When I made a pass over dungeon pets the other day, to see what changes Patch 2.3 brought, I skipped Dustwallow Marsh because I thought that the pre-existing creatures there were unchanged. But I was wrong — there were some interesting changes to pets in the Marsh.
Petopia was updated today for the following Patch 2.3 changes:
I’m headed out again, on a plane to San Francisco in just a few hours. I had intended to spend this morning responding to a bunch of the great comments you guys have left in the past week, but to my utter disgust I woke up this morning with a migraine. (It took me a while to figure out I had an aura going on — I thought I was just bleary-eyed from waking up!) It’s beginning to fade a bit now, but I I’m still taking regular breaks to lay down and moan.
Anyway, I expect this trip will be just as busy as the last one so I went ahead and updated Petopia for the Patch 2.3 launch a few days early. Hopefully that won’t confuse too many people. *grin* I’ll be back Friday, and I’ll do what I can in between to keep up, so go ahead and leave comments or e-mail me if you see a mistake or learn something interesting.
Now back to trying to pack for this trip with all the lights off and my eyes mostly closed …
I added a minor new feature to Petopia this evening. Now if you search in the Pet Database for qualities that are shared across an entire family and only qualities that are shared across an entire family, the results you get will be in terms of families, not in terms of the individual pets.
For example, if you search for pets that eat bread you will no longer see the 144 individual creatures that eat bread. Instead, you will see a nice simple list of the 5 pet families that do. But if you change the query to include any pet-specific terms — for instance, if you search for pets between levels 55 and 60 that eat bread — then you will see the 11 pets that meet those requirements.
It’s difficult to explain without looking at the page, but in operation I think it’s pretty intuitive. Give it a whirl and tell me what you think!
In addition, the Special Pets pages for Rare Pets and Spawned Pets are both now static pages that I generate when I update the database instead of being live DB queries. Hopefully this will knock just a little bit of wear and tear off the DB. And thanks to the illimitable Ket Shi (as well as some other very helpful readers), I added a whole bunch of untameables to the site.
As I’ve mentioned a couple times now, my husband and I are moving cross-country, from San Diego, CA to Orlando, FL. The moving truck is here now and it’s time to load it up and start the long drive.
I will be out of touch for between one and two weeks, depending on how fast we get loaded, how fast we drive, and how fast we get settled in. During that time I may occasionally have access to e-mail and the web, but it is safe to say that I won’t be doing any major posting here or any changes to Petopia. I also can’t guarentee e-mail access, so it’s likely that if you e-mail me I won’t be able to respond until after the move is all over. But feel free to e-mail me still –just don’t expect a fast response. :>
I’m leaving comments open here because my regular readers are a font of information and answer questions well before I do anyway. *grin* Be nice to each other! Oh! Also … It seems likely that Patch 2.2 may launch before I am settled in, so I’ve updated Petopia with the info we know from Patch 2.2 (with appropriate notes about it being in Patch 2.2). But if you see someone confused about why Petopia says their raptor can learn Dash when it can’t, do me a favor and (politely!) let them know what’s going on. Thanks!
I’ve made some modifications to the way the Big List of Pet Skills works. It’s way too late tonight do a comprehensive rundown — for which I apologize, but between fighting with the Perl script for-freakin’-ever today and then pausing that to try (unsuccessfully) to hunt down my husband’s escaped hamster, I’m tired! — but give it a quick look and let me know what you think of it or if you see anything wonky or wrong. Although all the old info should still be available (in fact left the Big List itself mostly intact for backwards-compatibility), I do plan on taking some time this weekend to add notes to the individual skill pages — which skills scale and how, which cooldown timers overlap, etc. So I wouldn’t exactly call this finished yet, but I wanted to get what I had up for feedback.
I’m trying to squeeze in a lot of work on Petopia this week since next week and the week after will largely be taken up with a cross-country move. Last night I added a bunch more untameable creatures and extended the cross-through font to untameables in the database search results so that when you have untameables mixed in with tameables creatures in those results it’s easier to see which is which.
I also put the family damage, armor, and health modifiers back on the family and individual pet pages — no matter how much I think they aren’t useful anymore, too many people wanted to see them there. Petopia isn’t just for my private research, after all – it’s supposed to be useful for the readers!
I finally got the page for pets with special behaviors up on Petopia. You can find it, as you might expect, under the Special Pets menu. Let me know if I missed anything!
Petopia now has a page on Feeding Your Pet for younger hunters or hunters that were curious about the mechanics of Feed Pet. This is the first new guide on a new page called Fundamentals of Pet Care which I hope will eventually have a number of extensive guides. For right now, though, there’s just the feeding guide, the old skill training guide, and some handy links to other sites with more information.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
I had a few moments this evening and a desire to tweak, so I added a shortcut to the Petopia Pet Database that makes it easier to find pets with known skills. Now, when you are using the Pet Database, you can set Known Skills to “Any”. This will show you creatures that know any skill at all when they are tamed.
This is particularly useful when combined with a zone — for instance, you can find any pets in Darkshore that know a skill already so you can see what your young night elf hunter can learn there. Alternatively, if you just hit level 32, you might see what skills are available on level 32 pets.
