Pretty much. There are some fairly obscure tactical situations in raids where they can be used[1], but even in those cases any pet works as well as any other.
[1] Specifically, in some raid fights players’ add-ons will put a raid marker on a player depending on what effect has been cast on him, to point out players who (for instance) will damage anyone who comes within ten feet of them. However, it can also be useful to have a permanent raid marker on a given player. In those cases, the player can pop out a non-combat pet and mark the pet, allowing both mechanics to do their work.
Yup. Non-combat pets (aka vanity pets or companions) are just there for looks. Some of them have fun idle animations or responses to emotes aimed at them, but that’s it.
The only exception I can think of is the Disgusting Oozeling pet–that one will actually put a debuff on you and any party/raid member in a certain radius.
ETA:
To further explain Tom Scud’s point, you sometimes want to mark someone in a raid so that they can be spotted easily, usually so one or more people can run to them. However, various bossmods will sometimes give and remove raid markers during boss encounters, to indicate buffs or debuffs on players, which would potentially overwrite the person’s previous mark. So instead, you have them pull out a pet and mark the pet. It will stay in the player’s vicinity, allowing people to find them.
The Mechanical Yeti will fight for a very limited amount of time. And Sleepy Willie (one of the Children’s Week pets) will zap any nearby critter (level-1 “ambient” animals) on a set schedule (every 3 minutes or something).
ETA: The Mechanical Yeti may not count as a companion pet, actually…it has charges, so it’s not permanent.
IIRC, that only applies to the item, which has both a cooldown and a limited number of charges–*not *the Tranquil Mechanical Yeti (the actual pet).
That’s what I’m talking about as an idle animation. The oozeling pet from LIitA will eat critters, Lil’ KT will zap them, Mini Diablo will scare other pets, etc. Probably the most useful vanity pet right now is Lil’ XT–he’ll destroy various toys, including the train set.
Ooh…that reminds me! There’s an awesome interactive idle animation between two pets. If you happen to have the Bombay Cat, and you ever notice someone standing around with Stinky or whatever the skunk pet (that you get at 50 pets) is, (or vice versa…if you have Stinky and see a Bombay out), pull out the cat (or the skunk). The skunk will start chasing the cat around (like Pepe LePew, mistaking the cat for a lady skunk).
Yeah, I have a lot of those charge-based items in my bank. Can’t bear to use them up… so I just never use them. :smack:
ETA:
This also works with the Black Tabby (which is how I learned about it).
The biggest change is with Stamina–everyone’s getting a lot more of it. Hopefully we’ll move away from the current paradigm of constant huge heals and massive overhealing where bad RNG means your tank is flat, even if you everything 100% right.
I’m super-excited for all of the Warrior changes and JC and Alch recipes… except for the fact that they made fucking SAFEGUARD our uncrittable talent. Safeguard. THE worst talent in the entire fucking Protection Tree. DKs got a bit screwed, too, but at least theirs has some theoretical uses. IMO, they should have swapped out the second half of Toughness. Instead, we’re stuck with *two *half-useless but half-required talents. Sigh.
Even setting aside Stamina, which they warned us about early on, the increases in the rest of the stats are pretty stunning, though that’s probably partial compensation for the lack of secondary stats. But there was a level 81 blue two-handed weapon I saw that had more DPS than a similar weapon that drops off freakin’ Arthas.
To add to the list, the Durotar Scorpion bites (and poisons!) its owner occasionally. The first time I noticed this I was wandering around saying “WTF do I keep getting poisoned?”
Dear Og, I didn’t see that, that sucks, but am I reading the Paladin prot tree correctly here? Are they getting their crit immunity from Holy Shield? Ie it won’t be passive.
It’s called a gear reset, it’s the only way Blizzard have a chance of making the new content remotely challenging for characters wearing ICC raid gear while still being doable for characters hitting level 80 in quest greens.
The pet given at Blizzcon, if you’re a North American, was named Murky. He’s blue-green. And unfortunately $500 ain’t gonna happen. If you want one of these babies, be prepared to pay close to $2K. No, I’m not kidding. There were only 5,000 of them produced (they were on scratch-off cards given at Blizzcon 2005) and most of them have already been claimed. Gurky was the European version of the same pet–I think he’s either orange or pink.
Yep. Whichever one isn’t orange is pink. They look just like Murky.
I have this one. My friends and I did two hundred arena matches to get this guy. That might not sound so bad, except that we all suck at Arena and hate it with the fury of a thousand suns. It was very demoralizing to lose almost every match. The cool thing about Murkimus, though, is he makes the “baby murloc” sound (same one as Murky) when you click on him.
