. Remember, when she was created we didn’t yet have pet talent trees. Crabs weren’t a tanking Tenacity pet or a handy Pin in PvP — they were just useless and unpopular. So running around with three of them, swapping them out regularly so I could keep them all approximately my level (since we also didn’t have automagical pet leveling) was a real project.

Kaet also has a fairly specific personality. I don’t do much heavy-duty roleplay, but like many players I often have a personality and sometimes a backstory in mind when I create a character. Kaet is sweet. Sometime a little saucy, maybe, but overall very sweet: kind, generous, helpful, sympathetic … a real people pleaser. And while that’s a great personality for Kaet, it’s hard for me to play unless I am in the right mood. (I’m not really a people person at heart.)

And unfortunately it’s not as easy as not roleplaying Kaet when I’m not in the mood. I can’t just turn off her personality — it’s her personality. (What about Mania?, you may ask. Mania has her own backstory, but her personality is very close to mine. She’s not a people person either. She likes to help, sometimes, but throwing gold at people and then flapping off into the distance is more her style.)

But I can’t just abandon Kaet and start a new primary Alliance character. For one thing, I have no desire to level a new hunter from 1 to 80 in the next couple of weeks. For another, I’ve treated Kaet like my Alliance main for a while now and so she’s accumulated some nice Feats of Strength, as well as a retired Swift Zhevra.

The Solution: Nefane

I’d been thinking about this problem with Kaet for some time, but it took the looming deadline of pre-Cataclysm events to spur me to action. And the solution was actually a lot simpler than I thought: I turned Kaet into a Draenei.

… Or more accurately (from my point of view),  I put Kaet’s character into storage and turned those 71 levels of experience into a new character, a Draenei hunter named Nefane. A somewhat self-centered, fairly sardonic Draenei who is trying out a slew of white and grey pets to see what she likes best.

(A nefane is essentially the big brother of a niffis, pictured above via the Asheron’s Call Wikia community. You can see the resemblance in the tentacles. And Niffis was the name of Kaet’s white crab, so there is some continuity.)

Kaet still exists (in my head) and will likely make a re-appearance in Cataclysm. But in the meantime I have a mail Alliance character that I like leveling. And after a few days of playtime she’s already level 75 and ready for Operation Gnomeregan.

A race change isn’t something I was expecting to do, but it’s worked out well for me here. I’m glad I had the option.

From: Mania's Arcania

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Samuel Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

We’re in the calm before the cataclysmic storm, and like most calms this one is a bit boring.

The tasty leaked alpha data has temporarily gone away. Well, off the reputable sites, anyway. I had a cute little post lined up about the ‘most exciting’ probable pet in the alpha files, but I’ve decided to shelve that for now just in case. Although to be honest, I doubt if Blizzard cares if I reveal the existence of the last missing color of diseased bear.

And unlike some people who shall remain nameless (and who don’t get any links since they are trying to keep me out of the beta!), I am not special enough to be invited into alpha myself. If I were, I wouldn’t go gloating about it all over the internet either! But I’m not.

(Aside: And that last paragraph was meant in jest. Do not bomb this blog!)

But I can understand that. Not being invited, I mean. First, I am very vocal about posting my suggestions for hunter pets in general here and elsewhere, so inviting me to alpha doesn’t new Blizzard any new suggestions. Secondly, the details of pets — like the specific changes to family skills or the new level 1-10 pets for hunters — probably aren’t in the alpha yet. Pets and their associated data tend to happen pretty late in the creation cycle.

This isn’t a criticism: it makes a lot of sense to get the details of characters nailed down first. Even for the hunter class with pets that are a huge part of our uniqueness, you get the character figured out (with some basic guidelines about how the pets fit in), then build the details of the pets around that.

But since I do pets, that means that my feedback is probably more valuable when pets are being worked on heavily, which is probably not at this point in the alpha. Still, I’m sad not to be asked. I guess I’m just not that special.

