Lassirra over at The Hunters Mark was kind enough to induct Ranchero into her Hunter Hall of Fame for taming all  four spirit beasts. You can read about it here.

Hunter Hall of Fame Inductee

This week there were two new beta builds. There were a few talent changes for hunters, but for the most part hunters are still very much a work in progress, and the big changes/fixes to focus and talents aren’t implemented yet. Also, the pet design for Cataclysm remains missing in action.

Pets, on the other hand are still very much a part of the beta. Blizzard seems to be taking a “No Skin Left Behind” approach and the list of endangered species keeps dwindling. Most if not all of the “rare” skins have been found. In fact a couple of the skins that could only be found on rare mobs have been made common. The Strider Clutchmother and Mazzranache are two examples.

The Sapphire Hive Queen in Sholazar (sometimes referred to as the LSD Wasp of Doom) is reported as tameable in the current version of the beta.

And finally, Grunter the black boar in the blasted lands is reported to have a new look.

Yup, for the moment we have one tameable helboar. Keep in mind this is beta and there’s no guarantee that this will make it to release. But still this is cool.

Also, the image is not an actual screen shot of the new Grunter, but it is his new model. You can view a screen shot of him in this post over at the Petopia forums. If you want to stay on top of all the pet rumors and changes coming out of the beta head over Petopia . Until I get a beta key it’s where I go to get the skinny on pets.

Happy Hunting!

Tune in as I try struggle to get a word in edgwise, fail miserably, and resolve to just sitting there drinking beer and eating steak.

Finally if you have questions you’d like to ask us, please e-mail them to – huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com

• We’ll have a total of 41 talent points.
• Trees will be 31 points deep.
• You’ll receive your first talent point at level 10, and then get one talent point every other level.
• Once you spend your first point, you will be required to spend 31 points in that tree before you can spend points in another tree.
• Depending on which tree you spend your first point you’ll receive abilities associated with that tree.

Here’s a look at what Hunters will get when they choose a talent specialization. (thanks to the folks at MMO-C for their fine data-mining work).

Hunter – Marksmanship

A master archer or sharpshooter who excels in bringing down enemies from afar.

• Aimed Shot
• Marksmanship Hunter (+ ranged hit, pushback reduction)

Hunter – Survival
A rugged tracker who favors using animal venom, explosives and traps as deadly weapons.

• Explosive Shot
• Survival Hunter (+ ranged hit, pushback reduction)

Hunter – Beast Mastery
A master of the wild who can tame a wide variety of beasts to assist him/her in combat.

• Intimidation
• Beastmastery Hunter (+ranged hit, pushback reduction)

So what this means is at level ten, Survival hunters get Explosive Shot, Marksman hunters get Aimed Shot, and Beast Mastery hunters get intimidation. All hunters will get a version of an ability that is similar to the current Focused Aim talent.

Basically what’s happening is we’re getting some of what are now key talents at a very low level, and they won’t cost us talent points. I can’t say that Intimidation is all that exciting, but Explosive Shot and Aimed Shot at level 10 is alright in my book.

I’ll start sifting through trees tomorrow when I’m able to have big pot of coffee at my side.

Honestly if trolling and spamming is their big concern then might I suggest the following.

1. Require players to have a single forum handle that is used for all of their posts. Folks will still troll, but they’ll be easier to spot now.
2. Reduce the number of forums. Get rid of things like Guild Recruitment – Alliance and Guild Recruitment – Horde. Heck I’d even go so far as to remove the profession forums, class forums and role forums. Do it like you are for the Cataclysm Beta forums and have just one class forum.
3. Enforce the ban hammer. Maybe they do this now, I don’t really know. Keep posters on a very short leash.
4. Create a single announcement forum where only Blues can make topics. Put all of your important stuff in this forum.
5. Have Blue tracker (yes, it exists now) where folks can see all of the official responses.

To be honest I rarely post on the WoW forums. I do check the “Blue Tracker” and I am reading the Official Cataclysm Beta forums daily. Beyond that I tend to steer clear of the WoW forums.

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.