The big news

I'm sure by the time you get around to reading my blog you have already heard the big news about the upcoming patch incorporating a bunch of WotLK stuff. I'm not going to quote it again here, but if you really haven't seen it you shouldn't have too much trouble finding it.

One thing I do want to know is whether we will get our talent points refunded. I know that sometimes when they revamp a class' talent tree they will refund the points because of such a drastic change. Well I think adding new tiers of talents is a pretty drastic change, and with lots of talents that were previously very good becoming useless and vice versa, it only seems fair that we should be able to respec for free when the changes hit.

I've also been looking into the new hunter pet families and it's probably one of the things I am excited about the most. Not only do we get more pet stable slots, but there are way more pets to choose from and your choice isn't going to be based one of only a few viable pets that outperform everything else. Sadly it looks like cats aren't going to be much good with prowl as their special ability. Lots of people will be putting away their cats for something else now.

The one thing I've noticed though is out of all the families that are listed so far, there are still a lot missing. Of course it wouldn't make sense to have any of the underwater only beasts as pets, but what I'm not seeing are the rest of the dinos from Un'Goro, kodos, clefthoofs, basalisks, talbuks, or even a zhevra or stag. I realize most of these guys are normally neutral, but they still tend to pack a punch if you do decide to fight them.

I saw BRK's pics with his giant rhino, so that rules out the kodos and clefthoofs being too big, of course your raid would probably hate you if you brought one along. Basalisks seem like an obvious choice as they tend to have a stun ability (stone gaze or something like it), which would be very good for a pet. The Un'Goro dinosaurs don't seem too far fetched if we can have raptors and devilsaurs, and the pterrordax with a fear ability seems like an obvious choice for PvP hunters.

I suppose the talbuks, zhevras and stags are more grazing animals, and might not make sense when you think of training one to obey commands. I suppose they would be more like sheep or cows, and we all know how well they listen. That isn't to say that sending a cow in to off-tank a raid boss wouldn't be hilarious, but maybe Blizzard is being reasonable about this. I couldn't see these types having any special abilities anyway.

Lastly will be the new inscription profession. As I mentioned before, my hunter is really far behind on his herbalism, and with my lack of motivation to go back and level it up to where it should be, I might just drop it and go for inscription when the patch comes out. Can you send glyphs through the mail to other characters or is it going to be like enchanting is now?

I really want to try out the new druid shapeshifted form changing glyphs, but they will probaby be in pretty high demand, meaning high prices. Along those lines the, inscribers will be able to make some kind of parchment for enchanters to put their enchants on and sell as items. This means my priest can finally just send her enchants to my other characters and maybe even make some money selling them.

I ended up talking about the patch pretty much the whole post even thought it's been posted about enough already, but that just goes to show how much anticipation is built up about the new expansion and all the changes that will be going along with it.