Pet Reflections, 12 December 08

As you can tell from my posts and tags, I've been through a lot of pets with Tivara. Along the way I've learned some things about my own preferences, and confirmed some things I already knew.

Size and Position. I get easily annoyed when I have to turn my viewpoint or otherwise maneuver to get around a pet, to loot or reach a mailbox or what have you. I've long known that wide-wingspan flying pets just didn't work happily for me. I find that very large creatures like devilsaurs just really don't cut it either. I want my pets lower than me, and not very huge in any dimension.

Damage Dealing. Tivara is Archon's best-geared and most experienced-at-80 hunter. So weird to say that. But anyway, since I'm there, I'm trying to make the most of it, paying much more attention than usual to nuances of Tivara's spec and gear, and also thinking more about just what her pets bring to an outing. As nearly as I can make out, the top dps honors go to devilsaurs and cats right now, and since devilsaurs end up annoying me, Invictus is there to help Tivara bring down as much pain as possible. When he's up to 80, Ørlög will probably get some vacation time with Invictus as my primary all-around utility pet.

(The upcoming changes to hunter abilities and spells, including the large reduction in Volley damage, will undoubtedly affect how I go about endgame farming for leather, meat, and such. Will Sagarmatha at 80 feel like a big farming gain over single-target pets like Invictus? I don't know, and there's no point in guessing. I'll find out when the patch actually arrives.)

Tempering the Exotic. I find, somewhat to my surprise, that overly exotic creatures seem not to work as well for me in the long run. The pets I'm happiest watching in action are the ones that are exotic versions of real creatures, pretty much. No cat actually looks like Invictus, no gorilla like Sagarmatha, but they could, kinda sorta. There's something about the bond to reality that makes the fantasy work better for me.

Oh, and one other note:

Make Mine Bows. Guns often look neat and have good bonuses in WoW, but the firing noise just plain bugs me in short order. So does the silence that comes if I turn off local noises. So I'm happy to once again have a really good bow for Tivara.

This may sound grumpy, but the end result isn't. I'm tooling around with weaponry and pets that perform well and that I find fun to watch, reliably. So it adds up to cool-for-me play.

Loque'hanak? Yes We Can

Loque'hanak the Spirit Beast is not the rarest tamable beast in the game at the moment, but she is unique in her own way. She's the only member of the spirit beast family in play right now, tamable or otherwise. She's...well, you can see her looks, and she's got the family ability to cast Spirit Strikes. These hit for arcane damage right away, and then the same amount again 10 seconds later. (This is going to take some care, if I take her instancing, to avoid messing up crowd control.)

Special thanks to Sean Riley of Blogatelle for suggesting the name Ørlög, meaning "primal law", and the accompanying quote "To understand Ørlög is to understand the threads of wyrd." That's good for a spirit beast, I'm thinking.

Pet Notes, Level 70-72

Tivara hit 72 last night, thanks to helping out the swell undead guys at New Agamand. (Some of my characters would be horrified by it all. It's fortunate for my desire to explore that Tivara's personality includes plenty of room for finding the plague project fascinating.) Along the way I've been playing around with a variety of pets.

• Gorilla: Sagarmatha. No question about it, gorillas remain my pets of choice. The tanky pet is most comfortable and enjoyable for me in more circumstances than any other option.

• Wolf: Scourgebane. Almost as dear to my heart as Sagarmatha, Scourgebane is my instance pet of choice (everyone who does damage likes Furious Howl, pretty much), and I bring her out for questing when I feel like doing some single-target attacking and less volleying.

• Devilsaur: Gorynych. I'm genuinely uncertain about ol' Stompy. He's fun, and though he's taller than a rhino (see below), he doesn't have the bulk or thick fur, so he's easier to see around. But I don't feel any real urge to use him outside instancing. I suspect I should probably keep him leveled up and see how he does in higher-level instances and raids. I can afford the stable slot, at least for now.

• Worm: Kurgan. Not bad so far, but I haven't given it a really hard workout yet. Hoping to get the chance to do that soon.