So! Given that we’re in the boring doldrums, what is there to do? I was thinking about running another contest — maybe something a little more arty this time. I need to give that some more thought, though.

In WoW, I’ve been cleaning up some achievements in Old Azeroth. I got my Loremaster’s Colors (and that earned me a Tabard of the Achiever as well). And I’ve been finishing up the old world dungeons as I have time. (I’ve been in many of them for pet taming, but often not to the end boss.)

In fact, I’ve been quite surprised by how many quests and dungeons that Mania has never completed. I thought I’d been most places and seem most things in Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms … well, except for some of the raid dungeons. But I thought I’d done most of the solo quests leading up to those dungeons. Except … apparently I hadn’t.

I spent a lot of time in Winterspring — I loved that place — but I skipped the Plaguelands. Both of them. I had done almost no quests in Searing Gorge and I’d skipped half the quests in the Swamp of Sorrows. And never mind Silithus — I’m not sure I’d ever set foot there except to track down Krellack back when he was supposed to look like a tallstrider.

And some of the missing quests are very puzzling to me. How did I miss the quest to kill Steelsnap? Mania leveled right through Thousand Needles, and she was practically living out of Thunderbluff at the time. So why didn’t I take that quest?

And here’s where the secret comes in. (No, the secret wasn’t the diseased bear.) See, when I think back about my first 60 levels on Mania, I realize that … I was afraid of content. I knew I was weak; I knew I would die; I knew I shouldn’t even try to take on anything above a green quest. And elites? Run far, far away!

The Burning Crusade expansion cured me, and today this attitude is very odd to me. But in context, it makes a lot of sense.

See, I started playing MMOs back in … let’s see … it was during my first job, but after I got divorced the first time, when I started dating Eric, so that would be … 1999! Man, I’m old.

I started in Asheron’s Call (and stayed there for many, many years) but of course I also tried EverQuest. And Anarchy Online. And Dark Age of Camelot. And Final Fantasy XI. And Shadowbane. And Star Wars Galaxies. And Lineage II. And Horizons. And City of Heroes. And …

Well, I’ll stop there. But there was one thing that the early games had it common, and that was the certainty of my quick and brutal death.

The first character I made in EverQuest was a wood elf. I fell off the edge of their tree city and died. Then I couldn’t find my way back up, and died again to some sort of spider or something. And again. And again. This was in my first five minutes.

My second EverQuest character was a barbarian. At that time in EverQuest, you accepted quests by typing keywords into local chat while talking to an NPC. (Weird, eh?) But if you forgot to hit enter to go into chat mode, you’d do the emote dance. Except in EverQuest, the ‘a’ key attacked. And you could attack NPCs, including the quest giver you were talking to. And then they would kick your ass.

The first two times this happened, I stood there in shock … and died. The third time, I tried to run. I ran into the water and — you got it! — died.

These stories are pretty common to EverQuest players. But my point is that death came easily and quickly in the early MMOs. And the big thing for most of them was grouping, so if you didn’t find groups almost immediately you were very weak compared to every creature you would ever meet. (DAoC reduced some of the EQ suck by moving the must-group level to 10.)

Even my beloved Asheron’s Call had some problems here. AC didn’t require grouping, but it was very, very easy to permanently destroy your character’s ability to fight well. (And there were no respecs in these games at this time. That would be cheating.) Thankfully, AC had a very forgiving XP system that allowed a weak character to kill things *way* under their level and still progress, albeit very slowly.

That’s why I stuck with AC — because my terribly weak character could at least crawl forward slowly, whereas in EQ I was stuck, unable to progress at all.

So when I started WoW, I just naturally assumed that I was weak, that I could only attempt to take on quests and enemies below my level, and that I would die terribly over and over again. And that’s why I skipped so many quests and zones. By the time I wandered into a new zone, some of the early quests would be grey to me. And if the zone seemed too hard for me — and too hard in this case meant that the spiders looked at me funny, or there were dragonkin somewhere in the zone, or I saw a higher level player doing quests there — I’d go back to a lower zone.

