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Get your Winter Squid and Snowy Owl while you still can
Pet collectors and fishermen take note -- the wintery months are almost behind us, and with them, the appearance of wintery pets and fish as well. The Snowy Owl, located in Winterspring, will be gone as of March 20 -- the onset of the Spring Equinox out here in the real world. Pet collectors should head to Winterspring now to capture these pets, as they won't be making another appearance until December of this year. This pet is part of the Kalimdor Safari achievement, so if you'd like that Zookeeper title, head to Winterspring and grab an owl of your very own today. In addition to the Snowy Owl, the sly Winter Squid is also prone to disappearing come spring. For most players, the apparent hibernation of squid won't really amount to anything. However, if you're working on The Oceanographer achievement, you'll want to catch a squid before they disappear until next winter. The pesky squid can be fished off the coasts of Swamp of Sorrows, Blasted Lands, Tanaris, Badlands, the Cape of Stranglethorn, and also around Sunken Temple. Both the fish and the pet have their own summery counterparts. However, while players may begin finding Summer Bass in fishing pools immediately after the Spring Equinox, the Qiraji Guardling for pet collectors will not be appearing until the onset of the Summer Solstice in June.
Clarification on bonus rolls for mounts, pets, and heirlooms
Ever wondered if using a bonus roll on a particular boss would actually grant you another chance at a mount or pet? Item and Rewards Designer Owen Landgren took to Twitter to clarify where bonus rolls do and do not work for specific items. Bonus rolls do not work for Garrosh heirloom weapons. These only have a random chance to drop into your bags on each kill in flex, normal, or heroic. Sha of Anger, Galleon, Nalak, and Oondasta mounts can be obtained with a bonus roll. Raid mounts, such as the Reins of the Astral Cloud Serpent, cannot be obtained with a bonus roll. Kor'kron Shaman's Treasure (shaman transmog gear) cannot be won with a bonus roll. Battle pets which drop from Siege of Orgrimmar bosses can be won with a bonus roll and they do not affect your chance at getting regular loot (winning a pet will not replace potential loot you could have won). However, the Quivering Blob from Throne of Thunder can only be won with a bonus roll on LFR difficulty and not on normal or heroic. I'll admit I was surprised to learn that the Garrosh weapons could not be won with a bonus roll. Blizzard's reasoning is they do not want you choosing between account-wide and character-level power when you bonus roll. Hopefully these clarifications will help you better spend your precious bonus rolls.
Scattered Shots: Hunter pets we'd like to see in our stables
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing potential new hunter pets in Warlords of Draenor. Blizzard seems to have really enjoyed teasing hunters this expansion with the Dire Beast spell. Dire Beast is a talent which summons a random beast to fight for you for 15 seconds. Each zone in Pandaria has three different beasts it chooses from, and there are several instances where it will summon a beast which you're currently unable to tame. The most notable examples being the pterrorwings on Isle of Thunder and the gulp frogs on Timeless Isle. There's also several beast families which have been in the game for a long time but remain untamable. Occasionally, these are added in a new expansion, such as the basilik and water strider in Mists of Pandaria. As a pet collector, I have high hopes that we'll see both old and new pet families added in Warlords of Draenor to fill our stables. Let's start with a family of beast so obvious that they already have a unique spell attributed to them in the game.
Snowy Owls now available in Winterspring for pet collectors
Saturday, December 21 marked the Winter Solstice out here in the real world -- and in the World of Warcraft, it marked the official beginning of the winter season. For pet collectors, this means that the Snowy Owl is once again spawning in Winterspring, and will continue to spawn all winter long. Keep in mind that these pets are rare spawns, and therefore are slightly harder to find than your usual pet. The Snowy Owl can be found all over Winterspring -- there are no specific spawn locations. Pet quality starts at Poor and goes all the way up to the coveted Rare. While we do know that December 21 was the first day of winter in Warcraft, we don't quite know as of yet when these owls will stop spawning -- last year it was the end of February. However, if the spawns are matching up to real life spring, the owls should disappear at the Spring Equinox, which is March 20, 2014. Because this isn't really guaranteed or known information at the present time, it's highly recommended to simply go catch your owl now, while we know they're available. The Snowy Owl is required for the Kalimdor Safari achievement, which in turn is required for the World Safari achievement. Completing World Safari will net you the Zookeeper title, so players that would like the title should definitely go pick up the pet. And even if you don't care about the title, I'd pick up an owl anyway. With fast attack speeds and deadly abilities like Predatory Strike, they're a nice addition to any Battle Pet team.
