New pet families. Fen Striders. Basilisks. Goats. Quilen. Plus Cranes and Porcupines, which were probable shoe-ins for new pet families.

But in case you missed the important part, let me repeat:

Basilisks. Fen Striders. Goats.

Goats!

All of them new hunter pet families, all with their own family abilities. Quilen and fen striders (called Water Striders) are exotic families with two family abilities each. Porcupines and Cranes have a cute bonus ability

The following ability details comes from MMO Champion:

Quilen
Eternal Guardian [Exotic Ability]: Returns the spirit to the body, restoring a dead target to life with 20% health and 20% mana. 20 yd range, 2 sec cast, 10 min cooldown.
Fearless Roar: The quilen lets out a fearless roar, increasing the critical strike chance of all party and raid members by 5%. Instant, 45 sec cooldown.

Porcupine
Paralyzing Quill: Fires paralyzing quills around the porcupine, incapacitating all enemies for 2 sec. 0.5 sec cast, 60 sec cooldown.
Rest [Bonus Ability]: You command your pet Porcupine to take a rest. Instant.

Goat
Trample: Your goat tramples the enemy, kicking up an obscuring cloud of dust, causing all enemies within 10 yards to have their melee and ranged attack speed reduced by 20% for 30 sec. Melee range, Instant, 25 sec cooldown.

Water Strider
Still Water [Exotic Ability]: Infuses all party and raid members within vision with still water, increasing their spell power by 10% and their critical strike chance by 5% for 60 min. Instant.
Surface Trot: Allows the Hunter and the Water Strider to walk across water for 10 min. Any damage will cancel the effect. Unlimited range, Instant.

Crane
Lullaby: Puts the target to sleep for 4 sec. 20 yd range, Instant, 60 sec cooldown.
Trick [Bonus Ability]: You command your Crane to do a trick. Instant.

Basilisk
Petrifying Gaze: Turns the target into stone for 3 sec, causing them to be invulnerable. 20 yd range, Instant, 60 sec cooldown.

But my favorite stupidly huge pet in the MoP beta, bar none, is Terokkarantula.

With the help of Wassa in the Petopia Community MoP forum, allow me to demonstrate:

Just imagine the amazingly terrible horror movie you could build around that screenshot!

And in the same thread, Spiritbinder shared this adorable comic:

I’m embarrassed to say it took me a good thirty seconds to spot the hunter!

A couple of caveats:

1. This will almost certainly change!
2. Right now, Ferocity pets are showing up as ‘Arcane’ – no idea why.
3. I only checked about half the pet families, but even within those some – Dogs, for example – are missing many of these abilities.
4. This will almost certainly change!

Since the system is currently a little hard to ascertain in beta, I’ll try and summarize the basics. Hopefully we’ll have this working in a build or two.

• Every pet has 3 specs: Ferocity, Tenacity and Cunning. These work much like class specs, with a similar UI.
• Pets come with the spec you’d expect (Ferocity for kitties) but you can change it. If you want a tanking cat or a DPS crab, you can. If you have a favorite pet, you can just always use that one and swap the spec around.
• I hope to see A LOT of DPS crabs.
• Each spec comes with 2-3 active and 2-3 passive abilities. We took a careful look at what pet talents most hunters were taking and tried to take the best of those. Things like Roar of Sacrifice, Last Stand and Heart of the Phoenix made the cut.
• We didn’t think we were getting a ton of gameplay out of the pet talents on live — players interacted with them even less than the class talents — and we didn’t think pets needed the full tiered system like the Mists talent implementation, so we decided the best way to offer pet customization is to let hunters choose their pet mostly because of how it looks (and its one special ability) and not from its role.

Although I don’t know if this information is going to change or not, I can tell you what the current spec talents seem to be for pets in beta. Err … well, it will take me a moment to get that info together. Next post!

In the meantime, can I just say that I have waited forever for my bloody DPS crab!

I’m usually use the word ‘pet’ to mean ‘hunter pet’. Other communities (hi, Breanni!) usually use ‘pet’ to mean ‘companion pet’. When we overlap, we need to be clear about which we mean … but it usually works out okay.