So that’s my shameful secret. Mania skipped a lot of content because I “knew” that she was weak.

The Burning Crusade expansion changed that for me. And I strongly suspect that players getting into MMOs now — or really, any time after WoW launched — will never suffer that illusion. Nor will I, ever again.

From: Mania's Arcania

We’re looking to get some feedback on the types of pets that hunters would like to be able to tame and the types of abilities that might be interesting for those pets to have. Is there a type of creature in the game now that you would like to be able to tame or an ability that you’ve always thought should be added? Here’s your chance to share a bit more about what you think could be great additions for the hunter class.

Edit: EU hunters, your version was posted a bit later on the EU Hunter forum.

Needless to say, this is a question near and dear to my heart. I posted a response immediately and I expect you to do the same! In fact, head on over there right now … I’ll wait.

…

So. I was mostly interested in the first part of the question: “Is there a type of creature in the game now that you would like to be able to tame?” But there are a couple of thoughts about pet families in general that have been bouncing around in my head and that I wanted to share as well.

First, my suggested list of pet type additions, in more or less priority order:

1. Slime
2. Silithid Wasps
3. The blue and green magehunters (to match the Vargul Blighthound)
4. Bogstriders (aka Tripods)
5. Silithid Scarabs (the beetle-like silithid) and Silithid Drones (the ant-like silithid)
6. Darkhounds (aka Plaguehounds, Deathhounds)
7. Maggots
8. Helboars
9. Foxes, as mentioned by Ghostcrawler in the last Twitter dev chat
10. Basilisks
11. Hydra
12. Ungulates (including shoveltusks, zhevra, horses, giraffe, talbuks, rams, and stags)
13. Kodos, Clefthooves and Elekks (to flesh out the Rhino family)
14. Dinosaurs: Diemetradon, Thunder Lizards, Pterrodax

(I’m sure I’ve missed quite a few, and I’m sure that you’ll let me know in the comments. *grin*)

Some of these beasts can go right into existing families, which is a convenient thing for Blizzard. For example:

• Silithid Wasps could go into the Wasp family.
• The rest of the Silithid types could go into Silithid family.
• The magehunters could of course go into the Wolf family (where the Vargul Blighthound is now).
• Maggots could join the Worm family.
• With a slight renaming (akin to Owls becoming Birds of Prey), basilisks could join with crocilisks as the .. err .. Lisk family.
• Helboars could join the Boar family.
• All of the hooved animals I mentioned could move into the Rhino family without causing too much distress.
• The dinosaurs could join the Devilsaur family.
• And shoot, if we had to the foxes and darkhounds could also join the Wolf family.

Thing is, even in the best case we still have a whopping 32 pet families. In the worst case, that grows to 40+. That, my friends, is too many pet families. More to the point, it is too many pet family abilities to keep straight. And I’m saying that as the person who maintains Petopia!

So the first thing I started thinking about was this:

Q: What significance does pet family have?
A: 1) Available talent tree. 2) Exotic vs. non-exotic. 3) Pet family skill. 4) Focus dump skill. 5) Diet. 6) Real-world feel.

1. I’ve mentioned before that I’d like to see any pet family able to train in any pet talent tree, so long as all the pet’s points are spent in a single tree.
2. I’ve also mentioned before that I’d like to see exotic pets within normal pet families instead of having the entire family be exotic or non-exotic.
3. We’ll talk more about pet family skills in a second.
4. All the focus dump skills are identical in stats; they just have different names.
5. Diet isn’t a huge factor in pet choice these days, but it is a factor. There are ways to preserve diet outside of pet family, however .. which actually might be kind of interesting.
6. We already base most of our real-world feel from the pet model rather than it’s family. For example, we tend to consider owls, eagles and Aotona as separate types even though they share a family. Same with the Vargul Blighthound and the maned lions. The differences are there regardless of the pet family.

