Rhinos don’t have a family skill yet, I posted just after this last beta build, but Glassdragon contacted me today to let me know that I might be wrong. He noticed that the Shardhorn Rhinos of Sholazar Basin have a skill called Rhino Charge … briefly, at least.
Blizzard announced today that, much as they released Patch 2.0 for all players shortly before Burning Crusade was available for purchase and play, they will be launching what they call a content patch containing many of the game-wide changes from Wrath of the Lich King before Wrath of the Lich King is actually available.
Ghostcrawler was out in force last night answering many questions about pets and pet skills on the WotLK Beta Hunter forum.
First, the great news: Wasps are definitely non-exotic:
We didn’t want BM to have all the fun. Wasps for everyone!
I still haven’t gotten the new focus numbers for talents in beta build 8820 up, but at least I have wasps and rhinos posted! The WotLK New Pet page is now autogenerated, as are all the Wrath family, skin and pet pages, which should make everything easier to update. Not everything is quite in place yet, but it’s getting there.
I also updated a whole bunch of previously untameable beasts that can now be tamed. My favorite (today): Bjomolf, the brown saber worg. (Thanks go out to a hunter named Bartarus from the WotLK EU for that good news!)
This most recent WotLK beta build included a lot of updates to focus costs for pet abilities. I’ve updated Petopia with the focus changes for pet skills, but not for pet talents. (I’m still working at moving those over to a nice auto-generated script system that will let me update faster.)
Likewise, although family information has been updated and the new families added, new pets have not yet been added. There is a wasp page, for instance, with no wasps on it. So Petopia is in a weird halfway state between builds 8788 and 8820. But it’s almost 7 am here and I need to go to bed. The rest will wait until … later today, anyway. *grin*
This is a random collection of notes as I poke around the new beta build that went up tonight. Expect this to be very disordered.
At this point I have finished updating this post. What you see here is all you get! (Although I am now working on getting Petopia update with new info, and as always please let me know anything you run across.)
The beta realms are currently down while Blizzard gets them updated to beta build 8820. In the meantime, we have some early information on the contents of the patch via a patch note diff on a site called World of Warcraft - Mirrors, Patches, Files.
Keep in mind, however, that the patch notes are rarely completely up-to-date during beta. And since I haven’t been following the notes carefully, some of the may have already been true.
Ghostcrawler popped up on the WotLK Beta Hunter forum last night with some more comments about pet abilities. None of this is world-shaking, but it’s good to know that the work continues.
Rotseh, a hunter from EU-Proudmoore, and Solaia, proprietor of the fine German pet site Solaia’s Wildtierkunde, both wrote in some time ago to let me know that the stat modifiers for the Cunning tree were changed at some point, probably in the patch before last.
After a short absence (that merely made our hearts grow fonder), Blizzard poster Ghostcrawler has once again popped up on the WotLK Beta Hunter forum. This time she had some information to share about the pet abilities Charge and Growl.
