On New Pets

one of the defining characteristics of the hunter class is our pets. some hunters go through pets like kleenex, some stick with the very first pet they tamed, others only care about pet dps and for a few it's all about the looks - vanity pets.

perhaps the ultimate vanity pet was the ghost wolf from dustwallow marsh, but that's no longer tamable as of this month. even prior to taming being removed for them, ghost wolves were stupidly hard to tame. you had to have just the right gems, a 70 shaman in your group, as much spell haste as you could get your hands on and a good bit of luck to make it happen.

having missed the ghost wolf boat (not that we were seriously thinking about it anyway), we wanted a new pet that was both nifty looking and rare. it also had to be a high dps pet, since we're a BM hunter and that's our bag. for us, high dps pets = cats; we're not big fans of ravagers.


as it happens, we already have a fairly nifty cat that we picked up in winterspring back when we were level 60. Icyhot's been with us throughout our entire outlands career and retiring him for a new pet is not something we take lightly. not just any kitty will do.

there are 19 tamable flavors of cats in the game right now. only one of them was unique enough to make it worthwhile, though; the ghost saber.

what makes the ghost saber so special? it's translucent! you can see some better screenshots here.

we tamed our new kitty a couple weeks ago (still trying to come up with a good name). it's obviously a sexy cat, so why don't you see more of them? two reasons: first, a lot of people don't even know these cats exist. they are a sometimes summoned when you loot [Cat Figurines] that spawn in northern darkshire. some people report having to loot 20+ figurines before a ghost saber spawns; I got mine on the third try. the second reason (more applicable to level 70 hunters) is the cat's level; 19-20. if you happen to tame this cat when your level 20, perfect. if you tame this cat at level 70 like we did you have a long and painful pet leveling road before you. we'd call it a labor of love, but honestly it's mostly labor.

fortunately for us, our timing was good and we tamed our ghost saber after patch 2.3.2 went live. patch 2.3.2 introduced a change to pet leveling speed, making them level faster from 20-60, to help keep pets in sync with the new character leveling speed changes that were introduced in patch 2.3 (prior to 2.3.2, hunters were sometimes out-leveling their pets due to increases in quest xp, which pets don't get).

so, how painful is leveling a new pet post-patch 2.3.2? it's pretty damn painful. in order for your pet to earn xp you have to kill mobs that are at least green to you. for a level 70 hunter, than means you have to be killing mobs that are at least level 63. what makes it rough, especially for BM hunters, is that until your pet reaches about level 60 it's almost useless in combat; can't take much damage, growl is resisted because it's too low a rank, misses a lot and all hits are glancing blows for maybe 1-2 points of damage each. that means that you're going to spend a lot of time either kiting mobs around the countryside or *shudder* in melee combat.

the first several pet levels go pretty fast. my new cat went from level 20 to level 40 after about 3 hours of perforating ogres in nagrand. once into the 40's things slow down noticeably. the amount of xp required for a pet to level goes up in much the same way that player xp requirements do, so this wasn't a huge surprise (just a lot more work). it took a few nights of grinding ogres in nagrand (money and cloth), buzzards in terokkar (meat for [Kibler's Bits] for raid nights) and demons in netherstorm (money, cloth and aldor rep) to get up to level 60. then it *really* slows down because the pet leveling bonus that came with patch 2.3.2 only applies up to level 60. on the bright side, though, grinding becomes slightly easier from 60 on up because your pet can actually hold agro if you're careful (only use stings and auto-shot) and it starts to do some real damage of it's own. note that I said easier, not faster. going from 60 to 61 took a couple nights of farming bog lords (helping out one of our guild alchs) and our new cat is about half-way through 61 as we write this.

we've read that taking your pet along to instances post-60 is a faster way to level it then simply grinding. we think it's bad form to show up for an instance with an under-leveled pet and expect everyone else to carry you through, though, so we'd only recommend doing this on guild runs or with close friends. if you do bring a low-level pet along, we feel it's only fair to warn the party because it *will* impact your overall dps. it shouldn't cause any unusual agro issues, though. we brought our ghost saber along on a slabs run the other night and things went fine. unfortunately, we didn't pay close attention to how much xp our pet was getting in slabs so we can't really say if instance-leveling your pet is faster than solo grinding or not.

now... who's got name ideas?