Over a month because I'm terrible D: Had the images done for a while but talking seems to be so intimidating D:
First of all,
Please Note: this report is about the retired Grimtotem Spirit Guide. This pet is no longer available in-game; there's a Spirit Beast with the same skin available since Cataclysm hit (and a wolf in Ashenvale that can be tamed with the skin, though it doesn't persist through death), and all visual/audio things should apply to both pets, but specific pet abilities will be different.
The Grimtotem Spirit Guide was added in patch 2.3, when Dustwallow Marsh's questing experience was revamped to, you know, actually make sense for both factions (also the patch that the original Zul'Aman was released, making the timing of this report somewhat awkwardly-funny imo). The Guides were summoned by the Grimtotem Spirit-Shifters in groups of two, and would die/despawn about 8 seconds after they spawned. At the time, my main was still my warrior, but my shaman was just in the right level range to go through the new Dustwallow quests. I'd seen the ghost wolf skin while leveling several tauren through Mulgore and always felt that a shaman's Ghost Wolf really SHOULD look like that, and not just a transparent coyote. I don't remember how I heard about the Spirit Guides being tameable—it's not like I was on good terms with most of our hunters at that point and I don't think any of them went after it anyway—but as soon as I did, my shaman got pushed aside and my hunter immediately got conscripted to level from 62 (where I'd left her since the start of Burning Crusade, once she'd gotten her sporebat) to 67. Why 67?
Well, as I mentioned earlier, the wolves would die after about 8 seconds, and at the time Tame Beast's cast time was 20 seconds. This meant that in order to tame one of them you needed to get enough haste to lower your Tame Beast to what, a third of the original cast time? However, at the time there was a meta gem you could get that had a chance on spell cast to reduce the cast time of your next spell by 50%. This meta gem affected Tame Beast—lowering it from 20s to 10s—and could be triggered by switching between aspects (monkey and hawk at the time, I believe). But to use a meta gem, you need a meta gem socket. There was a helm with a required level of 66 from Spirit Shards, but being the outnumbered faction, we hardly ever had the spirit towers of Terrokkar. The quest for Steam Vaults opened up at level 67 and offered a choice of four different helms, all with meta gem sockets. By the time 'Santi got a SV group conned out of my guildmates (who were much easier to persuade than I'd expected) and finished the instance, she was 68 (and had gotten two pieces of her D2 set for when she hit 70 haha), but it didn't matter, so long as she had the gem and the helmet. I managed to get a different guildmate with a level 70 shaman to come down to Dustwallow with me, and after the second try at it, my new wolf was mine.
Meet Kanassa (kuh-nass-sah). Kanassa's name comes from the... I'm not sure "villain" is the right word, but "primary plot-mover" maybe... of the same story my hunter's name comes from,
Shadows. The original Kanassa is supposed to be androgynous and doesn't have a defined gender (and I refer to him as "he" simply because everyone else in the story is female and it saves confusion), but WoW!Kanassa is a boy-wolf for certain. To quote myself from six years ago, "Kanassa's name comes from a hero of the Kiukuru Amazons of the Xingu River region of the same name. Supposedly, he brought the Kiukuru fire =3"
If you've seen a WoW-coyote or classic wolf (not worg), you've seen the animations for Kanassa, but his skin is what makes him shine. Like most of the spirit beasts (with which he now shares a skin), Kanassa is ghostly and partially transparent. Unlike most of the ghostly spirit beasts, however, he doesn't have any extraneous particle effects, and his skin's beauty stands on its own. As with the other ghostly spirit beasts, his transparency is a double-edged sword, and when looking at him head-on he gets a little bit awkward. Okay, technically when you're looking at him sideways you can see his other side too, but it's not usually as obvious and doesn't bother me as much
Kanassa has two common idle animations—a ground sniff, and a search for ghost-fleas—and I THOUGHT he also howled, but I sat around waiting for it for a while and it never happened, so it might have been removed (I know he used to, back when he waddled instead of properly running).
Kanassa—both as a wolf and in his spirit beast incarnation—is a ferocity pet, making him great DPS but not so amazing at holding aggro on multiple targets without some micro-managing on your part. His racial ability as a wolf is Furious Howl, which used to increase the damage of your next attack but now works as a 5% crit aura. This aura affects both physical and magical attacks as well as heals, making it a great choice both for soloing as well as dungeons and raids, provided someone else isn't also providing the buff (elemental shaman, fury warriors, feral druids, subtlety rogues, and devilsaurs also all provide their own 5% crit aura). His animations for fighting are identical to normal wolves, but he has his own vocalizations—if you've heard an enhancement shaman's spirit wolves (which also share this skin), that's the noises he makes. They're wolfish, but with some added reverb to make them sound ghostly.
The Grimtotem Spirit Guide is one of those pets—like the ghost hydra, ooze, or the Sandfury Guardian—with a charged history; when taming him was first discovered and started becoming popular, a Blue poster on the official forums said that it wasn't initially intended, but they were fine with it and they weren't going to remove the ability to keep taming them. However, in January of 2008, a hotfix was implemented (without any warning that I can recall) that removed the wolves' spawning, and later they were replaced with a non-tameable Grimtotem Spirit Wolf. The argument by blue posters then was that they felt the wolf didn't fit well with the theme of hunter pets because it was too undead. Any hunters—like mine—that already had the wolves got to keep them, but any hunters who hadn't gotten around to taming their own was out of luck. When Cataclysm came out, a "new" version came around in the form of Karoma the Spirit Beast. I rushed my hunter to 67 as soon as I heard that it was tameable, and didn't trust the "we're not removing it" post when it came out, and I'm very glad I did. It's very possible that in the future, the NPC ID will get reused or changed and I'll lose my spirit wolf, and while I'll be very unhappy if that happens, the further away from that January hotfix we get, the less likely it feels... but of course, you never know.
(omg, half-finished image cheats!)
Overall, Kanassa is my second-favourite pet on my hunter—some days, favourite. He's certainly my favourite-with-a-usually-useful-species-ability, anyway. He has very few faults in my opinion, which is hard to say about a model that's been in the game since the beginning (and I believe the skin has as well—the tauren spirit vision quest was certainly there in beta, and I'm pretty sure it was a ghost wolf skin then). He's my favourite wolf skin, and favourite Spirit Beast (though Skoll does come close, Skoll has more problems. Well, not problems... just aesthetic preferences). If I made a different hunter and had to choose a different wolf skin, I don't know which I'd choose, but I'd definitely try and pick up Karoma for my spirit beast. When my hunter was a Night Elf, her "iconic" pet was Rajah, a Durotar Tiger. When she became human, Kanassa came much closer to the fore.
Name: Basanti
Level: 85
Exotics: Yes
Restrictions: None
Rares I Have: Skoll, Arcturis, King Krush,
Sunblade Dragonhawk,
Grimtotem Spirit Guide, Ghostcrawler,
Corpse Scarab
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