Air Chao

Real shamans travel via iron rune construct.

Air Galli

From Assorted WotLK

What a hunterly way to travel! I approve.

Chill nymphs

Maelstrom Weapon has pretty low utility in its current state, as it still resets the swing timer and doesn't proc off of Windfury crits, only auto attacks. Right now it is extremely effective at pulling mobs farther than 20 yds away using a hasted Lightning Bolt once every few kills, and not much else. Seeing as I used to use rank 1 LB for that purpose, I certainly would have preferred the old implementation where one could cast hasted heals (or insta-rez in arena lawl cue qq!).

The change of generic crit rating now affecting spell crit is noticeable. It kind of makes me wish all of our on-crit talents would proc on spell crits too — Mental Quickness, Unleashed Rage, Maelstrom Weapon, and the like. Our hybridized crit mechanics are getting nice and complex, with spell crits increasing melee crit chance and melee crits reducing mana costs of spells yet opening the door to higher mana consumption. I can't wait to train Lava Burst to add to all the confusion.

These sons of liches are strong... but not strong enough.

We've finally encountered some elite mobs that weren't trivially easy to kill, like some liches and some runed stone giants. The ginormous devilsaur bug happened again during some runed stone giant ownage, and I got owned instead while trying to take screenshots — which, like baby pictures, you totally can't get enough of.

Giant devilsaur, now with flagged hordies.

Are you watching my health? 'Cause I'm not.

It finally occurred to us though that gear is totally going to devalue as we level because of the way hit rating, crit rating, and expertise convert on a per-level basis. That combined with the fact that there aren't any gear upgrades until like, say, level 77, is kind of depressing. We'll just continually enfeeble until we reach that sordid minimum. I gasped in dismay when I dinged 71 and saw that I had lost a precious point of expertise, and it pains me to think that my already pitiful crit chance will also be plummeting by the level. I actually broke down and replaced a bunch of my epic strength gems with blue-quality agility ones that were previously queued for Dijkstra's upgrades.

Anyway, let's not think about such dark, dark, dark things. NYMPHS. There are actual mobs called chill nymphs. You can free them from their unchilled forest that is a couple hundred yards away from the frigid habitat of the frost nymphs.

I'm totally sparing you the nymphomaniac jokes.

Devilsaur addendum

There's a display issue with devilsaurs that I'm pretty sure hunters won't be reporting to Blizzard anytime soon. Sometimes Galli's devilsaur appeared elite in its unit frame and was displayed using the full size model of its untamed, natural state in the wild. This only ever seemed to happen on other people's screens (like mine) and not Galli's. So that's probably what accounted for all the "omg it's so huge" / "that's what Chao said" conversations.

Elite devilsaur turns in quest to Captain Adams.

Taming Tyrants

From Devilsaurs!

I was very excited when I heard the announcement that Hunters would now be able to tame Devilsaurs. In TBC, far too few pets were used in practice. All of the hunters in my 25-man raid group (SGA Fubar), used windserpents. Although it was kind of cool to have a whole fleet of flappy serpents, it is more fun to have a variety of viable pets. Also, devilsaurs are cool. With this goal in mind, I set out for Un’goro Crater. I first headed to Menethil with hopes of catching a boat to Theramore, but it never arrived. Instead, we flew to Booty Bay, hopped the boat to rachet, and then flew down.

From Devilsaurs!

Upon arrival in Un’goro, I wandered around a bit using track beasts to find a devilsaur. There are three skins for the devilsaurs available: a greenish black one, a brown one, and a white one. The first one I came across was an Ironhide Devilsaur, which uses the greenish black skin. This guy was no problem at all to tame; he didn’t hit very hard. I decided that the white skin (with pink eyes!) would fit in better in Northrend. The problem is that the white devilsaurs have a knockback, which they use fairly frequently. Also, the brown devilsaurs have a fear. Both of these mechanics interrupt the (relatively long) channeling of tame beast, making taming these beasts problematic.

From Devilsaurs!

It turns out that both of these are tameable. To deal with the fear, I decided to use The Beast Within to become unfearable. Unfortunately, this requires having a pet, but you can’t have a pet while taming. However, the buff persists even after abandoning the pet, so you can pop the ability, abandon the pet, and then begin taming while you are still immune to fear. I also used drums of battle and Chao’s Heroism to speed up the cast time (this strategy will be familiar to those of you who tamed ghost wolves). The white devilsaur was tameable by waiting until it used it's knockback, popping heroism + drums of battle, and taming before it used the ability again.

From Devilsaurs!