So the big significance of pet families for me is the pet family skill. Blizzard said in the Hunter Class Preview that they are working on adjusting these skills for Cataclysm “to provide important buffs and debuffs” and that their goal is “to have all pets provide a damage increase that is very similar and no greater than any other pet.”

Once you rule out direct damage and fall back to important buffs and debuffs … well, coming up with 32 (or 40+!) distinct variations may be a little tricky. Having fewer family skills and sharing them among what we currently consider families would make it easier to design such a system, and conversely easier for hunters to find a pet that appeals to them that has the skill they need.

Of course, if family pet skills are essentially the only difference between families, and multiple families share the same set of family pet skills, then we have effectively cut down on the number of pet families without actually removing anything. Which I think is not a bad thing.

Anyway … taking all those factor into account, here is how I would go about tweaking pets during Cataclysm develop if I were a magical Blizzard dev:

• Allow any pet family to train in any pet talent tree, so long as all the pet’s points are spent in a single tree.
• Choose a set of, say, 10-15 important buffs and debuffs and create a pet ability for each.
• Assign existing pet families to those abilities in a fashion that makes some sort of sense, but without getting too hung up on real-world notions of similarity.
• Invent snazzy names for each set of pets linked by a skill, thereby creating 10-15 new ‘pet families’.
• Oh, and while we’re here, I think I’d ditch the whole exotic thing. I posted a bit about this before, but the more I think about it, the more I just don’t think it works.

I’d love to take this a little further and draw up an example skill division, but the fact is that I’m not up enough on raiding to come up with the list of 10-15 important buffs and debuffs. If you want to start feeding them to me, though, I think it might be fun to play with.

So I am hoping to get a lot of commentary on these thoughts! You know how I love armchair pet design, even if you think I’m crazy half the time. *grin*

From: Mania's Arcania

If you’ve been around here awhile, you may remember Kaet — my second character to 70 and my ‘Alliance main’. She’s a dwarf lass with a penchant for those tiny jewels of the hunter world: crabs. For reasons unknown, she has three of the little suckers: a red crab named Tibri, a blue crab named Frore, and a white crab named Niffis.

Unfortunately, my focus since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion launched has been primarily on Mania (my Horde main) and a series of alts on both sides. At some point I took Kaet out to Borean Tundra long enough to get half a level … but that’s it. She doesn’t even have a dual talent specs yet.

But my urge to play Mania on the live realms is low — I’m tired of logging in for dailies and most of my WoW energy is taken up with eagerly anticipating the Cataclysm beta. So in the meantime, out comes Kaet! But man oh man, there is so much to do before she’s ready to go anywhere …

First thing I noticed was that she’s still carrying a quiver. I stacked her ammo up, dumped the arrows into my main pack and grabbed an empty Netherweave Bag from my bank to fill the slot.

(By the way, one of the things I miss the most about quivers is the ability to see how much ammo I have left without checking my bags. Instead I sacrifice an Action Bar slot for ammo so I have a number right in front of my nose. Otherwise I forget. And running out of ammo is so embarrassing!)

My skills seemed to be in good shape, but my talents (and all my pets’ talents) were reset. I went for a straight Beast Mastery build — all 61 points in the BM tree. I probably shouldn’t have, but I forgot that I was level 70 instead of 80 and by the time I remembered that I was ‘short’ 10 points, I’d spent everything. Ah, well — we’ll see how it plays, anyway.

But that reminded me that I needed to set up my Interface options the way I prefer. In particular, I had to turn on Preview Talent Changes (a little late!), turn on the Equipment Manager, set the Aggro warning to Always, and turn on Auto Self Cast. (I’m sure there’s a good reason that Auto Self Cast doesn’t default to on, but I usually die once per character before I remember that I need to set it.) I also re-arranged my Action Bars to match Mania’s configuration. (I keep most of my characters pretty similar so I can find things.)