• Rhino: Byran, retired. I gave it a shot, but it just wasn't the thing for me. They're big and massive enough to make the same kind of visibility and access problems for me that large-winged flying pets do, and while the knockback effect is hilarious to watch, it's much harder to control and maneuver with than gorillas' thunderstomp. I retired her, with thanks.

• Bird of Prey: Shravana, auditioning. I wasn't really planning to try out a new bird of prey, but then I saw someone with the fjord hawk matriarch in Coldarra, and Nyo's player asked me if I'd thought about getting one, and off we went! Not bad at all, so far. I'm not sure she actually does anything Scourgebane doesn't, but I'm willing to keep on experimenting. She has relatively short, thick wings, which means she interferes less than I'd have expected with my visibility.

Come level 74 for Tivara and I'll think about what to do dump to get a Blighthound to play with.

Doggy! (New Pet Time)

I owe thanks for this one to Mania, the keeper of the insanely wonderful Petopia, for blogging about it in the first place and to guildmate Nyo for reminding me of it.

In Hellfire Ramparts, there are patrols consisting of an orc beastmaster and two wolves. These are neat wolves, too, outfitted with saddles and gear. Someone noticed and reported to Mania that they became tamable in the beta test servers. Inquiries led to the revelation that they would become tamable on the live servers, too. And in patch 3.0.3, they did. I like wolves very much for single-target damage dealing, particularly when raiding. Nyo suggested that we go try taming one. The results of that trying:

This is Scourgebane, and he'll be accompanying Tivara into Northrend. I think that my first wolf, Timmorn, is going to get a retirement release.

Heroic Wolf Runners

Thanks to various real-life complications, it's been most of a year since I've done a heroic instance with any of my characters, and I've been missing that. Tonight I got to fix that, with a run to heroic Botanica:

I have always loved draenei architecture since I first saw it, and still do.

I did quite well, I think! I had some problems with trapping - the usual "forgot to turn off auto-shoot" problem - but there were some real-life distractions on that. When it comes to damage, the numbers pleased me a lot. Tivara dished out about 550 dps overall, and Timmorn did about 245. And, of course, his Furious Howl enhanced the other damage dealers' performance. He was neck-and-neck in Recount's damage tracking with Samadhi's felguard, so I feel happy about that.

Even better, several of my guildmates feel a real urge to sweep up as many heroic-instance achievements as is feasible in the next couple weeks, so I hope to get in on that. Even when the loot isn't of particular interest, as was the case tonight, the rep and money are very nice.

Huntard Corner: Leveling a pet from 65 to 70

It's great watching a newly tamed pet jump from level 1 or 30 or 45 to 65 all in a flash. But then you've still got five levels to go. Of all the places I've tried leveling a newly tamed pet so far, I am happiest with the Death's Door region of southeastern Blade's Edge Mountains.

It's a very compact place, it's easy to get to even with a very slow flying mount for both Horde (from Mok'nathal Village) and Alliance (from Toshley Station), and it's loaded up with mobs of level 68-69 - enough to generate good quick experience, not high or tough enough to be a pain to deal with - and with plenty of places to pause to rest, recuperate, go afk to read blogs for a few, or whatever. It's also a nice source of some Cenarion Expedition reputation along the way, thanks to a quest chain that starts with a damaged gas mask dropped by any of those fel corruptors who roam the area north of Toshley Station.

By the numbers, there's a good chance your level 70 hunter is Aldor. Something like two-thirds of level 70s who have an Aldor or Scryer reputation went with the Aldor. If so, then this is a good place for you: it's loaded with Marks of Sargaras. I've been raking them in at 30 or so per hour, on average, and sometimes better than that. But even if your hunter is Scryer or unaligned, the marks are worth gathering. They're in much shorter supply than Sunfury Signets, which means they auction at better prices. It's money on the hoof.

A couple of hours this morning, including idle time for blog reading, IM chatting, and like that, got me the 80 marks I needed to get Tivara to revered with the Aldor, and it got Timmorn (seen above gnawing on a Death's Might demon) from 66 to 68. Good stuff!

