Posts with tag stinker

A few new achievements were for added pet collectors in the latest PTR patch today, according to Wowhead. The small patch on the test realms contains three new achievements for players who collect 100, 125, and 150 non-combat pets.

• Petting Zoo awards Nuts' Acorn.
• Menagerie awards Brilliant Kaliri.
• Littlest Pet Shop awards Celestial Dragon.

Just as with previous pet collecting achievements (Shop Smart, Shop Pet...Smart, Lil' Game Hunter), our obsessive efforts will once again be rewarded with a unique pet. We've seen Nuts' Acorn in the patch 4.2 game files before, and the Celestial Dragon (pictured above) appeared in game files back in Wrath of the Lich King, but the Brilliant Kaliri is a new addition. Currently, there aren't any datamined pictures of the pet, but I can only assume it will be very similar to the Kaliri mobs found in Skettis and other zones from The Burning Crusade.

One thing I'm curious about with these pets is if they'll have any special animations or Easter eggs like previous pets have. If you remember, the skunk pet from the 50-pet achievement pays tribute to Pepé Le Pew from Looney Tunes by chasing nearby Black Tabby and Bombay cat pets.

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The news is already rolling out for the upcoming WoW Patch 4.2! Preview the new Firelands raid, marvel at the new legendary staff, and get the inside scoop on new quest hubs -- plus new Tier 12 armor!

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So hot on the heels of the best mob noise in game discussion, I thought I'd ask another question: What about the animations? We probably don't think about it too much, but the sounds and animations of PCs and NPCs alike probably end up making a lot of atmosphere we take for granted. It fills out the world and makes it feel more immersive, more real.

With that in mind, the noise topic got me thinking of what animations I really like. There's a lot of them that at least deserve a mention, from the howling of Coyotes to the nervous skittering of the Silithid. In the new animations, we get stuff like Stinker's escapades and the wildlife of Grizzly Hills going on with their every day activities.

Beyond that, even PC animations can have their awesome looks, such as a Draenei twirling a Polearm to attack or a male Blood Elf dying with Shakespearean dramatics. Ethereals also have some pretty graceful moves overall, even in the way their bandages move and their energy pulses.

What animations and graphics have you encountered in WoW that have made you stop and say, "Hey, that's pretty neat?"

If you're a serious noncombat pet collector, by now you probably have the Shop Smart, Shop Pet...Smart achievement, which rewards a Reeking Pet Carrier containing a very cute little skunk called Stinker. That was reason enough for me to get to 50 pets, but the owner of WarcraftPets.com (and the namesake of the Dalaran NPC who sells pet supplies, Breanni) had been told at BlizzCon that there was something unusual planned for the wee skunk in a future patch.

I didn't realize it at the time because the savages in my guild are still blowing up Crashin' Thrashin' Racers in raids instead of pulling out their usual pets, but it looks like 3.0.8 was the patch in question. Letters from Birdfall actually got video of Stinker's new behavior: when anyone nearby pulls out a Bombay Cat or a Black Tabby, he falls in love and starts chasing them, only to return to his owner with a broken heart. I'm off to go try this ingame, and suffice it to say that my own version of Pepé Le Pew is going to be out even more than he already is.

It was just a quick sentence that went by almost completely unnoticed, flew totally under the radar. But in an interview which WoW lead designer Jeff Kaplan gave to WoW Vault, he mentioned a heretofore unknown achievement reward coming up in Wrath that will definitely pass the smell test.

Current Wrath beta testers may have been able to peruse the approximately 500 achievements in the current build, but Kaplan has indicated that by the final release there will be 600-700 achievements for players to attempt. One of these achievements, Kaplan said, can be acquired by collecting pets. It seems that if you collect all the available pets in the game -- and I'm not sure if he meant tameable pets or collectible/vanity pets or both -- you will be granted a unique pet in the form of a skunk called Stinker. For my two "scents," I do love me some cute vanity pets, but I'm really glad that WoW doesn't come in a scratch-n-sniff version or with smell-o-vision.

So now it's time for you to earn a WoW Insider achievement! Anyone under the age of thirty who can guess the name of the character in the picture will get this achievement: "Le kittee quel terriblay odeur!!"