Now the word ‘pet’ is all over the place because of pet battles – and it’s driving me crazy. MMO Champion had a headline today about “WoWDB Pet Pages“ that included two big, exciting images that read “Pet List” and “Pet Abilities”.

I got excited! Of course I got excited! Often the first hint we have of a new hunter pet family comes from a data-mined family skill!

But no … sadly the news was all about companion pets. Sadly for me, anyway – I suspect Breanni was happy as a pet clam. *sigh*

So yes, I am looking forward to playing with the Companion Pet Battle system. But I wish Blizzard had chosen to make the name a little more clear. My nerves can’t take much more misplaced excitement.

There are some pools in the new Pandarian area with a very Ranma effect: when you enter the water you become something else. A frog, a skunk, or for this image, a crane.

(Wheatgrass is the turtle. He’s very lucky.)

Good timing, guys.

Unfortunately I had promised Eric that I’d go to Wekiva Springs with him to meet a guy he works with (and the man’s family, all of them on vacation) – mostly to prove that he does indeed have a wife and he didn’t make me up. So it wasn’t until after we got back that I was able to log in.

And … I immediately became completely confused. My skill bar was mostly empty, skills and talents gone. Worse, half my active pets were gone. (Don’t panic – they showed up again as soon as I hit the stable master.) Portals are bugged so I had to fly back to Orgrimmar from Dalaran. And with so many new people in beta today, all of them just as confused as I was, my PC is having fits keeping up with the graphics.

I love beta!

At this point I’ve done very little except wander around Orgrimmar and Stormwind in a haze, ducking thirty-story tall devilsaurs and house-sized corehounds. I did manage to briefly make it to one of the new Pandaria zones and get killed by a peaceful green crane when I accidentally attacked it without a weapon or pet.

Hey – those cranes hurt!

There’s lots of information available from people who have been in beta for a week already. I should have gotten that info up on the website already but I’ve been sickish. And of course tonight I’m going to indulge myself and wander around looking at stuff.

The most important thing to know about new pets right now is that most of the beasts are currently not tameable. That’s not because we’re not getting new pets, but because Blizzard tends to do the pass where they flag things as tameable after they stick stuff on the landscape.

So I am hoping that sometime soon I can go back and tame that damn green crane who pecked me to death.

In the meantime I may post some random screenshots here – and I’ll try to get some basic beta info up on the sites as soon as possible.

(Aside: Hey, today is my sister’s birthday! I should call her.)

I suppose this means I have to start paying attention to World of Warcraft news again. I admit it, I have been sadly lax in keeping up with … well, anything. This is a combination of real life (Project Gorgon, money issues, my first ever MRI, the incredibly sad state of politics in the US) and a period of WoW ennui. Sometimes you need a break. Especially after almost eight years.

Anyway! I went looking for leaked MoP information today and found very little. This isn’t terribly surprising since as far as I can tell MoP is still in internal alpha, and internal alpha players are unlikely to leak much.

But apparently GamesRadar accidentally leaked four zone videos that weren’t intended to be released until tomorrow: Valley of the Four Winds, Wandering Isle, Jade Forest, and Scarlet Monastery & Scholomance Heroics. You can find these videos all over YouTube if you’re interested. Or you can wait ten hours until they are official.

Of course the important thing is not what the zones look like, however pretty they might be, but what potential hunter pets they contain! I saw: A white moth. Some sort of flappy bird – looked like an owl maybe.  A shreth. (I wish.) A baboon, although it appeared to be wearing clothing. Pretty tallstrider-like cranes. Actually, the crane in the Jade Forest video has red hearts coming from it – as if it were in the process of being tamed.

Blizzard also started adding MoP shots (and doesn’t that sound dirty?) to their Screenshot of the Day section – under Cataclysm, for some reason. Some gorgeous shots in there, but I didn’t see anything pet-like.

In the videos from last year’s BlizzCon we also saw some foxes and cats, including the gorgeous jade gem panther. The crane image above is from the BlizzCon Art Panel, via MMO Champion by way of the Petopia Community.

My WoW ennui isn’t entirely gone … but if there is one thing that can re-energize me, I suspect it might be that crane …