That’s Magmadar. Yes, as in that Magmadar.

Solo-tamed him. And yes, I know, he turns into just your average core hound pet once the tame is complete, but there’s something awesome about knowing what he used to be:

A 40-man raid boss.

Can you get much cooler?

…what’s that you say? Taming druids would be cooler?

Way ahead of ya:

Did I mention I’m running Karazhan once a week now? The necklace I’ve wanted from Attumen since Burning Crusade has yet to drop. This and other earth-shattering announcements at eleven.

As usual I have the best readers. I mention offhandedly in a post that I can’t afford Cataclysm and the next thing I know I have enough money to cover it a few times over. So at this point, not only can I snag Cata and some WoW cards, but I can buy WoW time for my younger siblings, too, as their Christmas present. Awesome! <3

So the world went kablooey the other day, as I'm sure we're all aware. I haven't had much of a chance to survey all the damage yet but I did run around and snag a bunch of new pets in an effort to stave off my gnawing desire to roll and level a gnome priest as my way to see the world (I want to give it a few days until the starting areas are a little less congested).

But hey, Fox Mulder is already level 80!

Now taking suggestions on what I should tame for a Scully.

Three years ago I tamed the Teal Kitty. I wanted the teal kitty ever since I set eyes on it, since teal is and always has been my favorite color. There were two, Shy’Rotam, summonable via a quest (back then, only available for Horde only)… and Rak’Shiri.

I tamed Rak’Shiri in a leper gnome costume at 4:30am. I wasn’t even level 60 yet. Immediately I loved him to pieces. I named him Locke, a bit of an in-joke since, like Hobbes, Locke was originally a 17th century philosopher. And so Locke was my fangirly tribute to BRK.

Locke and I did everything together. We learned how to do instances. (Pretty sure he wiped Dire Maul once when I forgot to dismiss him and jumped down a ledge.) We learned how to do heroics. He was my Karazhan pet. He became very well-known (and well-liked) in my guild. We had dozens of in-jokes with him. Doing one Heroic Mech run we joked that he didn’t like me anymore and was running off to replace Pathaleon the Calculator and become the new final boss. We joked about him being the Sacrifice Bot on those land mines in Heroic Blood Furnace. Guildies drew pictures of him with a top hat and monocle. Blog readers have sent me fan-art of him.

Once Wrath of the Lich King hit, Locke accompanied me to level 80 and came with me to early heroics and Naxx runs. It was about this time that I decided to re-tame Wash, a pet I’d loved and lost from early on (pre-Locke), and Wash became my new full-time companion. But I never forgot Locke. How could I? He’s just as much a part of Tawyn as Wash is. He still sits faithfully in my stable and I take him out to romp around sometimes.

He likes to dance.

Well, you see, today I found out that everything is changing in Cataclsym, and Rak’Shiri is turning into a white tiger. The change is retro-active, so all tamed Rak’Shiris will be turning into the white tiger. (The other teal tiger, Shy’Rotam, is safe.)

I… guys…

I know this is silly and weepy and utterly irrational of me, since really it’s a big block of pixels. But I like my Locke the way he is. And I don’t want him to change.

To those who say “Just go tame Shy’Rotam”: It won’t be the same kitty. Not the “new last boss of Heroic Mech”. Not the kitty that went with me to Karazhan week after week.

To those who say “The white kitty is still a pretty cool skin because they’re getting a sabre’toothed model now”: Yes, but it’s not my favorite color. It’s not the reason why I wanted Rak’Shiri.

My Teal Kitty and I have been through thick and thin for three years. Will I still love him when he changes color? Yeah. I’m sure I can wrangle up some sort of weird RP reason for it. Maybe.

But I’m still sad. =(

So I was feeling pretty happy about hitting 20k words (exactly!) in my NaNoWriMo today so I decided to dink around in WoW for an hour or two.

The first cool thing that happened was getting WSG for my random battleground, seeing that our ragtag group of team members was up against a pre-made, deciding to stick around anyway… aaaand then notching up a win. Against the pre-made. I giggled.

