So the raid team has a couple monks and a couple paladins, which means that the buffs I bring with my typical “raid respectable” pets – the spirit beast and the cat – get totally overridden by their buffs. This left me wondering what the hale kind of pet would be most useful, since all my favorites were essentially redundant too (or kind of silly). “Why,” I thought, “serpents are handy now, with the 10% increase to melee and ranged speed! I’ll catch me one of those.” Maybe I have a strange sense of humor or something, so I went and tamed this red/hot pink snake from Tanaris and named it Valentine.
I apparently haven’t been the only one with these kinds of buff related quandaries.
Hot Pink Snake
Seriously, never thought I’d see the day.
Though we’ve been pals for only a short time, we’ve already gone through quite a lot together.
Valentine Solos the Lich King
And then I, the huntard, failed him.
With the patch making arcane wyrms tamable as serpents, I had half a mind to go tame the bright red Acroniss and joke that Valentine had “evolved,” possibly compensating for my incompetence, but every friggin’ time I went to the spawn site (and I went there a lot), there were ninety million huntards there! Ninety million, I tell you. Sometimes we lined up, sometimes we didn’t. I’m okay with spending four hours sitting in a cave if I’m going to get rewarded for that effort in the form of the pet I wasted my time for, but I really don’t feel like waiting in line for ninety million hours to run the risk of having another huntard in close quarters try to tame it/kill it/whatever.
So I decided to go tame a white one instead. After a quick fly-by, I determined I would need a way to lure the creature down into the 30 yard taming range, so I shot at it, since my regular shot is 10 yards longer. Unfortunately, I’m level 90 and gemmed, which I didn’t think about, so I severely underestimated the amount of DPS I now do on poor, gray leveled creatures.
Shattered Dreams
Why am I remembering the time I shot that rare bird I wanted to tame in the face? Oh yeah, because I shot the rare bird I wanted to tame in the face.
/cough
Try two went better. I studied the circles mobs made, and tested various points! Perhaps in some convoluted form of justice, I tried dismounting and taming while in air, but you can’t Tame Beast while moving (since it’s channeled), and I discovered that falling to your death counts as moving.
In the end, I managed to perch myself on a pointy ice thing that I thought might be juuuuuuuuuust ever so high enough to put me in range when the slow-flying thing made its circuit.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON
If I do anything other than click the “Tame Beast” button, I am sure to kill myself.
This shot may make my position a little clearer in the context of Coldarra:
This Pointy Icy Thing
It’s JUST in range of the lower-flying Spirit of the North.
The thing is, I’m kinda feeling attached to Valentine now. Maybe I should camp out in line for Acroniss after all … or just leave Valentine as the derpy old school serpent (derpent?) that he is.
That Was an Accident! 
Just thought it was about time I commented that while I never have anything meaningful to say, which is hardly surprising given that I don’t play WoW any more and only ever played it for about three months a couple of years ago, this is one of my very favorite MMO blogs and quite brilliantly written. And illustrated!
WTG! Grats! And all that stuff.
D’awwww, why thanks! 😀 Goblins are such rich source material, you must admit!
That, and if it were possible to be a professional derper, it’d be my full time occupation.
Wouldn’t Disengage and your rocket belt both save you from pancaking…? 😀
One of the surprises our hunter pulled was summoning out a sporebat. Yes, the ridiculous pet that people link in trade as a joke when a new huntard asks what the best pet is. Turns out it now provides a haste buff, which we don’t otherwise get in our comp…
LOGIC!? Well, actually, that’d just be way too many buttons to push at once and I’m too lazy/confused to figure out macros beyond the basic /chicken one I usually make.
I have Stampede glpyhed to make a bazillion copies of Valentine, so you get a ton of hot pink snakes running around. 😀
Strangely, Petopia still shows sporebats as having a skill that silences thingies and not a haste buff.
…which probably means he was trolling the ‘lock that was asking for a haste buff, and I was dumb enough not to realise. Well played, huntard. Well played.
Then again, looking at WoWhead it seems sporebats had Mind Quickening at some point in Mists developmnt. It isn’t really clear whether that’s been dropped. o.O
I could tame one and find out, I suppose.
Or you could just ask the other huntard. But that would require more effort on your part. 😛
I may be wrong on the internet! Don’t you see that this is a CRISIS?!
Your crisis, not mine! 😀 /whistle
Bah… time to ste^H^H^H borrow my wife’s huntard for a bit. /innocence
Am I a sucker because i keep going back to my little Wolf? Yeah I liked Dances with Wolves … oO
Naw, I bring along Shatouched (http://wow-petopia.com/look/worgwhite_ghost.html) and Moonfang (http://wow-petopia.com/look/direwolfskindarkgrey_ghost.html) quite frequently, and I’ve had Moonfang since my troll days. There was a point in time where I had, I think … four different worgs? Maybe five? I like my puppies, which is kind of ironic, because I have two cats in real life. I forced myself to get rid of the ones I didn’t use very often though, so could tame the other things I wanted to tame. /sadface
The thing is, with the raid team, I want to bring along a pet that has a buff which will actually benefit us, and I seem to remember the wolf buff (critical strike chance increase) being overwritten by one of our monks/paladerps. Bosses always seem to be immune to pet debuffs, so I wanted something that would positively affect us instead of being useless (I love you, Gulliver the Sea Gull, but your Disarm, it does nothing … or if it does, I just died too fast to notice).
Snakes and hyenas have the speed increase, but Gawd help me, I am not taming one of those mangy hyenas. Urgh. Not my thing. EVERY TIME I see a hyena, I think of “The Lion King” and want to call it Ed. It’s not that I want to be a special snowflake, because I’m already SPECIAL. I just don’t like hyenas and I don’t like the names I come up with, since all the names are “Ed.”
Didn’t hyenas have a bleed debuff? o.O
Crit is provided by Arcane Brilliance now, for no apparent reason. No idea what else gives it. Not ret paladerps as far as I’ve noticed. (says the guy who believed in sporebats having a haste buff…)
Yeah, I think they used to (though I don’t really remember, not having one), but they’ve got the speed one now. http://wow-petopia.com/family/hyena.html Still, hyenas. There’s an entire quest devoted to bettering the world by killing mangy hyenas, so why would I want to tame a mangy hyena?
At this point I’ll have to wait ’til we try Mogushan Vaults again, since all I can remember is “we had a crapton of buffs,” and I think two were monk and two were paladerp. I think we do have a mage, so that may be where I am getting this idea of even my wolf’s buff being redundant from.