Two for the Road

I love pets. I make no secret about this. I hate the fact that our current situation for raid is, as GC put it, “wolf or die.” The good news is Cataclysm is bringing some terrific changes regarding pets. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the pet changes coming in Cataclysm.

Oh, but before I dive into this I just wanted remind you that if you really want to keep up with all the pet changes happening in Cataclysm, there is not great resource Petopia. I don’t know if Mania is in beta yet, but if you happen to be in beta, and you happen to love pets she would welcome your help in gathering information.

You can check out her Cataclysm pet forums for more info. on what you can do to help.

Stable Slots – It Goes to Twenty

This is how I think it’s going to work. We’ll have 20 slot stable and the ability to carry around five active pets that can be called from the Call Stabled Pet ability. If we want to make a pet from out stables active we’ll have to visit a stable master to do this. If this is correct that means hunters should be able to have up to 25 pets in Cataclysm. Unfortunately, when you move a pet into the stable its talents will get wiped.

Even if it’s only 20 total pets that should be enough to fill most hunter’s needs. That is unless they added 15 more spirit beasts to the game 😛 .

How Will Pets Work

Here’s a recent quote from Ghostcrawler on how pets will function in Cataclysm.

Pets — We haven’t done our design pass on them yet. The design is for them to no longer receive raid buff since they get complete scaling from the master (and we don’t want them to double dip). Their abilities will be divided into 3 categories: basic focus dumps (e.g. Claw), specials (e.g. web), and exotic abilities for the BM exotic pets. Specials never cost focus and basics have short cooldowns but meaningful damage. All pets will do the same dps. We don’t want “wolf or die” in Cataclysm (and before that it was cat). Each pet family will bring a unique raid buff, allowing hunters to be wildcards for when you are lacking something. The ease of swapping pets will facilitate this further.

Basically pets should scale nicely with the hunter, they’ll bring some raid utility in the form of buffs (probably nicer for 10-man raids), and pet dps is getting normalized so it’s possible that we won’t look like huntards for bringing that spirit beast to the raid.

Starter Pets
Hunters will get a pet right out of the gate a level one. I haven’t seen an update to this, but last I heard the race/start pet combinations are as follows,

Human – Wolf
Dwarf – Bear
Night Elf – Wintersaber
Draenei – Moth
Worgen – Mastiff
Orc – Boar
Undead – Bat
Tauren – Plainstrider
Troll – Raptor
Blood Elf – Dragon Hawk
Goblin – Crab

All of these seem appropriate and they’re not too far off from what I thought they might be (see For Starters Pets).

New Pets – Filling Up the Barn

Petopia’s Cataclysm pet page show Monkey’s, Foxes, Mastiffs as three of the new pets we’ll be able tame, and I’m sure they’ll be others. Monkey’s are part of the primate family (currently called the Gorilla family in Wrath), and Foxes and Mastiffs are part of the wolf family.

Old Pets – Endangered Species

Unless Blizzard tells us they’re building an Ark, there remains the possibility that some of our favorite animals could be on the verge of extinction. So far there is nothing official about specific pets disappearing but there have been some rumors that the Cat Figurines used to spawn the Ghostsabers don’t seem to exist in the beta.

There are also some rumbling that Sian-Rotam and Echeyakee may be missing in action as well. For those that don’t know they are the only white lions found in the game and they are spawned from the following quests.

• Shy-Rotam
• Echeyakee

Now I happened to have two open stables slots so I decided to jump the gun and save these two from extinction.