Then back to talents! With three crabs, spec’ing the pets was an interesting experiment. I aimed Tibri (red) more towards damage (within the Tenacity tree), Frore (blue) entirely at defense, and Niffis (white) somewhere in the middle. There’s not really a lot of room in the tree for differentiating three crabs, though. I really do wish we could assign pet talent trees at will. If we could, then Tibri would (of course) be Ferocity, Frore would stay Tenacity, and Niffis would go Cunning.

Unfortunately after all of that I was out of playing urge. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually get her our of town.

In the meantime, it was just fascinating to look back on all the things that have changed during the Wrath expansion.

From: Mania's Arcania

The problem, so far as I can tell, is that about have the population of any given realm believes that the “right” way to gather eggs is to find an egg spawn spot and sit in front of it until an egg spawns. That eggs is then “theirs” because they were specifically waiting for it.

The other half of the population believes that the “right” way to gather eggs is to hop frantically from spawn spot to spawn spot, grabbing any egg that happens to spawn and isn’t grabbed by someone else first. That egg is then “theirs” because at that point, it’s in their inventory.

Unfortunately, these two methods don’t necessarily work well together. When an egg spawns by a sitter and a passing hopper grabs it … well, there may be words. And regardless of your personal predilections, I find that too much yelling can get on my little bunny nerves.

Personally, I love hopping frantically … in general, I mean, not just when gathering eggs. There’s something about being a bunny that makes me want to hop about frantically, and it’s not just that I can’t mount up without dropping the shapeshift, either.

At any rate … try to have fun gathering your eggs. If you aren’t having fun, skip it. There’s no title for Noblegarden and it’s not part of “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” either.

Edit: Sheesh — I completely misread my Achievement panel. Noblegarden does have a title — “the Noble” and is part of “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been”. I apologize for the misinformation.

Thanks for catching me, Kestrel.

From: Mania's Arcania

I finished up Outland and Northrend first because I find per-zone count of quests both convenient and satisfying, but now I am working on Kalimdor.

(As an aside, I’ve been posting some of my more pithy-but-certainly-not-interesting-enough-to-make-a-post-out-of thoughts about my travels on Twitter.)

Anyway, since I outlevel the content in Kalimdor by at least twenty levels, and usually more like fifty, I figured I’d do my questing in style.

Above and to the left is my favorite questing shirt right now: a Watcher’s Tunic from a level 68 group quest in Nagrand. On a female character, the color of the sleeve fabric changes to match your skin color, leaving you with a spiderweb or fishnet effect.

The sleeves flare out at the bottom, though … which looks a bit odd if the fabric is supposed to be skin. But a pair of gloves fixes that! I am still looking for a pair of pants and a pair of gloves that look really good with this tunic, but for the moment I’m just wearing it with my normal combat gear.

But that’s not my only questing outfit! I also have the purple pleasure that you see above and to the right: Mordant’s Travel Tunic and The Wanderer’s Cover (both courtesy of quests in Dustwallow Marsh).

I know that you can put together some really nice purple outfits if you try, but I just happened to pick these two pieces up while I was doing quests in Dustwallow. Coincidence, or does Blizzard employ a fashion consultant for quest rewards?

And finally, for those times when I want to look like Wonder Woman, we have a Gleaming Scale Breastplate to the left, also from Dustwallow Marsh.

My thanks to Letters From Birdfall, by the way, for a recent ‘Outfit of the Month’ post that got me thinking about my own outfits again.

From: Mania's Arcania

Okay, yeah, there’s PvP and that’s supposed to be a decent chunk of the game. And yes, sure, there’s lore and lore is important — I get that.

But Mania the character has no beef with most of the Alliance (except humans — she hates humans) and Mania the player could often use their help. And not being able to talk to them makes that a bit of a pain.

Sometimes we find ways around that, though, and I admit that it is very satisfying when we do.

