Mania’s Arcania

Patch 3.2 has finally made it to the live realms! Of course, the live realms aren’t up yet as I type this, but they will be soon enough I imagine.

In the meantime, read on for the hunter patch notes (or head to the official site for the entirety of the patch notes) and feel free to comment your brains out while I work on getting Petopia updated.

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Yesterday I received a fascinating e-mail from Hydrax, a hunter on Hellscream (EU). Hydrax has found a new pet — and a very odd one at that!

Check out the image on the right. See the weirdness?

I’ll let Hydrax tell the story:

While I was getting my reputation up with the Sha’tari Skyguard, I was doing the quest Adversarial Blood, the same quest for Gezzarak.

I summoned Darkscreecher Akkarai. Now he has an ability called Flock Call. This summons some owls called Akkarai Hatchlings that have the dark brown appearance. They looked as if they had a sort of shadowform on them.

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Ask and you shall receive! Zardoz, Armor Data Mining expert extraordinaire, has another wonderful report on how we hunters like our pets.

Like his last report on pet popularity, this one is based on the Armory data of almost 10,000 level 80 hunters. Unlike the last one, this report gives us full data on the occurrence of each pet appearance (aka skin) within each family.

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A while back, Blizzard asked for questions we might want to ask them about each class — what it is and where it is going. And they have been gradually (oh so gradually) posting Q&A sessions for each class addressing some of those questions. And now, finally, the hunter Q&A post is up and available for reading!

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It appears that in today’s maintenance, all the remaining tamed versions of the worgen changed to the normal ‘white worg’ wolf skin.

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I ran across a post a few days ago by a blogger called Zardoz, who writes a blog called Armory Data Mining. Zardoz was using the new hunter pet data on the WoW Armory to analyze the most popular hunter pets.

A day later, Zardoz posted a consolidated list of the most popular hunter pets for each of the pet families.

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In amongst all the worgen madness today, Blizzard pushed another Patch 3.2 build to the Public Test Realms (PTR). This new build has a few changes that may be interesting to hunters.

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[Update]

Zarhym has just posted this about Blizzard’s feelings on the worgen pet:

The worgen should not technically belong to any of the pet families and was therefore removed. This means the pet no longer has access to pet talents or abilities. Whether or not similar circumstances with hunter pets in the past have occurred isn’t really relevant. Given the nature of the creature that was tamed in this case, we feel it should not belong to any of the eligible pet families from which a hunter can choose his or her combat companion.

There are several other responses from Zarhym in this thread. The most important so far:

It may yet still be removed altogether. I don’t have a final decision on that to share with you.

[/Update]

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We have an initial response from Blizzard about the fate of the worgen pet. Zarhym posted the following just a bit ago:

It is not intended that Garwal can be tamed while in worgen form and will be addressed via a hotfix in the near future. When we have determined how to handle situations where hunters have already tamed Garwal we will let you know.

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[Update] Because this topic is getting so much attention, I’ve re-organized the post slightly to highlight what we know and hopefully answer some questions before they need to be asked.

The facts as we know them:

• When hunters tame the wolf/worgen Garwal, he normally reverts to wolf form. However, if you tame him at just the right time, he gets ‘stuck’ in worgen form and you can have a worgen pet.
• In order to see Garwal, you must be on the quest to kill him (called Alpha Worg). This quest is available to both Horde and Alliance but has a different chain of prerequistes — check Wowhead for details.
• If you have already completed the Alpha Worg quest, I’m afraid that you are out of luck. At this point we do not know any way for hunters who have completed the quest to tame Garwal. And GMs are unable to reset individually quests for characters.
• There is a guide below on how to hit that “just the right time”, but be aware that the specifics of percentages and times will depend on your level and how much damage you do, and you will probably have to make several trial runs to get everything to work out.
• The worgen pet shows as a wolf in the character selection screen and the stables, even when he is still safely in worgen form in the game.
• He will revert back to wolf form permanently if you enter an Arena with him. Entering an Arena with another pet while the worgen is in the stable is safe, however.
• So far, every other action we know about — battlegrounds, raids, instances, leveling, auto-leveling on tame, dying, resurrecting, stabling, logging out, dismissing, mounting, dueling — is safe for your worgen and will NOT cause him to revert to wolf form.
• At this point, Blizzard has not made any statement of their intentions about this pet. It’s likely that hunters are not intended to run around with a humanoid pet like a worgen, but whether Blizzard will make Garwal untameable, or revert all worgen pets to wolf form, or leave existing worgen alone, or even ban the lot of us — we just don’t know. Please remember that before you get too attached to your new worgen.

There is a ton of good info in the comments below, and our understanding of this situation is increasing as more hunters spend time with this pet. For that reason, you may want to start at the bottom of the comment thread and browse up it to get the latest news. There is also an RSS feed for the comments on this post available.

And now, back to the original post. [/Update]

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