Mend Pet

This is one thing about Wrath of the Lich King that has actually caught my attention.  The 51-point Beast Mastery talent: “Beast Mastery” (What an original name!)  The talent, as of right now, says:

You master the art of Beast training, teaching you the ability to tame exotic pets and increasing your total amount of Pet Skill Points by 5.

Exotic, you say?  Oooo!  How intriguing.  Even more intriguing is how little we (and the developers themselves) know about what exactly this could mean.  My first reaction was non-combat pet training!  Wouldn’t it be cool to see that little bunny hopping along the road, and instead of giving it the standard drive-by axe-murdering, you could tame it and keep it in your pocket!  Cute!

But then I thought, well, as cool as that would be, I don’t think it’s a talent-point worthy cause.  /sadface.

Well, if you haven’t heard the news, Exotic pets seem to be more along the lines of Devilsaurs and the other beast-like creatures that have been previously untamable.

Coooool.

So this has got me asking:  What do YOU wish was tamable? I’m going to say a couple that would be really cool are Zevras and Giraffes, I could start my own ersatz petting zoo!  Well, if only there were more stable slots…

A.K.A.  “Why I did not sign up for the Wrath Beta.”

With the opening of the Beta for WotLK, the news about the new expansion has hit the world with quite a lot of force.  With my horrible memory, I must say I don’t quite remember how bad it got before the Burning Crusade was released, but this time around, the drama is already going strong.

Even though the expansion isn’t set to be released until at least November, some guilds have already fallen apart.  Many guilds have stopped bothering with progression, and players are quitting the game left and right to wait for the expansion.  They say, what’s the point of progression when in 4-6 months, we’ll be replacing our T6 with greens?  Sure, that’s one way to think of it.

But that’s not how I think of it.  If you are going to go along with that kind of thinking, you could just as easily say, what’s the point of playing WotLK when the third expansion will be out in just 2 years?  It’s the mentality that you are playing to get the best gear, and if there is some reason that in the future, it is all going to be replaced, then there is no reason to get it.

I can’t say I understand that myself, though.  Sure, I want to get better gear, and it’d be great to have the best gear out there – but to me, the gear is just the means, the goal is to see all of the terrific content that Blizzard has designed for us to play.  Just because the expansion is coming out soon, and there will be more content to see there doesn’t mean I will stop playing.  In fact, it motivates me!  I need to work extra hard if I want to see as much content as I can BEFORE it becomes obsolete!

Unemployed is working toward a planned Onyxia raid right now, and that is what has gotten me thinking.  I wish I had worked harder to see things like Onyxia and Naxxramas before the Burning Crusade came out.  I feel like I’ve missed a book or two in a comic book series.  Sure, you can catch up if you miss them, but it’s just not the same.  And now they are rare editions, it takes a lot of work to get a chance to see those old instances and raids.

So I say to you, stop panicking!  Cherish what we have now, savour it, stop reading all the Wrath of the Lich King news, and get back to your raids.  You will see it all in due time, when it is ready to be played, and you will have another couple of years that will go by all to quickly before the next expansion is released.