The second cool thing that happened was that I decided to clear out my quest log before Cataclysm so I was doing this random quest down in Howling Fjord and I happened to stumble upon this huge gigantic elite polar bear as part of the quest. So obviously I tamed him.

So there I was, doing pretty good for a random WoW break, so I hopped onto my Netherdrake and sort of aimlessly started to fly around in a general Northerly direction. I had the music on (which is rare) and it was nice and calm and atmospheric and I was kind of thinking about the good times I’d enjoyed with this expansion and how it was almost over.

And this is when the third cool thing happened. See, I somehow wound up in Zul’drak during this little jaunt, and a little voice popped into my brain. The little voice said, “Hey, isn’t there a spirit beast around here or something?”

And I said, “Hey, I think there is! Let’s turn on Track Beasts for the heck of it.”

So I turned on Track Beasts.

And the second I did, this little yellow dot appeared on my minimap.

I moused over it and it said “Gondria”.

>.>

…

This is, believe it or not, my very first Spirit Beast. I know Gondria is sort of seen as the Poor Man’s Loque, but I’m already in love with my Shiny Ghost Kitty who, because of his heal, has already proven himself to live through things that would have killed any of my other pets. (Read: the last boss in Gundrak who does that thing, I’m not sure what it is, that KILLS PETS DEAD.)

I had to release my newly-tamed polar bear to get Gondria. But don’t worry. I went back and got the same bear again afterwards. :3

As we are all aware, the best part of the new patch for hunters is being able to tame about a million more pets. Hunters have collectively been dreaming of this day since the stable could only hold three pets, and now it is finally ours.

…granted, even though I have multiple hunters, two of which are at max level and one of which is relatively close to it, I’ve only tamed three new pets so far. Hey, you’ve gotta spread out the goodness.

Tawyn went out and tamed the devilsaur in Netherstorm and named him Roxton (Cookie Points– much better than Brownie Points– for anyone who gets the name before seeing this link.)

Meanwhile, Lunapike went and got herself a corehound. Specifically, the one from the draenei starting area. I heard some rumor somewhere that Horde wouldn’t be able to tame it anymore once the world changes due to the boat being replaced with an Alliance-only flight point or something, and while I don’t know if the rumor is true (you’d think that would throw a wrench in the Explorer achievement, afterall), I wanted to cover all my bases just in case.

So this is Tock. He is a Watch Dog. (Raise your hand if you read The Phantom Tollbooth when you were a kid.)

Finally, Lunapike’s also tamed a raptor. For starters, raptors are basically my favorite pet family EVAR. Secondly, it had to be done in response to Krizzly’s Mudkip:

u mad?

Armory Data Mining has some fun info on hunter pets. Now some hunters are all into having what everyone else doesn’t have– you know, so when Cataclysm comes out and everyone is running around taming everything, you can say you tamed a pet when it was still underground– so I figured I’d go through, figure out which pets per family had been tamed by less than 1% of hunters with that type of pet, and list them here. There are really some underused jewels here. So without further ado:

Bird of Prey:
Dark Brown Owl/Brown Crow: 0.8%
Red Owl: 0.3% (Why?? This thing is awesome. And can’t you solo Sethekk now?)

Cat:
Orange Leopard (aka Travel Form): 0.7%
Lioness: 0.1%

Crocolisk:
Ghost Crocolisk (No longer tamable): 0.4%

Ravager:
Red & Purple Ravager: 0.2% (Another awesome color combo)

Scorpid:
Red Scorpid: 0.6%

Spider:
Green Spider: 0.8%
Tan Spider: 0.4%
Olive Spider: 0.4%
Jungle Spider: 0.3%

Wolf:
Dark Gray Worg: 0.7%
Ghost Wolf (No longer tamable): 0.6%

Worm:
Brown Worm: 0.9%
Green Worm: 0.3% (Best worm skin by far, you all are nuts! *nod*)
White Worm: 0.3%

Hit the link for the complete lowdown, as well as a list of pets with unique properties as opposed to unique skins. But now you at least have a start if you want something new and different.