For example, yesterday I was trying to finish up the quests in Icecrown. I was on the chain that leads up to the three Riders quests (Blood, Frost, and the Unholy) … although I really wasn’t looking forward to getting there because I’ve seen too many people begging for help in General chat and not getting any.

As I did the run-up quests, I noticed a night elf hunter (with a black armored boar) doing the same quests right beside me. In fact a couple of times we were headed for the same doodad-to-be-gathered-or-used at the same time, and one or the other of us would back off politely.

We finished the lead-in quests at about the same time and I noticed her flapping off towards the Rider of Frost, so I followed. I hung back until she attacked the Rider, then I joined in. It was pretty close thing for her, but we took him down. After she’d gotten her health and mana back, she stepped behind me and pointed. My turn!

After my kill, I pointed towards the next Rider and /questioned her. She nodded, and off we went. We killed all three Riders together, twice each since we couldn’t group up properly. And except for a small problem when we aggro’d one of the horses, everything went quite smoothly.

So when that was done, we headed for the next stage of the quest line: Orbaz Bloodbane. Unfortunately, Orbaz killed her boar in about two seconds flat, smashed her a second later, and took me and my slime down a heartbeat after that. I headed right back for my corpse, but she never came back. I was saddened … if nothing else I wanted to apologize for not being good enough to keep her alive.

The story has a happy ending, though. Several hours later I had found a Horde death knight to help me with the fight against Overthane Balargarde, which I kept losing at the very last minute. The fight was cake with a death knight in tow. (DKs are good for that, if nothing else!)

Just as we were about to leave, a gryphon set down next to us. It was my night elf! I explained to the death knight how I happened to know her, and he agreed that we should stay to help. Three minutes, one fight, and two long dialogs later, we all set off in our own directions, waving happily at each other and — in my case at least — smiling broadly.

From: Mania's Arcania

Both came in little black drawstring bags, about 11″x13″, with “World of Warcraft” and the name of the critter on one side, and a faction symbol on the other. The Gryphon Hatchling bag has a big Alliance lion in yellow and the Wind Rider Cub bag has a big Horde symbol in red. I rather wish the bags didn’t have the names on them: a reusable drawstring bag with the Alliance or Horde symbol would be cool, but a bag that says “Wind Rider Cub” is just a little too geeky for me.

I am somewhat surprised by the size of these kids. I was picturing something about 5″-6″ tall (akin to the stuffed snail I have, or the little rhino) but these are a full 9″ tall and about that wide across the bottom. Both seem to be fairly high quality — and both are absolutely adorable, of course.

The Wind Rider Cub narrowly wins the cute content with his fuzzy mane and darling little fabric wings. The gryphon’s head is a bit big and his wings, oddly, are attached to his head — but he does have a charming little fuzzy tuft at the end of his tail. (Can you tell I’m running out of synonyms for ‘cute’?)

Each also comes with a code for an in-game mini-pet, of course — which is how I justified spending $24.99 on each of them. (I would have bought the in-game pets for $10 each, so the plush animals themselves are effectively only $14.99 … right?) The Blizzard store has Flash video of both in-game models in flight. (Click the pictures or the links above to see ‘em.)

Something I found very interesting: Rather than just including the code on the receipt or something, each plush mount comes with a card in a protective plastic sleeve. The card has an illustration of the mini-pet over a ‘tooltip’ — i.e. “Wind Rider Cub” (in blue), “Binds when picked up.” and “Use: Right click to summon a wind rider cub.” Under this is a scratch-off strip with the code itself.

So I expect it will be approximately 3 nanoseconds before we see unscratched cards on eBay, minus the toys. Or vice versa, I suppose. If you really want only the real-life or only the in-game version of these critters, that might be one avenue for you.

I haven’t redeemed the codes yet — not because I’m going to sell them but because every time I start I find myself cuddling the Wind Rider Cub and thinking about puppies. But I suppose I’ll get to it some time today …

[edit] Warcraft Pets has added these kids, so be sure to update your collection when you get them! [/edit]

From: Mania's Arcania