The Great Eight

Earlier this week Blizzard announced Eight new and unique taming challenges for hunters. 

“8 new rare tamable beasts have been added, each of which provides a unique taming challenge. Will you be the first hunter to tame Deth’tilac, the rarest and most powerful of them all? Players will need to progress through the Hyjal Regrowth and Molten Front daily questing areas in order to unlock access to the full gamut of taming challenges.”

Well hunters across the PTR have been hard at work trying to find these new and mysterious creatures and through their combined efforts we now know what the eight creature are. Fellow hunters, I present to you the Great Eight.

  1. Ban’thanlos – An owl who flies high in the air. You’ll have to fly up high, aggro him, and hope you survive the fall damage and 35K moonfires he does. He’s a spirit beast so you’ll need to be BM to tame him.
  2. Anhka – Another spirit beast that uses the same model as Gondria, only white. His (her?) damage scales with the amount of armor you’re wearing. The trick here is to get nekkid and tame. Also Anhka is immune to traps and CC.
  3. Magria – Yet another spriit beast that uses the same model as Gondria, only blue. Magria requires the same taming technique as Anhka.
  4. Solix – An orange lava spider. The key to this tame is you need to be doing the daily quest – Enduring the Heat. It provides you with a buff to protect you from the “fiery creatures”.
  5. Kirix – A green lava spider. Kirix has a buff called toxic presence which does AoE nature damage to anyone near it. I suspect lots of nature resist will be needed for this one.
  6. Anthriss – A yellow lava spider. He has something called the web of doom. The trick will be to jump in the lava and tame him while you’re submerged.
  7. Skitterflame – A red lava spider. This guy is too hot to tame so you need to keep him cooled. He has an energy bar that needs to be lowered. You’ll need to drop a frost trap and show off your kiting skills to nab this one. Marksman with readiness might be the way to go here. He also hits for about 24K a pop.
  8. Deth’Tilac – A purple laval spider. He has a buff called Molten Will which prevents taming and is removed at low health. The trick here? DPS him until he’s at low health. The challenge is he has about 36 million HP and needs to be dropped to about 8 million. Of course he hits hard too. There are reports of hunters spending as much as 30 minutes to get the tame.
So there you have it, the Great Eight. Three spirit beasts and five lava spiders. While I like the concept of unique creatures and taming puzzles, I’m a little underwhelmed here. There isn’t a one that really has me excited. I’m not a big fan of spiders and they’re mostly used for PvP. I also have Gondria, so I’m not sure that I need another one, okay, maybe the blue one. And I don’t find the owl that intriguing.

Honestly I was really hoping for eight new looks that we hadn’t seen before. Maybe even an entirely new pet family. I do like that fact that these pets aren’t simple drop a trap, tame and go. 

There’s a lot more of this expansion left so I hope that Blizzard continues and improves upon this concept in the remaining patches.

Good Hunting!

2 Comments on “The Great Eight”

  1. Sounds like a good alternative if everything else bores me later on, especially since Blizzard are adding a few elements to the taming process. I tend to tame pets towards the end of expansions.

    With 8 new pets I can be pretty sure that 6 of them will be completely uninteresting. I hope that at least 1 of the remaining two gives me the Thrill.

  2. I wasn't excited either. I feel bad about my disinterest, though, because it's not every day that Blizzard introduces fairly extensive class-specific content like this.

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