Syrelil, a Level 45 Blood Elf Hunter from Sentinels, let me know yesterday that there is something special about the tan wolf Spot who hangs out on Theramore Isle. Well, I should say that there is something else special about Spot — the first special thing, of course, is that he is friendly to the Alliance and can only be tamed by the Horde (and only with some risk, since he’s inside the Alliance stronghold at Theramore Isle). But the second special thing: Spot barks when you click on him, even after he is tamed.
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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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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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This is not a hunter-specific tip, but since I just spent several hours researching it, testing it, getting confused, and researching it some more, I thought I’d be nice and share what I learned.
As you get significantly higher level than a quest, the experience that you receive for completing that quest starts to drop off. So it makes sense to do quests as early as you can so you get the maximum rewards for them. Now it used to be that reputation worked the same way — once you got more than five or so levels above a quest, the reputation reward would start to drop off. Get high enough level and the reward was so pitiful it didn’t make any sense to do the quest (at least not for the reputation). But that’s not true anymore!
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After Blizzard deleted my Deviate Dreadfang in order to uncork my stable slots, I of course went back and grabbed another and started the slow process of getting it up to my level. Since my windserpent character is only 35 and I grabbed a level 21 Dreadfang, I only needed to get it 14 levels. And really, I figured it would be able to help me out well enough to fight pretty normally by level 28 or so. So – seven levels. No big deal!
Except that I get bored easily, I hate grinding, and I knew I’d be dying a lot — I am just not a very good player. *sigh* I decided that doing some research up front this time might help. I started by reading a very nice guide about leveling pets at 70 on the EU forums. (And thanks to WoWInsider for that link, by the way.) Of course, the locations weren’t useful to me at level 35, but the philosophy seemed solid. I decided to respec to something more akin to a Survival hunter in the hopes of, er, surviving. *grin* Then I had to learn what all of those skills do that I’ve always ignored (like Mongoose Bite and Scorpid Sting). Then finally I was ready to go out and kill! If I could just find somewhere nice …
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A few days ago I posted about how hunters can use ghost travel to get to hard-to-reach areas to tame new pets. Basically, you die on one continent, travel as a ghost to an area that you want to be in on the other continent, and resurrect there. It only works, I said, if you cross between continents (i.e. game servers) before you resurrect.
But the masterful reader Tiiaa was kind enough to point out that there is another, easier way to ghost travel.
You can even circumvent this - run to the graveyard where you want to resurrect, and then log out and back in, and then talk to the spirit healer. Doing this revived me at the graveyard I wanted to get to even on the same continent.
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Since I hid a pretty neat tip down in the Mangeclaw Misadventures post, I thought I’d repeat it here under it’s own title.
Ghost travel involves dying on one continent (for example, near Orgrimmar), then taking a boat or zeppelin to the other continent while you’re dead (say, the zeppelin to Undercity), then running slowly and tediously as a ghost to wherever it is you want to be (for example, Loch Modan), and resurrecting at a Spirit Healer there (say, outside Thelsamar). It only works if you die on one continent and resurrect on the other — if you die in Silverpine, run to Loch Modan and resurrect, you’ll be teleported back to the graveyard in Silverpine. But apparently when you zone between continents, the information about where you died is not preserved, so the server let’s you choose your resurrection spot.
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I haven’t been paying enough attention lately to hunter gossip, so I know I am really late to the party on this one. But I was intrigued to learn today about some of the interesting side effects of Scorpid Poison– and how you can use those side effects to your advantage.
Basically, it goes like this: Scorpid Poison (known as SP in this post, so I don’t keep misspelling it every sentence) is a pet ability that only scorpids can learn. It’s a damage-over-time (DoT) effect that can stack up to 5 times on a single target. Each time the applied spell ticks, it does damage for each poison in the stack – so if your target has SP stacked five times and a single SP would have done, say, 10 damage (a completely made up number, by the way) then the entire stack will do 50 damage this tick.
The interesting thing is that, even though you can think of the stack as being made up of individual applications of the poison, the entire stack actually acts as a single entity in most ways. For example, when a new posion is added to the stack the time left on the entire stack is reset.
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