I’m assuming most of you who read this blog also read OutDPS, however, if you are one of the three or four people who doesn’t, I’m going to take a quick minute to bring a post there to your attention:

It appears that simply letting your pet auto-cast its attacks lags a bit and results in a DPS loss. You can find the details (and advice on how to fix it) right here.

Also note that this effects all pets, including warlock and mage ones.

Just a heads-up from your Friendly Neighborhood Pike!

- So between now and the last time I messed around with femaledwarf.com, something interesting has happened in regard to Beast Mastery and pets; namely, Devilsaurs appear to be beating wolves again. Only if you both have about a bajillion buffs though. (i.e., wolves are probably still superior in five- and ten- mans). Why this is different from how it was when I tested it multiple times a couple months ago, I dunno. Gear maybe? It may be worth a look, though, if you a Beast Master and are into that sort of thing!

- I did ToC25 on the weekend, like I always do if I happen to have the time slot off from work. Actually we did it twice. The first time we were going to have six hunters so I volunteered to go on my druid instead, and I healed the thing. Then I was feeling all good about how the next day I’d go and pretty much be the only hunter cause all the hunters had gone on the first day. But no, we still had like… four or five hunters in the group. The number of hunters that have joined the guild in the past month or so is through the roof. Maybe my guild is right, maybe hunters DO just follow me around, like I’m the Pied Piper or something.

ANYWAYS.

I got a whisper from one of the hunters, who was spec’d Beast Mastery at the time, if he should use his wolf, cat, or Spirit Beast. I told him that, numbers-wise, the wolf would perform the best of all three, but stressed that he should use the pet that he loved the most! So he ended up actually cycling through all three pets throughout the course of the run, giving each one a chance to do one or two bosses. Which I thought was neat.

The point is that I still support using the pet you love. That, to me, is one of the points of “Being a Hunter”. I mean, I can see not running with a tenacity- or cunning- pet, cause that makes sense, but I don’t like feeling pidgeonholed into one or maybe two pets of all the ferocity ones we can choose from.

I’ve been running as Marksmanship lately and recently discovered that, according to all the mathy stuff, I’d be doing 200 more DPS if I was using a wolf. My raptor, though, is not going anywhere, so the math can shove it. (Not saying wolves are bad though, I know a lot of people that really like them… but they are simply not my style. Well, except for the fiery Zul’Drak wolf, but Lunapike has that one already and I like when my hunters all have unique pets).

Granted, if Wind Serpents because a Ferocity pet, I wouldn’t raid with ANYTHING ELSE EVER, EVER AGAIN, but that is just a pipe dream. /dreams

- My “NaNoWriMo” book is going well, I’m at 13,500 words! I must say, the writing thing is fun. I’ve let the WoW and the blog fall a bit to the side while I work on this big book project but it’s suuuuper fun. Right now I’m just trying to dump words onto the page, but once I finish up, I plan on going back and doing a hardcore edit job. This is my profile-ma-jig by the way, and you should add me if you are doing it too. Not really for any reason, but just cause it’s fun.

…so that last one was totally not pet related. “Pet project”, maybe…? Hmm. /muses

I’m pretty sure we’re all clear on the fact that I enjoy rolling hunters. I can’t help it. It’s relaxing. It’s nostalgic.

Alongside this, it means I have tamed a lot of pets in my WoW career. The level 10 pet is very important to me, because I consider it to be the pet that particular hunter will have their entire life– oh sure, they’ll tame others, and may even use others in raids or PvP, but all of my hunters keep their first pet.

And one of my little quirks is that I enjoy taming the… more challinging to obtain pets.

I’ve ran level ten Hordies to Teldrassil. Twice. Once for the owl and once for a cat.

I’ve ran a low level Hordie to Azuremyst for the moth.

I’ve ran a level 10 Hordie to Dun Morogh for the snow leopard.

I’ve ran a level 10 Alliance character to Durotar for a raptor.

A good chunk of those were on PvP servers.