Again, you’re low on the price, I think. I haven’t checked lately, but you’re probably going to pay at least $100, probably quite a bit more. You might have better luck locally through Craigslist or something. Grunty makes more of a mechanical baby murloc sound (like it’s inside a helmet). The cool thing about Grunty is that if you know anybody with the Zergling pet from the original Collectors’ Edition and you put them both out at the same time, they’ll fight and one will kill the other in a rather spectacular bloody fashion. Grunty explodes into green goo. I forget what the Zergling did–my Grunty is apparently a terrible shot, because the Zergling killed him almost every time.
In other news, I have a new purpose in my WoW life: I WILL have the Dark Phoenix mount. Oh, yes, preciousssss…it will be mine.
Got a look at the new Troll and Worgen druid forms yesterday. I’m staying Tauren that’s for sure, those models are ugly.
ICC10 Teusday. Blow through everything up to Sindragoa (Picked up Facelifter from Professor, yay!) and then just stall there for the rest of the night and last night.
I don’t know what we’re doing wrong. Phase one and two we can pretty much sleep through, but when Phase three comes everything just sort of falls apart. We set up a healer and tank rotation to drop stacks, have someone full time on ice blocks so people don’t suffocate, tank swaps are clean. She was down to 2% last night before we wiped on our first attempt, 5% on our third attempt, but then we couldn’t get her past 20%.
Sometimes it’s the dps who start dropping first, sometimes it’s the healers, or a tank. Right now we’re not sure what to do to improve or what it is we need to fix. It’s just really frustrating.
After wiping for an hour and a half on Sindy we start our ICC25, first wing only. Tanking shoulders drop from Gunship and I pass them up because if I take them I’ll break my 2 piece bonus. I can’t help feel that I should have taken them, though they went to a guildy for offspec so they weren’t DE’d. Of course Saurfang seems to have misplaced all his warrior tokens so I doubt I’ll be getting an upgrade that way anytime soon.
Yesterday was just really annoying for raiding. And don’t get me started on the random dungeon finder putting my warrior tank in HoR twice.
SFG, hit it right on the nose. I sense a confidence issue here, winterhawk, though I have no idea why. You seem to know your shit, and tanking is all about awareness moreso than anything else (IMO - feel free to disagree), so I can’t imagine that it would take you very long to pick up the movement in the twilight realm. Obviously, with limited time it makes the situation put more pressure upon you, but I have no doubt that you can pick it up. Just make sure to keep an orb behind one of your shoulders or just to the left/right of where you’re looking and you’ll be fine. I found that doing two abilities than tapping strafe would keep me lined up fine. Also, during Twilight Cutter, threat shouldn’t be your largest priority, so much so that I think it’s perfectly reasonable (especially as you’re learning) to tell your DPS to not DPS while it’s happening and to just focus on staying alive (if they have a chance of overtaking you while you focus on movement). This may hurt you come P3, but it will smooth out the learning curve.
Is this guild an alt-guild for the “elite” (puke) guilds on the server? Just wondering, since you’ve had to PUG a lot the past couple of weeks. I would find that infinitely frustrating, TBH, as it clearly seems like your guild has the ability to down Halion (normal) the first day. If you’re PUGing healers, though, that’s seriously problematic. I’m sure Caponus was already doing this, but I’d max out HoTs on the tank going into the Twilight Realm and have them blow a CD so that they could survive the second or two for the rest of the raid to join them. If you have the Cutter and curse/dispel mechanics worked out, there’s no reason for you to not down him. Good luck in the future, and keep my guild in mind for the future (particularly Cataclysm?).
Sorry to hear about your crappy raid day. As far as Sindragosa goes, have you all tried wearing one piece of FrR gear to help the healing? Oh, and are you doing this on Heroic or normal? In either case, the biggest key is to break out any healer that gets tombed immediately. It will force a tank to use a CD to survive a Frost Breath if the other tank couldn’t drop their stacks, but on normal, that’s survivable. Having a healer with UM, and one tombed means you have one healer for the entire raid, which it is very easy to fall behind on. Aura Mastery FrR Aura is also very helpful in those situations, or of course Divine Sacrifice/Bubble. If you got her to 2% repeatedly, there’s no reason for you to not get her down; it can just be frustrating because you have to go through P1/2 to get to the real meat of the fight. Last night, my guild, who has been farming Heroic Sindragosa for a while now, took over an hour to get her down because of stupid mistakes and poor play. It’s a tough fight, so don’t get too discouraged. Good luck on the next attempt.
I think it’s just more of Blizzard’s poor wording. I can’t imagine that they’d make Paladins’ crit immunity depend on a stacking buff that could be completely removed. I think the talent (reduces their chance to be crit) **and **(gives them the stacking buff that increases block and does damage when it blocks).
