Well, that answers that question! It's hard to go for anything but the purple anyway, purple being my favourite colour (followed closely by teal, which isn't an option for the little Shale Spiders!) Finding the appropriate colour once in his natural habitat proved a little tricky, but eventually I prevailed!
(I dunno about you, but the size of my frost trap on that bitty little elemental-beastie made me giggle. It's so big, and he's so small! Whoops, sorry, she in this case!)
Meet Darémyth [dah'r-ey-myth]. Usually I avoid special characters like the plague, especially for player-characters, but as nobody is likely to need to whisper my pet, going with the proper spelling of the word seems appropriate here. Darémyth is a (fictional) term for a type of self-sacrificing relationship, where one person's happiness is enhanced or dependant on the happiness of another. As a tenacity pet, and since I've always liked the way the word sounds in my head, it felt appropriate here (much more appropriate than poor Jareth!). Also according to Google, Daremyth without the accent was a character in Heroes 3, which is probably where I internalized the word/name from in the first place!
Darémyth walks with opposite legs in tandem, with each pair of legs on each side meeting closely before parting again. The run is a sped up version of this, and so there's no awkward change from walk to run animation like you see on wolves or cats sometimes while you (or they) are lagging. Her face glows a pretty purple and while its brightest point isn't connected to any of the crystals, I don't really mind that so much. Standing idle, she shifts her weight pretty frequently, and will also look side-to-side (quite a bit more than I'd like, but I guess she's just super-inquisitive!)
The swimming idle animation for Shale Spiders is quite cute, with the occasional leg dipping much lower than the remainder of the body. The moving swim is kind of awkward static but looks pretty nifty in motion; her legs all bunch up and then the back legs strike out, in a sort of breaststroke.
As a tenacity pet, Darémyth has access to Thunderstomp, whose animation (like the frost trap) seems to be much larger than fits her. Her species special, Web Wrap, is a 3s stun on a 31.5s CD (with Longevity) and uses the traditional Web Wrap animation seen in places like ICC or Azjol-Nerub. It looks great on appropriately-sized humanoids, but a little awkward on other beasts or things with a different shape. It's a magic debuff, shares diminshing returns with Intimidation, and on several occasions, a web wrapped mob would continue casting Shockwave or Twilight Bolt or whatever it was they were casting before getting wrapped, which makes me a bit leery of its actual classification as a stun.
Overall, the Shale Spider model is quite nice. The textures on several parts of the body—the larger portions of the legs and the mandibles in particular—seem a little bit fuzzy, but unless you're sticking your nose up their, um, probiscus... you're not likely to notice on a regular basis. I saw no major animation flaws, the model doesn't drift significantly when going through its animations (though there is a little bit), and is generally put together quite well. My biggest gripe with her is her summoning icon:
That's a real spider, not a shale spider! Shale Spiders, I am convinced, are named spiders because they fill a similar ecological niche in Deepholm that "proper" spiders do in the rest of Azeroth, and because they bear a vague physical resemblance to both spiders and shale (or are, potentially, actually made of shale considering the rest of Deepholm). I suspect that I'm not the only arachnophobe that has no issues whatever with shale spiders, except by name association. Luckily, this is a quite easy thing to fix in the overall scheme of "pets with issues," and is so minor that I suspect Mage Armor will get three or four more icon updates before Shale Spiders get a proper icon
Being an exotic, only a Beast Mastery hunter can befriend a Shale Spider. Their secondary exotic ability, Embrace of the Shale Spider, increases Str, Agi, Sta, and Int by 5% and increases magic resistances (an amount based on your pet's level). Druids and Paladins can both provide this ability (via Mark of the Wild and Blessing of Kings, respectively), though deciding whether to use a Shale Spider for Embrace vs. having your paladin use Kings also requires a secondary consideration of whether Blessing of Might's components are covered elsewhere in your raid. Shale Spiders are the only hunter pet that can provide the 5% primary stat increase.
Darémyth made a great tank, her web wrap was a little bit awkward but the 5% agi from Kings/Embrace increased the rate at which we both could kill things (and how many milliseconds it took all the PvP horde guilds on Bloodscalp to kill us both), making her my current tenacity pet of choice. I might putz around with trying a red one later, and it'll be difficult to decide which pet gets taken off my active list to keep her ready-to-hand, since I'm still keeping slot 5 empty for impulsive tames and I haven't got a tenacity pet to flat-out replace on that list... but that's a dilemma for later!
Name: Basanti
Level: 84
Exotics: Yes
Restrictions: None
Rares I Have: Skoll, Arcturis, King Krush, Sunblade Dragonhawk, Grimtotem Spirit Guide
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Something unusual happened this time around though. Normally I can't keep sporebats because of their...dangly bits. I blame being half asleep ever since I've come home from work for making me view Squish differently. He developed a personality as I set up the screenshots in Photoshop and now I feel bad for abandoning the poor guy--I'm going to re-pick him up later after I've gone to sleep. Anywho, this guys is found around the middle of Zangarmarsh.
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. Going to use a lot of copy/pasting from Fiona's report on the same crab.