I’ve also done safer but still lengthy trips on other characters: dragging a Tauren to Eversong Woods or Trolls and Blood Elves to Mulgore. (It has occurred to me that an unusually high percentage of my lowbie hunters are Horde. Hmm.)

This was all in my mind yesterday when I did something crazy and made a character on one of my non-”Home Servers”. Thus it was that I made a female tauren hunter (yes I have a billion of those, shuddup, Azeroth needs more, dangit! /shifty eyes) on Wyrmrest Accord, so I could say hello to Faeldray and Tzia, two people who have been a part of the Aspect of the Hare commenting community for a very, very long time and who both have awesome blogs of their own.

We hung out for a while and did some really nifty RP (which I may talk about later, in its own post), but always in the back of my mind as I did the tauren starter quests for the umpteenth time was what pet I should get. It had to be special, something that I could tie in to my developing character story, and preferably something I hadn’t ever tamed before.

Then I had an idea.

Snoeken (Dutch for “Pike”, albeit the fish and not the weapon =P) went on a little adventure.

First, the ride from Thunder Bluff to Orgrimmar.

Taking the zeppelin to Undercity…

And getting on a different zeppelin and going to a very scary place for a level 10:

Howling Fjord.

Then came the ceremonial removing of all the clothes (except the shirt and pants– I’m a decent tauren!) and a deep breath…

And then the corpse hop began.

So, rez timer, we meet again.

The run to Utgarde Keep wasn’t that bad though, and I soon found myself where I needed to be…

Well well well, what’ve we got here?

Brand New Birdie:

The fishertauren and her sea hawk:

My new druid-birdie has a few bugs, it would appear. He flies extremely low to the ground (as opposed to, say, an owl, who flies much higher), and when he flies after you, he remains leaned back in his “hovering” position. The way a druid would look if it was just flying in place. I’ve actually had this happen to me in my druid flight form, if I time myself carefully and jump right when I enter flight form. But it seems to be a perpetual problem for the Daggercap Hawk, and it looks kind of silly. In addition, he doesn’t “highlight” when you click on him, the way other things do.

Regardless of these issues, he is a gorgeous pet– and certainly unique, as well!

Now we just have to cross our fingers and hope Blizzard eventually fixes these issues, rather than conveniently deciding that a level 10 hunter shouldn’t have a bird from Northrend =P

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend recently both in game and as anecdotes on other blogs: hunters that aren’t using their pets. At all. Like, they don’t even summon them.

Okay guys, here’s the deal. I know that 99.999% of you are Marskman or Survival right now, but even so, you can’t afford to not have your pet out.

“But Pike, his DPS sucks!”

I asked some people on Twitter how much DPS their pet contributes in a raid setting. Here were some of the responses I got:

TheAllianceGuy (Marksman): “Above 1000 at least”
T_Jazz (Marksman/Survival): “the hundreds”
tchann (Beast Master): “40+ percent of 5k dps”
shizukera (Beast Master): “I can’t give you a number, but it hurts like hell when my pet dies”
jayesh (MM/SV, depending on fight): “16-23 percent. varies from fight to fight”
ILikeBubbles (Beast Master): “I think mine is…800/900ish DPS?”
dhollinger (Survival): “Rough estimate? My ulduar geared SV hunter’s wolf does ~450-500 from what I remember”
shieldbreakr (Survival): “536dps in my raid last night in my 25man naxx pug. I did 4132dps, he did 536. I use cats”
Eidtalheg (Survival): “my average pet (wolf) dps is ~730.”

The awesometacular Anna of Too Many Annas sent me some raid info from Totally Raids, Inc, on Feathermoon. Here is what she sent me:

First 3/4 of Ulduar + VoA Clear
Surv Hunter Pet – Cat – 950 DPS, 3.3 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Moth – 900 DPS, 3 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Wolf – 920 DPS, 2.5 mil damage

Yogg, Ony, VoA, ToC Normal -
Surv Hunter Pet – Cat – 850 DPS, 2.2 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Moth – 800 DPS, 1.9 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Wolf – 650 DPS, 1.5 mil damage
Marks Hunter Pet – Cat – 750 DPS, 1.5 mil damage

It’s worth noting that the marks hunter, whose pet is at the bottom of the chart, had never seen Yogg-Saron before (he’s our “sometimes” hunter, and we’ve not been doing Yoggy a lot), so he’s got a bit of a gear disparity from the other three!

