Mania’s Arcania

RFC stands for Request For Comments, and that’s exactly what this post is. I want to get your comments on hunter pets for raiding.

As many of you know, I am a very particular — and in some ways peculiar — sort of player. I am a strict soloer: I don’t group except under extraordinary circumstances, and I don’t raid or PvP. But while I am personally happy with my playstyle, it does unfortunately cut me off from a wide swath of hunter experience. So when a reader writes in to ask me for suggestions about raiding pets, I’m at a loss. I need your help.

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In-between packing for my cross-country move and searching for my husband’s escaped hamster, I spent some time this weekend continuing my research on loyalty. I now feel that I have a basic handle on what it takes for a hunter pet to gain a level of loyalty, although a good bit of verification remains to be done.

Summary:

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Since I now have some data on Scorpid Poison, I decided to continue gathering data on the spell-like pet abilities. Last night I spent some time investigating Fire Breath 2 

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Since I was testing how Scorpid Poison scales with a hunter’s Ranged Attack Power recently, I decided to extend those tests and see what other pet skills scale with RAP. My results were … mixed.

Pet skills that appear to scale with the hunter’s RAP include:

• Fire Breath
• Lightning Breath
• Scorpid Poison

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A couple days ago I issued a challenge to serious pet tamers on the Alliance side to infiltrate Shadowmoon Village and tame Detrafila, the stable master’s pet wolf. I certainly wasn’t able to do it — the Horde NPCs kept walloping me. But two brave souls did, and sent me the screenshots to prove it!

First was Dezar, a Night Elf hunter from the Black Dragonflight realm. Dezar didn’t give much commentary — he went in, got the job done, sent me pics. I get the feeling that this is all in a day’s work for this intrepid hunter. That’s him, to the right. He also sent shots of the tame in progress (with an elite guard beating on his head) and the tame just completed (as Detrafila turns on his old master).

I also received a note from Gettokiwi of the Stormreaver realm this morning that he too had tamed Detrafila. He included some useful advice along with his screenshots:

So it seems that taming Detrafila is possible, altho sadly after tame, he doesn’t hold any “special” property such as a bark or special dismiss/call back feature. To solo tame this beast, you must fly to the back of the Stables area. Then simply shoot and kite the Stable master away from the base. This will pull the pet, stable master, and one other guard. if you do not shoot the guard, he will De-aggo after you kite the other two away. Kill the stable master and take your prize!

You can see the shots of Gettokiwi’s tame in progress and the tame completed tame completed.

I just want to say thank you to both of these fine hunters for accepting and defeating my challenge — and also for helping me out by verifying that this little wolf can be tamed. Thank you!

While running around Shadowmoon Village today I noticed a big black Snarler-like wolf named Detrafila over by the Stable Master. Detrafila is level 60 and friendly to the Horde. Beast Lore says he can be tamed (although he has no skills), but since he displays as Gedrah’s Pet I assumed he probably couldn’t. But I am slowly adding untameable beasts to Petopia, so I logged my level 70 pre-made Alliance hunter into the PTR to check.

And lo and behold, I was able to start a tame! So this looks like another case of creature with a <Pet> title who isn’t truly the summoned pet of an NPC. Except … well, I died before the tame completed. Detrafila is surrounded by level 70 Horde NPCs, after all, and attacking them tends to bring the players to their rescue. And I’m just no good at that sort of thing.

So my challenge to you is this: If you tame Detrafila and send me a screenshot either confirming that he can be tamed, or showing the error message you get when it fails, I will be exceedingly thankful for your help. If you are the first person to send me a screenshot, I will make a big deal about it and post your screenshot on this blog with many accolades. *grin*

Edit: Two brave and intrepid hunters have completed this challenge! Check out the pics!

When I was checking out my lists of untameable pets recently, I ran across a mention of the Gore-Scythe Ravager. These guys apparently spawn right where the Rip-Blade Ravagers do in Blade’s Edge — which made it very odd that I had never seen one. So I wandered down there to take another look and see if I had missed something.

At first I found nothing out of the ordinary — Rip-Blade Ravagers everywhere and not a Gore-Scythe to be seen. But then, just as I was turning to leave, a horde of Gore-Scythe’s spawned and started attacking Toshley Station!

I quickly verified that these ravagers cannot be tamed (probably because they are heavily scripted to attack the Station). But that leaves me with the question — why do they spawn? Is it part of some Alliance quest? A timed event? Does anyone know what the lore is here?

It’s time for another installment of “What pet families will Mania pair with what races as she laboriously levels up an example of each just because she said she would and she doesn’t have anything better to do?” Today we’ll be talking about Night Elves.

Now I have mixed feelings about night elves in general — until the Draenei, they were my favorite hunter race on the Alliance side (although admittedly that’s not hard since there were just the two) and I am reasonably fond of Teldrassil as a starting area. On the other hand, I am not at all fond of General chat in Teldrassil and I quickly tire of the stereotype of the Night Elf hunter.

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I finished up my notes on what pets I plan to pair with the Horde races as I slowly and distractedly level a hunter with each pet family, so now it’s time to start on the Alliance races! I was holding off until I learned more about the next expansion, worried that I might have to rework everything to accomodate new races or new low-level pet families, but at this point that doesn’t look like it will be an issue. So off we go! Today we’ll discuss dwarves.

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As you may remember, I’ve been trying to piece together the underpinnings of pet loyalty in my free time. Today I spent many hours logged in (although I wouldn’t exactly call it playing), taming new pets and waiting for them to reach loyalty level 2 (Unruly), stopwatch and notepad in hand. The data I gathered indicates some interesting possibilities, although I’m not quite ready to call it definitive.

The most useful thing I discovered: It looks like that, in order to get a newly tamed pet from Rebellious (loyalty 1) to Unruly (loyalty 2), the pet needs to earn experience equal to 5% of the experience you need for your next level.

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