Well, ah huv tae admit.. ah’m fond o’ havin’ a wee critter or two aroon’ the hoose.  Especially mah wee dragon - it’s like a part o’ the family, ken?  Still, seems some types are goin’  a wee bit overboard - the headquarters here is overflowin’ wi’ a’ sorts o’ critters!

Things have been a bit quiet around here, I apologise.  Between a bad cold and some in-game activities (like running all over the world in search of pets) I’ve not had time to post.  Hopefully things should return to normal some time next week when my cold will hopefully subsided and I’ll have oh-so-much I want to talk about!

So - pets! I’m a bit mad about them - maybe not so much as some but I likes to hoard and napture any I can get my paws on.  Each of my characters has a signature pet or one which means something particular to them, or is special to them even if only by virtue of being ‘first’.  Mharai had her [Magical Crawdad Box],  Avarix has his [Scorched Stone], Jhai has her [Captured Flame] and Aurik has his [Sprite Darter Egg].

Overachieving

Any others who are pet mad will know of the new achievement in Wrath which requires you to collect 50 pets.  But what about those who like pets and maybe have a few stashed here or there and maybe want to quickly make up the difference, or those over-achieving completionists who must have every achievement available but have never really been into pets before?

I just thought I’d post some quick resources and tips for those who don’t already have vast collections, much as I did not before last week.

Two of the best places to get pet information are, undoubtedly, warcraftpets and the wowwiki page on small pets.  Both have comprehensive lists of the available pets and their relative rarity.

You best ’starter set’ will come from getting all faction starter pets - they require no rep, only the time to go and grab them from whichever hermit, crazy lady, random vendor or emo undead guy happens to ‘breed’ them.  A trip to your own or the neutral auction house means you may also be able to grab some cross-faction pets and if you have no luck with this then you might consider a post on your realm forum asking some people from the other faction to list them.

Most of the rest of the pets available, though, require rep, grinding, or quests.  Some simple ones would be the chicken quest in Westfall (available to horde with some alliance help), and going to The Deadmines for a green wing macaw.  Harder quests include the Lower Blackrock Spire Worg pup / Spiderling quests (soloable as a stealth class or those classes with some form of survivability - I did it as a resto shaman, aggroing only three groups and each time using an elemental to save my rear) and rep grinds such as Sha’tari Skyguard (which has very few dailies and only small increments from mob kills.  Getting a firefly, hyacinth macaw or any of the dragons will take some considerable grinding unless you’re lucky.

Reputation / Skills

Now is a good time to do some dual purpose grinding - Exalted with Sporeggar and Sha’tari Skyguard both give access to pets (plus tabards) and hunting whelps has such a wide level range that you can almost always be skilling up skinning.  Want that white kitten from Lil’ Timmy?  Get your fishing pole out and get some skill points whilst you wait for him to spawn!

Gaining fishing skill means you can have a shot, eventually, at catching Mr. Pinchy and you might as well do the Crocolisks in the City fishing daily if it pops up as that gives you yet another chance at a pet which you cannot get from any other source.

I’ve gained almost 200 skill points in skinning, 50-60 in fishing and gotten a faction exalted just whilst going for this achievement and I expect to get another faction soon - I’ve also seen bits of the world I’ve not seen for ages.

Cross Faction Sales

This is the time for many enterprising individuals to make a pretty penny by grabbing some pets and travelling to their local cross-faction Auction House.  Even better if you are able to get a hold of them and sell them at an even higher price on your faction auction houses to avid collecters!

Critter Collections

I know a lot of people recently have been posting their various hoards of ore or herbs and the like so here I offer my hoard: pets! I have two sets - pets for my druid and pets for my shaman - and this screenshot is now a few days old so I’ve added some engineering pets to it as well as a white kitten carrier.  This of course does not include the around 12 or so pets each character has in their bags / banks so both characters are well on their way to the achievement come patch day.  You don’t even want to see our guild bank after three of us decided to put some ’spares’ in for other guild members, hehehe.