Last half of ToC plus 11 wipes on Heroic Northrend Beasts
Surv Hunter Pet – Cat – 950 DPS, 2 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Wolf – 700 DPS, 1.3 mil damage
Surv Hunter Pet – Wolf – 1000 DPS, 1.1 mil damage

Extremely variable numbers as you can see, and I know this is dependent on things like gear, level of content, group makeup, etc. But look at even some of the low-end numbers from Twitter and tell me that’s not helpful. Would you say no to a free 400 DPS? And check out some of the stuff Anna is doing– those pets are doing twice that! If you’re min/maxing your gear and your spec, why would you say no to using a pet?

“But Pike, I can’t keep him alive, I’m not BM like you!”

There seems to be this weird misconception floating around the blogosphere and the WoWosphere in general that raid-spec’d BM pets are magically much easier to keep alive and/or are better tanks than non-BM pets. Here’s the deal, I could spec for pet survivability, but I don’t, because I spec for DPS. The only things my pet has that yours probably doesn’t, from a standpoint of pet survivability, is one extra point in Wild Hunt, one extra point in Bloodthirsty, and one point in Improved Mend Pet. Possibly one point in Endurance Training, if you are Survival and don’t have it. That’s it. (I don’t count Improved Revive Pet because that is assuming your pet is already dead, and we’re talking about keeping him alive.)

This means my pet has a little more stamina than yours, and a slightly greater chance to regenerate a minute amount of life in combat. Improved Mend Pet is extremely situational– it’s helpful on Heigan and that’s about it.

If I can keep my pet alive, you can too. It just involves some situational awareness and a Mend Pet keybind.

“But Pike, this is [Insert Some Ridiculously Pet-Unfriendly Boss Here]“

Now, believe me, I know that some fights are a royal pain in the butt in terms of pet survivability. I understand that not all fights are created equal.

So keep your pet by your side.

Most Marksmanship builds include 2/2 Focused Fire, which is free DPS just for having your pet there.

And on top of that, a good number of you are using a wolf right now. I don’t, myself, partially because I like other pets better, partially because my stable is full, and partially because I’m a stubborn idiot making a stand against what I see as an unfair pet status quo. But guys, the wolf is free DPS just from standing there because of Furious Howl.

“But Pike, he dies on Mimiron anyway, even if he’s standing by my side!”

Yeah, I know >.> We won’t talk about Mimiron. /cough

“But Pike, it’s just a couple hundred DPS.”

And yet that new piece of gear you are drooling over will get you what, like, 15 DPS?

And what about those 1% boss fight wipes? Betcha wish you’d had a couple hundred extra DPS there.

In Conclusion:

You have no reason to not have your pet at least out and summoned. It’s free DPS. And besides which, look at your favorite pet’s face. Go on, do it.

Who could say no to a face like that? >.>

Pet control is vital, in my opinion, to all hunter specs. It’s part of what makes you a hunter. It’s part of what makes our class difficult to play, regardless of what other classes may occasionally think or rib us about. Because when the raid leader says that “ranged has to do this and melee has to do that”, we have to listen to both those things because part of us– our pet– is in fact melee.

We are the ones who have to make sure our pet is not DPS’ing the same lasher as we are on Freya.

We are the ones who have to make sure our pet is DPSing the big add on Onyxia while we focus on whelps or Onyxia herself.

No other class has to worry about this kind of thing, except maybe demonology warlocks (and Unholy Death Knights..?). It’s a big responsibility.

And spec’ing MM or SV doesn’t automatically clear you from that pet responsibility. That arrived when you chose to roll a hunter. If you want to be the best hunter you can be, that includes your pet. You’re both in this together.

To mangle a quote by a toy cowboy, “Pets. If you don’t have one, get one!”