I love the devilsaur. It has a family specific ability called Monstrous Bite, which increases it’s attack power and causes it to grow in size. It stacks up to three times, which makes for a pretty big beast. Pop Bestial Wrath, and you have a pretty large dino.

From Devilsaurs!

One drawback from this pet family is how noisy it is. I don’t mean during combat, but the footstep animation. As Kuruyami of Northrend so aptly put it: “dam thats one loud step”. Although the noise was annoying at first, I have gotten used to it.

From Devilsaurs!

Since devilsaurs are pretty new, I get a lot of comments on it while walking around. I'm sure people will get used to seeing hunters wandering around with giant dinosaurs, mauling their enemies...

From Devilsaurs!

Also, it seems that there are still some bugs to work out. The pet frame display is a bit strange, and there isn't a swim animation yet.

From Devilsaurs!

Here is a gallery of relevant screenshots. See you next time!

From Devilsaurs!

Water walking wolf

Galli and I had tacitly agreed to keep our leveling perfectly in alignment, so when he was busy yesterday I rolled a death knight for kicks. The starting questline feels pretty damn epic, but pretty damn evil too. Runic power definitely feels like warrior rage, which means combat requires the same kind of patience. Luckily the death knight abilities have such over-the-top colorful swirly graphics that it's easy to keep yourself entertained.

Ohai!!!

The leveling hasn't been super fast so far, since the scenery has been so fascinating. We're halfway to 71 after two nights of questing, a couple of hours per night. This was all with rested XP that seems to have been arbitrarily calculated. I've observed quite a number of cruises and flights with somewhat circuitous path planning — which is great while we're still wide-eyed fresh graduates from Outland, but seems like it could get old soon. People are already jumping out of the boat to Valgarde and swimming instead.

I'm loving the quests and environments so far, and at least one questline has me utterly intrigued. Things just seem more directed and motivated than in Burning Crusade. The wildlife is great too; it's cool to see hawks perched in pairs on rocks and shoveltusk stags sparring with their (oh so sexy) antlers. I did notice that a lot of quests give you control over some entity that replaces your action bars. Maybe after the catastrophes of Teron Gorefiend Blizzard decided that everyone could use more practice with this mechanism.

It's a boy thing.

I also remembered the whole thing about Ghost Wolf not canceling the Water Walking buff, and it is totally true. Now this is a real victory for shamans everywhere.

Yeah I put Water Walking on a wolf that disappeared after 45 secs.

Nice aurora borealis even for my ghetto graphics settings.

First impressions

With my talents stripped away and my abilities unbound from my fingertips, I felt clumsy and disoriented venturing into the World of Wrathcraft beta. I was also apparently even in resto gear, which for you non-hybrids feels kind of like cross-dressing and being naked at the same time. Not that resto gear has any meaning anymore. The conversion to spellpower was rather thorough; no enchantment, gem, or socket bonus was left behind.

It's actually a little disconcerting how this change made a large fraction of BC itemization completely redundant. To think that the sunmote I used to convert [Gauntlets of the Ancient Shadowmoon] to [Gauntlets of the Ancient Frostwolf] totally sacrificed itself for a minor conversion of spell crit to mp5.

Spellpower everywhere.

Um good, now I can DE one of them.

Of course, my strength gems and enchants didn't magically convert themselves to AGILITY POWER! or anything, so after the changes to our AP and crit derivations from strength and agility my melee stats didn't look too impressive.

I'm so weak qq.

It took me over an hour to muster the courage to actually put in talents. By then Galli was slaughtering all the inhabitants of the Howling Fjord he could get his unlinked Auto Shot on. I was exceptionally pleased to find sharks in the water, which Galli lost no time skinning. There were also real live penguins hanging out on glaciers while we were on the cruise to Borean Tundra. Hopefully we'll see moar aquatic creatures moar (although it's too bad manatees are warm-weather ones... sigh, there's always next expansion).

Can you find the lost reagent pouch???

I basically spent the rest of the night with Galli on follow, trying to wrap my head around the fact of XP after 70. Fourier seemed extremely overpowered for some reason. After we got our UIs to a barely usable state, mobs just exploded. This made me regret putting points into Maelstrom Weapon so early, since there was no way you could crit a mob enough times for the buff to stack before the mob keeled over.

And ah yes... spirit wolves. As far as I could see they attacked with nonnegative damage — both of them even, for those who knew about the staying and cuddling bug. It will be interesting to see what uses they will serve when they are done being implemented. For now they provide very large doses of spiritual canine comfort for 45 seconds every 2 minutes.

Feral spirits in the spiritual world of aggro every Lich Kings.