I spent a big chunk of today getting myself set up to test taming ‘pet’ creatures on the PTR. I reactivated my husband’s account, installed the PTR on his laptop, copied a pre-made level 70 mage (that I have no idea how to play), read for an hour while both this character and my copied main waited in the PTR queue, ducked the hundreds of requests for teleports that came in as soon as I got on, and headed out across the world to try taming some of the controlled beasts that people have mentioned.
I had absolutely no luck.
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I got an interesting e-mail today from a reader who let me know that my standard response about how pets with “caster” stats are just all-around inferior is no longer correct. If you hover your mouse over the Intellect stat on the pet panel, he said, you will see that caster pets get extra Spell Critical Hit out of their higher Intellect. And indeed, this seems to be the case. Hovering over the Intellect of various creatures (with their actual Intellect shown in parens) gave me these results:
- Level 67 Raptor (32): Increases Spell Critical Hit by 0.00%
- Level 5 Dragonhawk (22): Increases Spell Critical Hit by 5.00%
- Level 70 Nether Ray (133): Increases Spell Critical Hit by 5.00%
The dragonhawk and the nether ray have caster stats; the raptor does not. But it doesn’t look look like more Intellect benefits the casters so much as their status as casters does — the actual Intellect score seems to be immaterial.
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I have a Grand Plan to level a character with each pet family to get a solid feel for how each family plays. I’ve already talked about the families that I plan to level with Taurens and Trolls & Orcs, and today we’re going to talk about my plans for Blood Elves.
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Thrallito, a hunter from the Uldum server, and his pet SpecialNeeds wrote in to me this morning to ask about creatures that are already pets of NPCs:
If a Grishna Raven is examined with Beast Lore, it is listed as tamable. The problem is that even if the Grishna Falconwing that keeps it as a pet is killed, the ownership persists, preventing the tame. … Are there other humanoid/animal pairs that can be broken up and tamed? How is it done? Could this be applied to the Grishna Raven? I’m hoping that the store of knowledge that exists amongst you and your readers will help to answer these questions.
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I’ve been trying to figure out the intricacies of hunter pet loyalty for many weeks now. It’s slow going, in part because building up and losing loyalty takes so bloody long. I haven’t gotten very far with it yet, but I have found out a couple of interesting and possibly useful bits of related information that I wanted to share.
First useful bit: A just-tamed pet that is never fed will stick around for 30 minutes before it runs away.
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Innate skills — skills that a pet already knows when it is tamed — are by and large active skills. This is just how it’s been since the beginning: some creatures innately know some active skills; hunters tame those creatures to learn those active skills; if you want a passive skill you go to the pet trainer.
Of course, this categorization isn’t completely accurate. Pet trainers also teach Growl, which is an active skill, and in the beginning that was all they taught since there weren’t any passive skills. (Remember when there were just four pet skills, period?) But regardless of accuracy, this is still how we hunters tend to think about skills: active skills are learned from the wild; passive skills from pet trainers.
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Today I thought I’d continue the thread I started a week or two ago with Taurens and talk about what pets I plan to level up with members of the Troll and Orc races. (As I mentioned in response to a comment on the overall summary of my plan, my main goal is to spread my characters out among the newbie areas so I don’t have to repeat too much content — and that’s why Trolls and Orcs get treated together here.)
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In a comment on the post about how my pets got stuck in the stable this weekend, Branan had a nice tangent about the pain of leveling a new low-level pet up to your level, and what he’s like to see Blizzard do about it.
Currently, the process of leveling one of these pets is so punishing and prohibitive that very, very few people would consider it. ( … ) I’d like to see Blizzard implement a feature that measures the new pet’s level against the hunter’s, and if the difference is greater than 10 levels (or five levels at 70), then the newly tamed pet is created with a ten (or five) level difference. This would not break the world by any stretch, and would allow veteran hunters to acquire and train new companions much more easily than is currently possible.
This is a topic that became important to me this past weekend, when I started leveling my Deviate Dreadfang from 21 to 35. (He’s at 28 right now, and I’ll post more about that later.) Even that relatively small level difference at a relatively low level has been tedious — largely because a pet that low can’t hold aggro against enemies that I need to kill to level him up, and so I have to change my entire method of fighting. And yes, good hunters are perfectly capable of adjusting their gameplay to the task at hand, and even find joy in working out optimal ways to do so. (Check out this guide on the EU forums about leveling a pet at 70.) But for a bad hunter like myself, who likes playing hunters because I can largely ignore my own gameplay while focusing on my pet, this is a daunting problem. Just to add insult to injury, once I do learn how to deal with this new style of play, I had better like it — because I am going to be doing it for many, many hours while my pet catches up to me.
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A couple days ago I posted some notes on which pet families I have assigned to Tauren characters in my grand plan to level with all 23 pet families. I intend to finish what I started there, with notes on the other six races. But Balerion asked politely in a comment if I could skip the long-winded notes and just list which races I intend to use with each family. (Okay — he was actually a lot more polite than that. I am inferring. *grin*) So here’s the short list of race to family:
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I’ve mentioned once or twice that I have a long-term plan to level a character with each pet family so that I have hands-on experience with how each family plays. I haven’t played all of those characters yet, but I have planned out races and first pets, and in some cases even professions, and I thought it might be fun to share my reasoning. Today I’ll share the plans I have for Tauren characters.
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