That was my original thought, but I couldn’t remember for sure, so I went with the safer number. (I’m pretty sure $500+ is actually what Spectral Tiger mounts go for.)
Yup, same here. We tried playing seriously for a while, and then in the interests of getting everything done in a timely fashion, we started facerolling our way through things. I made a Spellpower set for my DK.
This one, I’m pretty sure of, because I check it occasionally. And I check it because I’m waiting for the price to go up high enough to make a tidy profit on my extra code. (I bought two online access passes last year: one for the pet for myself, and one to hold on to for a while.) I’m waiting for the price to get consistently high enough to pay for both tickets and make a profit.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: at least one person in your raid should run Acheron, preferably a raid lead or assist. Knowing (a) what damage people took and (b) what heals they got immediately prior to dying is essential.
Take them next time. Part of what makes good tanks is picking up lots of odds’n’ends pieces, so you can trade pieces out for fights *and *swap set bonus pieces as you get upgrades for other parts. You might want to mention that you’d be banking the shoulders until you got your next tier piece and/or specify that you’re going for a sidegrade mainspec roll, in case your guild takes those into account. But IMO, grab them next time.
No. The guild only transferred to this server about two months ago. We just happen to have picked up a couple of alts from raiders whose mains are in the top guild on the server.
We’ve just been losing people, from a combination of guild drama and IRL issues and the usual summer and pre-expac slump.
It’s not the ph1-p2 transition that’s the problem. It’s ph2-ph3, when half the raid heads back up top. It only took us one or two attempts to learn that we needed to dump HOTs on the shadow tank and have them blow CDs on their way in (as well as wait a couple of seconds before jumping through for everyone else–I died to a body pull one time when I beat the tank down there).
Really, *really *fucking frustrating. We should have had it, and the group that stuck around got 10-man down after only a couple of attempts. (I couldn’t stay 'cause I had to pack–I’m leaving straight from work for the airport.)
Wiped on Malygos last night. There’s no reason we should have–everyone knew the fight (more or less) and we all had good gear and everything. But we wiped like four times. Couldn’t figure out what was going on. I hate that bastard; I’ve never managed to take him down. Stupid sparks. Don’t they know I can’t see blue?
Are you using a bossmod? I use Deus Vox Encounters (DXE), and it gives me a warning as soon as he starts casting, so I can move out of the way before the static field is up. There should also be one marked person that everyone should be stacking on–even if you can’t see the sparks themselves, you should be able to see when everyone else is moving.
I will, though I’m sure now that I’ve said that they’ll never drop again, along with the pants off of Marrowgar.
Normal Sindragosa, we don’t do any hard modes.
I do know how our mage kept dying, she would go nuts even with Unchained Magic on her and pretty much explode at some point during Phase three.
We had no holy paladin last night so it was myself on my resto shaman, a disc priest, and a Tree. Healing wasn’t bad, I had set up a rotation before we started so our healers would know when to clear stacks. We only got her to 2% once, usually it’s at 18-20% that we wipe. I’ll suggest the FR gear to our RL and see if he thinks that would help.
I think we’re extending our lockout so we have a full 3 hours to wipe on her next week. Not looking forward to the Lich King fight.
And can anyone tell me what this icon is? It’s a circle with a ? in the middle of it that appeared right in the middle of my action bars last night during ICC. It’s happened a few other times and I can’t figure out what it is or why it suddenly appears. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like.
Yeah, part of it is a confidence issue, though not much. The way I see it, there are two issues I’m having trouble with:
Even though I run my camera out pretty far (like max distance) during raids most of the time, I can’t seem to see the orb over my shoulder. It’s like it’s just a little bit too far back and thus out of my range. I’m not sure I can run the camera out any more, but if I could then that would help.
I’ve never been a good strafer. That’s something I just need to work on (and I have been, the last couple of days–I’ve gotten better.) I’m a combination keyboard and mouse turner, but the way I’ve got my keys set up, strafe left is on Q, strafe right is on E (I think these are default) but my normal WASD movement is on my arrow keys (don’t ask me to change this–I’ve been doing it since 2006 and thus it would be much easier for me to just learn to work around it than it would be to change it). The keys I use for tanking single target stuff are 4, 5, 8 and 10. Which means that until I get the hang of the movement (and I will–it just takes time) then it’s very awkward and requires either three hands (which I obviously don’t have) or a long reach from Q and E or the arrow keys to 8 and 10 (which is what I’m doing).
I think if I can solve the “I can’t see the orb” problem then the other one will sort itself out with strafing practice. It’s awkward, but I don’t have to do it for very long. Also, if they stop insisting that I spin for the entire fight, it will be much, much easier. Even the herky-jerky way I was doing it before works fine for 10 seconds at a pop.