So, Yeah, Ferocity Is Also Cool

Today my guildmate Marendyn and I provided some fine instancing cheesing for our friend's speed-leveled warrior Ugorok. As previously noted, speed-leveling tends to leave a character way short of proper gear. This generated some money and loot with which to fix that, along with letting Mar and Tivara get the Stratholme achievement.

And, of course, it's Hallow's End. What goes with Hallow's End? Pumpkin heads and glowing eyes, of course! Here's Tivara drinking up just before we go in through Stratholme's back door.

I'm tickled by this shot, for suggesting a growl-off between Gorynych and Marendyn that didn't actually take place:

I must say: while I love the tenacity pet for what it can do for me when I'm out and roaming around, it's awfully nice to leave the tanking to an expert and just make with the pew-pew for a while. Gorynych is not an optimal raid pet - I'm leaning toward a wolf for the group attack power buff for when I do more raiding - but he does dish out a lot of damage. It makes he happy to be an effective part of a team with people whose company I enjoy.

And, y'know. Dinosaur. Doesn't get better than fighting with dinosaurs.

Ray, I Feel So Funky

Yes, while waiting for the patch to install, I get even more obscure than usual in my quotes and allusions. No, there isn't really anything you can do about it.

So anyway, in the two days immediately following Tivara reaching 70, I got to take her on two raids, one to Magtheridon's Lair and one to the top part of Karazhan (starting with the Shade of Aran). It certainly helped to have prior experience with those places, so that what I needed to learn was just what ranged dps characters do in the various fights.

First of all, I'm really looking forward to seeing how Distracting Shot works once the patch is done. It is hard (at least it was hard for me) to get enough threat generation going to actually pull my assigned trapping target to me rather than having it sucked up in the seething vortex of aggro that always forms around a well-geared tank. I've been practicing my trapping, and I'd say that I'm now fairly reliable at it. I'm hoping to drop the "fairly" part at it in the next week or two, and maybe be at what I'd consider genuinely good by the time Lich King comes out.

(In my personal hierarchy of performance, there's the point at which you can be counted upon to do your task at a useful level, and then there's the point at which you do it well enough that it's worth others' going out of their way to give you more chances to do it, because it really helps out more than the norm.)

Wow, raiding sure is easier and less stressful when you're not a healer or a tank. Responsibility? We've heard of it, but we have no truck with such nonsense. A little trapping, sure, but mostly it's just me and my pet blasting away except when we need to hold fire for a moment.

And what do we get for that heroic control? We get dead bosses, that's what we get. Here's Tivara, Alcyone, and guildmates in the aftermath of downing the Shade of Aran in Karazhan.

I want to be careful not to extrapolate too much from a limited set of data, generated in the euphoria of getting to try out hunter raiding. But if even just most of this level of satisfaction carries over into the longer term, I'm going to enjoy raiding a lot more in 2009 than I did in much of 2008. Repeatedly running into a wall and finding "I can't do this anymore" is tiring and disappointing. Even if I do find limits I'm not thinking of right now, I'm hoping to go farther this time, and to make a softer landing when and if I do have to say that I've gone as far as I can, since I know so much more about what constitutes an early warning sign of raiding trouble in particular for me now. But I really do hope to be in there plinking and trapping away as far as Archon and friends can go.

Oh, yeah, knowing that I've got some readers who aren't up on all the details of WoW: If I'm so happy with my gorilla (and I am), why aren't I bringing him raiding? That's simple enough. In raids, there are people who specialize in getting monsters' attention and holding it, while damage dealers (like Tivara) beat the monsters down. This works best when amateurs aren't competing for prizes in the "most appealing to monsters" category. Gorillas' Thunderstomp would compete with the real tanking characters for aggro (the monsters' attention), but Sagarmatha doesn't have nearly the capacity to absorb damage or do other useful things that, say, Marendyn and Grimfell (in the picture above) do. Alcyone's single-target damage dealing works great, however - if I play my part well, neither Tivara nor Alcyone draw aggro away from the tanks, but do help with the beatdown. Essentially, Sagarmatha is a tank for times I don't have a tank. But when I do have a real tank, it's foolish to try to duplicate that role, and Alcyone puts more hurting on the designated target per unit of time.

Hunters have Swiss Army Stables, essentially - the right pet for the job at hand.