Scattered Shots: Why every hunter needs a tallstrider pet
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing how awesome tallstriders are, along with some other interesting hunter pets. I still deeply regret abandoning my hydra pet back in Wrath of the Lich King. A bug in one of the daily quests in Sholazar Basin allowed hunters to tame a ghostly hydra, oozeling, or crocodile. Blizzard fixed the bug, but allowed everyone to keep their pets. In my defense, we were only allowed to have four pets in our stable at the time, and there was spirit beasts to be had. Do you know how heavily camped Loque'nahak was back then? You think cross-realm zones are bad? Before Wrath added a couple of extra stable slots (which cost gold, by the way), hunters only had two stable slots throughout vanilla and BC in addition to our active pet. Then Cataclysm came along and let us tame a whopping 25 pets. I'm pretty sure the server hosting the Petopia forums spontaneously exploded in the back of a room somewhere, ruining some poor IT guy's day. It felt like it could never get any better for a pet collector. Then patch 5.3 came along and Blizzard said: "You guys want, like, 30 more pet slots? Sure, here you go." The new slots were welcome, but just how does one tame 55 unique pets?. Once you've tamed every rare and hunted down every spirit beast, what else is there? The tallstrider, of course. Get one in every color and have your own fleet of tallstriders. Tallstriders are awesome! Maybe even more awesome than sporebats.
Breakfast Topic: What's the most difficult thing in the game to farm?
My warrior recently found herself farming a lot of Khorium in order to build her Turbo-Charged Flying Machine, and while flying a seemingly endless number of circuits in Nagrand in order to get the metal (which is a rare spawn on other Outland ore nodes), I started to wonder where this farm fell in relation to other grinds. Khorium sometimes cooperates by spawning regularly, but this time, it was its usual, awful self. I'm sure the Burning Crusade-era players can relate. And yet, somehow I still don't think that khorium is the worst thing in the game to farm. Off the top of my head, I can think of others that are or have been equally bad or worse: Non-combat pets A lot of farmable non-combat pets (e.g., the dragon whelps, the firefly, the Fox Kit) have a 1-in-1,000 drop rate and a limited number of mobs up at a given time. Combat pets Waiting for a particular pet to spawn somewhere and then finding and taming it before someone else does can be maddening if you're consistently unlucky. Fishing Accomplished Angler is justifiably famous for being stuffed with requirements full of RNG. Let's talk about the year it took me to get Mr. Pinchy's Magical Crawdad Box! On second thought, let's not. The Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest This disappeared in Cataclysm, and with it went all the work that went into farming up bug parts and Elementium Ingots, which is where I got stuck in the chain. (So close, and yet so far.) The Insane This almost goes without saying, although it's easier these days than it used to be. Your thoughts, readers? What's the toughest thing in the game to farm?
3 things the Black Market Auction House needs to succeed
The Black Market Auction House seems to be a controversial topic. Some players love the idea, while some players utterly detest the idea with every ounce of their being. Regardless, the theory behind the Black Market Auction House is a solid one. Removing gold from the WoW economy is something that is desperately needed in the days of Auction House kings, in order to balance everything out. If the Black Market Auction House works, it'll even out player gold to a reasonable level, keeping items on the regular Auction House at reasonable prices. And for those who spent the tremendous amount of time it takes to amass their fortunes, it means that they finally have something to spend their reward on, something tangible and -- let's face it -- something pretty cool. In expansions past, we've only had one or two really major gold sinks to speak of, whether crafted mounts, or really useful mounts purchased from a vendor. Once those mounts were purchased or crafted, there was a vast sea of nothing for people to spend that gold on. But the potential for abuse runs pretty high with this thing. And as I pondered the potential side effects of the Black Market Auction House, I realized there are certain things that really need to be in place to make it work effectively.
Is the thought of the Black Market Auction House bugging you?