Only a few days left until the patch, though, so you better be fast if you haven’t started your collection!  Wrath should make it a lot easier to meet the 50 pets needed, though, so if you don’t want to run all over the world doing silly quests and sillier grinds then you might want to hold off.  Happy hunting!

I logged on to the beta this morning just to pootle about and play with what my hunter could do and check out some of the new pets.  I found a few little things which  I wanted to share.  If you don’t want to hear about beta stuff, look away now (obligatory image spacer for feed readers)! *ahem*

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So, as usual, this post is coming terribly late /sigh

I had the wonderful fortune, last time I was pottering about on the beta realm, to bump into a fellow EU-ite blogger!  Just as I was wandering through the leatherworking trainer’s shop I ran past an oddly familiar female human priest.  Cue a double take when I realised it was none other than Sephrenia from Guild Mum.  Oddly enough I’d just commented on her site saying I’d like to see her around on the beta if she was figuring on doing anything fun!

We chatted for a little bit, but I had to go grab some things on another char and made my farewells.  Since Softi was on and also chatting back and forth I suggested we make a wee channel for the EU bloggers instead of struggling to play about with a million whispers (multi-tasking, whassat?).

So, for any EU bloggers who happen to be on the beta, if you want to chat we’ve started a chat channel: eubloggers (yes, we’re terribly imaginitave *ahem*).  It’s not often we’ll get the chance to hang out together on one realm so I’d love to see anyone who happens to be about!

I don’t often rant here - in fact, I shy away from it like some sort of plague.  I do this as I know my rants tend to be very different to my usual writing form and, often, get slowly angrier as they progress.   However, I ask your forgiveness in this matter as, in reality, it is only my wish to put my point across vehemently which makes my wording so extreme or my writing a little more emphatic than usual.

So, what is this issue that has me irked, annoyed and agitated?  Well, at the moment quite a few things concerning the beta and people scrambling to denounce specs and classes as OP / UP before they’ve even had a chance to mature or even be completed.  Most of these I will not defend overly as I also do not know what will happen and arguments where both sides are based on speculation are generally somewhat… pointless?

One particular argument is one which is mostly based around personal feelings and beliefs (of which I have plenty experience *ahem*) is that of ‘Big Green Blob Syndrome’, or, “omg all the classes are losing their uniqeness /crai”.

My view on this? Mostly complete and utter nonsense.  Gaining a similar buff to a class or an ability which overlaps a now available buff does not make one class more or less unique than another.

The reason I’ve seen cited for these changes, by blue posters, is to make it so that you do not have to rely overly on stacking one class or deny a friend and good player a place on your raid team simply because they do not enjoy or have the gear for a ‘good’ raid spec (boomkins, retridins, MM hunters, frost mages for example).  Now I know you may wail and cry that there are examples of these specs already raiding and doing well but I have not yet heard of a guild who stacks boomkins - feral or resto are more useful for the ‘class benefits’ - in this case, battle res, innervate etc. - and the benefit of bringing two along is negligible - improved faerie fire cannot stack and the aura competes with the better buffs an elemental shaman could bring in their place, for example (alongside self res, a full set of totems, heroism…).

So, allowing a lot of classes to share buffs or simply making it so that similar buffs don’t stack no matter what the class is means that you only need “some dps, one with an AP booster, some tanks, one with an armor / AP reducer or slower, and some healers capable of… healing” rather than “we need at least two shamans, two priests, one warrior, one paladin tank, one survival hunter, two rogues, three warlocks and two mages minimum”.  The direction they are going in will allow for more freedom of choice for the player and for the raid as a whole.

You should be able to play with your friends and you should be able to play in a spec you like competitively. Burning Crusade was a step towards that (Wow, druids, shamans and paladins don’t have to be healers all the time?) and I’m hoping Wrath will continue the trend.  In fact, in my opinion, this allows for a far greater degree of individualism than if classes were restricted to one or two ‘amazing’ raid specs with the other being left in the dirt.

