Posts with tag stable

As promised, there's a new version of the Hunter class Q&A up on the official forums. Very little has changed from the previous version, actually, but they did add the following question:

Q: Do we have plans to increase the number of stable slots available to hunters?

A:Obviously we increased it a lot in Wrath of the Lich King. We want to try and keep the pet as some kind of decision - they aren't supposed to be like mounts or titles where you just collect as many as you want. We expanded the size so that players could have say a Tenacity pet for soloing and a Ferocity pet for raiding, but we don't want every hunter to have every family available here. Now one potential problem are the Spirit Beasts, which are collected by hunters and not trivial to replace. We have also discussed expanding the Spirit Beast concept to have rare skins of other pet families (that otherwise don't convey a combat bonus). If we do that, we'd probably have to expand the stable slots.

We've also considered a model where the hunter doesn't even need a stable and can work more like a warlock where they can just summon their pets whenever they want - with the remote stable ability from the dual-spec feature, we're pretty close to that already. If we went this route then maybe the stable could just become pet storage in the same way your bank has all those Invader's Scourgestones and Zul'Gurub bijous that you don't use often but can't bear to part with.

That's all we can see that's changed with the Q&A.

You may recall a few days back that we told you about new stable slots coming with Wrath of the Lich King. It looks like Blizzard wasn't just whistling dixie, because they're in. When I was switching from my level 65 devilsaur to my beefier level 70 dire raven for a Nexus run over on the Beta server, I noticed that the stable boy was offering me two more stable slots!

The stables slots costs 50 gold for the third one, and 150 gold for the fourth one, giving you a total of 4 slots. This means you have room for one pet from each talent tree, plus a spot for a specialized pet (such as a scorpid for PvP) or an exotic pet (and yes, devilsaurs will be exotic only) or two.

Combine this with the abolishing of the need to tame pets simply to learn skills and auto leveling, and it continues to look like pet management should be easier, funner, and more efficient in Wrath.

Reader V3T sends word that the folks behind Auctioneer did a long testing session last night, and they say that the latest builds of all the Auctioneer addons are now working under 2.3. They are, we're told, still in alpha, but V3T says they are stable enough to use and that all functions are working-- including BottomScanner, an awesome little addon that finds bargain auctions for you as they happen.

That cheering you hear is frugal and money conscious players everywhere happy to have a new build of Auctioneer under 2.3. Preview versions of the addons can be found on Auctioneer's Preview page. V3T also says they're looking for more usage and feedback, so if you do download it, make sure to report any bugs or errors and let them know what works or what doesn't.

Petopia (which has been a great Hunter resource for a long time, but only recently added a great blog to the mix), has a really interesting note for Hunters: you can now, apparently, tame an extra pet.

It's always been annoying to be a Hunter in search of a new pet-- you have to either stable or permanently abandon the one you have with you, which leaves you without a pet for a while. And considering that taming new pets is how you learn new pet abilities, it's a pretty important thing to do. So for a long time, Hunters have asked for a way to tame new pets without having to go without their old ones for a while. And apparently, that's what Petopia found is now live in the new patch-- when you want to tame a new pet, you need only dismiss (not abandon) the pet you have, and you are able to somehow tame another pet.

If you then go back to the Stable Master, your dismissed pet will have been placed in any stable spots you have open. If you don't have one open, but then buy one, Petopia reports that the dismissed pet will appear in your purchased slot, and that all three pets will be available to you, even after you log in and out. You can even dismiss and tame a pet multiple times-- at one point, Petopia had a total of five pets (two inaccessible from the stable) to juggle at a time.

This a huge feature to be undocumented, which actually leads me, and a few other players, to believe that it's a bug. People who have tried it report that some strange things are happening-- selected pets are showing up in the wrong place and so on (although from what I've seen, no pets have actually been lost yet-- then again, there's always a first time, so go for this at your own risk). It could be, also, that this was a feature Blizzard was building in, but didn't get done in time for the patch, and is being found in its early state by Hunters. In the meantime, now might be the best time to go learn those new pet abilities you've haven't been able to pick up because you didn't want to abandon your three best friends.