Ever since the Black Market Auction House was mentioned, people wondered what the heck would be in it. We were told it would sell rare items, but what we weren't told was the extent of those rare items. It's not just level 90 recipes and things along those lines; it's also rare mounts and items that have been removed from game. This includes the elusive tier 3 that was lost presumably for all time when Naxxramas was changed from a 40-man raid to a 10- and 25-man raid and moved from the Eastern Plaguelands up to Northrend. As shown in the screenshot above, this also includes the Ashes of Al'ar, a rare mount drop from Kael'thas Sunstrider in Tempest Keep. And that seems to be a hot topic for a lot of players right now, particularly players who already have the mount and obtained it the old-fashioned way. It's an even bigger topic among those who don't necessarily have gigantic piles of gold stashed away, because it's obvious the prices on these items are going to be incredibly high. Some have said that Blizzard is catering to the 1% of players who have stockpiled mass amounts of gold. Well, that's not it at all, really. And the Black Market Auction House is something that we've needed for a very, very long time here.
Mists of Pandaria: Black Market Auction House offers rare and removed items
According to reports by MMO-Champion, the Black Market Auction House is now live on beta realms. Attempts to confirm this by chatting with Madam Goya just kicked back a UI error at me, but there seem to be plenty of people stopping by to check her out. Madam Goya makes her home at the Tavern of the Mists in the Veiled Stair, north of the Valley of the Four Winds. She's not alone, as Wrathion is still quietly hanging out in the tavern as well. So what's available at the Black Market? A little bit of everything, including rare mounts like the Ashes of Al'ar, pictured above. Also included are pets that require a grind to obtain such as the Sen'jin Fetish, previously available only from grinding out Argent Tournament reputation, and high-level crafting recipes, although we don't have a lot of information on what those recipes are exactly. However, perhaps the most interesting note to glean from this is that the Black Market Auction House appears to be carrying the original tier 3 sets that were removed from the game when Naxxramas was moved to Northrend and changed from a 40-man raid to a 10- and 25-man raid in Wrath of the Lich King. Obviously, this means that those looking to transmogrify into these rare tier sets can now pay to do so -- provided they've got the gold to fling around.
Patch 3.2 PTR: Finding the Raptor Pets
For those of us who like to collect stuff in WoW, one of the cooler announcements for patch 3.2 was the inclusion of a whole new set of raptor hatchling pets, dropped around the world by rare and elite raptors. Of course, it was also an announcement of dread for serious collectors who can tell horror stories of killing thousands upon thousands of slimes and dragons for rare pets before. But will it be all as bad as that? WoW fansites have been on the case.Mania, maven of Hunter pets, has also been looking into the drop rates and drop mobs, and has compiled a handy chart on her blog. Between Mania and the news on Warcraft Pets, it seems we can mostly confirm that the rare raptors (such as, for example, Takk the Leaper) will always drop their pets, while those that drop only off elites have a very rare drop rate more similar to the aforementioned slimes or dragons.
Five old world vanity pets you may have missed
It's a good time to be a pet collector. We're getting recognition, cool toys for our pets, and even an achievement series especially for us. If you're new to the world of pet collecting, or have just dabbled in it so far though, you may be struggling a bit to get those last few pets for the achievement. In the spirit of helping out my fellow pet enthusiasts, here's a few rarer or lesser known old world pets that you might have overlooked, especially if you started the game after Burning Crusade.
Popular hunter pet site Petopia gets a facelift, new informational pages
Here's a nice little bit of news for all leveling Hunters, people looking into starting a hunter alt, or people looking to switch out or tweak out their current pet: the popular depository of all things Hunter pet related in WoW, Petopia, has gotten a facelift and a few handy new reference pages. The quick links and references seem to be a lot more streamlined now, and it should be even easier to find information. Some pages are still making the transition, and some of the pet pictures have not been updated to the new color scheme, but Mania assures us she is working on that. In the meantime, she's also added a few new pages to the library, namely the Retired Pet page and the "Fake" Pet Skills page. The former deals with formerly tamable pets that can no longer be tamed, while the latter deals with pet skills that are present during the newbie hunter taming quests, but not on any permanently tamed pet. I rather like both of the new pages. Not only should the information be helpful (if sad) to any newbie wondering where they can get that awesome ghost wolf, but the pages were a nice walk down memory lane for this old hunter. I remember when I made first Tauren Hunter, I was always disappointed that Swoop wasn't an actual bird pet skill, and I was considering a pet crab for my Dwarf Hunter at one point, and would have loved to have a thorny pet to add a bit more damage and threat power for tanking. Crabs could probably use some love anyway, as they seem to be competing with the likes of Sporebats and Bears for most neglected pet family. But anyway, if you're a Hunter, and you haven't checked out Petopia in a while, it's worth a look, there's some pretty cool stuff going on over there.