Crossover does not equal cross out, for example:

On my Shaman I rely heavily on +healing and mp5, holy Paladins in my guild also rely partially on these.  We both heal, use shields and choose similar ‘extras’ (rings, trinkets, food etc.). Does that mean we lack flavour compared to each other?  I don’t think so.  We’re very different classes.  If I gain a good, fast single target heal worth casting it still doesn’t make me a Paladin and a Paladin gaining some multi-target healing does not make them a Shaman.  Big mechanics - like totems and blessings, magical shields versus elemental shields, mitigation versus off-spec dps will always make these two healing specs feel very different.

However,  if need be I could single-target heal or they could raid heal without gimping the raid.  If we only have 8 paladins available for one evening why should that stop us from just saying ‘lets go!’?  Having similar skills across multiple classes simply means that a big glaring gap in their toolset (using the above example) as a healer has been reduced a little, allowing them to fill a healer spot rather than just a ‘paladin’ or ’shaman’ spot.

More specifically, having only certain classes able to ‘cleanse’ certain debuffs means having to build a raid around those classes for specific encounters.  Having these sorts of abilities as available from certain talents (without adding them as general class skills) means being able to have each specialist-spec have a tool-set wide enough to not be a burden simply by playing a class and spec they enjoy.

This is why I am supportive of the efforts to spread the love around, talents wise.  This is why I am glad they are doing so and why, I hope, others might begin to see all of this in a more positive light.

After half writing this post I noticed that Rohan at Blessing of Kings touched on another aspect of what I was trying to say in his post on the new buff system:

I think that, on the whole, this will be a good change for the game. There are some posters at EJ however, who feel that this will lead to a new form of raid stacking. Essentially, you figure out the minimum number of characters to cover all the buffs and debuffs, and then stack the rest of the raid with the flavour-of-the-month DPS class.

This is a possibility. However, in my view, there are essentially two types of raiding guilds: guilds which have access to multiple characters of every class and spec; and guilds which don’t. Maybe the first type of guild will stack, but they would have stacked anyways. But this change will make life a lot easier for the second type of guild, allowing much more leeway in recruitment and raid make-up.

I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment - hardcore raids who must have optimal setups will find a way to ‘exploit’ the new system.  Other guilds, who are more based around friendships or friendly, more paced raiding, will be able to raid more comfortably with an un-balanced number of one class or other.  I refuse to believe, at the moment, that granting buffs and abilities to multiple different classes will mean a loss of uniqueness for that class.  I believe, in fact, it does almost the opposite - allowing any one person to play their class in the spec they enjoy with the knowledge that they are a positive force for their raid group and friends.

Ok ok, I know.  Beta stuff.  I’m not meant to be posting much about it! The rest of my posts are pretty beta free, though, and I really wanted to show off parts of the two of the cool new druid abilities - Feral Charge (Cat) and Berserk (Bear).

If you are a wee bit curious then see after the cut!

(Won’t subject those to it as don’t want to see it /hugs)

Can’t get it to cut in a feed reader - apologies.  Can anyone tell me how to do it for next time?

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Seems that a’v been called up early - brought in tae Northrend tae gie a wee hand wi’ settin’ up things for the rest who’re comin’. Sure there’s a few problems the noo but I’m sure we’ll get things sorted…

I just had to…. Oh come on, he needs a hug! I managed to snag myself a beta key so I’m having a sneak peek around the new stuff.  I’ve created and am playing around wih my Death Knight - it’s interesting and different and I love the starter quests - very cool.  I’ve been a bit ill the past few days so I don’t have much coherent to say yet - I’ll maybe work up something more interesting for later.

Oh and I have to admit a little bit of squeeing when I submitted my very first bug ticket.  I’m making a difference! *ahem*