Tag Archives: rants

pet battles

I Have Just One BIG PROBLEM With Cats Sitting On Your Lap In WoW

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Recently, Warcraft Pets reported that cat mini-pets will now sit on your lap in game.  Which is absolutely, 100% adorable.  Absolutely nothing wrong with that, right?

WRONG.

This is my real life pet cat.

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She is absolutely, 100% a sweetheart and she loves sitting on my lap.  Her name is Scout.

This is the calico cat in game.

234716They look almost exactly the same.  And yet, Scout cannot join me in game to sit on my lap.  Why?

BECAUSE “SCOUT” IS ON BLIZZARD’S NAME FILTER

Look, I get it, it’s a title.  If players can’t name themselves that, then okay, whatever.

BUT LIKE

IT’S A BATTLE PET

I just want Scout to sit on my lap with me in game at the same time as she is sitting on my lap while I’m at my desk.  🙁  Come on Blizzard.  I thought you said you didn’t hate fun!

pets

RIP, Big Teal Kitty

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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. =(

beast mastery, specs

But I Don’t Feel Like You Failed Me, Blizz

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So I was browsing MMO-Champion and stumbled upon this blue post:

The only specs we really failed on in LK raiding were Frost mage, Subtlety rogue, BM hunter and Arms warrior.

…and I thought, “BM hunter? Really?”

I mean, I know tons of people see it that way, but I don’t.

Here is a handy list of stuff I raided as a Beast Master hunter:

  • Naxx
  • Obsidian Sanctum
  • Obsidian Sanctum hard modes back when they were still semi-hard
  • Eye of Eternity
  • Ulduar up through about half of Yogg
  • Various Ulduar hard modes (back when they were still hard)
  • VoA
  • Onyxia
  • ToC
  • Various ToC hard modes
  • ICC, the two times I went in there before I quit raiding

I dunno Blizz, I appreciate the concern, really, but I don’t feel like you failed me. I mean, maybe you did for that dark period between 3.0.8 and when you started giving us consolation buffs (although that didn’t stop me from raiding as Beast Master), but now that we’ve reached the end of WotLK, the spreadsheet has proven that a geared BM hunter does just as much DPS as a geared Survival hunter.  Tons of raiding hunters still play Survival, don’t they? Even though Marks has shown to outstrip it?

See, ultimately what bothered me the most about “spec issues” this entire expansion wasn’t the game mechanics so much as it was a good portion of the playerbase. If you had a problem with raiding BM hunters during the Ulduar era or even during the ToC era, then fine– my guild and I operated differently, but I can see where you were coming from.

But then ICC showed up, BM got more buffs, BM became essentially equal in DPS to SV, and yet blogs/forums were still only posting strats for MM and SV while ignoring BM, and various people in game were still picking on BM while gladly accepting SV raiders.

Yeah. I’m not seeing any logic here. (Please let me know if you see it, so I can correct it and put my foot in my mouth.)

Anyways, enough about that. I don’t raid anymore, and I don’t really seriously play my hunters anymore, so ultimately this doesn’t affect me, other than finally allowing me to get something off of my chest that has been bothering me the last few months. I guess I just wanted to say that I just found it odd that Ghostcrawler lumped BM hunters in with, say, sub rogues and frost mages, who, from what I understand, have it FAR worse off than we do. So yeah, don’t worry about it too much, Blizz. All’s good in hunterland. Go work on our frosty and stealthy friends.

Well, that’s all for now on one of my rare excursions into WoWblog-land recently. I have to admit, blogging here feels kind of odd lately. It truly does feel like what Aspect of the Hare used to be left back in February when I went on hiatus, and I don’t think it’s coming back, even if I do keep blogging here. Not to say that’s a bad thing. I just want to overhaul the blog and shift the focus a bit. I think more story posts are in order. You know, like “Once upon a time, there was this PuG…”

*grin*