Mania’s Arcania

I am spending today explicitly slacking off (which right now means flapping five characters around the world to hit every damned Candy Bucket in existence, with occasional interludes as a zombie). So while I slack, here’s some interesting links from around the WoW web that you should check out:

Ihlos at Big Red Rhino has introduced a new advice column called Ask a Rhino. This first question is about Roar of Sacrifice. I love the idea of a rhino-written advice column and I look forward to seeing more like this from Ihlos and Ohta.

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Final name: ibite

Among the influx of new and exotic pets, some hunters are focusing on the basics: a loyal wolf, a hulking bear … or in this case, a cunning giant spider!

Thtswatshesd, a 36 orc hunter in the Outland Outrunners guild on Mok’nathal writes:

Thtswatshesd, a 36 orc hunter, was fascinated by Bloodmyst and Azuremyst Isle bestiary. So he set out to get a Ravager.

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Remember Faeldray from Petoholics Anonymous? Remember Faeldray’s completely awesome community-driven pet naming tool, the Pet-o-licious Namerator? (How could you forget!)

Well, with nine new pet families on the scene (seven in Patch 3.0 and at least two more in WotLK proper) the Namerator is in need of more suggestions for the new families. Faeldray has posted a call to action on Petoholics Anonymous:

This is where you come in, my fellow Petoholics. I need your name ideas for all these new and wonderful pets that Blizzard has given us. I need at least 10 for each family before I can add them to the Namerator. So please do flood my inbox with your suggestions!

So what are you waiting for? Get on over there! To make a suggestion, just use the handy suggestion form on the Namerator page.

Our favorite Blizzard poster, Ghostcrawler, stopped by the WotLK Beta Hunter forum today to comment on the availability of Loque’nahak, the one and only Spirit Beast:

In case it’s not obvious, we added that creature and let it be tamable as a challenge for dedicated hunters. One of the things we hear from hunters often is that some of them liked the old-school gameplay of having to work really hard for a rare pet that would garner lots of attention. With so many new pets available, we didn’t think it would be a problem to have one that was relatively difficult to tame. He doesn’t provide a huge dps increase, so there shouldn’t be a need to tame him.

On the one hand, I can see what GC is getting at. On the other hand, I think he may be underestimating our definition of “need”. *grin* What do you guys think?

A couple of helpful hunters have e-mailed me in the past few days to let me know that there is something special about the Elder Ashenvale Bear — it’s exotic!

I swung by Ashenvale to take a peek for myself, and it’s true. Beast Lore says the bear is exotic and in order to tame one you must have the Beast Mastery talent.

Unfortunately, this also means that if you had previously tamed an Elder Ashenvale Bear you now have an exotic pet, like it or not! If you don’t have Beast Mastery you can stash your exotic bear in the stable, but if you aren’t level 60 yet you’ve got no way to get it out of the stable or to call it in order to abandon it.

I’m certain this is a bug: the Elder Ashenvale Bear still tames into ‘Bear’; it has no special skills; and its stats are the same as any other bear. Also, this problem popped up briefly on the PTR and beta realms. So now we just have to hope Blizzard can get it fixed quickly!

Final Name: Valwyn

In honor of Patch 3.0, today’s Name That Pet request features the prettiest of the new pets: a shimmering, royal blue moth!

With the new patch, I’ve learned that - finally - I can tame the one pet I’ve wanted since I first saw their majestic beauty in Bloodmyst Isle … the shimmering blue moth.

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We wondered what Ghostcrawler was talking about last week when he told us:

“You did get the Hellfire Citadel dogs.”

Well now we know!

Ceron (a.k.a. Gatling of Stormrage) sent us word this morning that as of build 9095, you can now tame the Shattered Hand Warhounds in Hellfire Ramparts.

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While I was hacking on Petopia this evening, Blizzard went and released a new build to the WotLK beta realms! (And also to the PTR realms, but if you were pro-active and deleted your PTR folder like I did, you won’t be able to log into this PTR test.)

I haven’t even had a chance to patch it yet, but according to WotLK Wiki there are a number of changes to pet skills in this build.

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A number of people have posted or e-mailed to let me know that Petopia is currently down. Initially, it looked like an unrelated network problem with our host. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that Petopia itself may be the problem — the unprecedented traffic we’ve been getting the past few days was causing problems for other sites hosted on the same network.

We are working now with our host to get back online as quickly as possible. However, we may need to disable some features temporarily. Thank you very much for your patience and understanding while we sort through this!

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Ghostcrawler had more to say on that buff to exotic pet damage we mentioned yesterday:

On the exotic pets issue, I have said before that we want to be very careful with the balance here. If the pets are immensely better, then the talent becomes a non-decision (which isn’t so bad) but the exotic pets also becomes a non-decision, which means that the tree that is supposed to be all about pets has fewer options to choose from.

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