Mania’s Arcania

Rumor has it that the Friends & Family alpha for Cataclysm, the next expansion to World of Warcraft, is about to begin.

A Friends & Family alpha is, as the name implies, a very early mostly private build of the game that is shared with friends and family of the development team only. For most MMO products, this is the first time a build will be available outside the company, and in fact for some companies this will be the first time that company employees who aren’t directly involved with the new product will see it.

In other words, you and I aren’t getting in. *grin*

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You can now find a fairly full-featured forum for the discussion of WoW hunter pets on Petopia! Just visit forums.wow-petopia.com.

My plans: I originally started the Arcania forums attached to this blog so that you guys would have somewhere to chat when I wasn’t posting. That worked out pretty well, except that I choose my forum software poorly^* and the location was a bit off the beaten path — hard to find for the average Petopia user who just wanted to know what was going on with pets. The new Petopia forums should fix both problems.

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Patch 3.3 is going live today. The big news for most players is probably Icecrown Citadel, which seems to have something to do with the Lich King. But there’s lots more of interest, from the long-awaited built-in quest mapper to a new fishing tournament.

Most exciting for high level Beast Mastery hunters is the new Spirit Beast Arcturis, who happens to look like a ghostly druid bear but is, in every way, a proper Spirit Beast. (That’s him to the right.)

We are also seeing what is perhaps the first impact of the upcoming Cataclysm on the creatures of Azeroth as diseased wolves invade Elwynn Forest and the Thistle Boars of Teldrassil shed their pretty orange fur for a new grey look.

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We know that the upcoming Cataclysm expansion is going to literally tear our virtual world apart. What we don’t know yet — and what many of us are worried about — is how the changes to the world will affect the existing wildlife, namely the beasts that we can tame.

But I thought it might be fun to speculate a bit. In this post I’ll make some guesses about what pets may be in peril in Kalimdor. Later I’ll take a poke at the Eastern Kingdoms as well.

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As I was showering today, I got thinking about the current problems with the hunter class in WoW. This is a perennial topic for any class, of course, even when there aren’t any major problems.

And as you know, I am not much of a power player, so my notion of problems is rather more limited in scope than many hunters, despite the frequent attempts by my loyal commenters here to enlighten me.

At any rate, I decided that I am personally pretty satisfied with hunters right now — as I usually am — with one exception. And that exception is the Spirit Beast family.

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Thanks to safrienaer, we now have a lot more information on the ‘spectral bear‘ — the potential new Spirit Beast that showed up in the Patch 3.3 data files a few builds back.

His name is Arcturius. He is, indeed, a Spirit Beast — complete with all the Spirit Beast skill, including Prowl. Like other Spirit Beasts, he is a non-aggressive rare elite. Unlike them, he’s only level 74.

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Ranshiin, in a post on the Arcania forums, brought an interesting thread on the MMO Champion forums to our attention: the wolves in Northshire Valley — the little walled human starter area in Elwynn Forest — are becoming diseased!

As you can see from this shot of Aisna with her new diseased wolf, these guys do indeed use the diseased wolf skin — which was previously unavailable before level 47, in Felwood.

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Blizzard pushed a new build (10676) to the 3.3 PTR today and updated the patch notes to match.

There’s nothing particularly interesting to hunters in the patch notes, but MMO Champion did notice a new skin in the data: the Spectral Bear.

Is this the newest Spirit Beast? Stay tuned … and let me know if you see him on the PTR!

I am fascinated by Cataclysm, the upcoming WoW expansion, because it represents a very different sort of expansion. Most MMO expansions change the world by adding new content to the edges of the world. Sure, some of that new content may be for low levels (especially new races), some may be meant to fill in holes in the middle levels, but the majority of it is usually intended for the upper levels. That division helps separate the old and new content in very obvious ways.

But Cataclysm will be restructuring the oldest part of WoW enormously. That clean division of old and new content … not so clean anymore.  Now I’m an old hand at MMOs, but I’m not entirely sure what to expect from this one. And that goes double for how and where new pet families may be introduced.

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